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Abstract: Chris Marker's La jetée (1962) has emerged as one of the foundational texts of postwar European cinema. Yet film studies' predominantly formal emphasis on Marker's play with movement, stasis, and temporality has undermined investigations of the film's political content. Focusing on the film's central theme of torture, this article shows how the relays between La jetée's two dominant settings-the concentration camp and a Paris in the not-so-distant past-generate a series of displacements between the colonial and consumer contexts of early 1960s France.
Modernity is, in fact, a European phenomenon but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity. -Enrique Dussel1
For the most crucial fact about pain is its presentness and the most crucial fact about torture is that it is happening. -Elaine Scarry2
Since its release in 1962, Chris Marker's La jetée (The Jetty) has emerged as one of the foundational texts of postwar European cinema. Film scholars consistently harness the Left Bank director's short ciné-roman to make both historical claims about the transition from cinematic classicism to cinematic modernism and theoretical claims about the filmed image's relation to cinematic time. Yet this predominantly formal emphasis on Marker's play with movement, stasis, and temporality has tended to come at the expense of investigations of the film's radically political content. As such, La jetée stands out as a curious anomaly in Marker's oeuvre, which has otherwise been widely understood to examine the dialectic between late capitalism and third-world revolutionary struggle, for example, iCuba si! (1961), Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam, 1967), A Grin without a Cat (1977), and Sans soleil (Sunless, 1983).3 In this article, I argue that La jetée is consistent with this larger project, demonstrating how the relays between the film's two dominant settings, the concentration camp and a Paris in the not-so-distant past, generate a series of uneasy displacements between the colonial and consumer contexts of early 1960s France. What initiates my analysis of this displacement is the film's central yet profoundly undertheorized theme of torture. More than a "spectral" allusion to topical events, I argue that Marker's representation of torture is conditioned by the text that was largely responsible for introducing the repressive nature of France's police operation in Algeria to a wide French audience: Henri...