Beginning of Essay
When I began to look at the relationship between Chris Marker's film, La Jetee, and Roland Barthes's book, Camera Lucida, I was thinking only about their most obvious link: photography. The more I looked, though, the more Marker and Barthes seemed to have in com ....

Middle of Essay
.... was led at the end of my research to some new, yet fundamental ideas about the nature of photography itself. One of the most interesting aspects of this study, and also the most challenging, is the nature of Marker's “film” itself. Simply the fact that I have to put the word film in quotes when applying it to La Jetee is perhaps the strongest evidence of the enigma that this film has been throughout its history. What exactly is la Jetee? This is a question that haunted my research. How do you take a book about photography, and apply its statements to this “film?” Now, obviously there are some answers to this question. Marker's film is o ....