4 Seconds of Subtext:Toward A Deeper Understanding of

Stillness & Movement in La Jetée

by Auguste Hill

This study

began as homage

to the 1962

French

film/novel/photomontage La Jetee, a twenty-minute Sci-fi narrative made up almost

entirely of still photos. Upon recent viewing of the piece I was made away of a four

second motion picture interval among the sequence of static images. The subject of the

exception to the still photo structure of the film is a moment in the life of the protagonist,

who upon being transported to the past with the aid of electromagnetic impulses and

drugs given to him by his auditors, scientists using him as a guinea pig for an experiment

about time travel, sees the love of his earlier life. As the man reviews his past through

Hill

the electro-stimulators attached to his skull, an image of a woman that he sees repeatedly

through the film, the object of his desire, suddenly comes to life, a flutter of the eyelids

and then direct gaze from the woman his passion is directed toward. This subtle interlude

breaks the stillness the viewer has grown accustomed to giving the moving images

intensity and impact; the sleeping woman opens her eyes, they flutter at the viewer, her

attention to us in effect attaching us to the experience of the film’s story; without that

moment we remain voyeurs to the process of memory. The infinite nature of stillness is

breached by a moment of movement that encapsulates the protagonists primal need to

reach into the past to find love. We enter infinity within our experience of her gaze just as

her she has in her lover’s memory.

Since the fixed entities of time and memory have played such a large part in much of my

work over the years I’m particularly drawn to stories with the essence of time and

memory as the core narrative theme. As I traveled Europe over the summer in pertual

movement by foot, train, bus and plane what became precious and rare was stillness.

Visiting several countries required almost constant movement on public transportation.

Therefore moments of stillness documented through the click of the camera lens were

markers of the places between moments. Instead of looking for a moment to capture with

a photograph I looked for places in the activity around me that were penetrable with my

lens. The subtle difference between focusing on the stillness of time rather than the

progression of life evidenced around me by the constant movement of the people and

ever changing scenery became the focus of my curatorial process when it came time to

edit the several hundred photos taken over the summer, reckoning my experience through

2

Hill

choices of placement, overlapped with layers of sound and positioning silence in such a

way as to break apart the essence of what I experienced.

Movement in Straying In The Field of Pleasure occurs around the subject of nature.

Moving images of rain from my hotel room provide an additional ambient layer of

experience for the viewer, movement unavailable throughout the remainder of the piece.

It is in the rain that a metaphor about time is interjected. We are placed in a specific

environment, a room, waiting. A woman lies on a bed; there is intimate interaction and

then stillness, perhaps waiting.

Experimenting with the interview approach to telling the story came about while reading

Michel Foucault’s introduction to Use of Pleasure as well as Jim Miller’s biography of

him, The Passion of Foucault. Miller references an early work of Foucault’s, Raymond

Russerl, which includes an interview of Foucault interviewing himself. It seemed

particularly fitting to use this approach with the narrative of my summer story about

pleasure and power since the empirical details of the project contain a lot of internal

dialogue: choice, disagreement, cajoling, discernment, self-mentoring, despondency and

finally agreement to step into a transgressive position. I’ve elaborated this process in an

essay written this quarter, a study of the broader topic of the dynamic of pleasure and

power.

What I found as a result of the research for the study is that the issue of power inserts

itself in the subtext of the trip’s non-visual content. As time went on my relationship to

3

Hill

pleasure changed as I changed to accompany my newly developing identity around

desire. For instance, the trip was structured so that a circular pattern unfolds

geographically as I travel from France to Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Hungary,

Czech Republic, Germany and over to Amsterdam. As my final destination there was a

sense of anticipation and fear of failure as I realized the true nature of my visit to Europe.

The narrative is used to mimic this circular pattern in a dialogue between selves, much

like my internal dialogue during the events of the trip took on a circuitous evolution of

discovery into my sexuality.

Experimenting with the audio portion of the montage has been the most challenging part.

I am still working out the story. This process will undoubtedly continue for a long time to

come as it involves complex realizations that I made on a personal level over the summer

and upon return to Los Angeles.

The immediate venue for this montage, along with supplemental work, will be the

Artistic Uprising at Antioch. I’ve also made a call to the owner of a space in Venice that I

would like to rent for a weekend night to have a show there, perhaps curating others work

to show along with mine.

4