ICFFS-Diversity & Difference

Chris Marker’s filmmaking has taken him around the globe, charting social or historical crises and turning points in world politics, his travels punctuated by occasional but significant returns to France. His passion for other cultures is such that France can no longer be understood as his home, however – a move already hinted at in his assumption of a pseudonym that disguises his French origins. Taking as my own point of departure the suggested erasure of a differential relation to France as point of origin for travel to other countries, I want to explore three films: La Jetée (1962), Sans Soleil (1982) and Level 5 (1995). Spanning four decades, these films provide a prolonged, interrelated series of reflections on travel through time and space. In each case, a woman, rather than a stable sense of place, is the anchor and facilitating point of access (for the male traveller and/or the spectator) to other times and cultural spaces, via her voice and/or image. Although it is necessary to address the ostensible passivity of her location, as well as the particular relations of these films to theorisations of the gender dynamics of the gaze (Mulvey), the woman nonetheless replaces an established geographical origin without becoming identified with it or restricted by it. These enabling women bear traces of a link to French culture – either because they are French-speaking (the voice-over of Sans Soleil, Laura in Level 5) or associated with a French context (La Jetée) – but this connection is secondary. Indeed, France is placed under erasure as a secure base: Paris is literally decimated in La Jetée, the Ile de France becomes one global location among many that undergoes a process of othering in Sans Soleil, and Level 5 is set in an anonymous computer room, allowing only a brief glimpse of an outdoors that vaguely resembles the Ile de France images of Sans Soleil. In these films images and memories need to pass through the feminine to be recognised and preserved, the desiring foundation of such cinema assuring thus that sexual difference provides the key to unlock an elsewhere, while being positioned nowhere in particular. Using feminist theory to identify the precariousness of this privilege (Kofman) and questioning the seeming agreement here between Marker and a theory of sexual difference (Irigaray) that prioritises this over other differences, what these women provide access to ultimately is the recognition that difference, both sexual and cultural, resists knowledge beyond the image we have of it. The elsewhere we arrive at thanks to these women is a tantalising but unfathomable and distant place, the films showing us fleeting encounters with images that refuse assimilation or prolongation, none of which can contain or satisfy the desire to be possessed. Haunted by the images of women’s faces, striking and larger than life, these films suggest that the differences that define identity and place are only accessible through the images we have of them, but they can never be reduced to this.




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