The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Chris Marker · a film · 1962 · about 28 minutes · credited as un photo-roman · in French, narrated by Jean Négroni
Mode
Science fiction of time travel told as an elegy and as an essay on the image; a narrative fiction made of stills
Mythos
The descent among the dead and the return for a woman; the oracle fulfilled by being sought; the image that was always of one’s own death
Phase
From a Sunday on the jetty at Orly, before a war, through a camp under Chaillot after it, into an undated past and a future, and back to the jetty
Presentation
Short film in black and white, about 28 minutes, credited as a photo-roman; still photographs by Marker, edited by Jean Ravel; no synchronised speech, a narration spoken by Jean Négroni, music by Trevor Duncan and a Russian Orthodox liturgical choir
Register
From Sunday crowds watching planes to whispers and a heartbeat in the dark; tenderness in a garden, stillness in a museum, a few seconds of a woman waking
Scale
One man’s memory, a destroyed city, a war’s victors and its prisoners, and the length of a life
Governing Proposition
A man held prisoner after a third world war is sent into time because he is attached to one image from his childhood, a face at the rail of the jetty at Orly and a man falling there, and at the end of his journeys he learns that the man he saw die was himself. The wager of the film is that a fiction made of still photographs, and granted movement once, can show what memory is: moments held after they have gone, put in order after the fact, and understood only at the end of the life that kept them.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A Sunday before a war. Crowds stand on the jetty at Orly to watch the planes, and a child is among them with his parents. He keeps one image: a face at the rail, and a man falling. He does not know what he has seen, and the film is the unfolding of it. Everything that follows is already present in this first sequence, folded, and the end will open it.
The images are still photographs. They are joined by cuts, dissolves and fades, and a voice tells what they show. The credits call the film “un photo-roman” (“a photo-novel”), the form of the illustrated stories on the magazine stands, and it borrows that form to tell a story of time travel as an elegy. There is no synchronised speech. The sound is Jean Négroni’s even narration, Trevor Duncan’s music, a Russian Orthodox liturgical choir, and the noises of the places: the airport, a heartbeat, birdsong.
Chris Marker wrote and directed the film in 1962 and photographed it himself, for Anatole Dauman’s Argos Films. Jean Ravel edited it. Hélène Chatelain plays the woman, Davos Hanich the man and Jacques Ledoux the experimenter. It runs about 28 minutes, in black and white, and it was made by a director who had spent the 1950s making essay films.
Movement II
Then the war, the third. Paris is destroyed, and the film shows it in a few photographs of ruins. It needs the condition, not the history. The victors hold their prisoners in a camp beneath the Palais de Chaillot.
In the camp the men in charge are experimenting with time: a prisoner is to be sent out of it to bring back help. He is strapped down, with pads over his eyes, and whispers move over him in the dark. The camp, under the whispering and the heartbeat, is terror made of almost nothing: dark stills, grain, a voice.
The man is chosen because he is attached to an image. His memory of the face at the rail is the hold by which the camp can send him. The victors treat his inner life as material, and what he kept for himself becomes the instrument of their purpose. The film glimpses, without opening, the camps of its century in this one.
Movement III
The first journeys are made, and he reaches her. He meets the woman in a past without dates, and the meetings become a whole affair given in a few scenes. They are together in a garden. She wears a necklace. He belongs to another time, and he is only ever visiting hers.
Before the cross-section of a great tree, its rings marking the years, he points beyond them to where he comes from. The image is the film’s knowledge in a figure: a life laid out as a set of moments, and a man standing outside it. The past he visits is a gallery of stills, and he moves through it as the camp moves him.
They go to the museum of natural history and walk among the animals, stuffed and held behind glass, out of time. The museum is a stillness inside a stillness: a film of photographs showing two people among creatures that have been kept by being stopped.
Movement IV
A run of stills shows the woman asleep in bed. The dissolves slow. Birdsong rises on the soundtrack. Then she opens and closes her eyes, and for a few seconds the film moves. It is the one moving shot in the work.
Everything depends on its placing. For a few seconds the past is alive and present, and the viewer feels, as a physical fact, the difference between an image and a life. The film has denied itself movement in order to grant it here, once, and the moment is among the great moments in cinema.
The return to stills afterwards is a loss. What the shot discloses is what the rest of the film has been: moments held after they have gone, which is what a memory is. The form is the knowledge, and here the form shows it in one instant.
Movement V
The camp sends the man the other way, into the future. Its people, with marked foreheads, hand him a power unit. The section is hurried and flat: its people are costumed and lit crudely, and the stills serve the plot more than the knowledge. It is the one stretch of the film that could be shortened.
He returns to the camp, and the future people make him an offer. The last journey is to the jetty at Orly, the Sunday of his childhood. He runs along the jetty, and the run is the film’s second summit.
He dies there. The man the child saw falling was himself. The prologue’s still was always of his death, and the ending applies the film’s law without exception, since the jetty was always the camp’s. The life organised around one image learns what the image meant only as it ends.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on 28 minutes, and the spine resists subtraction. The prologue holds the whole plot folded: the face, the jetty, a man falling. The war is told in a few photographs of ruined Paris because the film needs the condition, not the history. The camp is required, since it makes the man an instrument and sends him; the meetings with the woman are why he can travel and what he loses; the museum is time made into a place; the end closes the beginning. What gives is real for so short a film. The journey to the future, its people and the power unit they hand over, is a plot device the film hurries through and could shorten without losing a fact the loop needs, and the experiments in the camp repeat their effect.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated. A life can be organised around an image it does not understand, and the meaning of that image arrives only when the life ends: the man chases the moment he could not forget and finds it was his own death. Memory is shown as a set of stills whose order is imposed after the fact, and an ordinary moment becomes a memory only when its scar claims it. A second truth is political, that the victors of a war treat a prisoner’s inner life as raw material. What holds the axis lowest of the governed twelve, three tenths below the bar of the Epochal Gate: that political truth is glimpsed, not opened, and much of the film’s power is melancholy, a mood the rubric ranks below a meaning.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Elevation of several kinds. The prologue, Sunday crowds on the jetty, planes, a face at the rail, is already uncanny. The ruined Paris is dread; the camp, under whispers and a heartbeat, is terror made of almost nothing. The meetings rise to tenderness, in the garden and before the cross-section of a great tree. The museum’s animals are a stillness inside a stillness. The summit is the one moving shot, the woman opening her eyes as birdsong rises, among the great moments in cinema; the last run along the jetty is the second. What holds it: the heights are moments in a short film, the camp scenes repeat their effect, and the journey to the future is flat.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked. A man goes down among the dead, under the city, and is sent out of time to bring back help; like Orpheus he goes back for a woman and loses her. The deeper structure is the oracle fulfilled by being sought: the image the child carries is a prophecy, and the attempt to reach it is the means of its fulfilment, the shape of Oedipus at the crossroads. The loop is load-bearing, and the particulars stay particular: the jetty at Orly, a woman’s necklace, the rings of a tree. Held a tenth below the bar of the Epochal Gate: the future people and the experimenters are archetypes drawn in a single stroke, and the woman is kept a figure, an image more than a person.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the science-fiction story of time travel, the illustrated photo-novel of the magazine stands, the essay film Marker had made through the 1950s, and the cinema of memory around him, above all Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). The turn is radical: a narrative fiction made of stills, which denies cinema movement and then grants it once, and a pulp premise told as elegy. What holds it lower than the turn alone would: the matter of memory and time was already Resnais’s, the photo-roman already existed, and a short at Argos Films risked little in money. The wager was of form only, placed nearly alone, and it clears the bar of the Epochal Gate by a tenth.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film can no longer say what it knows. A photograph is a moment held after it has gone, which is what a memory is, and the film is made of them: the past, the woman, the museum, the jetty come as stills because that is how the past is had. The one moving shot is the knowledge in an instant: for a few seconds the past is alive, and the viewer feels the difference between an image and a life. The dissolves are time passing in the mind, slowed and quickened. The loop makes the knowledge exact, since the prologue’s still was always of his death. Held below the top because the future section’s stills are composed more for their device than for what they know.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Sixty-four years of return are evidence. The film has been read as a meditation on photography and death, in the line of Barthes; as a founding case in debates on the still and the moving image; as a memory of the war, the camps and Algeria; as an account of cinema itself, a man in a seat with images projected into his mind. Formally it yields on return, in the rhythm of the dissolves, the placing of the one moving shot, the rhymes between prologue and end. What holds it lower: the readings converge once the loop is grasped, the narrative surprise is spent on the first viewing, and much of the return is to texture and mood rather than to new meaning.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Released in 1962, into a decade crowded with reorganisations, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: a film built from stills and narration that remained cinema, and a form for the time loop, the traveller who witnesses his own death, so exact that later science fiction has been measured by it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995) is an acknowledged feature-length adaptation; the loop and the remembered death passed into the genre; the film is a fixed text in film teaching, and the essay film, gallery art and the photo-film draw on it. Held a tenth below the bar of the Epochal Gate: as a short it reached the wider audience chiefly through others, and its method was rarely followed.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty-four years. The form survives whole: the film as released is intact, an English version is an alternate soundtrack over the same images rather than a replacement, and restorations repair the image without revision. Presence has been continuous for six decades, in repertory, in teaching and on every home-video format, and it reaches beyond cinema into art and into science fiction through its adaptation. That presence is wide for a short film, though narrower in the public than the most circulated features of its decade. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the war is imagined, the past undated, and the stills age only as photographs do, which is their subject. The bar is cleared by two tenths.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. Marker’s photographs are composed for duration: faces close, the woman’s head on a pillow, the camp in grainy darkness, the museum’s glass and fur. Jean Ravel’s editing gives stills a pulse, dissolves timed to breath and narration, quickened in the experiments and slowed with the woman. The sound is built with care: Négroni’s even voice, the heartbeat, the whispers, Duncan’s strings, the choir under the ruins. The one moving shot is placed with complete judgement. The costs fall on real shares of a small instrument: the future people are costumed and lit crudely, stills of the camp and the experiments are rough beyond what the grain requires, and the score is partly library music and generic in places.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Sunday crowd on the jetty, a child among parents watching planes, and the dark camp under Chaillot where men whisper over a body strapped down with pads on his eyes. One law governs both: time is had only as image, and every image is held by someone with a purpose. The child keeps the face; the camp keeps the man to use his keeping; the woman is met in a past that is a gallery of stills; the museum keeps animals out of time. The ending applies the law without exception, since the jetty was always the camp’s. The range is wide, from romance to war to science fiction. The strain is in the future section, where the law bends toward plot device.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 28 minutes holds, and the low mark describes the form. Consciousness, held through one man’s memory; love, a whole affair in a few meetings; war and the state, a destroyed capital and a camp of victors and prisoners; science, in the experiments; history, an undated past and an imagined future; the natural order, in the museum’s animals and a tree’s rings; and death, which the whole structure is built to reach. They are integrated, since the war, the love and the death are one loop. What holds it lowest of the twelve: everything is given in outline and at a stroke, the woman’s consciousness is withheld, labour, the family and the sacred are present only as figure, and the future is a sketch.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.9, The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6. A form in which the still photograph is what a memory is, and the one moving shot the difference between an image and a life; a film that survives whole after sixty-four years with a surface not fixed to its making; and a narrative cinema of stills that denies movement and grants it once.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.9: consciousness, love, war and the state, science, history, the natural order and death are held in one loop, but in outline and at a stroke, with the woman’s consciousness withheld and labour, the family and the sacred present only as figure. Above it, The Unconcealment at 8.2: a truth about memory and about a life’s governing image that holds, a political truth glimpsed rather than opened, and much of the power in melancholy.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.5, The Made at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 fall a tenth short and The Unconcealment at 8.2 three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.3 from a sum of 100.1, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of La Jetée as released in France, dated 1962: the original French version, about 28 minutes, with Jean Négroni’s narration, from the jetty at Orly to the last run along it. Written and directed by Chris Marker, who also photographed it, for Argos Films (Anatole Dauman); edited by Jean Ravel; music by Trevor Duncan, with a Russian Orthodox liturgical choir; with Hélène Chatelain, Davos Hanich and Jacques Ledoux. An English version exists with another narrator over the same images; it is a translation of the soundtrack, is not judged, and nothing here is charged to it. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The narration is described rather than quoted; the one phrase quoted is the film’s own credit. Restorations bear on The Imperishable only. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the date of the first Paris showing, the narrator of the English version, the liturgical occasion of the choir, the language of the whispering in the camp, the film’s debts to particular scenes in other films, the number of shots and the length of each section.