It was a funny-shaped
object. A small tin box with irregularly rounded ends, a rectangular aperture
in the middle and on the opposite side a small lens, the size of a nickel. You
had to gently insert a piece of film—real film, with sprockets and all—in the
upper part, then a tiny rubber wheel blocked it, and by turning the
corresponding knob the film unrolled, frame by frame. To tell the truth, each
frame represented a different shot, so the whole thing looked more like a slide
show than a home cinema, yet the shots were beautifully printed stills out of
celebrated pictures: Chaplin's, Ben Hur,
Abel Gance's Napoleon. ... If you
were rich, you could lock that small unit in a sort of magic lantern and
project it on your wall (or screen, if you were very rich). I had to satisfy myself with the minimal version:
pressing my eye against the lens, and watching. That forgotten contraption was
called Patheorama. You could read it in golden letters on black, with the
legendary Pathe rooster singing against a rising sun.
The egotistic pleasure of
watching by myself images pertaining to the unfathomable realm of Movieland
very soon had a dialectical byproduct: when I couldn't even imagine having
anything in common with the process of filmmaking (whose basic principles were
naturally far beyond my comprehension), there something of the film itself was
within my reach, pieces of celluloid that were not that different from the
photographic negatives when they came back from the lab. Something I could
touch and feel, something of the real world. And why (insinuated my own
dialectical Jiminy Cricket) couldn't I in turn make something of the same kind?
All I needed was translucent material and the right measurements. (The
sprockets were there to look good, the rubber wheel just ignored them.) So,
with scissors, tracing paper, and glue, I managed to get a proper copy of the
Patheorama model tape. Then, screen by screen, I began to draw a few poses of
my cat (who else?) with captions inbetween. And all of a sudden, my cat belonged
to the same universe as the characters in Ben
Hur or Napoleon. I had gone
through the looking glass.
Of all my school buddies,
Jonathan was the most prestigious; he was mechanically minded and quite
inventive, he made up maquettes of theaters with rolling curtains and flashing
lights, and a miniature big band emerging from the abyss while a cranked
gramophone was playing "Hail the Conquering Hero." So it was natural
that he was the first to whom I wished to show my masterwork. I was rather pleased
with the result, and I unrolled the adventures of the cat Riri which I
presented as "my movie." Jonathan managed to get me sobered up:
"Movies are supposed to move, stupid," he said. "Nobody can do a
movie with still images."
Thirty years passed. Then
I made La Jetée.
Chris Marker
First published at Film Quaterly, 52:1, Autumn, 1998, p. 66.
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