Notes on a film: E-clip-se (1999)
"Once you look further from the delusion of banalities, you can find that the eclipse-goggle bearing individuals are more than just the observed. The film simply tells you: We are still waiting for Godot. Just in a more controlled fashion. From an owl's eye perspective, to which Marker later even alludes, the masses of the eclipse's watchers are almost as dystopian as modern-day human beings who grab their VR-headsets (to escape reality). Was Chris Marker a prophet of times to come?"
- Rahul Sharma, Letterboxd, June 30th 2020
Eclipse. Or clip? In the absence of E and se, the two words fading in and out of one another against an image of the titular occurrence, form a half-word: a word between words, like an image between images. The appearance of this first eclipse – a black and white solarization that looks like a human mouth in negative – cuts via a crude iris wipe to the face of a smiling child that for a moment recalls the gurning lunar surface from Georges Méliès silent landmark, A Trip to the Moon (1902). In doing so, the transition of shots connects the present to the past and reality to fiction; framing the observations of everyday people attempting to view the natural spectacle of a solar eclipse as another of Marker's alien dispatches, in which the filmmaker attempts to understand the vagaries of human behavior by wielding his camera like a scientist wields a microscope.
E-clip-se [Chris Marker, 1999]:
Like much of Marker's work, it would be easy if not dismissive to read E-clip-se as a documentary. On one level, the film is essentially a homemade observation/recording of an actual solar eclipse, which occurred on the 11th of August 1999. The subjects – gathered in a park on a warm, late summer day, some sat at picnic tables eating food as nearby children play innocently on sculpted objects, all dressed in their solar goggles to stare wordlessly into the darkening sky – are real people: strays before Marker's lens. However, in filming real people reacting genuinely to a real occurrence, Marker isn't simply documenting the occurrence itself or the reaction of those in attendance, but instead creating a homage to the audience, to the act of spectatorship, which for Marker becomes spectacle itself.
Hence, the deconstruction of the title at the beginning of the film and its presentation in all further promotional materials, "E-clip-se", which can be read in a variety of different ways, with a myriad of different interpretations and emphases. From the obvious, "Eclipse", which refers primarily to the actual occurrence that these spectators have gathered to view, to the included word, "clip", which might refer to the film itself, the clip, the short film, or to the idea of the cut, the edit, this montage of shots depicting the human face and its various expressions. In the image of Parisiennes watching the eclipse occur behind their disposable solar goggles, the film also recalls, intentionally or not, sinister images from Marker's earlier and more famous film, La Jetée (1962). In this context, they suggest the presence of a hidden mystery, a conspiracy, though one that I won't spoil.
La Jetée [Chris Marker, 1962]:
La Jetée is a film that evokes sight, its montage of still images broken only by a single shot of the eyes of a blinking face. However, it's also a film about time; about human existence, and the attempt to save a remnant of civilization following a cataclysmic event. In the film, an unnamed protagonist – a prisoner of a post-apocalyptic future ravaged by a third world war – is sent back in time by a group of scientists attempting, in their own words, to "call past and future to the rescue of the present". Using a memory of a significant event, the man is sent backwards through time and space to become a witness to an incident that connects both his past and future lives to a single fixed point in time, creating a paradox, or a window between worlds.
In E-clip-se, we see a different event being depicted; however, it's one that again creates a fixed moment in time that Marker – and in turn the viewing audience – can return to. Not via the efforts of scientists from the future, but via the film itself. The work, the recording, becomes a vessel, a piece of history however small and seemingly insignificant, that we can go back to, again and again.
E-clip-se [Chris Marker, 1999]:
Throughout his career, Marker was a filmmaker obsessed with notions of time and travel. In films as varied as Sunday in Peking (1956), Letter from Siberia (1958), The Koumiko Mystery (1965), Sans Soleil (1983), Tokyo Days (1988), Level Five (1997), The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004), Ouvroir, the Movie (2009) and others, the filmmaker depicted travels between countries and territories, both real and imagined. Travel for Marker was both physical and metaphysical. One could travel between countries and continents, cross borders and observe actual cities and their customs, or one could cross more figurative territories of time, memory, and space. Whether turning his camera on the underground bunkers of a post-War future-world ravaged by destruction, the bustling urban streets of contemporary Tokyo, or the ephemeral worlds of the internet and the online gaming platform Second Life, Marker was interested in the ethnological minutiae of lives and the memories and experiences that make up life.
Thinking of E-clip-se as an echo of La Jetée gives the film a whole new perspective. Is what we're seeing really a benign observation of Parisiennes gathered together in a park to watch a solar eclipse, or is this some kind of dispatch? A warning from Marker, the alien anthropologist, the time traveler extraordinaire, connecting the past to the present, a memory translated into fragmentary images that play out like a short film? At eight-minutes, many will dismiss the film as a short-sketch, a "clip", an observation, but in its imagery and ideas it creates echoes and repetitions that reverberate throughout Marker's career, creating a dialog, or a conversation across time. It's as if each project existed within another, both a continuation and reflection of itself and its predecessors. In this context, I don't think it's an accident that the subject matter evokes the title of an earlier film by Marker, Sans Soleil. The English-language title translating plainly as "Sunless", or without sun. Another eclipse.
E-clip-se is currently available to view on YouTube. Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: Sans Soleil [20th August, 2020], Tokyo Days [31st of March, 2020].
