(Un)moving images of the Third World War: nuclear narrative and nuclear aesthetic of Chris Marker’s La Jetée

To begin at the end, the protagonist of La Jetée (hereafter, the Man) – a veteran of the nuclear Third World War – dies on the observation deck of Orly Airport, realising in the moment of his demise that there is ‘no escape from Time’. Today, the same revelation that befalls the Man of La Jetée haunts the horizon of our contemporary politics and culture. Responding to the ongoing war in Ukraine and the (re-)emerging prospect of nuclear conflict, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock of 2024 at 90 seconds to midnight, marking the Clock’s closest ever imminence to the symbolic hour of apocalypse. Just as the Man sprints towards his own death, it appears that we are also accelerating towards what Jacques Derrida forewarned in his ‘Nuclear Criticism’ as a total and ‘remainderless destruction, without mourning and without symbolicity’ – that is, an unprecedented destruction that would not only precipitate an untold number of deaths, but also unravel the very capacity to signify such violence and commemorate the victims.¹ Contemporary cinema is starting to address such existential anxieties. To take a notable example, the coda of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) anticipates this unthinkable fate; haunted by the panoramic premonition of the Earth set alight, Oppenheimer shuts his eyes, drawing the film to an abrupt close, and leaving audiences in the darkness of our present precarity. And so, in the context of our suspension and speculation before this unimaginable prospect, I return to La Jetée. In what follows, I explore how the narrative and aesthetic strategies of Chris Marker’s 1962 photo-roman effectively mediate both our movement towards, and the ultimately un-signifiable nature of, the nuclear apocalypse.

This reading of La Jetée is informed by, and seeks to contribute towards, a growing field of scholarship on the relationship between the nuclear and the moving image, a medium, perhaps beyond any other, that has defined the cultural imaginary of the Atomic Age. Highlighting the intimacy of this relationship, Susan Courtney declared that ‘the history of nuclear weapons is also, in several crucial respects, a history of moving images’.² Some 50 cameras stationed around Los Alamos documented the inception of the Atomic Age at the Trinity test in July 1945, which proved not only a scientific success, but also an aesthetic sensation; the astounding commercial success of Oppenheimer reflects the enduring cinematic appeal of this scene. For the subsequent tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946, the US military recruited hundreds of Hollywood photographers and filmmakers to record the explosions. John O’Brian details how these tests were carefully choreographed media events, calibrated to project the triumphs of American science to screens across the globe.³ Ultimately, around 50,000 still images and several million feet of motion picture film of the explosions – causing a worldwide shortage of film stock – proliferated the cultural imaginary of the Atomic Age. By promoting the image of the mushroom cloud as an icon of American hegemony, these photographic and cinematic technologies helped to sublimate the death drive of nuclear proliferation.⁴ The cumulative effect of this conditioning was to produce the ‘deep-seated boredom of an alienated public that dreams of debris’.⁵ Such insights reveal the historical (ab)use of the moving image to accelerate humanity’s somnambulism towards nuclear war.

In contradistinction, the narrative and aesthetic strategies of Marker’s La Jetée exemplify the potential of the moving image to interrogate our acceleration towards a remainder-less destruction. In discussing the ‘nuclear narrative’, I demonstrate how La Jetée exposes the Faustian terms of Gaullist France’s programme of nuclear proliferation. The film’s fable of the Third World War conjoins these broader politics to the personal, introducing itself as the ‘story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood’. This image is of the Woman (Hélène Châtelain) at the eponymous jetty of Orly Airport, moments before our child protagonist witnesses a man’s death. This instance of violence signals the beginning of nuclear war, which forces any survivors into the tunnels under the Palais de Chaillot. Here the victorious Scientists subject the Man (Davos Hanich) to experiments in time travel. Instrumentalising the Man’s memory of the Woman, the Scientists transport the Man back to pre-war Paris, and subsequently task the Man with retrieving an energy source from the future that can revive human industry. Eventually the Man flees to the past, where he is pursed by an assassin. The circularity of La Jetée’s nuclear narrative concludes where it began, as the Man realises that he, as a boy, had witnessed his own death on the jetty at Orly. Attending to Orly and the Palais de Chaillot’s spatial legacies of violence and war, the nuclear narrative of La Jetée denotes that the new technologies of the Atomic Age appear to merely perpetuate – or even consummate – our historical precedent of self-destruction.

Alongside the nuclear narrative, I also explore how La Jetée mobilises the ‘nuclear aesthetic’ in order to mediate the spectre of nuclear apocalypse. Self-styled as a photo-roman, La Jetée consists of around 400 still photographs with only a single passage of a ‘moving image’ over its 29-minute runtime. Since its release, scholars have questioned how and why La Jetée does not present sequential spatial and temporal intervals, leaving omissions in vision for the viewer to interpolate.⁶ My intervention puts Marker’s composition of La Jetée in dialogue with the wider literature on historical trauma and the (un)representability of nuclear violence, including the story of Yoshito Matsushige’s struggle to document the effects of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. Through this comparison, the horror of La Jetée’s nuclear aesthetic resides not only in what is seen but in what remains unseen beyond the frame. Going further, I also refer to the images of the ‘nuclear shadows’ in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to account for the stillness of La Jetée’s nuclear aesthetic. This stillness both emphasises the macabre effects of nuclear violence and underlines how the Atomic Age may precipitate what Derrida terms the ‘absolute épochè’ – no less, that is, than the concluding chapter of human history.⁷

What emerges throughout this discussion is how the nuclear narrative and aesthetic of La Jetée is prototypical of the insights from Derrida’s Nuclear Criticism. During the 1980s, Derrida spoke both ‘of/ in an apocalyptic tone of philosophy’.⁸ This tone signified that the ‘the end is soon […] We’re all going to die, we’re going to disappear.’⁹ The Cold War context of nuclear proliferation provided a material basis for such existential anxieties. In his contribution to a Diacritics issue on the incipient subject of Nuclear Criticism, Derrida warned that nuclear conflict risked the ‘possibility of an irreversible destruction, leaving no traces, of the juridico-literary archive – that is, total destruction of the basis of literature and criticism’.¹⁰ Crucially, this pulverisation of literature would foreclose the movement of survivance, the idea that death could be signified by ‘monumentalisation, archivisation and work on the remainder’.¹¹ As Liam Sprod suggests in his summary of Derrida’s Nuclear Criticism, nuclear war would leave no possibility of a memorial, ‘because the very possibility of the symbolic itself will be destroyed’.¹² In order to avoid this prospect of a remainder-less destruction, Derrida advocated for a ‘critical slowdown’ against the accelerationism that defined the culture and technologies of the Atomic Age.¹³ Marker’s strategies of the nuclear narrative and nuclear aesthetic both pre-empt and enact Derrida’s advocacy of a critical slowdown. Attending to this spectre of the nuclear in La Jetée not only redresses a major oversight of the literature on Marker’s photo-roman but also, more importantly, informs how we might best mediate the spectre of an uninhabitable and unrepresentable future.

The ‘nuclear narrative’ of La Jetée was produced and released during a climactic moment of the Cold War. The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 had concretised the bifurcation of Europe, escalating fears of a military conflict – involving even a possible nuclear exchange – on the continent. Then, mere months after the release of La Jetée in February 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis in October marked the closest imminence to a nuclear war between the USA and Soviet Union; as Sarah Cooper indicates, La Jetée was made at a time when the world was ‘holding its breath with regard [… to the] threat of apocalyptic destruction’.¹⁴ Films such as Fail-Safe (Sidney Lumet, 1964), Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) and The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1966) demonstrated how cinema was grappling with these existential fears of the nuclear cataclysm. In this way La Jetée can be situated within a heterogeneous corpus of works – ranging from docudrama to dark comedy – that shared a pre-traumatic anticipation of a remainder-less nuclear destruction, two decades before Derrida turned his attention to the proliferation of an apocalyptic tone in philosophy.

Amid the heightening tensions of the Cold War, Gaullist France was undertaking its own programme of nuclear proliferation. The wartime occupation by Hitler’s Germany and the post-war tide of decolonisation had diminished le rayonnement de la France, the perceived ‘radiance’ of the nation.¹⁵ Charles de Gaulle subsequently predicated his politique de grandeur around modernising France’s civil and military capabilities as a technological power. Above all else, de Gaulle identified nuclear weapons as the key to closing the ‘disparity between French goals and capabilities’.¹⁶ France had previously played only a bit-part role in the success of the Manhattan Project – that said, this did not deter the film La Bataille de l’eau lourde/Operation Swallow: The Battle for Heavy Water (Jean Dréville and Titus Vibe-Müller, 1947), featuring the physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie as himself, from celebrating the apparent criticality of French scientists’ contributions.¹⁷ From the inception of the Atomic Age, we can observe how such films sought to revive France’s wounded pride by suturing the nation’s narrative of redemption to nuclear proliferation.

After the Soviet Union and Great Britain successfully tested their own nuclear weapons, de Gaulle believed that it was imperative for France to expedite the acquisition of its own nuclear force de frappe, and personally supervised the progress of France’s nuclear weapons programme to its first successful test, codenamed the Gerboise Bleue, in February 1960. Historians have since emphasised how national pride, more than security concerns, was the driving factor behind de Gaulle’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.¹⁸ Moreover, de Gaulle’s pursuit of nuclear proliferation also proved popular with the nation at large; a poll from March 1960 revealed that over two thirds of the French public supported the state’s development of nuclear weaponry.¹⁹ In the wake of the Gerboise Bleue detonation, which proved four times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, there arose a patriotic sense that France was, in the words of de Gaulle, ‘stronger and prouder as a nation’, and that it had finally restored its radiance as a great power.²⁰ Even today, as Gabrielle Hecht indicates, nuclear proliferation in both the military and civil spheres continues to inform and inspire practices of French identity-formation.²¹

La Jetée emerged in the fallout of the national, nuclear chauvinism from this initial Gerboise Bleue test. Marker had originally planned to produce a documentary on nuclear weapons with his friend Alain Resnais; the two had already collaborated on Les statues meurent aussi/Statues Also Die (Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Ghislain Cloquet, 1953), a critique of French colonialism in Africa. From the basis of the pair’s conversations, Resnais went on to direct Hiroshima mon amour (1959), a romantic drama, written by the novelist Marguerite Duras and set against the backdrop of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.²² Marker did not participate in this production, but he retained his interest in the nuclear. In interviews at the time, Marker confided his curiosity in doomsday films and subterranean stories of nuclear shelters.²³ As part of his ongoing research into the subject, he wrote to Jacques Ledoux, curator of the Belgian Film Archive, asking for a selection of apocalyptic films; later, Marker would cast Ledoux as the Head Scientist in La Jetée. Eventually, during the filming of a separate project, the documentary Le Joli Mai/The Lovely Month of May (Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme, 1963), Marker began shooting the first images of La Jetée. These initial fragments of La Jetée constituted an ‘almost unconscious rendition of contemporary anxieties’ during the Cold War.²⁴ Marker later recalled that the ‘pieces of the puzzle came together’ to form a fully-fledged narrative of time travel.²⁵ And so La Jetée emerged as a work of science fiction. The power of this genre, as Fredric Jameson attested, was to ‘defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our present’.²⁶ This is what the nuclear narrative of La Jetée achieves. Marker’s vision of dystopia diagnoses how the accelerationism of de Gaulle’s politique de grandeur, in the context of the ever-expanding arms race of the Cold War, threatened to deliver a complete and remainder-less destruction.

Within this nuclear narrative, Marker’s foregrounding of Orly Airport at the beginning and end of La Jetée exposes the Faustian bargain of Gaullist France’s renaissance as a technological and nuclear power. At the time of La Jetée’s production, Orly was an ‘emblem of General de Gaulle’s Paris’, a celebration of the vertical vector of post-war French revival through technology.²⁷ From the rubble of the Second World War, Orly had been reassembled as one of the world’s busiest airports. Beyond just commercial success, the modernist design of Orly, constructed of glass and steel, showcased the cutting-edge ingenuity of French engineering.²⁸ The architecture of the airport also embraced the consumerism of the modern age, incorporating restaurants and even a cinema. The defining feature of Orly, however, was the eponymous jetty of Marker’s photo-roman. This terrace for plane-spotting, the site of a ‘jet-age family picnic ground’, drew 3.5 million visitors in 1961, making it a more popular destination than the Eiffel Tower.²⁹ Such was the airport’s cultural resonance that Gilbert Becaud even wrote a popular ‘jet anthem’, Dimanche à Orly/Sunday at Orly (1963). De Gaulle himself paid tribute to Orly when his speech at the inauguration of the new South Terminal proclaimed how France had broken through a metaphorical ceiling, ‘in order to exploit the possibilities of jet-era aviation’.³⁰ Within the Gaullist imaginary, Orly and its jetty had become a viewfinder for France’s renewed position of grandeur on the international stage.

In the nuclear narrative of La Jetée, Marker proceeds to unravel the aesthetic project of Orly as a centrepiece of France’s politique de grandeur. La Jetée opens on a quotidian Sunday at Orly (figure 1). On the jetty, the Man as a boy catches a glimpse of the Woman, whose face was to be the ‘only image from peacetime to survive the war’. As an aeroplane suddenly screeches overhead, panic erupts on the jetty, a man’s body crumples to the floor, and the Woman’s smile disfigures into horror. This rapid, staccato transition of images pre-empts a fade into darkness, in which the narrator announces the nuclear attack: ‘soon after, came the destruction of Paris’. The emerging light reveals a stilled frame of swirling firestorms above Paris. Through a succession of crossfades the city is razed to the ground, while Russian Orthodox liturgical chants further augment ‘the disconcerting tone of the entire stratigraphic image’.³¹ This a cappella soundtrack rises to a crescendo, as the montage of destruction concludes on an image of the ruptured Arc de Triomphe. Patrick Ffrench observes how these apocalyptic visions of Paris, emptied of any inhabitants, recall the scenes of complete annihilation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.³² Consequently the Orly of Marker’s La Jetée becomes an observation deck for the hypothetical – and total – nuclear destruction of France during the Third World War.

Fig. 1.

La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) opens with a normal Sunday at Orly.

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Marker’s repurposing of Orly also evokes the site’s specific legacy of violence, as linked inextricably to aviation’s ‘twin capacities for communication and destruction’.³³ Orly had originally been founded as a military airfield during the First World War, before being occupied by the German Luftwaffe during the Second World War. Orly’s modernist reiteration in its commercial and consumerist guise had sought to disavow the site’s association with warfare; as Douglas Smith corroborates, the stakes of Orly’s aesthetic project was to pacify the aeroplane from a ‘lethal weapon of mass destruction into a benign instrument of travel and tourism’.³⁴ It is thus ironic that the screech of a plane – this renovated prop in Orly’s staging of France’s jet-age grandeur – inaugurates the outbreak of nuclear war. It appears (and sounds) as if Orly is doomed to witness the continuous and inexorable narrative of the First, Second and eventually Third World Wars. However, La Jetée warns that the scale of this latest conflict would be unprecedented and irreversible. The narrator states that in the aftermath of nuclear war, Paris became ‘uninhabitable, riddled with radioactivity’. Within this description lies Marker’s prophetic criticism of the Janus-faced character of de Gaulle’s politique de grandeur. On the one hand, the pacification of Orly as a beacon of jet-age travel had rehabilitated France’s self-image as a modern, technological power; on the other, de Gaulle’s nuclear proliferation had only heightened the already precipitous risks of the Cold War arms race. La Jetée therefore observes how the Gaullist endeavour to rejuvenate le rayonnement of France could capacitate the nation’s own remainder-less destruction. The dialectics of this nuclear narrative found an uncanny applicability to the French language, as le rayonnement could indicate either ‘radiance’ or ‘radiation’.³⁵ France’s pursuit of grandeur, framed within this linguistic polyvalence, could thus either restore national pride or render the nation completely uninhabitable.

It is the latter, pessimistic outlook of near extinction that prevails in Marker’s dystopian vision of survival under the Palais de Chaillot. His decision to stage this underworld beneath the Chaillot, a landmark of Parisian topography, also evokes a site-specific historical charge. It was at the Chaillot that Hitler posed for a photograph in front of the Eiffel Tower, signalling the fall of France to Nazi Germany. It is therefore auspicious that the Scientists who conduct the experiments in time travel under the Chaillot whisper in German, as though historical precedent resurfaces to conduct the Third World War along familiar geographical tensions. However, the extent of this latest Blitzkrieg is irrevocable. Attesting to the insuperable triumph of the Scientists, they are the only characters in La Jetée that Marker does not render mute; in the pitch black of the Chaillot’s underworld, the Scientists speak to the omnipotence of technology over its victims as their whispers penetrate the screen of the photo-roman, directly into ‘the space of the [spectator’s] psyche’.³⁶ In other words, the subterranean tunnels of the Chaillot immerse the viewer in a dystopic realm, in which the fascistic regime of science reigns supreme.

Marker further adapts the heritage of the Chaillot in order to situate the Scientists’ advent of time travel in a lineage of modern – and malevolent – technologies. The Chaillot had originally been constructed for the International Exposition in 1937, to house the sculptures of the Musée des Monuments Français. Marker splices these statues into scenes beneath the Chaillot, intensifying the Gothic character of La Jetée’s underworld. Then, at the beginning of the 1960s, the Chaillot was repurposed to store the extensive collection of Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque Française, revered as the ‘temple of cinema’.³⁷ The specificity of the Chaillot’s prominence in La Jetée therefore emphasises the ‘power of images’ in facilitating the Scientists’ experiments in time travel, which depend on the unique strength of the Man’s Proustian madeleine-memory of the Woman.³⁸

Simultaneously – and critically – this underworld of the Chaillot also compels the viewer’s own form of time travel through a gallery of oblique glimpses into historical and contemporary atrocities. For example, the trapezoid tunnels in which emaciated survivors reside as guinea pigs for the Scientists’ experiments evoke visions of the Nazi concentration camps – a visuality further augmented by the acousmatic soundtrack of German whispers.³⁹ (figure 2). Proposing a different view, Matthew Croombs and Lee Hilliker foreground Marker’s affiliation with the anti-imperialist politics of the Left Bank group and read the Scientists’ dehumanising experiments as an allusion to France’s colonial campaign of terror and torture during the Algerian War of Independence.⁴⁰ The crucial point here is not that one single interpretation necessarily takes precedence over the others. Instead, Carol Mavor summarises these hermeneutic practices as ‘linked beyonds (in that they are beyond figuration, sound, and comprehension) […] all are echoed in La Jetée’s mythical, devastatingly quiet terror’.⁴¹ From a Derridean perspective, time emerges as out of joint in these tunnels of the Chaillot, which stage Marker’s exercise in hauntology, as the images of past, present and even future atrocities coalesce together in an archive of incredible – in the truest sense of scarcely believable – violence. And thus La Jetée indicates that advances in science have always been, and will be, instrumentalised to facilitate humanity’s sado-masochistic death-drive.

Fig. 2.

The dark underworld of the Chaillot, in La Jetée.

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Within La Jetée’s broader critique of humanity’s abuse of technology, the Scientists’ endeavour to acquire an unlimited energy source is specifically analogous to Gaullist France’s pursuit of nuclear proliferation. The Head Scientist justifies the very inhumanity of his experiments by proclaiming that humanity’s survival depends upon them, even as these tortuous trials displace their victims as refugees in space and time.⁴² When the Man is eventually able to reach the future, the citizens of a reconstructed Paris appear to inhabit a metaphysical and ‘Platonic realm of intellect’ with access to higher Forms.⁴³ These future Parisians equip the Man with an unnamed ‘power unit strong enough to put all human industry back into motion’. The description of this Promethean gift in La Jetée mirrors the acclaim of nuclear power in the discourse of Gaullist France; in the aftermath of the aforementioned Gerboise Bleue test, Hecht noted how ‘emotional renderings in the metropolitan press extolled the renewal of French “radiance”’.⁴⁴

This outpouring of patriotic fervour around the force de frappe simultaneously occluded the immediate and long-term consequences of the Gerboise Bleue test, which was conducted in the contested colonial territory of the Algerian Sahara. In the same way as the Scientists’ experimentation in La Jetée spared no thought for their victims, Roxanne Panchasi indicates how the radioactive fallout from the Gerboise Bleue test constituted ‘weapons of light, sound, heat, air and gusts whose effects could not always be easily identified or contained in space or time’, thereby rendering vast swathes of the Algerian Sahara uninhabitable.⁴⁵ In fact, the scientific disregard for human and environmental consequences of nuclear weapons testing has been endemic since the Manhattan Project; Karen Barad stresses how 19,000 people, including members of the Navajo Nation, lived within a 50-mile radius of the Trinity test, and continue to face a series of health repercussions.⁴⁶ It becomes apparent that these technological advancements of the Atomic Age, whether in La Jetée’s fabulation of time travel or the historical realities of nuclear testing, have been conducted with sheer apathy for the humanity that they purport to advance.⁴⁷

La Jetée’s nuclear narrative does not accord a happy ending. After the Man achieves his objective, he awaits his execution beneath the Chaillot. The guardians of the future come to his rescue, offering to receive him as ‘one of their own’. Instead, he requests to be sent back to the past, to his madeleine-memory of the Woman. Little does the Man know that his libidinal desire for the past will only transport him to oblivion. In a modern re-enaction – or, rather, subversion – of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the Man dies for the sake of one final cherished look at the Woman. Fulfilling his doomed destiny, the Man realises that there is ‘no way to escape Time’. This fate of the Man in La Jetée’s nuclear narrative, alongside the histories of Orly and the Palais de Chaillot, demonstrates that modernity does not ensure a linear trajectory towards a peaceful future, but instead an entrapment within a closed circuit of repeated violence. At the same time, La Jetée observes how the advent of nuclear weapons gave humanity’s predilection for violence a sharper and irremediable edge. The nuclear narrative of Marker’s photo-roman thus pre-empts Derrida’s Nuclear Criticism to warn that the latest chapter of human conflict could precipitate an ultimate and remainder-less destruction.

The ‘nuclear aesthetic’ of La Jetée endeavours to mediate the un-signifiable nature of this remainder-less destruction. Kathleen Kelley notes that the tradition of cinematic realism – as a (simplistic) distillation of André Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image – has strived for ‘transparent fidelity to the visual world’.⁴⁸ Kelley problematises this claim to realism, stating that ‘a medium committed to realism is a medium committed to its own destruction […] in seeking realism as its perfection, it seeks to efface itself more and more completely’.⁴⁹ Against realism’s movement towards self-effacement, Kelley observes that the anti-realist tendency of La Jetée ‘destroys’ the idea that photography ‘automatically and sufficiently embalms time’.⁵⁰ What emerges from Marker’s photo-roman is the recognition that certain realities – and in particular, certain traumas – evade and exceed the frame of ‘realistic’ representation. In other words, it is precisely by virtue of recognising this limit that La Jetée discloses its authority and ‘essence as a medium’.⁵¹ In so doing, the film both pre-empts and circumnavigates the aesthetic challenges of representing the nuclear subject, as later articulated in Derrida’s Nuclear Criticism.

Derrida believed that ‘the terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the signified referent, never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or a text’.⁵² Through this statement, he perceived how the putative destruction of the archive – that is, the basis for language and literature – would foreclose any possibility of representation and remembrance. Thus emerged the peculiar phenomenology of nuclear war as a pure phantasm; any actual materialisation of such an event would constitute a ‘breaking of the mirror’, a shattering of any medium that attempted to bear a truthful representation to this apocalypse.⁵³ Given this irrepresentability of the nuclear, and as part of his wider project on deconstruction since Of Grammatology, Derrida was an exponent of experimental writing.⁵⁴ This was why his Nuclear Criticism revered the works of Stéphane Mallarmé, Franz Kafka and James Joyce for anticipating the concept of remainder-less destruction more ‘seriously’ than ‘present-day novels that would offer direct and realistic depictions of a “real” nuclear catastrophe’.⁵⁵ Linking Derrida’s evaluation of literature to Kelley’s critique of cinematic realism, I argue that the experimental nuclear aesthetic of La Jetée succeeds in only glimpsing at – rather than providing a fraudulent and ‘realistic’ panorama of – the nuclear apocalypse.

This argument also builds upon wider scholarship on historical trauma – from the Holocaust to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – which has already explored the irrepresentability of certain events. Applying Derrida’s hypotheses on remainder-less destruction to the realities of ground zero in Japan, Akira Mizuta Lippit assesses that the unsignifiable atomic light of the bombs ‘exceeded the economies of representation’ and tested the ‘very visibility of the visual’.⁵⁶ To be within the blast radius of this blinding atomic light was to experience a ‘spectacle in excess of the capacity of any individual to recognise it as spectacle, or even to see it’.⁵⁷ Any attempt, therefore, to represent the human consequences of this unintelligible trauma through a mimetic framework, such as the tradition of cinematic realism, would be nothing short of fraudulent.⁵⁸ And yet, as Abé Mark Nornes notes in his survey of documentaries on the atomic bombings, filmmakers since 1945 have ineluctably been drawn to depicting the epicentre of the nuclear attacks.⁵⁹ What this epicentre actually discloses, however, is an evacuation of meaning, a remainder-less void of human testimony; this is why Nornes observes that ‘all representations of the atomic bombings face the specter of impossibility’.⁶⁰

The testimony of Yoshito Matsushige, a photojournalist from a daily newspaper in Hiroshima, illustrates perhaps the earliest encounter with this spectre of impossibility. Having survived the initial explosion, Matsushige took his camera into the city in order to document the effects of the atomic bomb. He eventually arrived at the Miyuki Bridge, the pre-ordained evacuation point for schoolchildren in the area. Matsushige recalled that the sight before him was a ‘hellish apparition’.⁶¹ Having been directly exposed to the sun-like temperature of the atomic fireball, the skin of the children was hanging down ‘like rugs’, with their heat-stricken blisters ‘starting to burst open’.⁶² This scene at the Miyuki Bridge was so macabre, Matsushige later recounted, that it felt cruel to point his lens at the victims of such an atrocity. What arises in this testimony, then, are the specifically ethical dimensions of the spectre of impossibility. Analogous to Theodor Adorno’s aphorism that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, Matsushige’s reticence in photographing these children attests to his moral ambivalence in transfiguring victims of extreme violence into ‘works of art, tossed out to be gobbled up by the world that did them in’.⁶³

Over the subsequent course of ten hours walking around Hiroshima, Matsushige took only seven photographs from his film stock of 24 possible exposures. His stricture of images makes apparent how the deadening effects of the atomic blast sought to resist and repel any representation. As the bomb cremated the city, it had also seemingly immobilised the capacity to commemorate its victims; as the blast had destroyed his darkroom, Matsushige was forced to develop the photos in the radioactive stream of a river at night. Evidently, the spectre of impossibility imparted not only ethical constraints but also practical and material ones, as the radioactive fallout staged its chemical intervention in the development of Matsushige’s images. Through this contaminated process, Matsushige was able to develop only five of his seven exposures, which have since informed our earliest photographic archive of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Crucially, the affective impact of this archive does not just relate to the images of Hiroshima contained within it; it is what remains unseen beyond the frame, those horrors unmoored in reality and unattached to celluloid, that pre-determines and defines the nuclear aesthetic of Matsushige’s photographs.

This nuclear aesthetic that haunts Matsushige’s photography of Hiroshima also intervenes in Marker’s La Jetée. Of course, Matsushige’s nuclear aesthetic was dictated by actual historical experience, whereas Marker’s photo-roman, emerging amidst the near-misses of the Cuban Missile Crisis, constitutes a thought-experiment on the possibility of future disaster. La Jetée could therefore mark a useful inflection point in the Cold War, after which representations of the nuclear shifted from the post-traumatic expression of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the temporality of the pre-traumatic, anticipating the prospect of a remainder-less destruction to-come. In this way, La Jetée’s pre-traumatic register of the 1960s foretells Derrida’s subsequent announcement of an apocalyptic tone in the 1980s.⁶⁴ And yet, in encircling the same nuclear subject, Matsushige’s and Marker’s bodies of work share a mode of oblique representation in which the unseen, as much as the seen, generates the viewer’s affective response. Just as Matsushige’s scarce and scarred photographs obscure a comprehensive view of the effects of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, the strict economy of Marker’s stills in La Jetée flicker slowly behind cinema’s conventional passage of 24 frames a second, disassembling the illusionism of the so-called ‘moving image’. La Jetée thus denies – with the single exception of a still of the firestorms above Paris – any panoramic or moving image view of the nuclear destruction of France during the Third World War. Réda Bensmaïa expounds on Marker’s retention of horror throughout the photo-roman: ‘at no time are the bodies of the deceased shown, at no time are the concrete effects that such a violent war has on human beings exhibited’.⁶⁵ With no image of bodies, there is no relief for the viewer’s anguish in surveying the remainder-less consequences of nuclear war. In the tunnels beneath the Chaillot, the surface-level reality of nuclear holocaust is only ever narrated and never shown, impelling us to interpolate the unrepresentable scenes of an irradiated Paris. The reality of ground zero dematerialises to become a spectre, haunting La Jetée’s vision of subterranean survival. It is only later, during the Man’s early attempts at time travel, that La Jetée gestures to any disfigurement of the human body, in the form of dismembered statues; only in this fade between flesh and stone does the nuclear aesthetic of La Jetée render visible any passing view of humanity’s self-destruction.⁶⁶

This nuclear aesthetic constitutes what Roland Barthes terms a scriptible narrative, which invites the viewer to interpolate the unseen and lacunae of a text.⁶⁷ From within this praxis, Matsushige’s and Marker’s visualities of the nuclear demand that the viewer locate, and be affected by, the unrepresentable realities of the atomic bombing that ‘no discourse could ever pacify’ or ‘no fiction could domesticate’.⁶⁸ This strategy of oblique representation resurfaces in Nolan’s Oppenheimer. After the end of the war, the scientists of the Manhattan Project watch a slideshow, projected off-screen, on the effects of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is possible to imagine that in this scene, as perhaps in real life, Oppenheimer encountered Matsushige’s photographs of Hiroshima. Oppenheimer averts his gaze, seemingly unable to bear witness to such atrocities. Certain critics have read this as Nolan’s own failure to index the human consequences of the atomic bombings.⁶⁹ Indeed, even Adorno remarked that ‘no art that avoided the victims could stand up to the demands of justice’, reminding us that oblique forms of representation should also be careful to not completely obscure the visuality of victims of traumatic violence.⁷⁰ Although Oppenheimer is certainly guilty of such erasure regarding specific, particularly racialised, dimensions of the Manhattan Project – including the provenance of uranium from Congo, and the slow violence inflicted upon the ‘downwinders’ of New Mexico – I contend that in the case of the slideshow, Nolan resists what Nornes terms the logic of the epicentre. Instead, through Oppenheimer’s aversion to the images, Nolan stages an oblique, yet nonetheless unsettling, encounter with the unimaginable horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fact that Nolan projects these effects of the nuclear weapon off-screen should not relieve us of any anxiety; as with the underworld of the Chaillot in La Jetée, we must learn to be haunted by the unintelligible realities of a remainder-less destruction beyond our immediate field of vision.

Beyond these absences and gaps in our visual archive of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atomic light of the nuclear bombings also – paradoxically – produced photographic effects of their own. Scholars have likened the instantaneity of the atomic blast to the single flash exposure of a camera, which could cast an ‘apocalyptic snapshot’ of an entire location.⁷¹ In effect, the atomic bombings rendered Hiroshima and Nagasaki as ‘photographic laboratories’.⁷² It was the proliferation of atomic light in these laboratories that produced the infamous and ghostly ‘nuclear shadows’, the victims who evaporated in the heat of the atomic blast and left behind only an indexical trace of their bodies on the canvas of the city. As Lippit notes, these ‘grotesque shadows and stains, graphic effects of the lacerating heat, were often the only remnants of a virtual annihilation’ in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.⁷³ The very weightlessness of these ‘nuclear shadows’ prefigured Derrida’s later anxieties of remainder-less destruction, of humanity’s new-found and near-complete evanescence in the light of the Atomic Age. It was one such macabre and spectral trace of nuclear disaster that Matsushige also captured in his photograph, The Human Shadow Etched in Stone – a literally de-pressed figure of a man on the steps of the Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima.

The nuclear explosion in La Jetée achieves the same effect. The (unseen) atomic flash of the diegesis incinerates characters and imprints their ghostly presence, fixed in their immobility and immateriality, onto sites around Paris – just as Marker’s Pentax camera imprinted La Jetée’s actors onto photographic stills. When the Man returns to the verisimilitude of pre-war Paris, it is already a dead past, pulverised by nuclear annihilation. If, as Brian Baker posits, the time travel in La Jetée constitutes an internal, ‘psychological journey’ for the Man, then the Woman is already dead, a victim claimed by the atomic bombings.⁷⁴ Tragically, the Man can only search for the nuclear shadow of his madeleine-memory. Try as these characters might, and as much as we may desire it, the Woman of La Jetée does not appear able to move within Marker’s frame and break free of her immobility. Like the nuclear shadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Woman is merely a ghost inscribed onto the Parisian cityscape. Further enacting an uncanny likeness with The Human Shadow Etched in Stone, which later became an artefact encased in glass, Marker frames the Woman and the Man in a display cabinet of the Natural History Museum. The window behind them illuminates only their indeterminate, blurred features (figure 3). Their complete stillness questions the distinction between humans and the taxidermied animals in the museum; in front of Marker’s camera, both are immobilised as anachronistic, extinct species from a bygone time. This silhouette of the Man and the Woman, just like that of The Human Shadow Etched in Stone, ‘embodies a haunting from the anticipated future of our own species’ suicide’, a future in which shadows are the only remaining traces of humanity.⁷⁵ Standing immobile, the nuclear aesthetic of these spectres pre-emptively mourns the prospect of our remainder-less self-destruction.

Fig. 3.

Framed as if in a museum cabinet, in La Jetée.

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This stillness of the nuclear aesthetic is not only mournful but horrifying. Only a few years earlier, Francois Truffaut had experimented with the optical arrest of a freeze-frame ending in his Les Quatre cents coups/The 400 Blows (1959). Marker affords each image this optical arrest in La Jetée, bestowing each still with the bespoke character of a punctum, ‘a wound that demands meaning’.⁷⁶ A poignant, early example occurs in the audience’s encounter with a victim of the Scientists’ experiments in time travel beneath the Chaillot. The prisoner’s unblinking and terror-stricken thousand-yard stare suggests that he has witnessed an unassimilable trauma. Moreover, the stillness of the frame locks the viewer into the piercing and demented gaze of this prisoner, as if we too are incarcerated in his immobilised and exploited condition. This encounter compels us to imagine what unrepresentable sights – perhaps of the surface-level reality of nuclear destruction – could have forced him into this irrevocable state of catatonia. It is in this stillness, then, that we are brought into an inescapable, unnerving confrontation with the dehumanising uses of science in the Atomic Age.

However, stillness is not the sole defining feature of La Jetée’s nuclear aesthetic. Elena Del Rio observes that Marker’s photo-roman ‘invokes neither movement and life, exclusively, nor immobility and death, but rather both simultaneously’.⁷⁷ This deadlock between movement and immobility informs the unnerving animism of La Jetée’s images, which constantly appear on the precipice of coming alive, of satisfying our expectations for cinematic (e)motion. This tension is perhaps most palpable when the Man visits the Woman in pre-war Paris. In his early attempts at time travel, the Man is only able to access singular images of the past, of trompe l’oeil impressions of space: a rural landscape with farmyard animals; an empty bedroom; a flock of birds, their flight held in stasis. There are significant intervals in this montage, which has a more ‘tableau-oriented rhythm’ with no clear relational logic between the images.⁷⁸ However, once the Man establishes contact with his madeleine-memory of the Woman, the editing of the stills gains greater momentum. The cuts and dissolves between the images begin to convey a certain sense of duration in the Man’s interactions with the Woman, of time and space passing between each frame. Paul Coates corroborates this claim, identifying that Marker’s ‘occasional dissolves are the moments at which such a hope [of movement] flickers into possibility’.⁷⁹ ‘Time’, the narrator announces as if cognisant of this enhanced motion, ‘takes shape painlessly around them’. A cinematic sensibility emerges in these scenes of the Man and the Woman walking together through the streets of Paris. Explicit references to Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) further furnish La Jetée’s credentials as a more fluent moving image, both in terms of its cine-literacy and the augmented pace of the editing. For example, in a near frame-by-frame homage to Vertigo, the fluid, dynamic gestures of the Man point beyond the diameter of tree rings, in order to indicate his provenance from outside of recorded time. As the Man and Woman grow closer to each other, so too do the images, until the nuclear aesthetic of the photo-roman becomes cinema-adjacent.

Eventually, the aspiration for motion in La Jetée’s nuclear aesthetic erupts in a single, transitory moment of jouissance, as Marker briefly satisfies a desire for movement. In one foray into the past, the camera adopts the Man’s point of view as he watches the Woman sleeping in bed. Close-up shots of the Woman trace her every movement, with fades blurring the transition between each still. These shots begin to accelerate against the rising pitch of birdsong, which builds to a crescendo as the Woman – finally, if momentarily, freed from the formal constraints of the photo-roman – wakes up, blinks, and stares back into the gaze of the camera. The Woman’s romantic motion arouses La Jetée from its storybook stillness; ‘it is the film’, Catherine Lupton suggests, ‘that wakes up as she does’.⁸⁰ However, the nuclear aesthetic rears its ugly head again, quite literally, as Marker cuts back to the future with a low-angle still of the Head Scientist, the white pupils of his unblinking eyes barely discernible in the chiaroscuro of the Chaillot’s tunnels. As the Scientists withdraw the Man from his reverie, the thudding monotony of a heartbeat replaces the chirruping chorus of birdsong. This sequence exemplifies the competing forces within the nuclear aesthetic of La Jetée, between the liberatory and animating force of intimate human connection and the deadening, fascistic abuses of science.

The subsequent scene of the Man and the Woman in the museum further stages this dialectical conflict of the nuclear aesthetic. When the couple visit the Natural History Museum, the intervals between the stills narrow and, once more, a quasi-motion emerges. Even the narrator observes that the Man can ‘move around at ease’. It is as though the Woman’s very presence enables the Man’s ‘dream of escape from stasis, a dream of movement’.⁸¹ Surrounded by a parade of animals, this fantasy appears to materialise in the Garden of Eden, a bucolic time that predates the inventions of science. Marker respects the sanctity of this prelapsarian moment and withdraws the intervention of acousmatic narration – hitherto instrumental in keeping the viewer on-track – in favour of the elegiac strings of Trevor Duncan’s soundtrack. The museum becomes a stage of expressive display, not just in the posture of the taxidermied animals, but also in the romantic gestures of the couple. For Janet Harbord, this sequence in the museum restores Giorgio Agamben’s belief in the ability to ‘correspond through the body’; the fluid motions of the couple emote, as it were, for themselves.⁸² Yet this utopianism does not last. Duncan’s soundtrack tapers off, as Marker cuts back again to the future with a low-angle still of the Head Scientist. This time, the Head Scientist smiles ominously down at the Man, who comes to realise that he has just seen the Woman for the last time. In the darkness of the tunnels, the narrator’s voice re-intervenes into the text, just as the Scientists’ injections once again immobilise the Man’s bodily autonomy. The potential for La Jetée’s motion, for its figures to freely communicate through their gestures, is foreclosed. We are confined to the (e)motionless darkness of the nuclear apocalypse. In La Jetée’s nuclear aesthetic, the regressive impulse of Science triumphs.

The dialectical conflict between fixity and mobility in the nuclear aesthetic culminates in La Jetée’s final revelation that the image at Orly that marked the Man as a child was his own death. When the Man climbs the stairs of Orly, and runs through the crowds on the jetty, the frame rate of the stills accelerates. In a mechanical echo of the birdsong that accompanied the jouissance of the Woman waking, the hum of a taxiing aeroplane amplifies with the Man’s each and every step towards his lover. It is as though the Man himself will take off from the jetty and break free, not just from the Scientists’ incarceration but from Marker’s formal constraints. But his run towards the Woman is suddenly stalled in a freeze-frame. Marker cuts to a still of a Scientist, ‘who had trailed him from the camp’. In distinction to his earlier frenzied movement, the Man’s final gesture – his spine bent backwards, arms outstretched – is held in agonising stasis (figure 4). Libby Saxton has noted how this prolonged and pained pose of the Man refigures Robert Capa’s infamous photograph The Falling Soldier (1937) during the Spanish Civil War.⁸³ Capa’s photograph had gained international acclaim for its visualisation of an individual’s heroic struggle against the spread of fascism. Marker adds another salient detail to his citation of Capa’s image, with the Man sporting an ‘El Santo’ T-shirt under his military jacket. ‘El Santo’ was a legendary Mexican luchador, constructed in the kayfabe discourse of wrestling as a ‘world-saving superhero in an everyman figure’.⁸⁴ Through these visual references to Capa’s Falling Soldier and El Santo, Marker compresses the doomed heroism of the Man in a single, stilled pose in the grip of technologies of ‘totalitarianism and massive destruction’.⁸⁵ This symbolism of the Man’s final gesture in his fatal encounter with the Scientist from the future warns us that an everlasting stillness awaits as the concluding tableau of the nuclear aesthetic.

Fig. 4.

The Man’s final agonised gesture, in La Jetée.

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Throughout this essay I have identified how the spectre of nuclear apocalypse haunts and informs Marker’s narrative and aesthetic strategies in La Jetée. Six decades after the film’s release, and despite the end of the Cold War, we remain in the same, pre-traumatic state of precarity engendered by the Atomic Age. Reflecting on the persistence of nuclear proliferation against the wider backdrop of the ecological and climate crisis, Ted Toadvine has stated that an ‘eschatological vision of the world is essential to environmentalism’.⁸⁶ In other words, the apocalyptic tone that Derrida identified during the 1980s retains its relevance today, not just as a descriptor of political and philosophical discourse but as a way of rousing us from sleepwalking towards a remainder-less destruction. As Derrida later notes in Archive Fever, the truly insidious and surreptitious horror of the archiviolithic death drive is how this force ‘eludes perception’ and ‘incites forgetfulness’.⁸⁷ The nuclear narrative of La Jetée demonstrates this oblivious march towards an unimaginable disaster; as Coates summarises, ‘only in the moment of death, does the Protagonist know himself; only in the moment of its demise, does humanity achieve such self-knowledge’.⁸⁸ This tragic conclusion to the photo-roman’s narrative enacts an ominous insight of Derrida’s Nuclear Criticism, which exposes the etymology of apocalypse as a form of ‘Revelation, of Truth, Un-veiling’.⁸⁹ And so both Marker and Derrida pre-emptively mourn how humanity may only realise the remainder-less consequences of its Faustian bargain with nuclear modernity at the precise point of no return, in the instance of our extinction. This trajectory towards self-destruction fulfils the singular character of apocalypse, an event that can have no possible precedent or postscript.

At the same time, and as Gabriele Schwab carefully delineates, we must be cautious in imagining extinction while ‘avoiding the secondary gratifications of sensationalising apocalypticism’.⁹⁰ Photography and film have continued to contend with these ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the spectre of impossibility since 1945, whether in attempting to document the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or fabulating a pre-traumatic vision of a remainder-less destruction to come. This marks the renewed relevance – or rather, urgence – of revisiting La Jetée and its ethical and effective aesthetic strategy of invoking the spectre of nuclear apocalypse. Marker disassembles the illusionism of the ‘moving image’, informing the viewer that there can be no panoramic, totalising perspective of certain horrors. La Jetée’s indirect visions of atrocities thus premonish a central insight of Derrida’s Nuclear Criticism, that there can be no authentic representation of nuclear war. The pedagogical purpose of La Jetée’s nuclear aesthetic, then, is to train the audience’s apperceptive capacity to ‘read what was never written’ and ‘remember images we have never seen’.⁹¹ From this perspective, La Jetée’s impact extends beyond its well-documented influence on subsequent science-fiction filmmaking, from The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) to Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995).⁹² Instead, Marker conditions an alternative form of the spectator’s cinematic gaze, encouraging the viewer to attend to the gaps and margins of texts on the apocalypse in order to glimpse at the prospect of our remainder-less destruction. While encounters with Marker’s photo-roman itself may be rare today, particularly beyond the academy, they can be invaluable in opening up new ways for contemporary audiences to critically engage with other, more widely available and commercially successful works, such as Oppenheimer, that encircle the same, unrepresentable nuclear subject.

Seen in this light, La Jetée emerges as a time travelling miracle from the past that can help to mediate the spectre of nuclear apocalypse in an attempt to save the present moment from itself. Ironically then, Marker’s photo-roman serves a similar purpose to the aim of the Scientists’ experiments – ‘to summon past and future to the rescue of the present’. Viewed today, in the context of ever-heightening anxieties about the inhabitability of the planet, La Jetée indicates the responsibility – and indeed, possibility – of image-based media to enact Derrida’s call for a critical slowdown, to haunt audiences with eschatological visions of the future, and to stop humanity from sleepwalking into an irreversible and unrepresentable disaster. Ultimately, La Jetée interpellates its viewer as Hélène Châtelain’s Woman, who must awaken from her slumber and from her dreams of debris. As a fable of the apocalypse, it is precisely because of La Jetée’s (un)moving images that we may be moved to construct a more peaceful, truly radiant future.

Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their insights, and to the editors at Screen for their additional feedback. I am grateful to my supervisor, Dr Laura McMahon, for her guidance and support, as well as to Dr Xin Peng and Dr Martin Ruehl for their comments on an earlier draft. I am also grateful to Prof. Emma Wilson and Dr Isabelle McNeill, for initially inspiring this essay. This research was funded by the Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities.

Footnotes