Abstract
This paper looks at Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). It rests on a premise of film as a constructed, ordered world that answers only to itself. Both films address particular questions about time: what happens to our anticipation of the future if we move back and forth in time reinventing our past and present? (Marienbad), or can we escape our ruined present by moving into the future? (La Jetée). From Jacques Lacan, it borrows the concepts of the mirror stage by which we recognize ourselves, and of the objet petit a, the looking for which (both in terms of “search” and “seeing”) is that from which we derive our pleasure. From Jean-Luc Nancy it adopts descriptions of how film touches us, and the careful orchestration of the pleasure that is jouissance in being within this moment, not knowing where we are going.
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