Overview

This is the story of a man marked by a childhood image. The scene that disturbed him by its violence, and whose meaning he would only manage to understand much later... With these sentences, narrated in voice-over, begins Chris Marker's film La Jetée, and which in this video come to open the question of how does one come to have a memory that one never had? Memory, metonymy, desire, abjection, childhood, belonging and photography appear here as loose pieces of a reconstruction of the scene, where the absence of a body, that of the witness, and the presence of another, a victim, constitute the staging of the way in which individual memory and testimony are complexly intertwined with collective memory. We are not privileged witnesses of the scene, except by the desire for the scene.