essays —

Chris Marker and the Spiral of Time

In Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil, the narrator, an unnamed woman voiced in English by Alexandra Stewart, describes letters she receives from a traveling cinematographer, the fictional Sandor Krasna: He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time. Krasna functions as an alias for Marker, who also credited a fictional brother, Michel, as creating the electronic score for the film, as if a piece of living self-portraiture was possible for him only in becoming numerous. We aren’t sure here, as poet Susan Howe notes in Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker (2013), “who is real and who is imaginary.”1

Chris Marker was a pseudonym for Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, born 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Little more is known about Marker, who perhaps distrusted biography in general. He didn’t like to be photographed, though he showed up briefly in Wim Wenders’s 1985 documentary, Tokyo-Ga, obscured behind a sketch he made of a cat, in a bar named after his film, La Jetee (1962). He may have adopted the name Marker on the suggestion of his friend, Alain Resnais—Marker had written the screenplay for Resnais’s documentary short Nuit et Brouillard (1956). ‘‘I read his surname may simply be a reference to magic markers,” writes Howe, “because they highlight or mark a text at the same time you can see through it.”

A mark, Howe goes on to note, is a dynamic cut. Dynamic cutting is a highly stylised form of editing. Sequences get magpied together from optical surprises, invisible but omnipresent verbal flashes, flashes of fact. A documentary work is an attempt to recapture someone something somewhere looking back. This circling back through time is the subject of Sans Soleil; the film is a reckoning with the nature of memory, the ambiguity of the living alongside of memory, the reality of which can come to seem fractal, inherently mysterious, spiralling in form; images stream past us and circle back in alternate versions, almost in anticipation of themselves, a kind of cinematic deja-vu.

Marker was a poet and novelist before turning to the camera, and the film’s images are braided together with elliptical voiceover, the nature of which Howe describes as omnidirectional—that is, it elides rather than follows the images, the text haunting rather than guiding the visual, which unfolds in what, for Howe, is disruptive-associative montage, with emphasis on the mysterious patternment and subliminal structures of images (icons), sensitivity to the sound shape of each pictured event, awareness of the time-mystery of simultaneous phenomena.

Most scenes take place in either Japan or in Africa, circling through Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde islands, with a brief detour to San Francisco— and many are concerned with ritual as a sort of living choreography by which to mark the passage of time.

He wrote me: animism is a familiar notion in Africa, it is less often applied in Japan. What then shall we call this diffuse belief, according to which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart? When they build a factory or a skyscraper, they begin with a ceremony to appease the god who owns the land. There is a ceremony for brushes, for abacuses, and even for rusty needles. There’s one on the 25th of September for the repose of the soul of broken dolls. The dolls are piled up in the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon—the goddess of compassion—and are burned in public.

Ritual here becomes a container for the enigma of memory. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, “We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself as home in the world… They are to time as a home is to space, they render time habitable.”2 Ritual becomes a practice of collaborating with the elusive material of time, rather than having it work without or against us. Ritual becomes a way of honouring time as that which cannot be replaced.

Marker described Sans Soleil as essentially a home movie, and was resistant to categorising it as a documentary or even a travelogue, nor himself as a documentarian. Many of his films translate the epistolary form into the cinematic space; letters become, notes Howe, colliding image-objects and divine messages. He is interested in ephemera — often old photographs, texts and souvenirs— as forming the material dimension of the memory-stream. The essence of fact, writes Howe, was to be found in the poetry of reality; in material objects. That is, he is interested in the object as locus of memory formation.

Marker suggested that he also wanted the viewer to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. We observe in his films the strange, inevitable duet between memory and place, usually through the lens of the traveller— how transience heightens the impressions place leaves on memory. “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining,” Krasna writes.

Sandor Krasna is searching for what, exactly, in his montage of memory and being? Perhaps the reconciliation of the past with the elusive present, or the elusive self, which have become impossible to separate. Circling back becomes an essential process of self-recuperation. Sans Soleil is a film I have revisited often throughout my life, the experience being one of revisiting or experiencing myself—to quote Merleau-Ponty—as a thing among things, between one eye and another.

When we return to a loved thing that thing serves as a reflection of the way we change or don’t change over time; through it we measure the effects of time on our responsiveness to things. It’s reassuring to love the same song you loved at the age of nineteen, to recognise your current self in the years-old marginalia, the long-ago underlined passages in a book still seeming the most personally resonant on the page. This circling back has little to do with linear expectations of progress, but is a revisitation to a private core— one where the eighteen year old and thirty-five year old self favour the same Cocteau Twins tracks— the loved thing becomes the stringlike object that binds us to the core of the elusive self.

Philosopher and psychologist William James defined this elusive core as the central nucleus of the self. This central nucleus is, for James, no “mere summation of memories… It is something with which we also have direct sensible acquaintance, and which is as fully present at any moment of consciousness in which it is present, as in a whole lifetime of such moments.”3 We can imagine memory here as a collection of beads on a string— place being the string which holds these beads together more so than any particular concept of time. Writes Sandor Krasna: “He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories.” That is, once collected, a memory becomes separate from any linear stream of time, and is preserved as a meaningful object in itself.

For James, when this central nucleus is found, “it is felt; just as the body is felt, the feeling of which is also an abstraction, because never is the body felt all alone, but always together with other things. Now can we tell more precisely in what the feeling of this central active self consists, not necessarily as yet what the active self is, as a being or principle, but what we feel when we become aware of its existence?”

We reach the central nucleus, then, when we experience our own inner likeness as echo—we experience ourself in felt relationship to the world of things. For Marker, dreams, too, are essentially woven into this alternate current of experience presented in the montage—that is, in the representation of how imagination augments reality. Here is Krasna:

One day he writes to me: description of a dream. More and more my dreams find their settings in the department stores of Tokyo, the subterranean tunnels that extend them and run parallel to the city. A face appears, disappears... a trace is found, is lost. All the folklore of dreams is so much in its place that the next day when I am awake I realize that I continue to seek in the basement labyrinth the presence concealed the night before. I begin to wonder if those dreams are really mine, or if they are part of a totality, of a gigantic collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection.

For Susan Howe, the opening image of Sans Soleil, of three children walking on a field in Iceland, is one of the loveliest she remembers seeing on film. “I can’t say why it is so haunting, only that silence has something to do with it… Wind blowing their hair is all… They could be playing a game, or they could be leading the tall one along to show her something. It is not clear who is leading who following… Silence and green fields that resemble ones I remember in Ireland. Salt air of the sea. A lyric fragment cut away. Simply peace and no evidence. They are spirits.”

Is the image is haunting perhaps because it represents to Marker, by way of Krasna, something about unadulterated experience— that is, that liminal interlude before— or potentially after— experience starts to examine itself? Or perhaps because it brings to mind a kind of pre-memory, something that occurs prior to the construction of identity through story; it exists as pure sensation, without commentary, and without reason.

Once, when living in Berlin, I visited a books shop in the centre of the city. The store was located on the main shopping hub of Friedrichstraße, and leaving, I decided to cut away from the busy streets and walk home a different route. My phone battery had run out but it was a lovely, light-filled afternoon, and I figured if I just walked south-east at a diagonal, I’d end up more-or-less where I wanted to be. Quickly the storefronts disappeared and the streets became more industrial and faceless. I started to wish I’d just taken the simple route as I felt I’d been walking forever and was arriving nowhere. I noticed a sign that suggested I had wandered a little too far east, and started to adjust my curve southward. Cue what felt like another endless stretch of cars and faceless buildings, so I decided to head to where there was the most foot traffic and where, hopefully, there would be a train I could jump on. When I emerged onto a busier street I found myself (you guessed it) on the same street where I had started, only a couple of blocks down from the bookstore. I couldn’t imagine how this had happened without my at some point making at least a semi-obvious U-turn. My mistake, I believe, was in temporarily neglecting my inner sense of orientation when I thought I had veered off course. On reflection, the signage that had distracted me was intended for drivers, not pedestrians; I was thrown by externalities, and didn’t trust my sense of orientation, so I over-corrected myself. Even as someone who tries not to default to navigation via little blue dot on a screen, I realized I had experienced a profound deterioration of an essential life-skill: that of getting meaningfully lost. You cannot situate yourself on a map you do not have.

And places, too, can easily come to resemble containers for old feelings. We can return to a location for the first time in years and find our feelings right there where we had left them, like footprints trapped in dried concrete. Feelings and sensations persist, as if overlaid on street corners, across the facades of old buildings—an experience which can be painful or nostalgic depending, of course, on what exactly those feelings are. If our present self feels lost to us, or perhaps trapped somewhere undesirable—this unconscious process of weaving memory and experience can come to feel self-defeating— antagonistic, even. To return to Sandor Krasna: if the images of the present don’t change, then change the images of the past. History is always subject to be rewritten depending on our current clarity of vision. And yet failing to purposefully plot our reversals with care is perhaps just another way to get lost, an unwillingness to surrender to a time more given to sudden fluctuations and ambiguous turnarounds than to a single, unwavering line.

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung often employed of the image of the mandala—another symbol originating in the East and recurring across multiple religious and spiritual traditions, meaning literally, in Sanskrit, circle—in his clinical work, describing the mandala as exerting a retroactive influence on the unconscious mind, effectively flattening time so the soul could walk back over and across it, in pursuit of its own retrieval. In his book Dreams, Memories, and Recollections (1961) he describes mandalas as:

cryptograms concerning the state of the self which was presented to me anew each day…I guarded them like precious pearls….I saw that everything, all paths I had been following, all steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point — namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths.4

Carl Jung’s mandala is an inner image, a map of the self. The circle is perhaps not only truer to our experience of time, but to our place within it. In a time of capital and accumulation—which we experience perhaps less as a horizontal line than as a sharp-runged ladder—we easily fall back, or behind, and must climb our way back up. The self is located wherever we happen to be, and if we are far from where we want to be, we are lost, we have failed to find our way. And yet the felt self, the central nucleus, defies this linear timeline. I imagine the central nucleus as hot, like the earth’s core. Draw close to the mystery of oneself and jump back like a moth. Draw close to the centre and it seems to speak back— take all of me, or not at all. The best of ourselves gets wrapped up in our shadows and dark as they are they still burn our eyes.

How much does this aggressive beat of time distort this process of self-recuperation? To return to Bachelard, “one no longer knows right away whether one is running toward the centre or escaping.” We inhabit a labyrinth of time that runs parallel to our memory collage, which can be recovered only by the examination of our own likeness. He writes, “if we want to determine man’s being, we are never sure of being closer to ourselves if we ‘withdraw’ into ourselves, if we move toward the centre of the spiral; for often it is in the heart of being that being is in its errancy. Sometimes it is in being outside itself that being tests consistencies. Sometimes, too, it is closed in, as it were, on the outside.”

The “being outside itself” can perhaps resemble the practice of negation, the ease with which we inhabit the liminal space between one eye and another. James’s nucleus here blends with Bachelard’s dialectic of imagination— the felt self becomes the imagined centre— “Because every universe is enclosed in curves, every universe is concentrated in a nucleus, a spore, a dynamited centre. And this centre is powerful, because it is an imagined centre. … This nucleizing nucleus is a world in itself. The miniature deploys to the dimensions of a universe. Once more, large is contained in small.”

I had long shared Marker’s proclivity toward the roaming self, the self as it is reflected in difference, or perhaps distance— however, this started to change as I experienced a decline in my mental health. I no longer sought out expansion. I was interested instead in miniaturisation, in the possibilities of self-reflection contained in the small. Staying for several weeks at a town in Central Greece, I swam each day in a small cove tucked inside the bay of Corinth. I claimed this cove as my own, holding back and waiting on the rare occasions when it was occupied by other swimmers. It had to be that cove, I felt. Not the next one along. I had on occasion walked right past it in the early days when the high tide obscured it, entirely altering its appearance from where I observed it from the footpath before making my decline down the rocks. The cove offered me a generous education on the subtle, daily permutations of the coastline, and therefore the effects of time and weather on matter. Often I would return in the morning to find the shifting tide had deposited the empty shells of the arbacia lixula— the spiky black Mediterranean sea urchins— all across the cove. The strange, flesh-coloured spheres like tiny anagrams of the universe itself. My daily trips to the cove became a study in miniature, or what Bachelard called the plenitude of smallness.

I felt I could have returned to the cove every day for the rest of my life and it would have had something to teach me about waves, about how their subtle or sometimes dramatic gestures add up over time to deep and significant transformation. I felt there was nothing worth knowing that I could not learn inside this cove, or from the behaviour of wind on the water that filled it up and then retreated with each daily cycle. I experienced that rare sense of nothing lacking; of needing nothing more than what I had.

My experience as a traveller had foremost instilled in me the knowledge that life did not exist in a single iteration. If time has regional inflections, so, too, does our consciousness of its passage. If we truly open ourselves to place, we open, too, to other ways of interpreting experience. But perhaps there had been, in recent years, an imbalance in this process of expansion and contraction that I had not yet examined and which the cove offered me an invitation to observe more closely. “I feel more at home,’’ writes Bachelard, “in miniature worlds… when I live in them I feel waves that generate world-consciousness emanating from my dreaming self. For me, the vastness of the world has become merely the jamming of these waves.” That is, for Bachelard, the personal capacity to accurately interpret the outside world was possible only in the close examination of the smallness within.

When I left Greece I was convinced the cove had remade me, the bay having held me womb-like, surrounded on every side by the peaks of Mount Parnassus as I floated, in what felt like a true encounter with self. It gave me insight, too, into what it is to sustain a wound when already wounded. Sometimes the wind picks up and the waves come at us hard and fast; we try to climb out of the water for safety, but struggle to find our footing on the rocks below, now hidden beneath the surging water; if the wave doesn’t take you under, it will put you into the path of other kinds of hazards— the sea urchins across the rocks, ready to pierce into your skin, or the wind knocking you up against the sharper rocks. Lightning might not strike in the same place twice but lightning can strike structures built on weak foundations; it creates fires which burn through our familiar surroundings, and these fires spark other kinds disasters, and on it goes. All to say, the storm having not yet settled, the time that followed this brought about a significant decline in my mental health, something which I experienced at the time as a failure, but understand now as simply the nature of waves.

Part-way through Sans Soleil Sandor Krasna makes a pilgrimage to San Francisco to trail the locations of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), a film that explores the possible reversals of hunter and hunted, predator and prey, in which San Francisco becomes a subterranean labyrinth echoing the spiral of time. Writes Susan Howe: ‘‘it seems to be a question of trailing, of enigma, of murder, but in truth it’s a question of power and freedom, of melancholy and dazzlement, so carefully coded within the spiral that you could miss it, and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space in reality stands for the vertigo of time.’’

Marker frames the scene in which Hitchcock’s protagonist Scottie watches Madeleine, the object of his desire, in a museum. Her hair is tied up like a nautilus shell, which, for Marker, represented this spiral of time, or, perhaps more accurately, a kind of anagram for the vortex of glitching time, brought about by a painful and undiminished memory. “An anagram,” writes Howe, “defies linear logic. Any letter of the alphabet may contain its particular in-dwelling spirit.” The anagrammatic nature of Marker’s montage pulls us into an alternate temporal current, one in which the anagram speaks to us about time’s possible rearrangements.

The Transcendental Weird

Throughout the original run of the television show Twin Peaks (1990-1991) the mysterious death of Laura Palmer, the teenage girl found murdered in a small town in Washington state, serves as the show’s central locus. She is the cynosure around which everything else seems to spin— and there’s a lot of everything else going on in this deceptively sleepy corner of the woods. The framed image of tiara-clad Laura Palmer as homecoming queen—blue-eyed, dream-spun, practically lit from within— is, in itself, a sort of cultural synecdoche for a certain strain of dark Americana that will forever be associated with David Lynch. Even if we’ve never seen the show, we’ve probably seen it; it is designed to tug at our senses like a siren pulling us into the always uncertain abyss between that which appears to be and that which actually is.

The show was rebooted twenty-five years after its original run as Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), apparently making good on a suggestion in the final episode, when our endearingly strange protagonist, FBI agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, is visited by Laura Palmer’s ghost, who tells him she will see him again in twenty-five years. (Laura frequently shows up as apparition inside the mystical, red-curtained anteroom Cooper visits in his dreams.)

Because all seventeen episodes of The Return were directed by Lynch, the series was eligible for inclusion in Sight and Sound Magazine’s poll1 of the top 250 films of all time— it sits at 152, sharing the spot with Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). In it Lynch seems not just to refine and elevate the primary aesthetic and thematic tendencies of the original series, but also to take a substantial, and ultimately transcendent leap beyond them. It brings to mind the image of Yves Klein, a man who also invented his own colour, diving upwards into a quiet, suburban street in Fontenay-aux-Roses. The adjective Lynchian at this point feels as similarly consecrated as the term Kafkaesque, or Orwellian: in that sense, whatever it was that Lynch invented and confetti’d into contemporary culture, it somehow eclipses style and genre and aesthetics and feels closer, perhaps, not just to a mode of seeing but also of sensing.

It is when the hypnogogic mindscape arrives unannounced mid-afternoon, stitched with strange affect: deja vu, for instance, feels like something Lynch could have invented, had the French not first laid claim to it. Though the Tibetan Buddhists have a term— nyams-shes — translating from the Tibetan to something like olfactory consciousness—(not a bad section name under which to stock tapes of Lynch’s films if video rental shops still existed)— which is not quite deja vu but similarly occurs when the mind-stream of consciousness carries into present awareness a kind of cosmological driftwood belonging to a before. Or possibly an after, or adjacent. Nyam-shes is less glitch than a momentary overlapping of experiential threads. And does olfactory consciousness not suggest something else distinctly Lynchian: the scent of time wafting through a room and dissolving into a pleasingly uncanny vignette, or else accumulating in sinister glyphs until we are practically gagging with it?

Also making the Sight and Sound top 250 is Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), a prequel film to the original series made shortly after its conclusion. Fire Walk With Me is dark; possibly too dark— at least, that’s what I remember thinking when I first saw it as a teenager. I had been infatuated with Lynch since seeing Mulholland Drive (2001). I was, at this time, around the same age as Laura Palmer and the film was influential in shaping my personal taste; it remains one of my all-time favourites. Part of Fire Walk With Me’s relative heaviness is the absence of many of the more farcical, slightly ridiculous side characters that offer us comic relief in the television show—the ongoing love-spats between Kimmy and Deputy Andy in the sheriff’s office, or Audrey Horne’s attempted seductions of Cooper, or her father Ben’s frenzied relationship with his baguette-loving brother, Jerry—and the relative absence of Agent Dale Cooper, who has up until this point been our iconically charming and clairvoyant escort through the Twin Peaks multiverse— MacLachlan shows up in the film, just not that much, and without him we are left to navigate the disturbing events that lead up to a brutal murder without much of a cushion. The atmosphere, here, is tenebrous; and the darkness, unmitigated, creates a kind of seepage: we become the liquid infused with its unnatural blend of uncanny rottenness.

The cushioning, in Lynch’s universe, is significant, because when we examine the entirety of the Twin Peaks arc, for all its iconic charm, we cannot deny that Lynch’s project is, in essence, largely a study in malevolence— or, perhaps better put, in the unspeakable kind of dark that nonetheless lies at the heart of the human experience. We can suggest, too, that his project is a noble one, because he does speak it; or rather, he evokes it, conjures it like a rapt wizard half-awake while still dreaming out loud; casting illumination onto shadow spaces that while commonly felt, are rarely openly staged, even less rarely probed so unflinchingly and well, magnificently. Lynch likes to play with echo and glimmer and warped reflection; he builds scenes, often, with a kind of dream matter that is inexplicably and unnervingly familiar to us, though we wouldn’t know how to name it, no less depict it.

And while this probing is direct, it is also constitutionally indirect, or rather, Lynch is direct in the same way that taking a widely concentric and spiralling route between two closely situated locations can also be the most thoroughly direct: as if to take the straightest or well-marked road onwards would suggest, ultimately, a kind of evasion; in a Lynchian landscape passage between two locations is as necessarily shaped by ordinary terrain than it is by its unseen elements, things that might exist above, or possibly below, or possibly parallel, to the mapped and familiar route.

Because more often that not, when it comes to internal landscapes, mysterious, out-of-the-ordinary things do drive us in one way or another, and freakish sort of characters do wave us over at the roadside, obfuscating the route. Characters that first seemed to us freaky can also reveal to us something hidden that was gentle and benign and in doing so redirect us, refining our sightline, causing it broaden in scope. Amorphous things fasten themselves to our windshields, suggesting that getting lost may in fact be the most direct route to getting where we are going, which is nowhere near the location we had plotted when setting out.

It is this direct indirectness that allows Lynch to maneouvre freely inside his dark material; entering edgeways becomes the only way to enter certain rooms (see: the dancing dwarf slinking through the red-curtained ante-room like a rogue tendril on an ancient arabesque). Much like the way we view an eclipse: we glimpse, or else we require a different mode of looking. This is the prism Lynch creates for us. Through it, we can see all kinds of things that would otherwise spook us silent or else shrink us into a catacomb brought about by too much exposure to unmediated fear.

In Fire Walk With Me, Laura Palmer is given her full outline. She is, however, a classic case of the ‘‘imperfect victim’’. She is often unlikeable, thoughtless, callous; she is a law-breaker; she is promiscuous; she snorts blow and laughs when her boyfriend, Bobby Briggs, accidentally shoots someone. It is primarily through her relationship to her best friend, Donna Hayward, that we glimpse her humanity. Donna seems to function here as Laura’s last thread to her own innocence. When Donna follows her to the Roadhouse bar, where Laura engages in sex work, Laura is horrified when Donna starts to mimic her: yet watching Donna initiate sex with a stranger is briefly sobering for Laura; she is too far gone, but she can save Donna from following her into the same abyss; Laura starts screaming at her, demanding that Donna stop ‘‘wearing her clothes’’, as if it is only in pulling Donna momentarily into her underworld that she can actually see where she is, see that underworld suddenly reflected as if onto mirrored-walls.

Much has been said about Lynch’s fascination with small town America— with the bizarrely reflective veneer of middle-class respectability and the dark torques of suburban secret-keeping. I think of this aesthetic as the small-town sinister, and I’m probably among many of Lynch’s fans who hail from small towns only to make their home in the affordable and therefore “bad” neighbourhoods of major cities, finding familiarity in his particular vivisection of white-picket-fence-style aspiration. I’ve always felt on edge in suburbia, the relative silence feeling ominous, and also bottomless. It’s a silence that seems to expand inside itself like Russian tea dolls—there’s always more of it hidden within.