An off-beat cinematic detective story with wider personal and political dimensions, French director Dominique Cabrera’s latest essay-doc grew out of a bizarre family connection to experimental film-maker Chis Marker’s groundbreaking sci-fi short La Jetée (1962). It began when Cabrera’s cousin Jean-Henri was struck by one of the film’s shots, which captured a real family on the viewing platform at Orly airport south of Paris, watching flights land and take off. His conclusion, that this image featured his childhood self and his parents, drove Cabrera to dig around for more evidence, weaving a wider web of connections around Marker’s life and work, which she depicts as inextricably linked to public protests against French colonialism and the end of the Algerian War in 1962.
Composed entirely of still photos aside from a very brief, achingly romantic live-action shot, La Jetée is a landmark in French avant-garde cinema, a dreamlike meditation on love, memory and mortality with a gut-punching time-loop twist. Despite its slender runtime, it remains a revered and influential cult film, most notably inspiring Terry Gilliam’s expanded semi-remake 12 Monkeys (1995).
World premiering this week in competition at DOK Leipzig festival, Cabrera’s documentary is very much its own creation, part cinephile essay and part poetic memoir, with an unashamedly niche art-house flavour. It is untidy in places, and unavoidably self-indulgent, but also charmingly quirky, moving and intriguing. Marker’s reputation should ensure this unorthodox homage finds a keen audience at further festivals and in cinematheques, particularly those where the clientele wear all black, smoke unfiltered Gitanes and exude existential ennui.
Most of La Jetée, the Fifth Shot consists of Cabrera interviewing her own relatives, tracking down Marker’s surviving associates, poring over vintage film clips and still photos, all in a bid to line up dates and locations from more than 60 years ago. She even visits Orly airport today to recreate the shot from Marker’s film that seemingly features Jean-Henri’s family. Slowly, forensically, she builds a pretty persuasive case.
In the process, Cabrera unearths some even wilder twists and coincidences. In one bizarre revelation, she finds that the male star of Marker’s film, Davos Hanich, grew up in the same Algerian neighbourhood as her own extended family. Furthermore, he may have had a youthful romance with the director’s aunt, which her parents sabotaged because Hanich was Jewish. Teasingly, Cabrera probes the possibility that her cousin Jean-Henri could actually be Hanich’s secret love child. The timing makes sense and the two men certainly share a physical resemblance, though any definitive proof is lost in history. “I feel a bit dizzy,” Jean-Henri laughs, “it’s like Vertigo.”
As it happens, Hitchcock’s Vertigo was one of Marker’s own obsessions, and helped inspire the hallucinatory dream-romance mystery plot of La Jetée. Cabrera weaves this element into her own free-ranging narrative, as well spotlighting the background impact of the Algerian War, which ended just as Marker was shooting La Jetée as a weekend side project to his more expansive, explicitly political Parisian panorama documentary, Le Joli Mai (1963).
Dead since 2012, the elusive Marker left few concrete clues for Cabrera to follow in this magical mystery tour though history. Born Christian Hippolyte François Georges Bouche-Villeneuve to an upper class family, he was notoriously private and camera-shy, refusing to explain himself, hiding his identity behind cat avatars and multiple pseudonyms. Alas, the other key players in La Jetée are also gone – Hanich died in 1987, his co-star Hélène Châtelain in 2020. But Cabrera does manage to interview several of Marker’s later collaborators, including actors Catherine Belkhodja and Florence Delay. She even squeezes a few final memories from veteran cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, co-director of Le Joli Mai, before his death in 2019.
La Jetée, the Fifth Shot could use more journalistic rigour in places, notably by giving fuller context and clearer introductions to each minor player in this patchwork story. Some of Cabrera’s lateral-thinking hunches and speculations also feel a little flimsy. All the same, this sprawling family scrapbook of a film has an agreeably personal, idiosyncratic, passion-project flavour. It also features plenty of genuinely moving moments as the director’s relatives muse on their colonial-era roots, lost loved ones, and remembrance of things past. The closing scenes include a brief but lovely archive audio clip in which Châtelain pays lyrical homage to Marker. “His work is a never-ending metaphor,” she says, “and La Jetée is undoubtedly one of the strongest metaphors he wrote about himself.”
Director, screenwriter: Dominique Cabrera
Cinematography: Karine Aulnette
Editing: Sophie Brunet, Dominique Barbier
Score: Béatrice Thiriet, Oscar Turbant, Élise Bertrand
Producer: Edmée Doroszlaï
Production company, world sales: Ad Libitum (France)
Venue: DOK Leipzig film festival (International Documentary Competition)
In French
104 minutes
