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In the words of the French film scholar and critic, Raymond Bellour, almost everything there is to be said about Chris Marker's short film La Jetée (1962), has already been said (Bellour 2002a: 146). And yet, in both volumes of his collected essays, Bellour repeatedly returns to La Jetée as a point of departure, and a point of return, to reflect upon the materialities, intertextualities and relational ontologies between filmic images (Bellour 1999, 2002a). To write about La Jetée is, in some sense, to write about a history and philosophy of cinema, and the shift, as Bellour puts it (and with him, Deleuze) from thinking about cinema as embodying and internalising movement, to thinking about time as the most interior element to cinema. For other critics, such as Roger Odin and Réda Bensmaïa, La Jetée has proven to be a launch point from which a psychoanalytic-semiotic conceptual framework can be established in order to interrogate theories of film (Odin 1981; Bensmaïa 1990).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137283740_3

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