Retracing the topography of terror in Chris Marker's La Jetée

• Grant number: 15/13203-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2015
• End date: March 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Communications
• Principal Investigator: Ronaldo Entler
• Grantee: Lucas Barbosa Navarro
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Comunicação e Marketing. Centro Universitário Armando Alvares Penteado (FA-FAAP). Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to investigate the aesthetic construction performed by Chris Marker in La Jetée from the perspective of the relationship between trauma and representation that it sets to form the fracture in the visual culture of the twentieth century. The study of the work will consist in the examination of the formal problems that seem to respond to sociohistorical issues of France in the early 1960s. By setting the film in a Paris to come, devastated by modern forms of war in which the only chance of survival rests on a childhood scar-image of a prisoner, Marker proposes a merger of traumatic material in the structure of the film, facing preset limits of its meaning. How to represent the trauma without betraying it? Which concept of memory would retrace the topography of terror? Or, to what extent this view is identified with the same conception of cinema for the author? In order to understand the issues that guide the composition of La Jetée, this project focuses its efforts in trying to establish the critical dialogue undertaken between the reporting of an exhausted present and the emergence of modern cinema. (AU)