I am sure that it was only after watching ‘Twelve Monkeys’ that most of us found ourselves then watching Chris Marker’s 1962 short ‘photo-roman’ entitled ‘La Jetée’ or ‘The Pier’ which was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s film. Both deal with memory and time travel and are based around a central conceit: a predestination paradox. Yet they could not be more different visually and philosophically. If you haven’t seen ‘La Jetée’ yet, then I suggest you become acquainted as there will be spoilers in my piece.
In a series of photo-montages and with an overarching narration, Chris Marker slowly reveals the story of an attempt by scientists in the dystopian aftermath of a nuclear war to rebuild civilisation using time-travellers. These scientists (who whisper in German) are using prisoners of war as guinea-pigs. These earlier attempts have resulted in madness for the test subjects. However, one prisoner, the Man (Davos Hanich), seems to be able to connect with the past through an intense memory that he had as a child whilst visiting Orly airport in Paris, before World War III.
His memory is of a woman’s face and her reaction to an event that took place in front of them both. It is this memory, that eventually, after many attempts allows him to travel back in time to meet her. She calls him her ‘ghost’ but they do fall in love and are seemingly very contented. It is then that the scientists pull him out.
However, because of disturbances in time caused by him and others, the people of the future are aware of his success. They contact him. He asks for their help, but they are reluctant. Eventually, they give him a device which will help rebuild the world. They are aware of his predicament as a prisoner and now he is of no use to the scientists they offer him asylum. He declines their offer and asks that they return him to the past. They send him back and he finds himself back at the airport where his memory begins.
He sees his love standing on the pier and he rushes towards her. We see another man (who is wearing goggles that the scientists were wearing) turn around and shoot him. The Man is hit and throws his arms out. It is a crucifixion pose. Marker freezes this moment and the film ends. This is what he had seen as a boy. The reaction to his own death from the woman he loves, and loved.
In my previous piece on ‘The Time Element’ (1957) a similar method of time-travel is displayed. The mind. ‘Peter’ our protagonist in a similar dream-like state to ‘The Man’ in ‘La Jetée’ is transported to Pearl Harbour in 1941. In ‘La Jetée’ the guinea-pig immerses himself in that visceral memory from the airport, to time jump. This is also similar to the method used in the film ‘Somewhere in Time’ (1980) based on Richard Matheson’s book ‘Bid Time Return’ (1975) and also used in the novel ‘Time and Again’ (1970) by Jack Finney. These jumps have their method in the power of bodily and psychically charged responses to haptic and visual phenomena and are the direct opposite of the mechanical method of time-travel used in ‘Twelve Monkeys’.
Gilliam expands everything exponentially in his film. It is based upon the same predestination paradox and involves the same time loop. We see through the eyes of the boy watching events unfold at the airport terminal. A woman screams and a man falls to the ground having been shot. Yet, there is something more, as yet, not revealed to us.
The cause of the apocalypse is not nuclear it is biological. A weaponised virus has almost wiped out the entire human race. Scientists (speaking in English with a hint of a German accent) have this time built a machine for time travel and are sending back strong-minded individuals to find out who was responsible for releasing the deadly virus. There is more than one-time traveller and more than one time jump. This adds to the complexity (and length) of the film.
Our protagonist named Cole (Bruce Willis) is sent back in time where he meets Doctor of Psychology, Kathryn (Madeleine Stowe) and very much like the response to ‘Pete’ the protagonist in ‘The Time Element’ nobody believes his story about an impending attack. Cole is deemed mentally ill (‘‘mentally divergent’’) and is sent to an insane asylum after his pleas are rejected by modern-day psychiatrists whom Gilliam portrays more like overseers in the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham and with mind-sets (and film sets) straight from Michel Foucault’s ground-breaking work ‘Madness and Civilisation’ (1961).
Cole appears in 1996 completely naked just as how we see the first appearance of the Terminator and John Connors’ father, in ‘The Terminator’ (1984). Of course, in ‘The Terminator’ we have another man-made time-machine and another time loop and predestination paradox.
After jumping in and out of time, Cole ascertains with the help of Kathryn that those responsible were ‘The Army of the Twelve Monkeys’ led by Jeffery (Brad Pitt), who turns out to be the son of a famous scientist, developing biological agents. Cole had already met (unknowingly) the future leader, Jeffery, whilst in the mental hospital. In fact, it is Cole who implants the idea of ‘The Army’ into the mind of its future leader. Cole in further investigating Jeffery becomes the unwitting catalyst for the actions of Jeffrey and the biological attack. Far from stopping him, Cole ( and Kathryn) seem to be instrumental in the release of the deadly toxin.
However, it is on their way to the airport that Cole and Kathryn having accepted that the release of the toxin is inevitable and Cole has failed in his mission, see animals roaming free all over the city. They realise the apocalyptic event has nothing to do with ‘The Army of the Twelve Monkeys’.
At the airport we witness a colleague of Jeffery’s father buying air tickets to every destination that the plague was released from and see the vials he has in his suitcase. Kathryn recognises him (from her book launch) and Cole sends a message to the scientists that ‘The Army’ is not responsible. Kathryn tells Cole and Cole tries to stop him but is shot by security and we witness the memory of the boy (Cole) seeing himself die and the women (Kathryn) look at him in a moment of eerie recognition.
The film unlike the original does not end there. Inside the aircraft is the female scientist from the plague-infested future sitting next to the murderer, aware of his plan. The film ends in typical Hollywood style. No ambiguity or anxiety just a resolution that will content most people. The endings are fundamentally different. With this we are granted an insight into the radically different nature of their purpose and that is due to the historical epoch in which they were created.
When Marker created his story in 1962, the world was literally heading towards catastrophe. The Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962) would take the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. The still photos in black and white do give some sense of the complete devastation that might have taken place, as they are real photos of the aftermath of World War II in France and the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. ‘La Jetée’ is haunted by these terrible memories and is profoundly haunted by the Holocaust. That is why the scientists whisper in German.
It should be remembered that many of the German scientists who had worked on designing and building the V2 rocket were members of The Nazi Party and had committed war crimes. To us now that is history, but for Chris Marker it was contemporaneous memory and it was he who had made the documentary: ‘Night and Fog’ (1955) about the Auschwitz and Majdanak death camps.
When Gilliam made his film, nuclear annihilation had receded substantially with the fall of the USSR after ‘Glasnost’ (Russian: ‘openness’) implemented by Mikhail Gorbachov. What had now become the threat to the world was a resurgent pandemic like the Black Death or The Spanish Flu of 1918 carried in the lungs of returning soldiers from the first World War which killed millions and millions. (Strangely enough there is a brief scene in the film with Cole in World War 1 in the French lines).
The film still deeply resonates today because the danger of a deadly world-wide pandemic has become even more likely not from a rogue individual intent on making humanity pay for its contempt and abuse of the Animal Kingdom but from an existing virus whether from birds or from monkeys, mutating into a far deadlier strain that kills not the very young or the old but the strongest and fittest humans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZR4pfq77XI?rel=0
Another strong contemporary resonance is due to the way Gilliam has designed his dystopian future. Machines are integral to this society, but they are heavy, metallic and invasive. There are screens everywhere and everything is visible. Everyone (apart from the Scientists) is under surveillance. The tone is set in the opening scenes where we see Cole outside in a protective suit that is completely transparent, offering little, real protection and the brutal, inhuman interrogations upon his return. The organic is the enemy and must be watched closely. Yet in ‘La Jetée’ the organic is triumphant. It is the corporeal mind of our hero and the memory of love which provides him with the means to travel in time and save humanity from the end of history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ibtrxdUBTw?rel=0
Our protagonist (The Man), chooses to return to the girl he has fallen in love with. An assassin has followed him back in time to kill him and at the end we see him, as she sees him, as he sees himself (a temporal Trifecta of past, present and future) take on the sacrificial, martyr-like pose of Christ. He must fulfill his destiny and close the circle. It is a loop without a beginning or an end; an Ouroboros and the eternal recurrence of Nietzsche. I believe he knows he will die and he goes to his death knowing that it is his individual heroic sacrifice that will save mankind. How many in human history have made the ultimate sacrifice?! This is for them. A memory captured forever in the moment when past, present and future collide, in time.
Marc Barham
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