Airside, p.7
Airside, page 7
They are beneath the flight path of a jet aircraft – we gain a glimpse of it as it flies low overhead with a roar of engines. The woman gestures with horror or fear, and a man’s body crumples to the concrete floor of the pier. Later, the boy realizes he has seen a man die. The incident will haunt him forever, linked inviolably to his memory of the young woman’s face.
Memory is not a narrative. It is not linear or chronological in form. Memories from five or ten or twenty years earlier will present themselves in a seemingly random sequence not created by the calendar, but sorted by the unconscious. What priority does the unconscious mind work with? Why do we remember some events with such clarity, often the most trivial, while omitting others, sometimes crucial, leaving the rest in a disorganized generality?
Some years after the incident on the pier at Orly the third world war breaks out. After nuclear exchanges Paris is in ruins and radioactive fallout poisons the ground. Most of the population of the world has perished. In Paris, a handful of survivors take to the underground ruins in the tunnels and galleries beneath the Palais de Chaillot. One of them is the boy from Orly Airport – he has grown into a man (played by Davos Hanich). The conditions are grim: it has become an empire of deprivation and rats.
Strict rules are enforced by a small group of technocrats who have assumed control. Many of the ordinary survivors feel like prisoners. A crude scientific project is under way, a desperate attempt to contact the world of the future, seeking help. Most of the experiments fail: disappointment and madness almost invariably follow. The tunnels are haunted by the wasted men and women who have already been trialled in the risky project. Their faces are thin and gaunt, their eye sockets dark.
One day the experimenters come for Hanich, and although he fears the head of the team the man turns out to be reasonable in manner. He explains the project to Hanich in calm but daunting words. The human race is doomed, he says. The only hope for mankind lies in Time: the past or the future. Hanich has been selected because of the strength of his obsessive memory of the past: the shocking and violent incident at Orly Airport, the unforgettable beauty of the young woman.
The efforts to make Hanich travel in time begin. After many painful, terrifying and unsuccessful attempts he begins to see glimpses of a remembered pre-war world: a field where horses are grazing, a dozing cat, a sunlit bedroom, pigeons flapping away in a town square. Finally he sees the pier at Orly. He visits it again and again. One day he sees a woman on the pier he thinks might be Chatelain, but he passes her by. Later she smiles at him from inside a car.
Certain now that he recognizes her, Hanich makes repeated contacts with her, his confidence growing with each encounter. They live in a continuing present, having neither past nor future, lacking memories of each other, free of plans. She says she thinks of him as a ghost, who comes and goes. They are in pre-WW3 Paris. He knows the terrible truth about her, that she is certain to die in the nuclear holocaust ahead, but cannot tell her. They conduct an innocent love affair, meeting in sun-filled parks, in crowded streets, among the cases of the Natural History Museum.
One day she sleeps while Hanich watches over her. As she stirs, her eyelids move open lightly. It is an intense and poignant moment, the only use of a motion camera at any point in the film. Those few seconds are full of understated, undeclared meaning. She properly sees Hanich at last.
He becomes embedded in her consciousness, in her sense of the present time. Now he is less of a ghost, he may stay longer with her. Love is growing between them.
Hanich does not know, Chatelain cannot know, that the experiment is about to change. His ventures into the past were only the first stage to establish his suitability for the main experiment. The second stage now follows: he must travel to the future to negotiate with the people there. They too have mastered time travel. He is charged with bringing back from them some lesson or device which will help mankind survive the present crisis. He penetrates their society, and because they are waiting for him he succeeds.
Hanich’s reward is that he is told he has been accepted as a member of that future society and may stay there permanently in safety. He has an alternative request, though. Against the wishes of the technocrats he asks to be returned to the time of his childhood, to the pier at Orly Airport, where he knows the young woman will be waiting for him.
His destiny on the pier at Orly is to become a fragment of tragic embedded memory, for the woman who waits for him and for the child who observes him. The circle is closed.
La Jetée is a rare example of high cinema meeting serious speculative fiction. The images from this short but sublime film seep inextricably into the memory. It is impossible to see the film and not be moved.
Neither of the two actors, Hanich and Chatelain, have appeared in any other film since their memorable work in La Jetée . Their faces are forever fresh, their frozen gestures and gentle affection becoming visual metaphors for the fleeting joy and ultimate tragedy of a passing love. A third world war remains a constant threat in this real world of ours. Orly Airport remains. Passenger jets fly to distant places, airport terminals are packed with strangers. All this will somehow preserve La Jetée ’s purity, leaving it ageless, immutable, unfading.
[Film retrospective feature, The Guardian , July 17th, 1967]
10
Justin was approaching his twenty-fifth birthday, and had been sharing flats with friends, or living alone, or for a few weeks the previous year had been in a small flat with Kathy. That relationship had gone wrong. Since then, and for now, he was living alone. His present girlfriend was called Penelope, but she obviously did not want to spend so much time in cinemas, and he was growing interested in a young Spanish woman called Isabella, who worked for his agent. His relationship with Mort and Nicky had become distant. Not because of any disagreement or anything like it, but he and they all had busy lives and they were in different parts of the London area. He had returned to live in Fulham while his parents still lived in the big house in Chigwell, the one they had bought at the time the family moved south. It was relatively easy to get out to the Essex suburbs but in practice his casual or regular visits to see them were increasingly rare.
His career as a freelance film reviewer and commentator was quickly developing, and absorbed most of his time and nearly all his interest. He dutifully phoned home every couple of weeks or so – sometimes they called him.
His sister Amanda was also away from what they both still thought of as home. She was in a long-term relationship with a guy called Phil. Their apartment was in Walthamstow in north-east London. She and Justin hardly ever saw each other, but they also spoke on the phone occasionally.
The four of them were still a family, still like-minded in certain ways, but they were all adults and they lived apart.
The only time the family came together was for a couple of days each Christmas, and one other occasion two years before on his parents’ wedding anniversary, but Justin felt restless whenever he was away from his usual work and the routine he had established around the advance press screenings. His wish to leave always became obvious, at least to Nicky. Afterwards, when he was back in his flat, he invariably felt guilty and inconsiderate.
One day, towards the end of the year, Nicky phoned him with the news that his father was being offered early retirement from his job. He would be receiving a large sum of money in compensation. She said he wanted to treat the family to a holiday abroad. It took a few seconds for that to sink in.
‘What – all of us together? Amanda and me included?’
‘Of course.’
‘Not of course, Ma. I’ve a lot on.’
‘You always say that – couldn’t you, just once, give us some of your time? It would mean everything to Mort and me.’
‘Well, when would it be?’
‘We’re thinking of April or May. I’ve always wanted to go to Paris, and that’s the best time of year.’
‘Paris?’
Justin started to think of grumbling excuses: that was the period when there was usually a rush of new cinema releases, where would they stay?, how much would it cost?, and so on. He aired none of them because he always tried to please Nicky, and he hadn’t been prepared for the suggestion. Then he thought of Paris, the way the nouvelle vague movies inhabited the city in intriguing and memorable ways, considered the chance to see some films in French and in Parisian cinemas, perhaps to visit the Palais de Chaillot. Perhaps to explore Orly Airport.
Mort came on the line and said they could take the car over to France, stay in Paris for several days, then afterwards drive south, or into Switzerland, or up to the Brittany coast. He said there was now a way of flying across the English Channel, taking the car.
‘I don’t want to fly,’ Justin said, without thinking about it. ‘Couldn’t we use the cross-channel ships like everyone else? I don’t like flying.’
‘You’ve been up before.’
‘That was the joyride on the beach. Years ago. It doesn’t count. Anyway, the plane crashed afterwards.’
‘Is that the main reason?’
‘No.’ But he couldn’t think of another reason straight away. He added, ‘I don’t like being in big airports.’
‘You’ll be all right, then,’ Mort said. ‘The company that runs the flights operates from small airfields at both ends of the journey.’
At this stage in his life flying was for Justin a complex subject, full of negative associations. He did not normally dwell on it. He had no need to fly anywhere because all his work was in London. He never had to go abroad, and in fact did not have a passport. Flying was either too expensive or, if affordable, it involved cut-price chartered package flights to the sort of mass-appeal holiday destinations he did not want to go to.
He still had memories of the one aircraft he had flown in. What had happened to the Fox Moth not long afterwards had induced contradictory feelings in him. One was relief that it had not crashed while he was on board, but the other, much stronger, was his recollection of being confined in the tiny cabin, the uncomfortable seats, the restricted view, the noise and shaking and vibration, the doors which could only be opened from the outside. The thought of being trapped inside as it plunged into the sea had featured in several dreams since – not nightmares as such, but vivid and all too personal dreams. Then later, his close-up look at the shattered wreckage of the crashed Viscount near his old school had at the time been more interesting than traumatizing, but it nonetheless left a lasting impression.
‘I don’t have a passport, Pa.’
‘You’ve several weeks to send off and get one,’ said Mort.
‘I know.’
Something else. By April or May he would be twenty-six. He had been living independently, and it felt decidedly weird to go back and take a holiday with his parents and sister. He wondered if Nicky and Mort had already spoken to Amanda, and what she thought about it. Perhaps she would want to bring Phil along with her? If so, what about his own possible new girlfriend, Isabella? Or if it didn’t work out with her, someone else? Was there room in the car for six people?
Nothing was decided during that phone call, but the following week he did send in a postal application for a passport. He also spoke to Amanda. She felt, as he did, that a family vacation was low on the list of things she wanted to do, but she told Justin she had been talking recently to Nicky. She and Mort were both slightly uncomfortable with the idea of a trip with their parents now they were in their twenties, but something Nicky said had given Amanda an insight.
‘I think Pa might be worried about his health,’ she said. ‘I know his asthma has been getting worse, and there have been some X-rays. I thought it was odd the firm would give him early retirement, and that might be connected.’
‘OK,’ said Justin, now doubly ill at ease with the whole idea.
But in the end the plans went ahead, and towards the end of May he travelled across London to his parents’ house. Mort and Nicky were to cover all expenses of the trip. They would travel and stay in the same hotels together, but he and Amanda would be free to go off on their own. He slept that night on the bed in the spare room, the one that had been his own bedroom before he moved out to go to university. It had been redecorated and refurnished, but even so.
The next day the four of them drove in Mort’s car to Southend on Sea, where there was a small airfield, a former RAF station. What Mort had said was true: there was only one hardened runway, and the terminal building, such as it was, looked from the outside like an old RAF hangar and barracks. The airfield had been converted to civil use after the end of the second world war. A small number of short-haul passenger flights operated out of Southend, mainly serving airports in France and northern Europe. One of these operators was called British United Air Ferries, flying twin-engined Bristol 170 Superfreighter aircraft to fields in the Channel Islands and France.
Justin had previously read up on the background of both the airline and the aircraft, and although BUAF had a good safety record the aircraft type had been involved in numerous accidents. Developed during the war to carry troops and materiel it was an antiquated design, remodelled in recent years for use as a car ferry by widening its fuselage and putting access doors in the bulbous nose.
Justin kept his misgivings to himself. He sat with Amanda in their habitual childhood places in the back seat of the car, not saying much. The glimpse they had of the cumbersome looking aircraft they were about to fly in was less than reassuring. Justin tried to close his mind to it.
Mort parked the car in the area designated for BUAF passengers, leaving their luggage in the car. They walked into the terminal building. Prepared to be critical of it from its outward appearance, Justin was mildly impressed by the way in which the shabby old building had been modernized inside. The BUAF operation was smartly run, with obvious efforts to ensure a smooth transit to the aircraft. The small café served complimentary home-made snacks, and there was adequate space in which to sit around in comfort and wait for the flight.
They watched through one of the large windows as the ground crew drove their car up the front-loading ramp into the plane’s cargo bay. Three other cars went in too. When Justin and the other passengers walked out to board, the flight crew greeted them as they reached the aircraft. Justin, still an inveterate note-taker, automatically memorized the registration, G-AMWA , and when he could he jotted it down.
The air of careful modernity changed abruptly as soon as they were on board. The passenger cabin took Justin back to his memories of the flight on the beach at Southport, a decade and a half earlier. The seats were made of looped canvas buckets, sagging like deckchairs after years of use, and were crammed close against each other. The seat belts were non-adjustable, and lay loosely across their laps. There were several small windows. That was about it as far as passenger comfort was concerned. There was an inescapable impression of having climbed into a WW2-era military transport.
It was a short flight, less than an hour from Southend to Calais. It felt longer than that: the take-off from Southend seemed to require the whole length of the runway, the aircraft rolling forward with painful and bumpy sloth along the concrete before at last lifting away at a shallow angle, engines roaring, then circling around slowly until it was over the sea. The noise of the engines inside the passenger compartment was shattering, and the entire craft shook and vibrated. Where Justin was sitting he could look up through one of the windows towards the starboard engine, a chunky piston motor, the casing and nacelle looking battered and streaked with oil.
As they lost altitude to land at Calais Justin had a view of the ground on Cap Gris Nez, and he stared down at it with a feeling that once again he had been pushed back in time. The whole area was pockmarked with craters, presumably left over from bombing or shelling operations during the war. This was the spring of 1970 – the second world war had been over for a quarter of a century. Why was the land still churned up by the military activities of so long before? He barely had time to think about this: the aircraft was close to the ground, and soon, after a bone-jarring bump against the runway, it landed.
Relieved to be back on the ground he said none of this to his parents and sister as they disembarked, went along with them quietly. Not long afterwards they were back in the car, driving south towards Paris. He stared out at the French farmland, which looked reassuringly normal in the sunlight. The nerve-racking flight was behind them and soon forgotten.
They stayed in a Paris hotel for five days, which turned out to be not long enough for Justin, who had prepared in advance a checklist of twelve new films he wanted to see, mostly French or American. He managed to catch eight of them before they left the city.
On one day he travelled out of the city to Orly Airport.
He discovered that the viewing platform photographed by Chris Marker for La Jetée was now closed to the public, and that since the film had been made a decade earlier part of the terminal building had been enlarged. It was difficult to work out where the film might have been shot. No jets overflew the airport while he was there. The still and alienating sense of isolation depicted by Marker was replaced by modern bustle. The only engines he could hear were from the apron, on the far side of the building he did not want to enter. He went back to the centre of Paris, disappointed.
When they left Paris Amanda stayed behind, having run into an old schoolfriend who was now living there. Mort drove Justin and Nicky across northern France, ending up in St-Malo, a quiet port and seaside town on the north coast of Brittany. It was an attractive place but Justin felt he was wasting his time there. The cinemas in the town were both good, though, and he was able to catch up with two of the films he had missed in Paris, and another, a regional Breton broad comedy, which was by a French director he had never heard of and featured amateur actors. They returned eventually to Calais, where they joined up with Amanda again. The next day they flew home to Southend: the plane was the same one, G-AMWA .
