Summary:

This essay analyzes Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (1962), a science fiction work made almost entirely from still photographs. It explores how Marker uses photography as a "trace of the past" to reflect on memory, time, and desire. The plot, centered on a man haunted by a childhood image, is interpreted as the search for a hidden memory that conceals a structural horror: the encounter with his own death. The text highlights the film’s connection to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, underscoring the obsession with recovering the "lost object." The fascination with the image is deadly; unable to transform the image into writing and reading, the protagonist is trapped in a pulsional spiral that culminates in his aphanisis (the death of the subject) as he attempts to make present what is, by its very nature, an absence.

Key words: Photography | Memory | Remembrance | Letter