On Dominique Cabrera's “La Jetée, the Fifth Shot”

In “Tomorrow and Tomorrow Again, Diary 1995” (Demain et encore demain, journal 1995), one of the most distinctive diary films of the 1990s, Dominique Cabrera secretly films a sleeping black woman on the Parisian metro. In a time of psychological crisis, she is suddenly gripped by joy, but at the same time she is aware that she is doing something “forbidden”, that transgression is inevitably inscribed in her gaze.

I’ve always wondered what it would be like if, decades later, someone recognized their own mother or grandmother in this woman, who was probably exhausted after a long day of work, not aware that the woman sitting opposite her was aiming a camera at her sleeping face. What would this moment of recognition, whether real or imagined, trigger? More than 25 years later, Cabrera’s cousin experiences such a moment himself. When watching Chris Marker’s groundbreaking experimental sci fi classic “La Jetée” (1962), he is convinced that he recognizes himself and his parents in the fifth shot of the film, standing on the pier of Paris-Orly, with their back to the camera. A detective and cinephile research begins, the movements of which are circular like the various spirals in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”, which in turn influenced Marker’s film. “La Jetée, the Fifth Shot” (Le cinquième plan de La Jetée, 2024) deals with the projective force when watching images, as well as the historical context in which Marker’s work was made, touching Cabrera’s own family history and the working methods of the admired filmmaker.

Dominique Cabrera was prominently represented at this year’s edition of Dok Leipzig. In addition to the homage “Giving a Voice”, in which three other works by the Algerian-born filmmaker were shown alongside “Demain et encore demain”, “La Jetée, the Fifth Shot” was included in the international competition. The film, awarded with the Golden Dove for Feature-Length Film, opens in a dark editing room lit only by screens. In this cave-like space, which also acts as the “brain” of the film, Cabrera invites various people – family members, people from Marker’s family and work environment – to show them Marker’s picture of the pier of Paris-Orly, but also scenes from other films by Marker, and to ask them questions about them.

The shot from Marker’s film is juxtaposed with family photos, while Cabrera is acting with an obsessive approach, similar to that of Scottie’s, played by James Stewart in “Vertigo”. She compares hairstyles, coats, postures and facial profiles or looks through decades-old calendars, notebooks and contact sheets. The search repeatedly drifts away from the shot in question, to wander through other images or biographies, such as the face of the actor Davos Habich, in whom Cabrera suddenly believes she recognizes similarities with her cousin, or that of the actress Hélène Châtelain. She also looks at “Le Joli Mai” (1963), in which Marker and his cameraman Pierre Lhomme interviewed people on the streets of Paris immediately after the end of the Algerian war. In 1962, the year when Algeria gained independence from French colonial rule, hundreds of thousands Pieds-noirs, among them Cabrera’s own family, left their homeland to enter exile via Orly airport. Marker’s “La Jetée” is thus closely intertwined with Cabrera’s family history. Above all, “La Jetée, the Fifth Shot” is the story of an obsession that develops a momentum of its own, a film that shows that images are never self-contained works of art, but interweave with the experiences, projections and desires of the viewer to become something new and other.

Esther Buss
Edited by Yeal Shuv
© FIPRESCI 2024