For a project I created in collaboration with the Wexner Center for the Arts during the run of their exhibition William Kentridge: the Refusal of Time (February 3-April 15, 2018), I made a questionnaire that asked Wexner staff and visitors (both in person and online) to think about the passing of time in their lives. There were questions about what time they woke up that morning, how they have spent their day before filling out the questionnaire, as well as what they were doing at the same time last year (two years ago, five years ago etc, when Kentridge’s work was on display in another place) and what advice they would give their past selves if they could go back in time to visit them.
The first question, however, was more localized and asked the visitors and staff about the exhibitions they had seen at the Wexner before the Kentridge – which stands out in their memory. There were several popular choices, but none of the responses included the exhibition that I would have chosen: Chris Marker: Staring Back (May 12-August 12, 2007).
I joined the OSU Department of Greek and Latin (later to return to its previous name, Classics) in the fall of 2006, arriving fresh-faced from my studies in Cambridge, England. I remember during my campus visit at the end of January, not only being invited by my future colleagues to attend the Wexner for a screening of Astra Taylor’s 2005 film Žižek!, but also taking 40 minutes out of my busy schedule of back-to-back interviews to run around the exhibition Part Object, Part Sculpture (October 30, 2005 – February 26, 2006). So Staring Back was not my first experience in the Wexner galleries, but after surviving my first year in a tenure-track job and making it to Spring quarter (this was before OSU switched to semesters), it was the exhibition that I remember most clearly. Added to this, on my arrival at OSU I had sought out its curator, Bill Horrigan, as my sister, filmmaker Abbe Leigh Fletcher, had inducted me into the world of Chris Marker and she had told me that Horrigan, a recognized expert on Marker’s work, worked in Columbus. Bill and I met and he lent me a precious copy of the slender book Inner Time of Television, about Marker’s television documentary (ostensibly) about the continued impact of ancient Greek culture in the 20th century, The Owl’s Legacy, and a DVD of the Nicholas Ray film Bitter Victory. The first email I have from Bill is dated April 11, 2008, urgently asking for the book back, so I must have held onto until then. So, it was with an added level of interest that I visited Staring Back in the Spring of 2007, and I return again and again to the beautifully produced catalogue, and specifically to Horrigan’s essay “Some Other Time”; less an essay, than a rich treasure trove, comprising a revelatory email dialogue and commentary between the two friends, between curator and artist.
From this text I learned that one of the forces behind the exhibition of Marker’s still images was Horrigan’s reaction to some Marker had sent him of a recent protest in Paris (2006), leading him first to Marker’s recent Chats Perchés (The Case of the Grinning Cat), which Horrigan describes as feeling:
like an epilogue to Le Joli Mai, Marker’s dazzling 1962 experiment in direct filmmaking that found him, Pierre Lhomme, and their accomplices dashing around Paris to ask those they encountered their thoughts on politics, work, self-betterment and the meaning of wealth and of poverty, and on Frances’ recent surrender of Algeria and the prolonged trauma of self-identity that it triggered.
In an email to Horrigan, Marker notes:
Funny you mention Le Joli Mai, for I came upon it too, but in a different way.
Marker proceeds to explain what he means and, at the same time as proving Horrigan’s impulse correct (i.e. the thread that runs through Le Jolie Mai to Chats Perchés), he also untangles the knot further by spinning a tale about the origins of the earlier film in Marker’s reaction to police brutality by filming it rather than by turning violent himself, starting with Charonne earlier in 1962 (a metro station where 8 protesters choked to death) and continuing with the Pentagon protests in 1967. The email ends:
Hence the idea you may brood about, starting the exhib with a few small prints of these first steps, Charonne and later the Pentagon, as reminders of where I come from, filmwise. Here, some stills. Just an idea, out of the blue, but it’s comforting to have a sparring partner.
Reading this over now, I love the image of Marker and Horrigan as sparring partners, whose back and forth blows brought about this unique exhibition that I remember so well. In fact, I feel like I have a better grasp of the layout of that exhibition space and the distribution of Marker’s images, than I do of his films. This thought prompts me to go to the basement and pull out my DVDs of Chats Perchés and Le Joli Mai. I put on the latter, watch the introduction, then skip through the interviews, until I reach the last 8 minutes or so. A frenzied Hammond organ plays over a sped-up shot of a train station cuts into a silent shot of the Petite Roquette prison in Paris.
I then hear the familiar voice of Simone Signoret, calmly state:
But for the 5066 people in the prisons of Paris, each day of May was exactly the same.
As one of the female prisoners at the Roquette (heard but not seen) bring us into her world in the prison, we learn of the location of the bathrooms in the panopticon building’s hexagonal corner turrets, she tells us of the cold water, the generous younger nuns (and vicious older nuns) who guard them, and the undisclosed dangers posed by the other inmates. Signoret’s voiceover resumes at the precise moment when one of the prisoners seems to spot Marker’s camera filming her in a barred window, inviting a fellow inmate to look too (although the invitation is rejected).
While looking her gaze out to the camera, we then hear the following words:
When prisoners think of the city it is of these two wonders: doors that open from the inside and steps which go in a straight line.
As a harpsichord begins to play an eerie tune, we leave the prison to rush through the streets of Paris at dawn, as in the opening sequence of the film. Signoret continues over the music:
During this month, we have crossed Paris in a straight line, just as our journey could be made up of all those miles prisoners cover in a circle, from wall to wall. We tried to look through the eyes of this prisoner on his first day of freedom, when he, himself, tries to understand how these strange phenomenons, free people, live. We have met free people, we have given them the biggest roles in this film. Those who are able to question, to refuse, to undertake, to think, or simply to love.
Returning back to the prisoner-protagonist, we reach the crescendo of the film, with the voice uttering these memorable final lines:
There were others who would have amazed the prisoner, for their prison is inside themselves. Are you afraid of ghosts? Is that it? Or is it that you think too much about yourselves? Or is it because, without being aware of it, you think too much about others. Perhaps you feel, in a confused way, that your fate is tied to that of others. That happiness and unhappiness are two secret societies, so secret that you join them without knowing it, and without hearing it you shelter within yourself this voice which says: As long as poverty exists, you’re not rich, as long as despair exists, you’re not happy; as long as prisons exist you are not free.
Cut to black, and as the credits roll, enter the calming sound of a piano playing a sonata. Watching this sequence of Le Jolie Mai now I am transported back to the exhibition, both by a vague recollection of an image and the eclectic range of the soundtrack. Horrigan and Marker had selected music to accompany the exhibition and while I recall seeing the list of tracks on the slender gallery guide card, I no longer remember any of the selections ( I must ask Bill). As for the image, unable to fix it in my mind, I turn back to the catalogue and flip the pages.
There it is, on page 14, which you can see it for yourself in the photo below, amid the staging of the material I have been using to write this post, and the one to come tomorrow.
You may just be able to make out two female figures behind bars, one grasping the bars and the other starring back at Marker’s camera. From the context in the book, all I can work out is that this is an image from 1968. Could it be the same prison? Or another prison? (I make another mental note to check with Bill). Relishing this uncertainty and reading around my Marker library, it dawns on my how consistently, if sparingly, the French filmmaker had introduced the figure of the prisoner into his work. Of course there is the time-travelling hero of Marker’s 1962 masterpiece La Jetée, as well as the prisoners of Plato’s cave, restaged in an episode of The Owl’s Legacy (now a well-worn clip on YouTube).
At the same time, reading accounts of the end of Le Jolie Mai, I couldn’t help but feel that critics had overlooked this moment as a specific paean to the plight of the incarcerated to generalize it as lamenting that of other unfree members of society. For example, Vared Maimon in her essay “Towards a New Image of Politics: Chris Marker’s Staring Back“, forgets the prisoner and turns directly to the Algerian war:
[T]he question [‘what is bothering you?] the narrator of Marker’s 1962 film Le Joli mai addresses to a series of individual faces in the crowd of Paris at the end of the film followed by the question ‘are you afraid of ghosts?’ And then ‘You are hearing a secret voice that tells you that as long as poverty exists you cannot be rich, as long as people are in distress you cannot be happy, as long as there are prisons you cannot be free’. The ghost in this case is the Algerian war and the atrocities that were committed in the name of the French people, including the torture of Algerians, while the beautiful month of May marked the first spring of peace after the signing of the Evian accords in March 1962 and the termination the Algerian war.
Yet I was happy to read Brett Story’s review of the DVD release of the film, in which he doubles-down on the concrete significance of the figure of the prisoner:
We would be mistaken, however, if we were to interpret this closing sequence as suggesting nothing more than the idea that the prison is a metaphor, a way of dramatizing the self-repression of the Parisian masses and their complicities in their own unfreedoms. While it may be those things, the prison is also very much a real tactic and geographic site; it is part of the iron fist which packs the punch of the velvet glove, and an institution of control that would, we now know, expand dramatically in France, as in much of the Western world. It haunts the “happy many” to whom the film is dedicated, like the colonization of Algeria haunts the lovely month of May, and all the many months since.
I would add that the prisoner also haunts Marker and does so from one of his earliest creative works. Included in the catalogue for the 2014 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat, alongside both stills from Le Jolie Mai (including the shot of the prison) and the Staring Back exhibition, there is a translation of a curious short story that Marker wrote in 1945 called “Till the End of Time”. A surreal tale of a shopkeeper Pat Cormon who, the day after VJ day, is not only confronted by the ramblings of a marine, Jerry and the strange pronouncements of a mysterious woman, but who also starts to imagine the very street around him and its buildings moving through the air! As his world starts to shift and slide, Pat stubbornly and angrily rebukes Jerry:
“I’ve got my feet on the ground…and you can talk like that for weeks without either me or you stopping having our feet on the ground, and the same street in the same place, and this old shack around us, till the end of time”.
This leads Jerry to retort, following a marked increase in the unwinding of their surroundings:
‘That’s just it, Pat. Exactly. The end of the old shack. Don’t take me for one of those nutcases yelling that the world will blow up because we have offended our Lord. It’s nothing like an explosion or a celestial fury. Something like, if you will… going rotten. The town’s fallen to ashes, your legs and your hands and the table and the stones all mixing together, joining up, like the chains and the prisoners’ feet. And a shop like yours, Pat, which comes apart and goes off along the streets, all the way to the sea.’
Here Pat is one of those prisoners within themselves who cannot adapt to the ripple effects of the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Sure, the war may be over, but there are still other unmoorings ahead, and if you try to stand firm, you’ll be swept away. A little earlier in the narrative we catch a glimpse as to what this means for Marker in terms of the question of race. Jerry invites Pat to a jazz club, but he reacts with a flurry of racial abuse (the gist being why would he brave the storm to see a cursed dirty black man slobbering into his trumpet), to which Jerry calmly responds:
‘I see’, said Jerry. ‘You still have ideas about negroes. It’s a prejudice, if you know what that means. I met some on the other side of the ocean that knew how to drink for all the world like regular men.’
Jerry generously assigns Pat’s racism to his having his feet on the ground, quite literally, trapped within his own prison of prejudice. Reading this I was immediately transported back to those last words of Le Jolie Mai, the circling prisoner and the straight line of freedom, but with a twist.
I missed Bill Horrigan’s introduction of the screening of Le Jolie Mai on November 21, 2013, although I did visit the Blues for Smoke exhibition that was on show at the same time. I remember David Hammons’ Chasing the Blue Train (1989), going round and round, and Yall, the stalled shopping cart in a circle of blue dust by Kori Newkirk.
Thinking back, I wonder now how the audience of that screening of Le Joli Mai felt when, reaching those last minutes, they were asked to confront the concrete reality of the prisoner, accompanied by the sonic shift from the jazzy Hammond organ to the eerie harpsichord to the soothing piano? Sadly I cannot send my questionnaire back in time to find out. What I can do, however, is ask you, here and now, to transition from reading this post and this episode, to watch the first 3 minutes of a short interview with intellectual and philosopher Cornel West, made for the Whitney rendition of the Blues for Smoke exhibition. Then, in the next episode tomorrow, we can talk more about the nature of the catastrophe these past three posts have been skirting around.