notes.husk.org/likes images.

tmaction:

Chris Marker’s 1963 cinema verité documentary Le Joli Mai has been reedited (by Marker in 2009), restored, and re-released.

It is a film with several thousand actors including a poet, a student, an owl, a housewife, a stockbroker, a competitive dancer, two lovers, General de Gaulle and several cats.

Filmed just after the March ceasefire between France and Algeria, Le Joli Mai documents Paris during a turning point in French history: the first time since 1939 that France was not involved in any war.

Amy Taubin for Art Forum

In addition to the evocation through images and voice-over of the Paris that Marker wants for his personal time capsule and the person-on-the-street portraits, there are also several series of action montages, some of them bringing in contemporary news footage. The demonstrations outside the courthouse where General Raoul Salan, leader of an anti-Algerian terrorist group, was being tried for treason, is juxtaposed with one of the most thrilling jazz dance sequences ever committed to film, which, in turn, leads to a conversation with striking workers. How do you see the future, the off-screen interviewer asks one of them: “Pas joli, pas joli, pas joli,” he answers. “Not rosy.”

No, Paris in the first spring of peace was not joli. Racism and violence did not end with the war. The city was being radically reconfigured, the oldest neighborhoods gentrified or razed, their longtime residents sent off to the forbidding high-rise tower blocks that will become the banlieues. The “twin sorcerers of greed and anarchy” preside over this transformation, Marker explains. Overpopulation combined with the increasing elimination of jobs by technology is a problem not easily solved, two technocrats jawing at each other opine. It’s not good for cats either. Marker cuts away from this jargon-laced conversation to show close-ups of cats, some of them yawning, which is Marker’s way of saying cats find this endless kind of talk boring—and so does he. After a fast-motion sequence of cars and pedestrians moving through and around the Arc de Triomphe, accompanied by a vertiginous set of May 1962 statistics about births and deaths and food products consumed, the camera comes to rest on the panopticon structure of La Roquette, which housed 5,066 prisoners that month. The camera lingering on the exterior, we hear an unseen interviewer ask an unseen prisoner, “What was the worst thing about prison?” “The other girls,” she replies.

A movie about the most beautiful city in the world turns dystopic. (While shooting Le Joli Mai, Marker was using his free weekends to make his short film La Jetée [1962], a time-travel meditation intimating that we have already internalized the fascism of the future.) And the happy many? Fools or worse. “As long as poverty exists,” says Marker, speaking through the seductive voice of Montand or Signoret, “you are not rich. As long as despair exists, you are not happy. As long as prisons exist, you are not free.” A gentle chastisement? More like a kick in the teeth.

I’ve been trying to get a decent copy of this for ages!