is not repressed (anoemecannot be repressed) but experienced
with indifference, as a feature which goes without saying.’ Roland
Barthes,Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography(New York, 1980 ),
chapter 32.
3 Ibid.
4 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Pensive Spectator’,Wide Angle,ix/ 1 ( 1987 ),
pp. 6 – 10 ; reprinted inThe Cinematic, ed. David Campany
(Cambridge,ma, and London, 2007 ).
5 André Bazin, the realist critic who championed Rossellini’s work,
wrote the essay that became the cornerstone of realist accounts of
cinema the year afterLa macchina ammazzacattivi. In ‘The
Ontology of the Photographic Image’ ( 1949 ), Bazin argues that
what distinguishes the photographic image is its status as a direct
trace of life, like a death mask.
6 Nancy West and Penelope Pelizzon make this calculation in ‘Snap
Me Deadly: Reading the Still in Film Noir’,American Studies,
xliii/2(Summer 2002 ), pp. 73 – 101.
7 ‘If the purpose is to counter those, real or imagined, who bluntly
claim that photographs never lie, then the counter only replaces
the Village Idiot by the Village Explainer. There must be some
more attractive purpose. I believe the motto serves to cover an
impressive range of anxieties centered on, or symptomatized by,
our sense of how little we know about what the photograph
reveals: that we do not know what our relation to reality is, our
complicity in it... that we do not understand the specific transfor-
mative powers of the camera, what I have called its original vio-
lence; that we cannot anticipate what it will know of us or show of
us.’ Stanley Cavell, ‘What Photography Calls Thinking’,Raritan,
iv/4( 1985 ), pp. 1 – 21.
8 The title sequence ofLa Jetéetells us it is a ‘photo-roman’, while a
later book version of the film describes itself as ‘ciné-roman’. See
Chris Marker,La Jetée: ciné-roman(New York, 1992 ). Marker also
produced a page version in image and text for the French magazine
L’Avant-scène, 36 ( 1964 ), pp. 23 – 30.
9 La Jetéehas become one of the most discussed and theorized short
films. See in particular Victor Burgin, ‘Marker Marked’, inThe
Remembered Film(London, 2005 ), pp. 89 – 108 ; Uriel Orlow, ‘The
Dialectical Image:La Jetéeand Photography-as-Cinema’ [ 1999 ,
revised 2007 ], inThe Cinematic, ed. Campany, pp. 177 – 84 ; and
Jean-Louis Scheffer, ‘OnLa Jetée’,The Enigmatic Body: Essays on the
Arts(Cambridge, 1995 ), pp. 139 – 45.
10 Réda Bensmaïa makes this interpretation of the gaps betweenLa
Jetée’s stills in ‘From the Photogram to the Pictogram’,Camera
Obscura, 24 (September 1990 ), pp. 138 – 61.
11 Irving Blum recalls his experience of the premiere of Warhol’sSleep
in an interview with Patrick Smith in Smith,Andy Warhol’s Art and
Film(Ann Arbor,mi, 1981 ), pp. 223 – 4. ‘Marisol’ is the artist
Marisol Escobar who kisses Harold Stevenson in the film.
12 The book of Sander’s work that we see in the film is the anthologyMenschen des 20. Jahrhunderts Gesamtausgabe Fotos[Citizens of the
Twentieth Century]. It is the grand album that Sander himself
never managed to publish in his lifetime, because of the interven-
tion of the war and the confiscation of his work by the Nazis.
13 The moment brings to mind Jean-François Lyotard’s remarks about
the fate of documents: ‘Reality succumbs to this reversal: it was the
given described by the phrase, it became the archive from which
are drawn documents or examples that validate the description.’
Jean-François Lyotard,The Differend: Phrases in Dispute
(Minneapolis,mn, 1988), p. 41.
14 Letter to Janewas a development of Godard’s critique of news
photographs in hisCiné-Tracts, a series of eight three-minute films
produced quickly in 1968.
15 Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Pierre Gorin, ‘Retour de Hanoi: Excerpts
from the Transcript of Godard and Gorin’sLetter to Jane’,Women
and Film,i/3– 4 ( 1973 ), pp. 45 – 51. For a detailed discussion, see Julia
Lesage, ‘Godard and Gorin’s Left Politics, 1967 – 1972 ’,Jump Cut, 28
(April 1983 ), pp. 51 – 8.
16 See, for example, Carol Davidson, ‘A Critique:Letter to Jane’, in
Women and Film,i/3– 4 ( 1973 ), p. 52.
17 See ‘Speaking of Pictures’,Life( 19 February 1940 ), pp. 10 – 11. The
year before,Lifehad run a piece on Steinbeck’s novelThe Grapes of
Wrath, suggesting that ‘never before had the facts behind a great
work of fiction been so carefully researched by the news camera’
(Life, 5 June 1939 ).
18 Mouris’Frank Filmwon the ‘Oscar’ for best animated short film in
1973.
19 A second poster forThe Truman Showfeatured a crowd watching
the face of a sleeping Truman on a huge public video screen,
making Andy Warhol’s filmSleepseem all the more prophetic.
20 This is perhaps why Robert Altman’s fashion satirePrêt-à-Porter
from 1994 falls a little flat. It underestimated just how well
inoculated from criticism the industry had become.
21 For example, in Sidney Lumet’sThe Verdict( 1982 ) we see a lawyer
played by Paul Newman taking a Polaroid photograph of a dying
woman. It is only as he/we watch as the image appears that the full
force of her mortality is felt.
22 Even so, the hero ofMementomust supplement his Polaroids with
copious notes written on them. Not even Polaroid facts explain.
They require explanation.
23 Fredric Jameson makes a brilliant analysis of cinema’s crisis of visuali-
ty engendered by the replacement of analogue technologies by digital
ones in ‘Totality as Conspiracy’, inTheGeopoliticalAesthetic:Cinema
andSpaceintheWorldSystem(Bloomington,in, 1992 ), pp. 9 – 84.
24 The photographs of the murder that the photographer blows up in
his darkroom were taken for the film by the photojournalist Don
McCullin.152