ABSTRACT
In his book entitled The Essay Film, Timothy Corrigan defines the genre as ‘practices that undo and redo film form, visual perspectives, public geographies, temporal organizations, and notions of truth and judgement within the complexity of experience’. 1 Although stimulating, Corrigan’s definition and, by extension, the rest of his book, highlight a common practice in defining and investigating the essay film, which stresses a visual rather than audiovisual approach to the genre. By focusing on the ‘visual perspectives’, Corrigan is not alone in side-lining the ‘audio perspectives’ that are ‘undo[ne]’ and ‘redo[ne]’ by this innovative genre; the audio dimension, which is, as Nora M. Alter puts it, ‘one of the most important and determining forces in this type of film, for it structures the montage, shapes meaning, establishes tone, and encourages flights of fantasy’. 2 In an attempt to promote a truly audiovisual approach to analysing the essay film genre, this chapter will focus on the role of music, sound effects and commentary—the essential components of the soundtrack—in the early essay films of one of the most relentless and innovative essayists of all time, Chris Marker. Indeed, Marker will be remembered for having intertwined cinematic, photographic and literary techniques for over half a century to create some of the most evocative cinematic works in the essay film genre, most famously La jetée (1962), Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977), Sans soleil (1983) and, more recently, Chats perchés (2004). By means of his multimedial boundary crossing, Marker managed to redefine both the meaning and the medium of documentary filmmaking. 3 Given his groundbreaking role in the essay film genre, how then does the soundtrack operate in the combinative architecture of Marker’s documentary films? What is the relationship between music, commentary and image in his essay films? And how does it differ from the soundtracks of ‘realist’ documentaries? This chapter will explore these questions by listening to and analysing the audiovisual relationships at play in a range of Marker’s less-known early essay films, including two short travelogue documentaries from the fifties—Dimanche à Pékin (1956) and Lettre de Sibérie (1958)—and two politically engaged essay films from the early sixties—Description d’un combat (1960) and Cuba sí! (1961).
