The Kid Stays in the Picture
By Chris Marino
The Fifth Shot of La Jetée
Dir. Dominique Cabrera, France, no distributor
At a recent screening of La Jetée, Chris Marker’s great 1962 science-fiction photo-novel, a man named Jean-Henri Cabrera was struck by an image of a man, woman, and child watching the airplanes at France’s Orly airport. The three subjects were photographed from behind, so their faces weren’t visible, but some nagging feeling told him that, somehow, it was a picture of him and his parents. He sent this “fifth shot of La Jetée” to his filmmaker cousin Dominique Cabrera for her opinion, and she was so captivated by this possibility that she was inspired to make a film investigating it. For Dominique there was the added significance that 1962 was the year in which her ‘pied-noir’ family in newly independent Algeria moved to France. Might this photo depict her relatives waiting for her arrival in her new country?
We learn quite early in the film that Jean-Henri’s suspicions about this “fifth shot” are correct. But Cabrera continues investigating, following every lead, pursuing every coincidence, and developing a sprawling series of associations. And she arranges her film so that it hops rapidly among several plotlines, to potentially bewildering and exhausting effect. So however remarkable this story, it can be difficult to know what to make of the film as a whole. Is The Fifth Shot of La Jetée a sort of informal exercise, the product of a filmmaker set loose on a marvelous bit of family trivia, more interesting to the persons involved than to a general audience? Or does it possess a guiding logic, and elements of broader human significance, which make it a film to grapple with and return to?
The mystery of the fifth shot demands an investigation into the past, and Cabrera’s direct presentation of the archival material she finds allows the viewer to participate in this inquiry themselves. Family photos are consulted by the filmmaker in the identification of the three figures: is Jean-Henri’s mother’s haircut the same as that of the woman in La Jetée? Is the man standing with his father’s characteristic slanted posture? Does the boy have Jean-Henri’s protruding ears and skinny legs? Cabrera includes many pictures of her own parents as she considers the experience of their sudden migration to France. Old photos of Orly airport are used to determine where Chris Marker may have been standing when he snapped this still for La Jetée, while diaries and letters display production details that indicate when this photo could have been taken. Passports and identification documents reveal surprising coincidences, such as the fact that Davos Hanich, lead actor in La Jetée, is from the same town in Algeria, Sig, as Cabrera’s family. And we hear voices from old recorded interviews, including those of actress Helene Chatêlain discussing Chris Marker and director Alain Resnais praising La Jetée. Beyond their specific relevance to Cabrera’s investigations, these materials evoke an important function of cinema: its production of an archive of images and sounds which serves to preserve the past.
The significance of this archival footage is developed through a series of interviews. Cabrera shoots her subjects as they look at a photograph or watch a video, so that while sometimes her questions yield significant facts, just as often she captures the raw emotions these images provoke. A conversation with Cabrera’s mother, for instance, establishes details of family history: they left for France between Palm Sunday and Easter 1962, in the aftermath of Algeria winning its independence, and while she didn’t have much awareness of the political situation, she remembers her husband saying it was “natural” that the Algerians would want their own country. At the same time, seeing portraits of herself from this period summons memories of her deceased husband: “Your father would take pictures of me all the time … as a newlywed he photographed my every moment.” A similar dynamic plays out in an interview with the wife and daughter of Davos Hanich. On the one hand, we learn how he kept much of his past from his family: his name change, his being born in Algeria, how he likely met Chris Marker in a war camp. On the other hand, we see how their viewing of La Jetée moves them to tears, as they fondly remember the deceased actor’s “spark.”
Between these more narrative elements, Cabrera foregrounds the technical apparatus of photography and cinema. Most of Fifth Shot takes place in a film production studio, and Cabrera includes many individual shots focused on devices and machines. We see cameras for shooting both film and still photos; a film rewinder, a splicer, and a moviola for editing films; and projectors, computer monitors, magnifying glasses, and slide viewers for looking at pictures. Jean-Henri manages to find the same model of Pentax camera that Marker used to make La Jetée. He and his daughter play with its mechanisms and remark on its physical qualities: it’s heavy and indestructible, “you could use it like a hammer.” Then Cabrera brings it to Orly and tries to recreate Marker’s photograph with it. “A shamanic operation,” she says, “I’m placing my footsteps in Chris’s.” Rather than advance any of the film’s investigations, these images establish the mechanical quality of photography: cinema is not “natural” vision, but a mediated, technological way of seeing and experiencing the world.
Cabrera also interweaves clips from the films of Chris Marker—La Jetée most prominently, but also Le Joli Mai, the documentary portrait of Paris during May 1962 that Marker was working on before and after La Jetée. These images prompt questions about the motivations of the man behind the camera, and serve as a reminder that it is ultimately the work of an artist that has brought this world together. In a late voiceover, Cabrera addresses Marker: “Do you see how you have pulled our family into the vortex of your film?”
These elements don’t combine to form a narrative in a conventional sense. While there is the mystery of the fifth shot, any suspense around its provenance is resolved quite early. There aren’t characters who propel action forward, nor is there rising and falling dramatic tension. So how then do these disparate elements form a cohesive whole? The key lies in the film’s rich layering of images and sounds—in its rapid rhythms and inventive, surprising transitions. These movements are not only deftly executed but possess a thematic significance: they are governed by, and express, the ways we look at photographs. By allowing the experiences of “photographic vision” to guide its movements and progressions, Cabrera elevates her film beyond a digressive investigation and into something of broader significance.
By capturing a moment in space-time, a photograph produces a document of the past which can be used to ascertain matters of fact and identity. This forensic dimension of photography is explicitly acknowledged in the film, when a voiceover states that the filmmaker perceives the world “through the same means as detectives—with spyglasses and microphones.” Many of the film’s jumps, zooms, and pivots are informed by Cabrera’s detective work, her pursuit of connections and her interest in coincidences. But Cabrera’s detective’s eye is at work even in seemingly less relevant contexts than those scanning Jean-Henri’s family photos. While some of these connections might feel far-fetched, sometimes they turn up remarkable findings. Looking at a picture of Chris Marker taken from behind, she notices his ears sticking out a bit, and wonders whether Marker’s eye at Orly was drawn to a little boy whose ears similarly stuck out. In another scene, Cabrera points to a picture of Davos Hanich and insists to Jean-Henri that he and Hanich look quite similar. While these supposed facial resemblances were lost on this viewer, they spur Cabrera’s investigation into Hanich, which reveals not only that he was born in Sig, but that he was likely the young man who was once in love with Jean-Henri’s mother, Angèle, but was rebuffed by the family for being a “lazybones.”
By registering a candid expression or unexpected vulnerability, the flash of a camera can capture glimmers of personality in its subjects. Photography’s capacity for characterization is particularly apparent when Cabrera looks at pictures of her father. She sees in his tense expression and forlorn eyes an essential sadness, and as she recounts the circumstances of her family’s move to France, she comes to realize how it left her father a “nobody in a new country.” A photo can also reveal something about the photographer, and much of the film’s second half is spent grasping for insights about the reclusive Chris Marker. Cabrera takes particular interest in a short home movie Marker took of Chatêlain, his last serious romantic partner, as she wakes up in the morning. It captures the transition from peaceful angelic sleep to soft, happy eyes gazing at the camera. Cabrera connects this video to a similar sequence in the 1929 The Marvelous Life of Joan of Arc, starring Simone Genevois, and she then interviews actress Florence Delay, who played Joan of Arc in Bresson’s 1962 adaptation and narrated Marker’s 1983 travelogue Sans soleil, who says that happiness for Marker was “the face of a sleeping woman.” These connections generate an assessment of the elusive Marker: that while he was sad, melancholic, and solitary, he nevertheless had a gift for capturing intimacy and seeing right into people’s souls.
The verisimilitude of a photograph can foster destabilizing encounters with figures from the past, and the film conveys this spectral dimension of photography through explicit references to ghosts, visitations, and the presence of the dead. While reviewing footage of a pro-Algeria protest in Paris, we hear Cabrera say, as an elevated camera passes across a crowd of young faces, “It’s like they’re looking at us.” Then, when another shot reveals Marker in the middle of the demonstration, a camera to his eye, filming footage that would be made into Le Joli Mai, we hear, “We’re entertaining ghosts now.” And after Jean-Henri learns all his cousin has discovered about Davos, Sig, and his mother, he remarks, “I’m dizzy… it’s a bit like Vertigo.” In these encounters, figures of the dead and experiences of the past are resurrected in a flash. But accompanying these sudden shocks of time travel is a sense of the ultimate distance these appearances maintain from us. The film compares a photograph to an echo which never fades: it preserves the original, but in such a way that a fundamental mystery remains, and no final resolution is possible in looking at it. And sometimes this distance proves to be painful. After Cabrera’s mother watches a video of her deceased husband, she cries, “It’s difficult seeing him move. I’m with the photos all day, but this… I feel like saying, why won’t he come back!”
The Fifth Shot of La Jetée is a moving, resonant film because it provides a sense, at least in part, of what pictures mean to us: why we snap photographs, why we keep photo albums, why we go to the movies. The aspects that might be frustrating on a first watch—the somewhat confusing path from scene to scene, the seemingly endless pursuit of clues and coincidences—are neither careless nor indulgent but instead work to convey how photography and cinema can help us forge distinctive relationships with others and the world. In demonstrating the great extensiveness and richness of the associations that can come from one photograph, it attests to the power and significance of art.