Cinematic Movement as an Enigma (In La Jetée)

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Possible lecture on Cinematic Movement as an Enigma (In La Jetée)

The kiné in Kinematography kindled a crucial debate within the world of the moving image. Is the movement of Image and Sound real or illusory, natural or machine-driven, Euclidean or Carthesian? The various perspectives of authorities on the subject namely Eisenstein, Vertov, Tom Gunning and Gilles Deleuze's monumental work Cinema 1The Movement-Image will be discussed, tested or challenged through Chris Marker's 1962 PhotoRoman film 'La Jetée.'

The moving-image starts with Eadward Muybridge’s use of the stroboscopic effect to create the famous image of the galloping horse in 1878.

In this respect, film was perceived as sequential still images perforated by Edison and Dickson for Lumiere’s claws to provide an illusion of motion. The reason being that the eye did not see the blank screens in between and this naturally led theorists to claim that the moving image was an illusion that tricked the mind. This led to theories about The After image or Persistance of Vision‘.

‘ . . after an object has been removed from the field of vision an image of it lingers . . . ‘ Gunning, Tom. The Play between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth Century “Philosophical Toys” and Their Discourse in Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms. Røssaak, Eivind (ed). Amsterdam University Press, 2011. p 28

‘. . . a series of pictures depicting a man walking along the street . . . the man is shown with his left foot in the air. This remains in sight for 1/32 of a second, and then disappears suddenly. . . . The eye imagines that it sees the left foot descend.’ Talbot, Frederick. Moving Pictures: How They are Made and Worked. London. J.B. Lippincott Co. 1912 p. 6

The film world moved from displaying 16 frames per second to produce realistic on screen flickerless action. The advent of the soundtrack pushed film into the 24 frames per second which remains standard even in today’s digital world. This means film as equidistant snapshots projected at a constant speed

‘ . . . the equidistance of snapshots; the transfer of the equidistance constitutes the “film”. Deleuze, Gilles, et al. The Movement-Image. University of Minnesota Press, 1997. p.4

‘. . . first we had the industry of the moving image, today we have the industry of the accelerated image.’Youngblood, Gene. ‘Cinema and the Code.’ Leonardo, Computer Art in Context Supplemental Issues. 1969. P. 29 
 
Consider the film below: 
La rivière du hibou ("The Owl River", known in English as An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge), a French version directed by Robert Enrico was released in 1963. Enrico's film won Best Short Subject at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, and the 1963 Academy Award for Live Action Short Film. In 1964 La rivière du hibou aired on American television as an episode of the anthology series The Twilight Zone. (taken from Wikipedia) 
The film is an adaptation from Ambrose Bierce's 1890 short novel, 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.'

Any Civilian caught interfering with the railroad bridge will be summarily hanged.


Now let us consider the following insights:
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is full of action and yet it turns full cycle back to the start: A hanging, a death. The suspicion is that movement in Cinema provides alternative ways of motion. 

Physics also comes up with alternative descriptions of movement. 
  • Kepler sees it as a ‘relation between an orbit and the time needed to traverse it’
  • Galileo as ‘linking space covered to time taken by a body to fall’ 
  • Descartes’ ‘position of a point on a moving flat line at any moment 
  • Newton’s or Liebnitz’s differential and integral calculus. 

This all goes to show that time and movement is an independent variable. Ibid Deleuze 1997 p.3 

Philosophically, the classical viewpoint is that ‘Motion is in the eye of the beholder’ as a series of static images and therefore a ‘mere “illusion.” The ‘Heraclitean’ view considers it as a ‘Given that “everything moves” and that change and thus motion whether perceptible to the human eye or not is the very condition of life . . . ‘ Elsaesser, Thomas. Stop/Motion in Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms. Røssaak, Eivind (ed). Amsterdam University Press, 2011. p 118


An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge seems to share the paradoxical static and illusory quality of Joseph Plateau’s 1832 Phenakistiscope derives its name from the Greek phenax - cheater or deciever - marked the view it offered as deceptive.’  ‘He demonstrated the apparent stillness of a rapidly revolving device with a repeated identically drawn figure. As the wheel revolved . . . the figure appears within the viewing slots as a single static image.’ Gunning, Tom. The Play between Still and Moving Images: Nineteenth Century “Philosophical Toys” and Their Discourse in  Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms. Røssaak, Eivind (ed). Amsterdam University Press, 2011. p 36

These devices do not represent motion; they produce it . . . they make pictures move.’ This trickery of motion in film opened up a heated debate on filmic reality (André Bazin, Christian Metz, Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek etc) and filmic illusion. For further reading on the subject I recommend starting with Gilles Deleuze's 'The Time Image' and 'The Movement-Image.' 

‘“The persistence of vision” exemplifies . . . visual illusions as primarily a physiological phenomenon . . . As an explanation of the phenomenon of apparent motion it has now been basically discarded, but still must be dealt with as a revealing historical and cultural legacy (and one that displays its own phantom persistence . . .’ Fisher Anderson Joseph and Barbara. The Myth of Persistence of Vision,’ Journal of the University Film Association 4 Fall 1978. p 3-8

The Soviet School
Eisenstein: 'The Pathetic' Movement is extracted from certain crisis moments which create film.

Eisenstein extracted from movements and developments certain moments of crisis, which he made the subject of cinema par excellence.’ The Eisensteinian ‘Pathetic’ picks out peaks and shouts to a climax. ’ Ibid Deleuze 1997 p.5

Barthes' 'Puntum' dwells on images that bruise, scar, pierce and therefore create filmic movement.

The Punctum: Barthes’ verbs- “prick” or “wounds” or “bruises” a particular viewer’s subjectivity in a way that makes the photograph in question singularly arresting . . . ‘ in Fried, Michael. “Barthes’s Punctum.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 31, no. 3, 2005, pp. 539–74. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/430984. Accessed 27 Nov. 2022

Vertov's a kino-eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine . . . Now and forever I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion. . . My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you.

Deleuze 
Refers to Muybridge's Horse to draw attention to the hooves moving, as any-whatever instants on a line rather than privileged Einsteinian instants. This is based on Henri Bergson's philosophy especially 'Memory and Matter.' 

Deleuze opposes the Eisensteinian ‘Pathetic’ with Muybridge’s horse’s gallop, where the instants are of a hoof on the ground. Deleuze prefers an understanding of the movement-image as one built on these any-whatever instants rather than Eisenstein's 'Pathetic' or Barthes' 'Punctum.' ‘These instants have nothing in common with long exposures.’ Indeed, exposures are an ‘order of transcendental forms . . . actualised in movement.’ Ibid Deleuze 1997 p.6 

The French Wave
Instants on a line imply a Euclidean movement from pole A to pole B. Movement can be Carthesian with movement in all directions.

Let us try to apply this to An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.
  • What is the turning point or the catalyst in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge? 
  • What is the driving force behind the man's desperate escape and what stops it?
  • Is the film built on any-whatever instants or on the pathetic?
  • Is the movement Euclidean or Carthesian?

The sentences below come from the script of another film: How do they compare to An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge? 

This is the story of a man, marked by an image of his childhood.
The face he had seen was to be the only peacetime image to survive the war. As for him he never knows whether he is moving towards her, whether he is driven, whether he has made it all up or whether he is only dreaming.


There was one film that defied this trickery, illusion of movement. Enter Chris Marker's La Jetée.

Background Notes:

Christian Hyppolite François Georges Bouche-Villeneuve was born in 1921. Throughout his career he used 20 different pseudonyms for various  translations and publications. “Chris Marker” is the most famous one. He was a writer and a supporter of Pétain’s youth organization in the early 40s, joined the Résistance,  as an active fighting member. Ater the war, he joined the team of the left-Christian intellectual review Esprit in 1946, as a world-travelling photographer and journalist before working with film in the early 1950s. 

La Jetée is a photomontage of varying rhythm using 40 optically printed photographs.  It contains only one brief moment of conventional motion. Marker could only afford to hire one for an afternoon. The stills were taken with a Pentax Spotmatic and the motion-picture segment was shot with a 35 mm Arriflex. The film has no dialogue aside from possible diegetic muttering in German. The story is told by a voice-over narrator. 
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  • What is the turning point or the catalyst in La Jetée? 
  • What is the driving force behind the man's desperate return to the jetty at Orly?
  • Is the film built on any-whatever instants or on the pathetic?
  • Is the movement Euclidean or Carthesian?


La Jetée does not gallop like Muybridge’s horse and defies Deluze’s concept of  any-whatever instants on a line of action. Instead, its stilted nature manifests a progression of marks that are extracted from movement to take the Eisensteinian ‘Pathetic’ and Barthes’ ‘Punctum’ to the extreme. The violent scene, whose meaning he would not grasp until much later is sequence of ‘transcendental forms’, the sum of ‘the production and confrontation of singular points which are immanent to movement.’ Ibid Deleuze 1997 p.6 


The child of this story would remember the ‘eternal pose’ or ‘immobile section’ of the frozen sun, the scene at the end of the jetty. The frozen light endures on each frame and this endurance of the bruises and scars of crisis moments is an unheard and unseen movement. Indeed it seems that La Jetée ‘recompose[s] movement with eternal poses or with immobile sections.’ Deleuze refers to what he calles Bergson’s third thesis. ‘Not only is an instant an immobile section of movement, but movement is a mobile section of duration.’ Ibid Deleuze 1997 p.8 

This means that the still moves because it endures time.

Both films seem to reflect Eisenstein's belief that ‘movement only occurs if the whole is neither given nor giveable. Ibid Deleuze 1997 p.7

Both films involve a nostalgic return to the past.

Both films invite one to a reviewing and encourage us to be pensive spectators : Perhaps a nostalgic twist to rewatch. 

‘In consciousness there would be only images - these were qualitative and without extension. In space there would be movement - these were extended and quantitative.’ La Jetée as a reflection of consciousness and An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge as a reflection of space. Ibid Deleuze 1997 p.56

“[n]othing distinguishes memories from other moments: it is only later that they make themselves recognized by their scars.”



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