Slice of Time: A Film That Foretells the Future

Joshi’s formulation references Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (“If Venice is ‘the only city’ for Marco Polo”) to explain Marker’s technique universalizing destruction through Paris’s symbolic condensation. Rather than depicting generic war devastation, Marker doctored photographs showing specifically Parisian landmarks—”rubble inside a roofless Notre-Dame, a decapitated Arc de Triomphe”—making fictional nuclear war’s consequences viscerally concrete through beloved familiar architecture’s imagined ruin. This technique operates on multiple levels: emotionally, Parisian audiences confront their city’s vulnerability rather than abstractly contemplating distant suffering; symbolically, Paris as cultural capital represents Western civilization broadly, its destruction signifying universal catastrophe; historically, juxtaposing doctored Paris ruins with actual WWII destruction photographs creates temporal collapse where hypothetical future merges with documented past. Joshi notes this inadvertently created prophetic template: “Looking at the film now, you can’t help thinking of the various urban destructions that have come after the film was made: Beirut, Manhattan, Baghdad, Kharkiv, Gaza”—Marker’s technique of bringing destruction “home” through iconic architecture’s ruin established visual language subsequent conflicts would literalize. The formulation also suggests cosmopolitan perspective refusing comfortable distance between “here” (safe Western metropoles) and “there” (war zones), insisting vulnerability is universal and destruction anywhere threatens cultural heritage everywhere.

Joshi identifies La Jetée’s radical formal innovation—constructing narrative from still photographs—as creating perceptual instability generating anxiety beyond conventional cinema. He writes ‘the relentless succession of still images in changing rhythms actually generates far more anxiety than a “normal” cinematic film would have. Everything is still and, yet, everything is moving; the stillness is a deeply unstable one, not something you can trust.’ This paradox operates through violated expectations: viewers conditioned to cinema’s continuous motion instead encounter fragmented stasis requiring cognitive work assembling narrative from discontinuous images. The rostrum-camera movements (pans, zooms across photographs) create motion illusion while images themselves remain frozen, producing uncanny effect where perceived movement contradicts actual immobility. Changing rhythms—sometimes lingering on single image, sometimes rapidly cutting between photographs—prevent settling into comfortable viewing pattern, forcing constant perceptual adjustment. This formal instability mirrors thematic content: protagonist’s temporal displacement experiences where past, present, future become unstable; post-nuclear survivors’ precarious existence where apparent stability (underground shelter) masks fundamental insecurity (radioactive surface, resource scarcity, experimental torture). The technique makes medium embody message—just as protagonist cannot trust temporal continuity, viewers cannot trust visual continuity, creating “almost haptic” experience where formal experimentation generates somatic anxiety rather than intellectual appreciation.

Joshi’s “multilingual” characterization describes how La Jetée employs diverse visual and aural vocabularies rather than unified aesthetic, creating rich polyphonic experience. For images, he explains they’re ‘multilingual, speaking in visual tongues — doctored photographs from long before Photoshop, “straight” street photography, set up shots within a documentary situation and totally theatricalised narrative images.’ This heterogeneity prevents aesthetic comfort: viewers cannot settle into single photographic mode but must constantly navigate between documentary realism (street photography), obvious artifice (doctored images showing destroyed Notre-Dame), and staged narrative (theatricalized scenes). Each mode carries different truth-claims and emotional registers, their juxtaposition creating productive friction. The soundtrack similarly refuses unity: ‘using a matching economy of means, doesn’t ever let you rest — Western classical music of different sorts, sound effects both quotidian and highly distorted, and the haunting voice-over all play with your mind and your perception.’ This sonic diversity—from recognizable classical compositions to everyday sounds to electronically-distorted effects to narrative voice-over—prevents passive reception, demanding active interpretive engagement. The multilingual quality reflects film’s temporal themes: just as protagonist moves between different time periods encountering distinct realities, viewers navigate between aesthetic registers encountering distinct modes of representation. This formal strategy also anticipates postmodern pastiche while maintaining coherent dystopian vision, demonstrating artistic sophistication transcending simple genre exercise.

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This article is rated Advanced level, demanding sophisticated cultural literacy, comfort with experimental cinema discourse, and ability to track complex temporal arguments about how artworks acquire prescience through recursive relevance rather than literal prediction. Joshi assumes readers possess familiarity with film history (recognizing Chris Marker, understanding photo-roman format, knowing La Jetée’s canonical status), literary references (Calvino’s Invisible Cities functioning as structural metaphor), and cultural touchstones (The Devil Wears Prada quote establishing 1962 context). The piece requires tracking multiple simultaneous temporal layers: recognizing 1962 film references 1945 WWII destruction while inadvertently anticipating post-1962 urban devastations (Beirut through Gaza), creating palimpsest effect where past, present, and future collapse into simultaneous awareness. Advanced readers must distinguish between Joshi’s descriptive passages (explaining film’s formal techniques like rostrum-camera movements), interpretive claims (arguing artworks “shift shape” across historical contexts), and contemporary applications (positioning 2024 readers as inhabiting dystopian scenario). The essay’s structure alternates between immersive present-tense description and analytical past-tense reflection, requiring flexibility navigating between experiential and critical registers. Vocabulary includes technical terms (eponymous, rostrum-camera, haptic), philosophical concepts (defamiliarisation, shape-shifting, temporal displacement), and cultural literacy (knowing Orly Airport, Pan Am, recognizing extinct airline logos). This difficulty level suits readers with interdisciplinary interests capable of appreciating how experimental art’s formal innovations enable thematic endurance, understanding prescience as pattern recognition rather than prophecy, and recognizing apocalyptic imagination’s continuity across generations—preparing for graduate-level cultural criticism where close reading combines with theoretical sophistication and historical awareness.

This quotation captures La Jetée’s romantic fantasy of temporal escape from apocalyptic context, representing desire for pure present-moment existence freed from historical burden and future dread that frames film’s dystopian narrative. Joshi introduces this description writing ‘In our constantly fracturing world, one can long to inhabit a slice of time like the protagonist and his lover where “their only landmarks are the flavour of the moment in which they are living and the markings on the walls.”‘ The ‘flavour of the moment’ emphasizes pure sensory phenomenology—taste, touch, immediate perception—without historical or contextual baggage, while ‘markings on the walls’ suggests minimal spatial orientation without grand temporal narratives or external coordinates. This represents protagonist’s successful temporal displacement outcome: finding refuge in past where peacetime existence (‘Real Children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves’) contrasts sharply with post-nuclear present’s deprivations (no animals, constant surveillance, deadly experiments). However, Joshi’s invocation carries melancholy awareness that such refuge proves unsustainable: film’s plot involves controllers eventually demanding protagonist travel to future, and romantic interlude exists only as temporary respite from apocalyptic framing conditions. The longing Joshi expresses (‘one can long to inhabit’) acknowledges both desire’s legitimacy and its impossibility—2024 readers cannot actually escape into timeless present any more than film’s protagonist ultimately could, making phrase simultaneously aspirational and tragic, representing human desire for temporal escape that circumstances continuously frustrate.

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