What then if we were less invested in the twist ending, in the logic of the spoiler? As we will see, the appeal to intention does not so much secure interpretive evidence as skew the social field that springs up around a film, subordinating the actual exchange among viewers to an imagined relationship with the author. • Chris Marker's La Jetée: ciné roman and Janet Harbord's La Jetée are published by MIT Press. (5). False expectations give way to a richer sense of patterning, causality, significance, though all predicated on our having played a bit dumb along the way. The important point here is that, like the audience of a magic trick, we collude in the surprise ending, and that this collusion establishes a relationship, an imagined bond with the artist—weaker, perhaps, than the effect of hidden pictures, but often strong enough for a lifetime’s loyalty. But Michaels’ account generates an unexpected conclusion quite instructive for our purposes, for it renders the time of all viewing out of joint. In a study of fans who deliberately seek out spoilers, Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell consider a range of motivations that often confirm the force of this triangle. The use of the (very slow) dissolve, which allows for the tunnel and the man’s head to be visible simultaneously, suggests the hallway is a metaphor for entry into the mind of a lunatic, and the cut to the man with the glasses suggests he can look into this state from across a safe barrier (i.e., the cut instead of a cross dissolve). Film Editing and the Establishment of Instability in La Jetée. If anything, his productivity has seemed to increase in the last decade. The repetition is an attempt to relay to the viewer the main character’s mental state. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. There is a practical reason for that sense of incompleteness: Marker is still working. One remarkable aspect regarding the way in which Marker has achieved each of these effects is that they operate on the level of subtext, which interacts with ideas more explicitly stated. From the standpoint of the fantasy of intimacy, a revealing interview with Marker would in fact be—and I mean this in the sense of monogamy—a form of cheating, cheating on the director figure with the flesh-and-blood man. La Jetée, as Harbord notes, is littered with ruins. Among the merits of Harbord's concise study is her insistence that La Jetée is a film about the politics of memory, a point confirmed when one considers the films that its director worked on in the preceding decade. As I turned the page in Royle’s book, my future, though certain as ever in its finitude, now coursed through an increasingly tangled past. After the man is given an injection, a sequence begins in which the camp leaders sit around his body and wait for the drug to take effect. When I went back for a closer look, I was quickly able to figure out what I must have seen. In a further twist, it gradually became clear that in fact a small but regular minority of viewers see the reaper unprompted, as I did, and struggle to see the time traveler at all. The repetition and variation of images is also employed in relation to four scenes which involve a futuristic looking hallway, the camp experimenters, and their subjects. Given the film’s unique formal properties –except for one brief shot, it is composed entirely of still images– editing is a key stylistic and thematic element of the film. It is in the grip of the surprise ending then that we lose something that was never there: form understood as a set of intentions for our experience and, therefore, as a means of attachment to an author. Worth lingering over is one particular example from Strangers on a Train, in which a minor character can be seen to act out an unsung lyric from the tune playing on the soundtrack, a performance of course visible only to a viewer, such as Miller, who knows the words. Like me, the time traveler can be taken for a lonely lunatic, seeing things that are not there. This repetition of images from a previous section stabilizes the viewer’s impression of these images by providing an explanation that was previously absent, but is destabilizing in that we are unable to recall if the images are exactly the same. Requests for interviews are for the most part politely declined. La Jetée stages this whole choice. In the next sequence, however, the voice over and images are complimentary as we see and hear that the experiments can lead to madness. One shot later, we see two successive images of them from the front, and then two from her side; in both of these pairings the camera moves only slightly and the effect is jarring. Indeed, there is no greater sign of this sociability than the now ubiquitous “spoiler alert” that preserves the experience for the next round of viewers, but this warning always discounts the loss of present conversation. See. Nor could I have permitted myself to ask Marker. The subjective world of the main character’s memory state is also destabilized by an approach to editing that alternates between elements which are a part of the classical continuity editing system and those which are a violation of its desired smoothness. However you define Chris Marker's 1963 short La Jetée—philosophical fiction, genre exercise, treatise on cinematic time—one fact is unavoidable: it resembles few other films. Essays   For Michaels, a surprise ending illuminates retrospectively the intended form that was unevenly visible in the plot all along. The second occurrence begins with one of the madmen, cross dissolves into a similar hallway, and cuts to the man with the glasses (6’30”-6’43”). This alteration of their placements provides the viewer with knowledge that an alteration has occurred, even if the voice-over does not know. In 1959, he published Coréennes, a photographic study of Korea. Miller’s recent essays on Hitchcock, which find in Strangers on a Train and Rope a delightful collection of directorial “touches” hiding in plain sight, “visible but not apparent” (emphasis in original). At a similar point in those presentations, I announced that I would attempt a sort of group recovery. It is a feeling that viewers of Vertigo or Blade Runner (1982) know well: to lose something that was never there, like one’s madeleine or one’s implanted memory of a mother, is to lose not only an attachment, but all confidence in the ability to attach. The narrator tells us that the time traveler realizes that the boy must be there, but this claim is only a logical deduction, for, as Janet Harbord has noted, he is not in the visual field. The world portrayed in Chris Marker’s seminal science fiction film La Jetée (1962) is characterized by instability on a variety of levels. This sequence of three shots stands out for a number of reasons, which include the sudden urgency observable on the doctor’s faces. Under the continuity editing system, switching the placement of characters between shots, referred to as cutting across the 180 degree axis, would be considered a cardinal error because it would (theoretically, although not always in practise) disorient and confuse the viewer. But the recursive narrative of the film is just the pretext for a more involuted essay on time, memory and the lure of images. On the sixteenth shot, the experimenter stands up to look over the man’s body as he responds to the drug. On this level, all photographs look beyond us. (11) His lack of searching lends suddenness to his discovery, but only in his mind when he instantly became aware and in ours when he shows us. By the early 1960s, Marker - born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in 1921, he apparently renamed himself after the Magic Marker - had already established a pattern of production and collaboration that makes him one of the key artistic figures in France of that era. On the contrary, it seems equally necessary to acknowledge that the reaper, inhabiting and redirecting the traveler’s body, thereby appears through him to address us. Thus my two chance encounters with reapers have left me in a fortuitously doubtful position to explore the fantasy that Marker authored his image — a fantasy in play regardless of whether authorship actually occurred.