La jetée in Historical Time: Torture, Visuality, Displacement

Abstract

Chris Marker’s La jetee (1962) has emerged as one of the foundational texts of postwar European cinema. Yet film studies’ predominantly formal emphasis on Marker’s play with movement, stasis, and temporality has undermined investigations of the film’s political content. Focusing on the film’s central theme of torture, this article shows how the relays between La jetee ’s two dominant settings—the concentration camp and a Paris in the not-so-distant past—generate a series of displacements between the colonial and consumer contexts of early 1960s France.