(Un)moving images of the Third World War: nuclear narrative and nuclear aesthetic of Chris Marker’s La Jetée

Abstract

In the background of the commercial and critical success of Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023), the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock of 2024 at just 90 seconds to midnight – marking our closest ever imminence to the symbolic hour of nuclear and ecological catastrophe. From this cultural and political context, this article revisits Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), exploring the photo-roman’s narrative and aesthetic strategies of mediating what Jacques Derrida termed a ‘remainder-less destruction’. Foregrounding the context of the Cold War, I argue that Marker’s ‘nuclear narrative’ exposes Gaullist France’s acceleration towards this remainder-less destruction. In so doing, I also evoke the legacies of violence at Orly Airport and the Palais de Chaillot, the central sites of La Jetée’s nuclear narrative. Moving to engage wider scholarship on the relationship between photography/ cinema and historical trauma, I introduce the concept of the ‘nuclear aesthetic’. With particular reference to Yoshito Matsushige’s struggle to document the effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, I argue for the ethics and effectiveness of La Jetée’s oblique mode of representing nuclear violence, which provides only glimpses at the prospect of remainder-less destruction. What emerges throughout the article is an appreciation for how Marker’s proleptic photo-roman both pre-empts and circumnavigates the later insights of Derrida’s Nuclear Criticism regarding the challenges of representing nuclear apocalypse. I conclude that La Jetée’s narrative and aesthetic strategies, as prototypes of Derrida’s Nuclear Criticism, can help to arouse contemporary audiences from their somnambulism towards a remainder-less destruction.