One cannot overstate the influence of the work of Chris Marker on the realms of French cinema in general as well as on global documentary filmmaking. His short La Jetée (1962) serves as a perfect example here: basically an experiment dubbed a “photo novel”, consisting almost entirely of still photos with the exception of a single moving shot, it is regarded as the first French science-fiction film and is often seen as a strong metaphor for the Cold War state of mind. It is also one of the films that enforced the concept of time travel – going back to the past to try to mend the present in order to protect the future.

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For veteran French documentarian Dominique Cabrera, Marker’s aforementioned short is the starting point for an investigative journey into history (both official and unofficial), touching on the subjects of politics, cinema and family. The result is La Jetée, the Fifth Shot, which has just premiered and triumphed (see the news) in the International Competition Documentary Film at DOK Leipzig, where a retrospective of Cabrera’s work also unspooled.

The starting point for Cabrera’s documentary is the fact that her cousin Jean-Henri Bertrand recognised himself as a child in the company of his parents in the fifth shot of Marker’s photo novel. Pictured from the back, the family stands on the observation deck of Orly airport, watching planes taking off and coming in to land. The year is 1962, and back then, plane-watching was a popular weekend pastime for some and a symbolic act for others.

As the filmmaker finds out by talking to Marker’s collaborators and their descendants, La Jetée was filmed during the breaks from shooting The Lovely Month of May (1963), which pictured life in Paris in May 1962, marked by the end of Algeria’s War of Independence to put a stop to French colonial rule. Many people, the so-called pieds-noirs, usually of French, Spanish or Jewish descent, born and raised in Algeria, lost their homeland and came to France as refugees. Cabrera’s and Bertrand’s parents were among those people. Actor Davos Hanich, who played the protagonist in Marker’s short, was one of them as well…

The investigation spreads out in different directions, revealing other coincidences that might prove to be significant. For instance, in adulthood, Jean-Henri looked quite like Davos looked in the film, and both his and the actor’s family roots lead to the same town of Sig. There might even be some melodramatic plot twists to be revealed, but Cabrera is actually interested in a more wholesome and profound form of knowledge – made up of blends of histories on the macro and micro levels – that ends up forging someone’s memories and identity.

Although she starts the documentary in a fairly standard mode that combines interviews with materials from personal archives and cuts from Marker’s works, as the investigation and the story progress, Cabrera adopts an approach akin to Marker’s. It could be described as essayistic and free-flowing, with her voice-over narration connecting the loose ends into a clear, easy-to-follow stream of consciousness. Editors Sophie Brunet and Dominique Barbier do some impressively precise work in order to ramp up the tension, which can also be felt in the music by Béatrice Thiriet and her piece “Shadows” for violin and mandolin. In the end, this “genealogy of pictures”, as Cabrera calls her work on La Jetée, the Fifth Shot, explores many possible directions and becomes unpredictable, like life itself, but the end result is a strong, thought-provoking documentary.

La Jetée, the Fifth Shot is a French production staged by Ad Libitum in association with ARTE France – La Lucarne.