Identifying the Post and Non-Human in Chris Marker’s La Jetee

Recent trends towards a post-humanist discourse in critical theory have complicated many of our long established binaries (human/machine, human/animal, etc.). In his short essay film La Jetee, Chris Marker deconstructs a similar binary that undergirds post-humanism: life/non-life. Through a series of still shots that intersperse a variety of figures (humans, statues, stuffed animals, unconscious men) La Jetee blurs the boundaries between what constitutes an acting, living subject and a lifeless, perceived object.

After the young boy witnesses his future death at the airport, the story shifts to post-war future where the destruction of human society is reflected by its ruined remains and “the victors stood guard over a kingdom of rats.” In this first scene of human experimentation, Marker juxtaposes images of calm and staid experimenters (victors) with the pained expressions of blindfolded men connected to a series of wires (rats). As the narrator notes, the results of these experiments were “disappointment for some, death for others, and for others, madness.”

Following this introduction to the experiment, Marker gives the viewer a series of images of statues interspersed with shots of a frightened man. The first statue looks to be a small child or cherub of some sort with her arm around a swan. The statue is old and discolored and seems to be placed alongside piles of rubbish. After switching back to a brief still of the “mad man,” Marker shifts again to a figure that appears to be nothing more than an old concrete block with a couple of holes in the front of it.

Although the viewer is not likely to mistake this figure for one of the humans in the film, there is a certain resemblance to life-like forms that is difficult to ignore considering that the shots leading up to and surrounding this one are primarily images of the human face. The slab has two holes in the front which almost makes it resemble the nostrils of a swine due to the large area that they cover. Underneath these two holes there is a thin, wavy crack that runs across the bottom portion of the figure. The placement of this image is so powerful due to its ability to convey a sense of human-ness based off of nothing more than a few insignificant markings on a chunk of old stone.

Through the very form of the essay film, Marker is able to collapse a seemingly sturdy barrier between perceptions of life/non-life. In so doing, Marker is not so much restoring agency to the material objects that act upon human subjects, but rather revealing the ways in which non-human “objects” have always acted upon supposedly autonomous subjects. The mad man, as he stares at the similarly immobilized figure, identifies (perhaps for the first time) with what it means to be “objectified” and experimented on.

Interestingly, as the film shifts into the time travel/dream space, this collapsed distinction between subject/object seems to rebuild as the man desires a time in which he identifies with the life he sees in the woman. Marker alludes to this idea by making his only live sequence in the film a short moment of the woman in a bed. In this environment, for which the man can only desire, there resides the potential for the creation of life.

For the the man's captors, this moment is vital. It works to solidify the link that they wish to create between dream and reality by co-opting the man’s ability to connect desire and reality, or life and non-life.