microscope. Sensing something awful, Sutherland rushes outside, but it
is too late to save the girl. It is an unnerving scene, not least because we
are unaccustomed to seeing photos as predictions. The mute photograph
‘speaks’ of what is to come. As the story moves to Venice, the entire film is
haunted not just by the daughter’s death but also by that animate photo-
graph, which seems to foreshadow all that follows as the couple struggle
with the scrambling of time and causality that comes with mourning.
Chris Marker’s science-fiction filmLa Jetée( 1962 , released in 1964 ) is
one of cinema’s most complex articulations of time, a feat all the greater
for its seemingly limited means. It is composed almost entirely of
still images. Its closest genre is the photonovel, so often derided as a
‘low’ form inferior to literature and cinema proper, as we have seen.^8
Nevertheless,La Jetéeaddresses all the major themes that have preoccu-
pied serious European filmmakers since 1945 , including memory, history,
war, identity, loss, desire and the uncertainty of the image. In less than
half an hour it weaves a philosophical web across past, present and
future. It announces itself as ‘a story of a man marked by an image from
childhood’. The image is of a man’s death – a portent of the protagonist’s
own, it turns out – but he is equally marked by an image of a lost lover
(there are allusions to Hitchcock’sVertigoand Cocteau’sOrphéein the
hero’s pursuit of an elusive woman ‘from the other side of time’).La Jetée
is set in a subterranean prison camp in a post-apocalyptic Paris. The hero 99
88 Don’t Look Now(Nicolas Roeg, 1973),
frame.