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Cut and spark: Chris Marker, André Bazin and the metaphors of horizontal
montage

Article in Studies in French Cinema · January 2012

DOI: 10.1386/sfc.12.1.35_1

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 SFC 12 (1) pp. 35–46 Intellect Limited 2012

Studies in French Cinema

Volume 12 Number 1
© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfc.12.1.35_1

JENNIFER STOB
Colgate University

Cut and spark: Chris Marker,

André Bazin and the
metaphors of horizontal
montage

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article traces the positions taken by prominent critic and film theorist André Bazin
Bazin on the film-making of Chris Marker. In a series of reviews written between Marker
1954 and 1958, Bazin identified a sweeping transformation at work in Marker’s documentary
documentaries: film’s paradigmatic transformation from a sovereign visual experi- court métrage
ence into a medium amongst other mass media, subservient to the strictures of text metaphor
and cultural context. Over this four-year span, Bazin developed some key rhetorical montage
metaphors in an effort to capture the promise and the menace of Marker’s innova-
tive montage technique. A close examination of the metaphors Bazin used reveals his
appreciation of this dialectical process on celluloid, but also his dismay at the dimi-
nution of cinema’s imagistic power that he felt such a process necessarily entailed. In
alerting his readership to the damages film incurred when its image and its text (on
the soundtrack or in subtitles) were set in radical equilibrium, he exposed Marker
to a compelling kind of ‘friendly fire’, and exposed the extent of his own engagement
with filmic realism at the same time.

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 Jennifer Stob

1. For a brief and helpful It is the inadequation of the designation (metaphor) which properly expresses
overview of the
French Personalist
the passion. If fear makes me see giants where there are only men, the
philosophies to which signifier – as the idea of the object – will be metaphoric, but the signifier
Mounier subscribed of my passion will be literal. And if I then say ‘I see giants’, that false
and which influenced
as a whole many of the designation will be a literal expression of my fear.
contributors to Esprit, (Derrida 1998: 93)
see Gray (1971: 3–5).

2. All translations are In 1958, André Bazin wrote a review of Lettre de Sibérie/Letter from Siberia (1957),
the author’s unless which would later become the foundational analysis of Chris Marker’s film art
otherwise noted.
(Bazin 1958a). The names of both men are now widely renowned: Bazin for
the legacy he left as the father of modern French film criticism, and Marker for
his weighty contributions to the form as well as the activism of film-making.
In the 1950s, however, Bazin and Marker were first and foremost known to
each other as friends and fellow cinephiles. They had met after World War II,
when Marker came to work for Bazin in the film division of the left-leaning
cultural organization, Travail et Culture/ (Work and Culture) (Andrew 1978: 90).
This collaboration was symptomatic of the moral kinship they would come to
share in their approaches towards the institution of cinema, a kinship further
evident in the two men’s contributions to Emmanuel Mounier’s journal of art
and politics, Esprit (Alter 2006: 8).1 Their mutual conviction was that film should
be a kind of community service in the broadest and most humanistic sense of
the term, displaying the individual lives that together make up life as a whole.
As Bazin aptly put it, this was film-making as ‘a cinematographic “report”, a
disconcerting and irrefutable observation on the human condition’ (1971: 78).
Bazin’s and Marker’s respective writings on cinema and other cultural topics
throughout the late 1940s and well into the 1950s testified to their belief in film
as a sociological catalyst, a democratic ritual that could unite people globally. As
a result, both felt strongly that critics, film-makers and producers involved in
creating a discourse around film had a social mandate to truly enlighten via the
medium instead of merely dazzling or entertaining. Exactly what form this cine-
matic enlightenment should take, however, proved to be the decisive issue that
set Marker and Bazin at odds with one another in the last decades of Bazin’s life
and the early years of Marker’s evolution from essayist to essayistic film-maker.
Bazin’s ideal aesthetic of cinema was as different to Marker’s as his beliefs about
its ethical role in the larger world were similar, and this comradely dissonance
was manifest in Bazin’s now-canonical review of Marker’s film Lettre de Sibérie.
The review originally appeared in France-Observateur, and later reached an
extended audience through its inclusion in Jean Narboni’s 1983 compilation
of Bazin’s writing, Le Cinéma Français de la Libération à la Nouvelle Vague
(1945–1958) (1983). It was an analysis, a commendation and a condemnation
at the same time. Like an encyclopaedist tackling the classification and
taxonomy of an entirely new species, Bazin did not address Lettre de Sibérie’s
meaning but instead described the film’s function, its composition and its
assemblage. He was the first to pinpoint the new form of montage that
Marker had pioneered, one in which ‘the image does not refer to that which
precedes or follows it, but refers more or less laterally to that which is said of
it’ (Bazin 1958a: 22).2 In Lettre de Sibérie, Bazin elaborated, viewers witness a
dialectical operation that he dubbed ‘horizontal montage’, one effected ‘from
the ear to the eye’ (1958a: 22). Bazin’s ‘horizontal montage’ has become a
key term, featuring implicitly or explicitly in many of the subsequent articles
that describe Marker’s way of threading moving pictures along and against
an imposingly frictive soundtrack. It was the concise genius of Bazin’s formal

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 Cut and spark

explication that made his article essential reading for Marker’s audience of 3. Bazin’s lament for
sight’s diminishing
the 1950s and ensured that it remains today. primacy in film-making
Yet another Bazinian discourse is at work in the margins of this film review. can be contextualized
Thus far overlooked, it reveals as much about the seismic shift taking place within a larger
cultural framework
in the history and theory of cinema in the 1950s and 1960s as the principal of debasement of
argument in which it is embedded. If Bazin was generous in his praise of the visual in French
Marker’s poetic film-making, repeatedly noting Marker’s valuable contribution modernity. See Martin
Jay’s landmark study
to French short film culture, he was just as insistent on his disaffection for the (1993).
larger cinematic implications of such a style, and he couched this subtly uneasy
critique within his review commentary. The 30 October 1958 review marks
the apogee of these mixed feelings, but they feature consistently in virtually
every article Bazin ever wrote on Marker, beginning in 1954 and ending with
another Lettre de Sibérie review published posthumously in 1958 (Bazin 1954,
1956a, 1956b, 1957a, 1957b, 1957c, 1957d, 1958c). This anxious critical subtext
represents Bazin’s endeavour to both chronicle and lament a transformation
at work in Marker’s film-making: the transformation of film from a sovereign
visual experience into a medium amongst mass media, subservient to its text
and cultural context.3 When extricated from the articles they underpin, Bazin’s
objections to the very film procedure to which he gave a name accentuate the
threats and the promises identifiable in ‘horizontal montage’.
Bazin’s chief worry concerning Lettre de Sibérie revolved around what
he perceived as the profoundly decreased importance of the actual moving
pictures in relation to their narration. ‘Ear to eye’ montage, he felt, was not
a neutral alteration in the emphasis of traditional montage; rather, it over-
turned a basic filmic hierarchy. He held that Marker’s film was unlike any
other documentary before it because its ‘primary material’ was not the actual
images projected, but rather its ‘intelligence’ – the combination of sounds and
speech, the order of images, and the way the two tracks were timed to play
off of one another. ‘The image’, he explained, ‘only intervenes in a third posi-
tion in immediate reference to this verbal intelligence’ (Bazin 1958a: 22). For a
man who had established his critical identity as a phenomenologist of moving
images and moving image experience, this shift in filmic significance from that
which is viewed to that which is thought, from representation to representa-
tion’s interstice was a troubling one.
Bazin conveyed his beliefs in the preciousness of the recorded image and the
violence that was intrinsic to montage through tropes of abuse and reward, loss
and gain. It seems that each film Marker made challenged his friend and mentor
to question anew whether damaging the visual could ever produce enough illu-
minating enrichment in recompense. Bazin’s reviews of Marker’s films reveal the
evolution of a metaphorical model on which he relied in his attempt to come to
terms with an innovative coupling of sound and image. From diamond to flint,
from fireworks to light’s refraction, Bazin’s allusions frame his wonderment of
the new directions in which Marker pushes the dialectic process on film. At the
same time, these metaphors illustrate Bazin’s fear of the pictorial ramifications
of horizontal montage and divulge the deficiency he perceived within it.

SHOCKS AND CONFLAGRATIONS: THE FORCE OF

HORIZONTAL MONTAGE
Bazin’s parcours of Marker’s film-making began with a review of Les Statues
meurent aussi/Statues Also Die (1953), a fierce and breathtaking 30-minute
short that Marker made with Alain Resnais (Bazin 1954). Commissioned by

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 Jennifer Stob

the cultural publication Présence Africaine, the film provided an art histori-
cal narrative for African figural creation that went beyond Western connois-
seurship. It then used this lesson as a springboard for a merciless critique of
colonialism and general racism in the film’s second half. Marker’s scenario
politicized the rapid suite of filmic images, many of which were taken from
conventional documentary archives. As its voice-over specified, Les Statues
meurent aussi was a testament to the fact that for artworks as well as for the
human beings that create them, ‘death is not only something one suffers –
it is something one gives’. In sequences that juxtaposed stunning ritualistic
objects from centuries past with the contemporary plight of blacks in Africa
and beyond, the film charged white society and its manifold forms of imperi-
alism with cultural massacre.
Because of this trenchant and uncompromising message, the film was
promptly censored and remained banned from distribution in its original
running time until 1968. Bazin deplored the film’s censure in a 1954 review of
the film, conjecturing that it was largely due to the protests of ‘the Secretary
of Colonial Affairs as well as the Secretaries of the Interior Ministry and the
Ministry of War’ (1954: 22). However, he also added the following peculiar
caveat: ‘At times, the text of the latter [Chris Marker], fashioned into splin-
ters of diamond, injures a bit unjustly images which could be interpreted with
less severity’ (Bazin 1954: 23). Bazin was certainly not taking issue with the
progressive tone of Les Statues meurent aussi in its entirety; indeed, he contin-
ued to denounce the film’s censure in subsequent articles (1956a: 19–20,
1957a: 19–20, 1957d: 19). Despite his somewhat conservative disappointment
in the film’s conclusion, one he believed ‘shied away’ somewhat from ‘the
constructive synthesis of black culture and the technical civilization of whites’
(Bazin 1954: 23), he agreed with its condemnation of France’s colonialist
hypocrisy. The problem was that he remained unconvinced that these accusa-
tions warranted such a radical form. A brutal dialogue is just, he implied, but
it should refrain from ultimately brutalizing the pictures it accompanies.
Bazin’s critique misses the fact that the argument of Les Statues meurent
aussi would be incommunicable without a furious clash of word and image.
In essence, the film explains that the creations of black cultures have been
welcomed into the representational regime of the Western world while
the very individuals from which such objects came have been wrongly
disfavoured, belittled, excluded, and even forcefully disappeared from the
historical record of representation. In editing Les Statues meurent aussi,
Marker and Resnais had no choice but to forcefully confront the rhetoric
surrounding Africans and art with representations of Africans and art, stat-
ing and enacting their thesis at the same time in their effort to disinform. To
edit the film otherwise would have been yet another denial of the inherent
contradiction between rhetoric and representation, a denial doubtlessly more
injurious than the possible loss of several instances of pictorial contempla-
tion due to the sharp tone of a voice-over. When Marker and Resnais asked
for a non-commercial visa for a complete version of the film in 1957, they
were summarily denied (Bazin 1957a: 19). When government censors did
finally issue the film a commercial visa in 1963, it was exclusively for the
first two reels of the film, where the soundtrack does not critique the images
shown, politically or otherwise. Marker and Resnais agreed to the distribu-
tion of this truncated version on the condition that it carry an advisory noti-
fying audiences of the censorship; unsurprisingly, this advisory was left off
of the prints released for circulation.

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 Cut and spark

Les Statues meurent aussi was a prototypical example of the power of hori-
zontal montage, its aggressive elegance and sophisticated – even perplexing –
logic. With his hesitant critique of the soundtrack’s newfound muscle, Bazin
assembled a telling conceptual framework of radiance (of the text/sound-
track) and laceration (of the image) upon which he would continue to rely
in his ongoing discussion of Marker’s filmic dialectic. Returning to the film
in a review published on 17 January 1957, Bazin seems to have reconsidered
his original wording, if not his original reservations, and altered his choice of
metaphor accordingly:

Resnais and Chris Marker appear to me to use montage in not only a

brilliant but also a subtly new way – poetic and intellectual at the same
time, playing simultaneously on the shock of the images’ beauty and
the conflagration of their meaning, the text intervening all the while like
the hand which strikes pieces of flint against each other.
(1957a: 19)

In this passage, Bazin expresses his confidence that the film’s incendiary truth
is worth the injuries occasioned by the swift clash of soundtrack and picture.
Nevertheless, the extended metaphor continues to imply that the message
conveyed is the result of a deliberate blow dealt to filmic imagery – this time,
a glancing one rather than an outright gash. Contained within his meta-
phoric choice is a fear that although the filmic support can splendidly fuel a
dialectical exercise, it will consequently fall victim to this exercise, consumed
by the clash between the images on the reel and their accompanying sound-
track. This fear became more pronounced in Bazin’s reviews of the short film
Dimanche à Pékin/Sunday in Peking (Marker, 1956).
In Dimanche à Pékin, Marker’s preferred cinematic motifs are already in
place. The film addresses foreign travel, photographic memory, time’s inexo-
rability and the shifting meaning of community – themes that would later
come to define his auteurship. Like the celebrated La Jetée/The Pier (Marker,
1962) and a later short, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires/If I Had Four Camels
(Marker, 1966), Dimanche à Pékin was composed uniquely of filmed still
photographs and a voice-over. This unusual and inspirational stylistic experi-
ment foregrounded the connotative tensions between fixed and moving states
of the indexical image, and garnered the film the Grand Prize at the Tours
International Festival of Short Films the year of its release (Bazin 1956b: 18).
Using phrases he would later recycle in his discussion of Lettre de Sibérie, Bazin
wrote three reviews of the film, each time emphasizing its obvious formal
triumph and its recondite pictorial defeat.
In his first article on the film (written under the pseudonym Florent
Kirsch), Bazin lauded Marker’s ‘reflective, nuanced, and friendly’ view of
China, communicated through the film’s ‘marvellous commentary’ (Bazin
1956b: 18). The scenario of Dimanche à Pékin, he proclaimed, ‘produces some-
thing other than just an adroit grouping of disparate documents: a PRESENCE’
(Bazin 1956b: 18). Yet here, too, his praise of the film hinged on his avowal
of its weakened visuals: he is careful to note that the film offers ‘few remark-
able images; rather faces, human beings, street corners snapped at random’
(Bazin 1956b: 18). The film’s quality of presence is therefore something that
cannot truly be seen, only felt. This is a strange quality indeed to locate within
a pictorial medium, and one whose invisibility can also be construed as a trig-
ger for filmic anxiety, as it is positioned in Roger Odin’s masterful analysis

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 Jennifer Stob

of Marker’s film-making. According to Odin, Marker’s soundtrack serves in

La Jetée and elsewhere as the crucial supplement that fills the narrative void
exposed by the film’s images (1981: 157). The voice-over orders the film,
‘saving’ the audience over and over again from the ‘menace’ of inchoateness,
but the risk of communicative chaos remains intrinsic to Marker’s successions
of filmed photographs.
In his struggle to ascertain what exactly was hazarded in Marker’s films
in exchange for the insight a filmgoer might gain, Bazin drew upon his own
metaphorical reserves. He called Dimanche à Pékin a ‘dazzling apparition’
(Bazin 1957b: 19) in a second review of the film on 27 June 1957, but again
stressed the ‘banality’ of its photograms, concluding anew that Marker’s
montage was a relentless act of cut and spark:

Spread out and immobilized in photo album style, these [images]

proposed to us would at times be beautiful, at times remarkable for their
banality, but always the text comes to bite on them like a steel instru-
ment on flint to rip out the light […] The work’s primary material is
in no way the image, but rather the idea: that is what organizes the
montage, creates the text, and presides over their synthesis.
(Bazin 1957b: 19)

Bazin’s ambivalence towards this synthesis is most evident in a third review of

the film, published in Radio Cinéma Télévision several days later. He first confirms
the film’s visual paucity, and then defends the radical equality of its cinematic
components, equivocating sentence by sentence (Bazin 1957c: 45). Ultimately,
Bazin was unwilling to discard the notion of filmic hierarchies, and unable to
resist a subtle commentary on the diminished ranking of the film’s pictures. He
ended on a conciliatory note, writing, ‘Chris Marker went to China, and more
important and deserving of attention than the images which he brought back
on celluloid are those which he recorded in his mind’ (Bazin 1957c: 45).

A POINT OF VIEW WITHIN AN ESSAY WITHIN A FILM:

‘IMAGINARY NEWSREELS’
Bazin knew the horizontal montage in Dimanche à Pékin was indicative of
Marker’s ever-accelerating departure from traditional documentary. In the
article published on 27 June 1957, he drew an astute parallel between Marker
and Jean Vigo, both spirited, non-conformist film-makers whose innovative
narratives were inflected with graceful and pointed irony. Just like Vigo’s À
propos de Nice/On the Subject of Nice (1930), Dimanche à Pékin corresponded
to ‘a new conception of “the documentary”’, Bazin asserted (1957b: 19). In
both, a deft fusion of personal recall, sparing observation and political opin-
ion combined to form what Vigo had called ‘a documented point of view’
(Vigo [1931] in Lherminier 1985: 67). Not entirely satisfied with the compari-
son, Bazin continued to cast about for an appropriate term: ‘above all, it’s a
critical testimony, a poetic rapport, in any case a work which would deserve
the name invented for it’ (1957b: 19). Reviewing Lettre de Sibérie a year later,
he made a telling modification to his Vigo reference, and consequently found
the descriptive phrase he was searching for. Bazin proposed that,

Lettre de Sibérie is an essay in reportage form […] the key word being
‘essay’, meant in its literary sense: a historical and political essay, though

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 Cut and spark

written by a poet. Or in other words, adapting the citation of Vigo on À 4. The sentence is from
Henri Michaux’s poem
propos de Nice (‘A documented point of view’) I will say: ‘an essay docu- ‘Lointain intérieur’
mented by film’. (1938).
(1958a: 22) 5. A chronology of the
theory of essayistic
With this revision, Bazin shifted his critical emphasis away from subjective film can be found
in Blümlinger and
perception and towards the double remove of media hybridism and self- Wulff (1992). Thanks
reflexivity. Lettre de Sibérie spoke two languages, one literary and the other to Stephen Unger for
filmic, and during its screen time it translated ceaselessly between those signalling this resource
and offering further
respective traditions. This is evident from the opening titles of the film, useful commentary.
spelled out letter by letter to the accompanying clack of typewriter keys. The
6. For more on the
bilingualism continues with a poetic fragment from Henri Michaux (‘I write to Groupe de Trente in
you from a faraway country’) and variations on this fragment (‘I write to you the context of France’s
post-war history of
from the end of the world’/‘I write to you from the land of childhood’), which short films, see Bluher
surface several times over the course of the film in lieu of an image-based, and Thomas (2005)
diegetic transition.4 and Bluher and Pilard
(2009). I am grateful to
Bazin’s review positioned Marker’s ‘essay documented by film’ within a Dominique Bluher for
schema of insistently discontinuous, fragmentary and ephemeral approaches having shared a portion
towards cultural phenomena that Theodor Adorno had chronicled in ‘The of this latter text with
me in advance of its
Essay as Form’, a text published the same year Lettre de Sibérie was released. publication.
According to Adorno:

The essay […] does not try to seek the eternal in the transient and distill
it out; it tries to render the transient eternal. Its weakness bears witness
to the very nonidentity it had to express. It also testifies to an excess of
intention over object and thereby to the utopia which is blocked by the
partition of the world into the eternal and the transient. In the emphatic
essay thought divests itself of the traditional idea of truth.
(1991: 11)

Together, Marker’s film and Adorno’s essay-within-an-essay are representa-

tive of the slow but steady infusion of philosophic sensibility into European
post-war cinema.5 Hans Richter’s 1940 text ‘Der Filmessay. Eine neue Form
des Dokumentarfilms’ (‘The Film Essay: A New Form of Documentary
Film’ had signaled the beginning of this period of essayistic experimenta-
tion (1992: 195–98). Its trajectory was further defined in Alexandre Astruc’s
influential ‘Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo’/‘Birth of
A New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo’ published in Écran français in 1948
(1992). The essay on film found its ideal vessel in the short films made in
France during the 1940s and 1950s, and its most ardent advocacy in the affili-
ated film-making of the Groupe de Trente (Group of Thirty). Marker was a
principal member of this group, which formed in 1953.6
Lettre de Sibérie may have been the first film Marker made that approached
the length of a standard feature, but its unusual approach to subject matter
and its innovative form rooted it firmly in the typology of the short film;
Marker would later joke that making the film was like ‘giving birth to a
monster, a short film of seven reels’ (1961: 43). In Lettre de Sibérie, Marker
made use of his own term for the filmic negotiation he was orchestrating
between the conventions of a feature and the conventions of a short film,
between fiction and non-fiction, between text and illustration. The term was
‘actualités imaginaires’/‘imaginary news’ or ‘imaginary newsreels’, one he had
earlier coined in brief satirical sketches he had written for Esprit. It represented

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 Jennifer Stob

in every sense a counter-proposition to Bazin’s concept of an ‘essay docu-

mented by film’ (Bazin 1958a: 22). According to Bazin, Marker’s film-making
was first and foremost an experimental variation on a genre that traditionally
purported to be objective: the documentary film. Marker, on the other hand,
was interested in leaving behind the notion of genre entirely. He worked from
the theory that cinema could focus on the movements between the mislead-
ing categories of subjective and objective portrayal.
In Lettre de Sibérie, these movements are conceptual as well as medial. The
narration is pliant enough to bind the original colour footage taken in August
of 1957 together with black and white footage taken from documentaries in
the Soviet film archives (Pierrard 1963: 37), two whimsical animated fugues
(one a micro-history of the mammoth, the other a promotional short for
the many uses of a reindeer) and a suite of nineteenth-century sepia photo-
graphs of Siberian gold rush towns, displayed in vignettes. The mix of filmic
materials gives us a varied glimpse of what Siberia looks like and what kinds of
beings (human and animal) live there. More importantly, however, the diverse
styles and topics serve as a kaleidoscope in which the puzzled and amazed
impressions of a foreigner can tumble together with the very landmarks, land-
scapes, modern institutions and cultural heritage that Siberians use to define
themselves. The film is a meeting of ‘cultural imaginaries’, a concept that, as
Réda Bensmaïa points out, is central to Marker’s ethic of cinema:

To make a film about the Other, Marker seems to tell us, should always
involve not only a knowledge of their culture, but also a sensitivity to
their cultural imaginary. Better yet, to capture the imaginary of the Other
from a side angle is also to fight against the ‘degradation of the Diverse’
(the expression is V. Segalen’s), against the reduction of the diversity of
human beings and things in this world.
(Bensmaïa 1988: 62)

Internal contradictions that nevertheless manage to cooperate are the elemen-

tary particles of actualités imaginaires. A central implication of Marker’s ‘imagi-
nary newsreels’ is that patchwork syntheses of events and ephemera can be just
as valuable, newsworthy and real as information in conventional formats. In this
sense, the levelling of the sound/image hierarchy on film that so bothered Bazin
is entirely systemic in Marker’s work, part of a larger belief in the ‘coupling of
heterogeneous series’ (Bensmaïa 1988: 63) on each representational register.

‘ULTRA-VIOLET RAYS’: THE SUBTLE PERSISTENCE OF THE REAL

In a 3 November 1958 article on Lettre de Sibérie, Bazin pointed to the tenuity
of this approach, hinting that its fluid joining and disjoining of representa-
tion and utterance meant that the entire film could easily become unhinged:
‘Deprived of its soundtrack, Lettre de Sibérie doesn’t really mean anything, but
the text alone is nothing more than a firework of gratuitous ideas’ (1958b: 6).
In this sense, Bazin’s warning of the risks involved in the radical cinematic
equality between visual revelations and cognitive ones exposes Marker to a
curious kind of friendly fire, and also exposes Bazin’s own unflagging advo-
cacy of a particular mode of cinema. Despite his advocacy for the idea of
impure film (Bazin 1967b: 53–75), despite his recognition of ‘the irreducible
linkage of different media’, he was resistant to film that he felt went against its
own ‘ontological determination’ by treating its proper photorealism as merely

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another link in the dialectical chain it was assembling (Schröter 1999: 142). 7. Several scholars,
amongst them Nora
The quiet hand-wringing for the loss of visual potency in horizontal montage Alter (2006: 29) and
that is embedded in Bazin’s comparisons of Marker’s films to sparks, spar- Arnaud Lambert
klers and fireworks must be understood in conjunction with a more renowned (2008: 64), have
correctly noted that
metaphor he employed: that of cinema as an usher’s flashlight, moving uncer- Bazin fails to mention
tainly but persistently around our world to illuminate the dark and mysteri- the first of the four
ous spaces (Bazin 1967c: 107). Bazin must have worried that the illumination commentaries,
in which Marker
created by the fragmentary and self-reflexive narratives in Marker’s films was introduces his
simply too feeble and fleeting to light the spectator’s contemplative path. experiment: ‘Recording
these images of the
The exception that proves the rule of this metaphorical pattern is Bazin’s Yakoute capital as
characterization of three passages in Lettre de Sibérie as ‘three different intel- objectively as possible,
lectual beams of light’ thrown on the same image, whose refraction is received I asked myself who,
frankly, they would
by the filmgoer (1958a: 22). Here, Bazin honours the masterful dialectical please, since it is well
juxtaposition at work in the way Marker made the image track skip like a understood that we
record, projecting the same fifteen-second sequence four times as the sound- only know how to
discuss the USSR in
track provides four ideologically differing voice-overs to colour our perception terms of heaven
of the scene.7 Yet the light shed by horizontal montage is vastly different from or hell’.
the kind that, in the ideal cinema of Bazin, could spotlight the ‘spatial density
of something real’ within a film’s imaginary (Bazin 1967d: 48). Marker’s ‘three
different intellectual beams’ are not really directed at Yakutsk or its inhabit-
ants at all; they rather target the fundamental dimness of perception itself, and
its easy exploitation in the motion picture medium. As Jan-Christopher Horak
has explained, Marker believes that reality cannot be captured objectively in
photographs due to its incessant mutability. The only photographic objectivity
possible is a self-reflexive subjectivity, one that declares its own processes of
documentation and representation. Horak concludes, ‘The central paradox in
the work of Chris Marker, therefore, is the instrumentalization of a belief in a
photographic objectivity (documentary conventions) to communicate a radi-
cal subjectivity, thus placing the act of reception at the center of his aesthetic
concept’ (1997: 33).
Marker herewith accomplishes the perfect inversion of Bazin’s maxim from
‘The Virtues and Limitations of Montage’: ‘If the film is to fulfill itself aestheti-
cally we need to believe in the reality of what is happening while knowing it to be
tricked’ (Bazin, cited in Horak 1997: 33). Marker’s film-making stands for the belief
in the trick of what is happening, and the knowledge that such a trick is reality.
All essayistic creation must eventually address this tangled relationship between
belief and the visible. The luminary metaphor of Georg Lukács, one of Marker’s
forebears in essayism, best answers Bazin’s: ‘Were man to compare the different
forms of poetry with fractured sunlight from a prism, the essayists’ writings would
be the ultra-violet rays’ (1911: 15). At work beyond the normal range of human
vision and often ignored, essayistic discourse is nevertheless ever present and ever
potent alongside that which is immediately visible and comprehensible.
Bazin’s last review of Lettre de Sibérie was published on 16 November 1958,
five days after his tragically early death at the age of 40. Its gist is identical
to the reviews preceding it, but here, more bluntly than ever before, Bazin
acknowledges the ‘somewhat unnerving impression one takes away from Lettre
de Sibérie’ (1958c: 45). It is, he continues, ‘the feeling of a certain visual poverty’
(Bazin 1958c: 45). His concluding sentence is cryptic enough to leave readers
doubting the conviction in his words: ‘Luxury is not for the eye, it is first and
foremost for the spirit’ (Bazin 1958c: 45). Coming from a man who dedicated
his life to supporting the creation, criticism and circulation of luxury for the
eye, the statement could only be an indulgence of sorts, never a blessing.

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 Jennifer Stob

It is tempting to detect a metaphysical accord between cinematic realism

and the life of one of its greatest proponents in the history of these reviews,
but to presume that the two passed on together would be false. Such an inter-
pretation would not do justice to what Jacques Derrida has called ‘the inad-
equation of metaphor’ (1998: 93), in this case the inadequation of Bazin’s
metaphors for Les Statues meurent aussi, Dimanche à Pékin and Lettre de Sibérie.
As valuable as his metaphors of damage and brilliance are for measuring the
impact of a new form of cinematic expository in post-war France, they are too
simplistic. All film-maker-philosophers whose ‘image and commentary form
a non-dissociable audio-visual ensemble’ (Resnais cited in Donnot 1992: 15),
as Marker’s do, are inevitably sustaining the fundamentals of cinematic real-
ism in order to compromise them over and over again. Bazin’s error was to
assume that revoking the authority of the indexical was the same as dimin-
ishing its power to transmit reality. More than anything else, Marker’s films
testify to the staggering multiplicity of truths photography can convey.
Marker’s reply to Bazin and his dichotomy of luxury might well have gone
something like this: Luxury is cinema itself, and cinema is eye and spirit both,
soundtrack and photography on one support, a connective tissue for word and
image. Or perhaps Marker would cite himself, in a sentence excerpted from a
cautionary note that introduced his book of photography and prose poetry, Le
Dépays. The title is a play on words in French, combining the word for country
(pays) with the word for exile or deracination (dépaysement). He wrote, ‘Please
understand them [text and image] in a sense of disorder, simplicity, and
opening up, as one should understand all things in Japan’ (Marker quoted in
Bensmaïa 1988: 64). The most fitting example of Marker’s difference of opinion,
however, is in his ongoing use of horizontal montage, its ever-increasing layers
and its use in multimedia artworks. One particularly beautiful example of it in
Lettre de Sibérie takes place directly before the filmic sequence highlighted in
Bazin’s analysis. It begins with a medium close-up on eight record albums with
brightly coloured, folkloric wrappers affixed to a windowpane in a circle. A
slow zoom reveals a photograph of Yves Montand in the middle of this circle,
waving to a crowd from an automobile; to the delight of his Russian fans, the
singer had made the unconventional decision to tour the country in 1956.
The film then cuts to a mounted loudspeaker in long shot as the soundtrack
plays the opening bars of a song sung in tribute to Montand, composed by B.
Mokroussov and I. Khelemeski and sung by Marc Bernes.
‘When Yves Montand’s voice/resounds over the short-wave,/the branches
of Paris chestnut trees/come and peer into my window’, flash the French subti-
tles at the bottom of the screen, keeping musical time during the montage
sequence. It shows a series of outdoor shots, depicting fragments of Siberian
daily life: barren, unpaved street intersections, workers, curious young women
passing by, and the comings and goings in front of the cultural centre in the
city of Yakutsk. The song ends with an unexpected gift: a few halting lines
sung in French, to which the subtitles underneath the filmic image answer
unhesitatingly in a corresponding Russian translation. For a moment, both
languages are foreign, and the filmic conceits of both the soundtrack and the
image track conjoin through their very difference. The last sentences of the
song confirm the magic that has taken place: ‘Distances shrink to nothing/
when my faraway friend starts to sing’. Like this Franco-Russian exchange of
cultural imaginaries in Lettre de Sibérie, like the short waves on which sound
finds its way into the world of the visible, like the photography that docu-
ments and fictionalizes simultaneously, Marker’s transmission continues.

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 Cut and spark

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SUGGESTED CITATION
Stob, J. (2012), ‘Cut and spark: Chris Marker, André Bazin and the metaphors
of horizontal montage’, Studies in French Cinema 12: 1, pp. 35–46,
doi: 10.1386/sfc.12.1.35_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Jennifer Stob is a visiting assistant professor in the Film and Media Studies
Program at Colgate University. She received her Ph.D. from the History of
Art Department and the Film Studies Program at Yale University in 2010. Her
scholarly interests include avant-garde art and film of the 1920s and 1960s,
essayistic documentary, French post-war cinema, and the historical critique
of new media. She is currently working on a manuscript which examines
the Situationist International’s relationship to cinema over the course of the
1960s, their scepticism of cinema’s conventional apparatus, and their anticipa-
tion of its revolutionary potential.
Contact: Film and Media Studies Program, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive,
Hamilton, NY 13346, USA.
E-mail: jennifer.stob@gmail.com

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