“La jetée,” the punctum, & cinema

Bathes’ remarks in section 23 of Camera Lucida claim that cinema, while it has no punctum, nevertheless engenders a “blind field” to which photographs with punctums also provide access. In other words, the two arts use different means to achieve the same end of bringing out what some theorist, in one of their less flattering moments, might call the artfulness of art (a little joke). I wish to consider that effect of the “blind field”, which Barthes describes on page 57 as something like the phenomenon of bringing out the life or nature of the image, particularly in the context of the blurry line between photography and film exemplified by “La jetée.”

The film is composed of a series of photographs, each shown for a number of seconds, slideshow style, and a narrator and score. Consequently, for most of the film, there is enough time to be “free to shut [one’s] eyes” and in so doing to discover the punctum of the images (55). The use of the punctum in film is achieved in other ways outside of La jetée as well, for example through slow motion, freeze frames, repeating images and motifs. In short, one is given time away from the image to “allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.” Incidentally, and as a result, La jetée was in my opinion the most emotionally affecting film we have seen in the Screens and Projections series.

In La jetée itself, the narrator in his introduction of the protagonists’ mysterious memory of the pier at the airport says that, “Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments; only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars.” This claim would suggest that memory works like photography too, with that which we remember being the punctum of our ordinary moments, our experiences. When viewed next to Kafka’s idea that “We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds…a way of shutting [one’s] eyes” (54) taking photographs, or continuing to live and accrue ordinary experience, are a temporary relief from the “sting” (27) of the punctum, which comes from the idea, perhaps, that “what the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once…” (4), despite the blind field of life surrounding it. In other words, it is only an absence which can elevate art, and by then, the moment is already gone.