Despite being filmed 32 years apart from each other, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express both tackle the theme of time. In La Jetée, a man is sent back in time to save humanity but is doomed by time. In Chungking Express, a police officer begins a relationship with a snack bar worker after a series of chance meetings. Viewing Chungking Express through the lens of La Jetée allows us to gain greater insight into their portrayal of time. La Jetée uses stills to freeze characters and locations in time, while Chungking Express uses them to give the character life and freedom of movement. La Jetée’s achronological sequences assert that time is fatalistic by starting and ending with the same frame, whereas Chungking Express’ sequences, arranged in chronological order, portray time linearly. In this essay I argue that by understanding La Jetée’s fatalistic depiction of time, it can be seen that Chungking Express portrays time as giving agency.
La Jetée presents an atmosphere of despair through the lack of movement. In Chris Marker’s introduction of his post-apocalyptic version of the film’s setting, Paris, he employs the use of still images in a montage of its ruined landscapes (Marker, La Jetée 00:03:00-00:04:08). Buildings are levelled and abandoned by their inhabitants, cathedrals reduced to ruins and a church’s pews are replaced by debris. The city is depicted entirely through the use of monochrome photo stills, in which there is no movement. Without movement, life cannot exist. Marker lingers on the photo stills, allowing the audience to realise that the events that doomed Paris have already taken place and cannot be reversed. This version of Paris is depicted without colour and without movement. The use of still images emphasises the reality of Marker’s Paris. There is no movement. Without movement, there is no possibility of life. Paris is a dead city, devoid of life and hope. La Jetée’s narrator then states through voiceover narration that “Paris, as most of the world, was uninhabitable, riddled with radioactivity” (Wong, La Jetée 00:04:22-00:04:30). If “most of the world” suffers from radiation, the audience, savvy to Cold War fearmongering and remembering Hiroshima, knows that it would be impossible for the human race to survive. The survivors are presented as victims of time. The events of the past cannot be changed. In La Jetée,the characters are locked into their tragic fates by time.
By way of comparison with La Jetée’s montage, we are able to view Chungking Express’ opening scene in a new light. However, unlike the camera of La Jetée, which always has a subject in each still, Wong Kar-wai only tracks his subject, the woman, briefly. Wong sets the scene with the woman in the blonde wig navigating her way through the narrow, claustrophobic streets of Hong Kong (Wong, Chungking Express 00:00:45-00:01:19). Neon lights and people of different races line the tight corridors. The scene is shot on a hand-held camera and processed with step-printing. Certain frames are duplicated, creating the impression of stills being arranged together like in La Jetée. However, while La Jetée uses stills to create a sense of rigidity, Wong uses a flip-book effect to disorient the viewer. He allows the camera to pan away from the woman to other subjects: a man eating his dinner on the street (Wong, Chungking Express 00:00:49-00:00:51), a little girl ordering food at a food kiosk and other characters who only appear briefly. The viewer is bombarded by a series of confusing images in a short amount of time. The effect on the viewer is one of disorientation, as they struggle to make sense of the flurry of images shown to them. This quick transition between frames works in tandem with the blurring of many of the images, caused by time passing too fast to be captured by Wong’s camera. He employs blurred images in Chungking Express to create a sense of time in motion, as opposed to Marker’s use of still images to portray time as fixed.
As the hero of La Jetée is frozen in time by the black and white stills, it comes as no surprise when his attempt at asserting agency ends in failure. When he is offered the opportunity to travel to the future, he refuses so that he may travel to the past to find the woman (Marker, La Jetée 00:25:08-00:25:20). However, he travels to the moment of his childhood, and is murdered in front of his child self. The same frame of his death shown at the beginning of the movie is shown again, symbolising the cyclical nature of time (Marker, La Jetée 00:26:13-00:26:15). The hero has returned to the beginning of the story so that the story may begin. Hence, by having the film end at the chronological beginning of the story, Marker asserts that the hero’s failure comes from time’s cyclical, fatalistic. The hero himself knows that “there was no way to escape Time” (Marker, La Jetée 00:26:10-00:26:12). Time is portrayed as an omnipotent force that cannot be changed. In an ironic twist, the hero’s attempt at asserting agency causes his failing of that very task. Hence, by Marker’s assertion of Time’s fatalistic nature, the characters are portrayed as having no agency to change their fates which are fixed from the start.
Unlike La Jetée, the scenes of Chungking Express are arranged in chronological order, portraying time as linear. Faye and Cop 663’s story begins with a chance meeting at her food stall seemingly arranged by fate. However, Faye asserts her agency by looking for him and getting his address (Wong, Chungking Express 00:59:11-00:01:13). This action by Faye allows her to access his apartment and deepen their relationship in a later scene. The action that Faye takes in one scene takes effect in the next. The chronological arrangement of scenes, emphasises the cause and effect of each character’s actions. Faye’s decision to look for Cop 663 leads to a deepening of their relationship later in the film. In contrast, La Jetée’s hero is doomed since the beginning of the film, arranged achronologically. Any actions he takes do not affect the tragic outcome, while Chungking Express’ chronological storytelling gives Faye agency.
In conclusion, La Jetée and Chungking Express deviate in their use of stills. La Jetée uses stills to portray characters frozen in time, while Chungking Express uses them to portray time in motion and flowing. Furthermore, La Jetée’s achronological sequencing portrays time as fatalistic, stripping agency from its characters, while Chungking Express’ chronological sequencing highlights the cause and effect of each character’s actions, portraying time as giving agency.
Works cited
La Jetée. Directed by Chris Marker, Argos Films, 1962.
Chungking Express. Directed by Wong Kar-wai, Jet Tone Production, 1994.