In our moments of megalomaniacal reverie, we tend to see our memory as a kind of history book: we have won and lost battles, discovered empires and abandoned them. At the very least we are the characters of an epic novel ("What a wild novel my life would make!"). A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach might be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography.1 In every life we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. We could draw the map of such a memory, and extract images from it with greater ease (and truthfulness) than from tales and legends. That the subject of this memory should be a photographer and a filmmaker does not mean that his memory is essentially more interesting than that of the man passing by in the street (or the woman!) but only that he has left traces with which one can work, contours to draw up his maps.

Around me are hundreds of photographs which for the most part have never been shown (William Klein says that, at the speed of 1/50th of a second per shot, the complete work of the most famous photographer lasts less than three minutes). I have the "cuts" that a film leaves behind like comets' tails. From every country visited I've brought back postcards, newspaper clippings, catalogues, sometimes posters torn off the walls. My idea was to immerse myself in this maelstrom of images to establish its Geography.

My working hunch was that any memory, once it's fairly long, is more structured than it seems. That after a certain quantity, photos apparently taken by chance, postcards chosen according to a passing mood, begin to trace an itinerary, to map the imaginary country that stretches out before us. By going through it systematically I was sure to discover that the apparent disorder of my imagery concealed a chart, as in the tales of pirates. And the object of this disc would be to present the "guided tour" of a memory, while at the same time offering the visitor a chance for haphazard navigation. So, welcome to "Memory, Land of Contrasts" ­ or rather, as I've chosen to call it, Immemory.

"But when nothing subsists of a distant past, after the death of beings, after the destruction of things, smell and taste still linger on, alone and more faithful, like souls, reminiscing, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing unflinchingly, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory" (Swann's Way).

To each his madeleine. For Proust it was Aunt Léonie's, the one that the Védie pastry shop in Illiers still claims to make from the original recipe. (But what then of the other pastry shop, on the other side of the street, which also claims to be the true guardian of "Aunt Léonie's madeleines"? Memory's path already branches.) For me, it's a Hitchcock character. The heroine of Vertigo. And I realize that it may be forcing the note to see a scriptwriter's intention in this choice of name, at the outset of a story which is essentially that of a man in search of things past, but so what? Coincidences are the pseudonyms of grace for those who wouldn't recognize it otherwise.

At the time of Remembrance of Things Past, photography was still in its infancy, and people often asked "is it an art?" ­ art itself having for Proust and his generation a much higher function than the humble duty of sentinel: it was to be a link with the other world, that of the little patch of yellow wall. But today, could it paradoxically be the vulgarization, the democratization of the image that allows it to attain the less ambitious status of a memory-bearing sensation, a visible variety of smell and taste? We feel more emotion (in any case, a different emotion) before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history. Jean Cocteau paraphrased all that quite humorously when he evoked Cosima Wagner more moved in her old age by Offenbach's Belle Hélène than by her husband's Ring: "Siegfried, the Rhinegold, these are what protect a man, what keep him from dying. But Offenbach was fashion, youth, the memory of Triebschen, the moments of joy, Nietzsche writing to Rée: we'll go to Paris and watch them dance the cancan... Mme Wagner could have heard the Gotterdämerung without a quiver. She cried at the March of Kings" (Carte Blanche). I claim for the image the humility and powers of a madeleine [2].

The structure of Immemory? It's tough for an explorer to draw up the map of a territory while he's still discovering it All I can do is show you a few explorer's tools, my compass, my telescopes, my jug of drinking water. In terms of compasses, I went looking quite far back in history for my cardinal points. Curiously, there is nothing in the recent past that offers us models of what computer navigation on the theme of memory could be.Everything is dominated by the arrogance of classical narrative and the positivism of biology. "The Art of Memory," on the other hand, is a very ancient discipline, one which (oh irony) fell into oblivion as the gap between physiology and psychology widened. Certain ancient authors had a more functional vision of the meanders of the mind: Filipo Gesualdo, in his Plutosofia (1592), proposes an image of Memory in terms of arborescence which is perfectly logiciel, if I may risk the adjective. But the best description I have found of the contents of a CD-Rom is in the writing of Robert Hooke (the man who intuitively grasped the laws of gravitation before Newton, 1635-1702):
"I will now construct a mechanical model and a sensible representation of Memory. I will suppose that there is a certain place or Point in the Brain of Man where the Soul has its principle seat. As to the precise location of this point, I will say nothing presently and today will postulate only one thing, which is that such a place exists where all the impressions made by the senses are conveyed and lodged for contemplation, and more, that the impressions are but Movements of particles and of Bodies."[3]

In other words, when I proposed to transfer the regions of Memory into geographical rather than historical zones, I unwittingly linked up to a conception familiar to certain seventeenth-century minds, and totally foreign to the twentieth century.

From this conception derives the possible structure of the disc, divided into "zones." The example cited above, that of the madeleine become Madeleine, will allow for a sketch of their topography. The Madeleine "point" (as Hooke would say) is found at the intersection of the Proust and Hitchcock zones. Each of them in its turn intersects with other zones which are so many islands or continents, of which my memory contains the descriptions, and my archives, the illustrations. Of course, this work in no way constitutes an autobiography, and I've permitted myself to drift in all directions. Nonetheless, if you're going to work on memory, you might as well use the one you've always got on you.

But my fondest wish is that there might be enough familiar codes here (the travel picture, the family album, the totem animal) that the reader-visitor could imperceptibly come to replace my images with his, my memories with his, and that my Immemory should serve as a springboard for his own pilgrimage in Time Regained [4]

Chris Marker

[1] Henri Langlois used to recall that as a child he did not understand time. When he read that "Jeanne d'Arc laid siege to Paris" he thought it was another Paris, and that there must therefore be Jeanne d'Arc's Paris, his father's Paris, and so forth, on an unlimited globe.

[2] This paragraph was already written when the dazzling book by Brassaï, Marces l'emprise de la photographie, was released by Gallimard. Here the answer is given by Proust himself: "Seeing these plates, one can respond that photography is indeed an art" (Essais et articles). And Brassaï writes: "When he is struck by a sound or a flavor having the mysterious power to revive a sensation or an emotion he is irresistibly drawn to liken this phenomenon to the appearance of the latent image in a bath of developing fluid." But one really should read the entire book, where the Remembrance of Things Past is compared to "a gigantic photograph."

[3] I owe this quote, among other things, to the marvelous little book by Jacques Roubaud, L'invention du fils de Leoprepes.