For their 100th release, the consistently inspired reissue label Superior Viaduct offers La jetée, the soundtrack to Chris Marker’s groundbreaking science-fiction masterpiece of 1962. A one of a kind work with a far from typical aural component, its reputation has grown substantially over more than fifty years, and today it endures as a crucial example of cinema’s possibilities as an art form. This first-time issue of the film’s score comes with both French and English voiceover narration attached; it’s available now on LP.
“And thanks for linking me to music, the only real art for me as you know (cinema? you kiddin’…)”
—Chris Marker, in correspondence with Naomi Yang
Chris Marker’s passing in 2012 left a significant void that’s only balm is an enigmatic persona certain to linger for generations (his surname was reportedly taken from the Magic Marker) and of course the work. A truly incomparable figure of numerous talents, he was a writer of criticism, poetry, and fiction as well as a photographer, editor, and digital multimedia artist; examples of the latter include video installations and the CDROM Immemory.
Chris Marker is most widely known as a filmmaker. The chronology of his productivity in the field is foreshadowed by his writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the long-lasting journal founded by André Bazin in 1951; he debuted as a director in ’52 with the feature-length documentary Olympia 52, concerning the Summer Olympics of that year held in Helsinki, Finland, and then collaborated with Alain Resnais and Ghislain Cloquet in ’53 on “Statues Also Die,” a short devoted to the topic of African art and its perception through the lens of colonialism.
Marker also assisted on ’55’s “Night and Fog,” Resnais’ absolutely essential Holocaust short, and served in a similar capacity on Resnais and André Heinrich’s ’57 film “Le Mystère de l’atelier quinze.” Simultaneously, Marker continued to hone his distinctive aesthetic with ’56’s “Sunday in Peking” and the following year’s Letter from Siberia.
Other than collaborating with the noted (some would say notorious) Polish-born director Walerian Borowczyk on the animated ’59 short “Les Astronautes,” Marker worked in the non-fiction arena, with emphasis on the term non-fiction rather than simply documentary. Helping to pioneer the “essay film,” a slimly populated subgenre described with respect to brevity as a non-fictive region eluding conventions through a combination of the personal and the poetical, Marker applied the same aspects to his enduring fictional masterwork “La jetée.”
And it’s this ’62 science fiction short, at once sui generis and highly influential (openly cited by Terry Gilliam as the inspiration for his cult feature 12 Monkeys) that often gets Marker lumped into the Nouvelle Vague, or as its commonly referred, the French New Wave. Not an erroneous taxonomy, and in fact he’s even more accurately pinpointed as part of the Rive Gauche or Left Bank Cinema Movement alongside Resnais, Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, Henri Colpi, Armand Gatti and Marguerite Duras.
Superior Viaduct’s La jetée might seem like an esoteric choice and a potential discographical outlier, but it actually combines very nicely with the label’s pressings of Eduard Artemiev’s OST’s to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Stalker, and The Mirror. It’s a connection deepened by Marker’s ’99 docu-homage to the Soviet master One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich and further highlighted by Superior Viaduct’s San Francisco home being the locale of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a movie beloved by Marker as referenced in his brilliant ’83 film essay Sans Soleil and less overtly in a still photograph from “La jetée.”
And with one striking exception, the visual scheme of “La jetée” consists entirely of still photos, an exquisitely rendered montage that intensifies the narration’s necessity for purposes of comprehension and the musical cues’ importance in heightening emotional effect, though in execution these elements are complementary.
Marker’s decision to employ photomontage derived from restrictions of budget, a scenario extending to the soundtrack’s use of library music by English composer Trevor Duncan. Born Leonard Charles Trebilcock, Duncan is known for his light orchestral music, though together with “La jetée” his library catalog is immortalized in the opening theme for the Brit TV serial “Quartermass and the Pit” and perhaps less glamorously in Plan 9 from Outer Space, Edward D. Wood Jr.’s ’59 flick borrowing Duncan’s piece “Grip of the Law.”
Duncan also contributed scores written expressly for Joseph Losey’s Finger of Guilt and more recently the Quay Brothers’ The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, but the somewhat Hitchcockian tension wrung from his stock music is likely to stand as the composer’s highpoint in relation to motion pictures. I didn’t miswrite; all but one shot in “La jetée” may be immobile, but the cumulative result still moves.
Side one holds the French version, beginning with the sound of a jet engine morphing into an operatic setting, specifically the choirs of the Russian cathedral of Paris under the direction of Piotr V. Spassky. Throughout the almost 28 minutes the narration by Jean Négroni (who served the same function on “Statues Also Die”) intertwines with the choral element and the work of Duncan plus whisperings in German and an intermittent heartbeat.
Doubters surmising that these audio-only servings are a study in incompleteness have it exactly backwards, for I’m hard-pressed to think of a film more reliant on its soundtrack than “La jetée.” Shorn of its images the experience is in a sense diminished but it concurrently excels in other modes, side one transforming into a superb mood piece, at least for non-French speakers (methinks Duncan would be very pleased) as side two’s English narration by James Kirk functions as a sort of radio show, experimental in nature but always intelligible.
Don’t denigrate the English version as a sop to the anti-intellectual brigade; both are mandatory, and the Criterion Collection’s DVD/Blu-Ray package of Sans Soleil and “La Jetée” contains dual French and English versions of both films. It’s loaded with a rack of extras including David Bowie’s “La Jetée”-inspired music video for “Jump They Say” and a supplementary segment from the French TV program Court-circuit (le magazine) analyzing Bowie’s vid.
Obviously Marker newbies should hunt down the Criterion set, and it’s those knocked off their AV room sofas who will pursue this LP. While undeniably a specialty issue it lends dimension and personality to the stream of frequently underwhelming contempo vinyl reissues and caps a milestone for Superior Viaduct; here’s to 100 more.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
