In Matter and
Memory, French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the
pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring
the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement, an unending progression, there
is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but
an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on,
and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may
sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of
the now, at the very moment in which
it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past
seems, therefore, the only reality we
have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess.
Chris Marker’s La
Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of
triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are conducted to send
people to different time periods in the hope of casting for a possible way of
survival in the wake of World War III. The scientists settle upon a prisoner,
whose childhood obsession with an unknown woman (hence his inextricable tie
with the past) makes him a perfect subject for the test. Withstanding the risks
of death and madness (the normal and invariable consequences that befall the
other candidates), the man is transported back in the past, where he spends
time with the unknown woman, strolling through the streets of pre-war Paris and
visiting the natural history museum, and at length they develop a romantic
relationship. This successful instance prompts the scientists to send the man
to the future, much to his reluctance, and despite manages to procure a promise
to live permanently in that time zone, the man yearns to be reunited with the
woman of his past. His wish is granted; he finds himself at the very spot
where, as a child, he saw the woman for the first time. Exultantly, he spots
her in the crowd. But he also recognises standing next to her one of the
scientists who, he realises too late, is ordered to carry out his death. The
man dies making peace with the idea that never is he going to escape Time.
This abstruse but meditative allegory is accompanied
largely with still images – save one blinking instant when the woman, lying on
a bed, opens her eyes. Those powerful few seconds calls to mind Anton Chekhov’s
rhapsody of divine, aching beauty: “The dam, flooded with moonlight, showed not
a bit of shade; on it, in the middle, the neck of a broken bottle glittered
like a star.” If stillness, in the film, signifies the general passage of time;
that momentary motion is like a promise of timelessness.
Stripping off its poetic trappings, the core of La Jetee is actually a reiteration of
Bergson’s theory: that man cherishes his memory because the past, being the
only period whose outline remains to him the most tangible, reminds him of what
he used to possess but is no more. The act of remembering entails a tacit
acknowledgement of time’s inexorability, and is thus, as the film seems to
imply, an infinitely better option than the vain wish of transcending temporal barriers,
of attaining immortality, which only brings one to the foreseeable consequence
of death. But the difference between remembering and reliving is underscored –
by way of that ingenious insertion of an epiphanous moment of movement, the
possession of which belongs exclusively to those who are brave and foolish
enough to dream.
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