From Nations to Worlds: Chris Marker’s “Si j’avais quatre dromadaires”

Abstract

Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (If I had four dromedaries), Chris Marker’s underrated film of 1966, is a forty-nine-minute montage of seven hundred and fifty still photographs taken in twenty-five countries around the world. The film is a pivot-point in Marker’s work, the moment at which he passes from an implicit but insistent imagination of the world in terms of nations toward the global scope for which his later work is so celebrated. Before 1966, Marker had made films in six different countries and had edited volumes on two dozen countries in the Petite Planete series of travel guides. Si j’avais quatre dromadaires is the first of Marker’s international films, the first to pass across a cut from Pyongyang to Havana, from the Dead Sea to the Arctic Circle. Closely examining the film’s opening sequence and coda, the article proposes that Marker’s transition from nations to worlds can be understood as heralding an issue that still looms large in cultural criticism, the simultaneous thinkability and unthinkability of the world-system. Thinkability: on some accounts, economic production has been organized globally since the emergence of capitalist banking in the Renaissance, so that all any of us have ever known is a globalized economy. Unthinkability: we struggle to say anything meaningful about the planetary flow of capital, goods, people, and information, and if we are film scholars, it is not obvious that such questions even belong in our discipline. Yet, if we throw up our hands, we will find that these questions are thought for us, without our input. The article follows Marker’s passage from nations to worlds by following the prompts found in the formal strategies of the film, which may in turn enable us to connect the history of what Denning calls “the age of three worlds” to the philosophical understanding of “worlds” proposed by Badiou.