5 - Memories, Notebooks, Roads: The Essayistic Journey in Time and Space

Summary

And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time? (Sebald 2001: 359–60)

Twenty years before he directed Sans Soleil (1983), one of the most widely discussed and celebrated essay films, Chris Marker made the experimental sci-fi film La Jetée (1962), in which a time traveller journeys from a postapocalyptic Paris back to his childhood aided by a vivid memory. As the traveller realises that the incident he witnessed as a child and which has haunted his life was, paradoxically, his own death, the voice-over narration explains:

When he recognised the man who had trailed him since the underground camp, he understood there was no way to escape time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death.

La Jetée articulates a temporal journey, where the traveller revisits the past, like cameraman Sandor Krasna in Sans Soleil, whose epic journey through global spaces is also one through time and memory. This engagement with time, place and memory within the act of journeying characterises a fundamental interplay in the essay film and will be discussed in this chapter in relation to Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (Jonas Mekas, 1972), Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (Lynne Sachs, 1994) and Content (Chris Petit, 2010). Lithuania, Vietnam and the drifting locations of Petit's film are the landscapes of three films diverse in scope and aesthetics but linked thematically by the reverberation of war and conflict. The films are further united by the understanding, reminiscent of Sans Soleil and La Jetée, that there is no way to escape time and that a journey in space is necessarily also a journey in time.

Film essayists have sought to explore the world through spatial movement, where travelling becomes a tool to explore place and the subjective self across a multitude of spaces.