Ceci n'est pas une vie.

La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images) is a surrealist painting from 1929 by the French artist René Magritte. Below the depiction of the pipe are the words, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" or “This is not a pipe.” His artwork reveals the artifice of artwork. When one captures an image of an object, it is not the object itself, rather, it is a representation of the object. An image could never be more than an image.

This paradox of capturing reality through art also emerges in the Chris Marker’s 1962 French film La Jetée. The protagonist is a prisoner of war undergoing experimentation to test the limits of time travel. However, in a meta sense, he is also a prisoner of the film itself. La Jetée comprises mainly of still frames in succession. Of course, all films consist of still frames. However, Marker slowed the rate at which the frames transpire, and in doing so, he reveals the artifice of film — just as Magritte revealed the artifice of artwork.

Throughout the film, the protagonist is bound by the constraints of his imprisonment, traveling to the past and future only in fleeting moments before he is dragged back to the present by his experimenters. While the use of still frames work to expose the mechanics of film, I also believe that the fragmentation symbolizes his captivity. Throughout the experiments, the protagonist attempts to escape into freedom — into motion. However, every attempt is thwarted by his captors and he once again is fossilized midflight. The first example is when the woman awoke in bed. The accelerating succession of frames propelled him into perpetual motion as her eyes opened, while the sound of birds ascended into a searing screech. Yet, no sooner did the Icarian protagonist soar into his radiant freedom than he found himself plummeted back into the underground prison camp. His second attempt was at the airport in the final scene. The protagonist began his takeoff down the jetty, running toward the woman as the succession of frames accelerated. Yet, right before he could achieve liftoff, he was shot by one of the experimenters.

I believe La Jetée is an allegory for the limitations of film. Just as a painting of a pipe is not a pipe, a filmed recording of life is not life. Film is no more than “a museum filled with eternal creatures.” The actors never age, they are embalmed in cellulose. Their fate is predetermined, encapsulated within a reel of film. Each frame of a film entombs lifeless figures, thrown into artificial animation by the projector. As Bruce Kawin writes, “as the film moves through the projector, the images become ‘present’… ‘jeter’ is the root of ‘projector,’ to project a film.” In the same way shooting a person with a gun takes their life, shooting an actor with a camera captures their life. The film began with the death of the protagonist, shot by his captor. Yet, simultaneously the protagonist is shot by camera — his image is arrested, forever imprisoned within the bars of each frame and unable to break free. Once captured in film, he is no longer a man, only an image hoping to transcend into motion.