I. I’ve never seen any of Chris Marker’s films, but this book made me want to. (You can watch La Jetée online, or it’s available on DVD, along with Marker’s 1982 film, Sans Soleil.) (I’ve never read Moby-Dick, either, and this book made me want to do that as well.)
II. Howe’s book is mostly in prose: nineteen numbered sections ranging in length from a paragraph to twenty-two pages, with images from films interspersed with the text: an airplane seen from below, a woman with an inscrutable expression, a scene of dismay, a fuzzy image of, what, a shadow on water? Soldiers cross a frozen lake; a balloon hovers/wavers. Another blur; three blonde children walking; that woman, again. There is one other image: the return address on an envelope, postmarked January 1943 from Roswell, New Mexico: a letter from Howe’s then-future husband, now deceased.
III. Don’t worry: this isn’t going to be nineteen sections long.
IV. What’s interesting and challenging about this book is the way Howe brings together so many different strands. She’s writing about the films of Chris Marker, sometimes in detail, scene by scene, but also writes that she “was drawn to the project because of the fact of [her] husband’s death and [her] wish to find a way to document his life and work” (5). Other filmmakers make an appearance: Dziga Vertov, Andrei Tarkovsky. Howe writes about Ivan’s Childhood and also about the movie-going experiences of her own childhood, and also about her husband’s life as a pilot in wartime, and also about the death of Lenin and Three Songs about Lenin, and also about American literature she knows well: Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, the idea of montage in their work.
V. The word “fact” keeps recurring. “Without words, what are facts?” (7). The idea of “the primacy of the “factual”” in Vertov’s work (9). Poets and nonfiction filmakers as working by “factual telepathy” (7). The world is “flooded with facts” (13).
VI. There’s something so satisfying about the kind of close-reading that Howe is doing of Marker’s films. Like this:
La Jetée, composed almost entirely of photo stills, begins abruptly with a violent out-of-field-movement-sound-image, the roar of revving and hovering jet engines. Sometimes I think I hear sirens, until the whine or scream of aviation doubles and dissolves into cathedral music: voices in a choir sing passages from the Russian Liturgy of the Good Saturday. In northern Russia, Iceland, and other northern places, the sun never goes out of sight in summer. La Jetée’s aborted soundtrack takeoff evokes technicist and eschatological worldviews.
Immediately time could be going either way. (13-14)
VII. There is in this book a sense of “oscillating between presence and absence” (10). Howe writes about her husband; Howe writes to her husband. Howe writes about her husband’s image in photographs, in a home-movie; she writes about his studio, now gone: she “can only perceive its imprint or trace” (25). Her husband’s daughter, from an earlier marriage, “remembers listening to the noise of waves breaking over pebbles in the cove at night, how tides pulled them under, how they swirled and regrouped in the drift and came back” (25). “A documentary work is an attempt to recapture someone something somewhere looking back” (50).
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