The Archivist of Protest: The Attention Economy and Chris Marker’s Use of Détournement in Chats perchés

Abstract In his book 24/7, Jonathan Crary describes our contemporary temporality, an always-on existence that detaches itself from any possible political action in the form of a long-term project. A clear example of this temporality, in which a tremendous amount of labor and resources are expended to produce the consensus that no political change is possible or necessary, is the 24-hour news cycle. In Chats perchés (2004), his film contrasting the contemporary French news media with scenes from Parisian protests in the wake of the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the presidential elections in France, Chris Marker takes up Guy Debord’s practice of détournement, reversing the production-consumption flow of images and creating a new situation for thought and action. Marker’s use of voice-over and montage to repurpose the news media and documentary images of protest serves as a means of breaking out of the 24/7 temporality of the spectacle, allowing the viewer to tie the present to previous instances of revolutionary agency and to imagine the possibility of future political change.