Is it possible to trust images? They tell us very little, and yet we feel so strongly about them that we surround ourselves with them, let them snake their way into our imaginations. We adore them, but they look back at us with stillness and silence. Images are presented as accidental snapshots of a place or a person's consciousness, but both people and places are built over time, and we are rarely there for their beginnings. Conversely, movies invite their own criticism by their conspicuously constructed nature. It seems telling that documentaries only lasted several decades before the auto-critiques of cinema verite and Direct Cinema (among others) emerged. Because how could a film, with all its edits and omissions and outright manipulations, express anything close to objective truth? The film theorists were right to problematize film's claim to authenticity. And yet, where are we with images themselves? If a film is 24 lies per second, as Godard once said, what is an image?
I can only shine a light on this abyss and back away. Other than perhaps Harun Farocki, I feel Chris Marker is one of the few filmmakers who began exploring the connection between images, other images, and ideas. Few of the images in his films lead to a sequentially expected follow-up. The linearity of most films instead expands into 360 possible degrees, any of which points of departure are as likely to be followed as the next. Marker zigzags, asserting without words that there is no one true way to tell a story. This may seem an obvious observation, but think closely about how much of cinema is one sustained lie of causality, each image necessitating the next and building upon the last. There is beauty in these lies, of course, or how could we call ourselves cinephiles? We learn to love the lies. Less often do we question them, allowing ourselves to be troubled by the omni-directional potential an isolated image presents.
What amazes me about Chris Marker is that he refuses to ignore either the truth or the lie of an image. He presents both simultaneously, digging insightfully into one image before moving onto the next in a way that complicates the previous truth. In light of this methodology, Denise Bellon strikes me as an almost ideal subject for Marker. Her photographs speak to hidden truths just as often as they miss them. As her daughter Yannick points out, the proud bodies and daring aerial feats of interwar France show us just how the weight of repression was being cast off by everyday Parisians. The love of skin was captured anew in images, and the thrill of adventure was opened up to a waiting world by air travel. And yet these photographs cannot tell us about the horrors of the second World War. They gain their power from knowledge of the past, but they are not yet darkened by the shadow of the future. We can only perceive that gloom in retrospect.
The interwar period is unique in this aspect, not so much for being bookended by tragedies (what time period isn't, after all?) but for the blending of its orgiastic freedoms and sternly repressed secrets. In acknowledging both, Marker and Bellon find a fuller truth than either state of mind could express. The film's title becomes almost unbearably apt in its evocation of past and future mutating one another. Much of the film feels filtered through this unique pallor, brief moments of beauty amidst inevitable historical failure. Marker is masterful as always, and Yannick Bellon does a fine job of weaving her family history through this all-consuming metanarrative. I have heard jeers directed toward the affectless narration of Alexandra Stewart, but considering the sophistication of Marker's craft, I can only assume this serves some purpose unknown to me. Criticizing the mysterious workings of a Marker film seems to me about as useful as telling a cat it's done something wrong.
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Considering Denise Bellon was a staunch supporter of the surrealists, it's no big surprise to see Jean Cocteau making an appearance in daughter Yannick Bellon's short film COLETTE. Other than LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE, I am mostly unfamiliar with Cocteau, so this cameo isn't as meaningful to me as it ought to be. Of course, I could say the same of the film's subject, Colette herself. I know precious little of her either, but I am well aware of her importance in France due to none other than Simone de Beauvoir. In her truly magnificent book The Second Sex, Beauvoir references Colette time and again, parsing out mysteries of the gendered experience through Colette's writing. Of the many thinkers cross-referenced by Beauvoir, few are given such credence and respect as Colette. For this reason alone, she exists to me as a major writer, one I'd dearly like to discover soon. Credit to Bellon for reminding me of that wish. I imagine I'll revisit this little film one day and appreciate it more fully for the charming encounter it captures.
