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In Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time” the episode of the madeleine tells the story of a memory being revealed without intention by the taste of a small piece of a madeleine dipped in a cup of tea.  The memory that was recalled was from his childhood, and Sunday mornings with his Aunt in Combray.  He says that the sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to his mind before he tasted it.  

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. … Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself.

It was only after the mixture of warm liquid and crumbs touched his pallet that this long dormant memory revealed itself, first slowly then all at once.  This episode is a description of the function of involuntary memory, and the way in which our physical interaction with things, in this case a madeleine soaked in tea, can provoke or activate a long forgotten or submerged memory.  

The filmmaker Chris Marker also has his madeleine, which he articulates through the moving image.  In his film Sans Soleil (1982), which Marker presents as documentary, travelogue, and essay film, through the letters of Sandor Krasna (a pseudonym of Marker’s) read by an anonymous narrator, we learn of the travels and observations of Krasna, the globetrotting cameraman.  The reading of these letters is accompanied by filmed images that relate to a varying degree to the text being read.  Throughout Krasna is concerned with the formation and recall of memories, remembering and forgetting, history and time.  For his part he asks, “I wonder how people remember things who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape,” because for him these recording have replaced his memories, that they have become his memories.  He can only remember what he has filmed, what he has photographed.  

As the narrator reads Krasna’s letters, we are presented with the memories he has filmed; he starts the film by showing us an idyllic clip of three children on a road in Iceland.  The narrator says: 

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.

The narrator continues to read Krasna’s letters, with one section leading to the next, creating or recalling associations in the memories of Krasna/Marker, leading on in at times a free-associative manner, with the connections sometimes only apparent to the owner of these memories.  

Marker also attempts to illuminate or illustrate the quickly recalled and pushed aside, or discarded memory, through quick flashes of film from a place we may have not yet been introduced to.  These brief flashes of film function at times as foreshadowing, as reminders of ideas or places that we are meant to consider as a tangent, and as fleeting, and involuntary memories or association that are produced by the recounting of Krasna’s letters.  In a way Marker is attempting to show us how his filmed memory works, the connections he makes, and the places they take him.  It is as if we can see in his mind the workings of memory, the searching of the familiar to understand the places, people, and events that he experiences – his reading and rereading of his memory.  

A film that has been a persistent obsession for him is Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, one of its themes he first utilized in his 1962 film La Jetée, and he returns to it again in Sans Soleil.  The narrator tells us that for him “only one film has been capable of portraying impossible memory—insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains motionless the eye.”  We are told that it was a film he had seen 19 times, and like any true fanatic he made his pilgrimage to all the film’s locations.  Visiting one after another in their turn, the florist Podesta Baldocchi, where James Stewart, Scotty, spies on Kim Novak, Madeleine.  He tells us, “The tiles hadn’t changed.”  Marker uses this story, and his reinterpretation of Vertigo as a way to move towards the impossibility of memory, and the effects of time and madness.  This story of trailing, of following a woman that he believed to be possessed by another woman long since dead, “who she should not have known.”  His obsession leads to infatuation and love, and when finally she throws herself from the tower at Mission San Juan Bautista, Scotty, paralyzed by the memory of his own fall, and the resulting acrophobia, is unable to climb the tower to prevent her death.  This is where Marker/Krasna’s interpretation comes in.  The narrator tells us that Krasna imagines Scotty as “time’s fool of love, finding it impossible to live with memory without falsifying it.  Inventing a double for Madeline in another dimension of time, a zone that would belong only to him and from which he could decipher the indecipherable story that had begun at Golden Gate…” This new space created by Scotty provides us with a method for understanding the true problem of memory, that even when that memory is solidified in film that still nothing is fixed.  Memories drift, shift, and are distorted, that madness or obsession or trauma will change the meaning or placement of an event in ones memories.   But he also tells us that these mechanisms should be seen as protective, we are told that “madness protects, as fever does”.  But this split, this new space, this return will still inevitably lead to death.

Marker experiences his own return at the moment he finds his way back to his “three children of Iceland,” “where they grafted themselves in,” as though it was a memory that recalled itself, and was presented as a new complete moment.  He tells us that he picked up the whole shot again, adding in everything that he had cut inorder to tidy up.  But this realization was fleeting, because immediately after he tells us that:

When five years later my friend Haroun Tazieff sent me the film he had just shot in the same place I lacked only the name to learn that nature performs its own dondo-yaki; the island’s volcano had awakened. I looked at those pictures, and it was as if the entire year ‘65 had just been covered with ashes.

For Krasna/Marker, his return was very much impossible.  Not only had this place been covered in ash, and in effect annihilated and forever preserving the memory of those children, this return is made all the more impossible by the fact that it was only through the document, an experience and memory had by his friend Tazieff, that enabled this transformation.  But still Marker was able to see, emerging above the cover of ash “the landmarks of the walks I took through town every day, down to the cliff where I had met the children.”  But these memories have been forever changed by the eruption, by the memories recorded and then transcribed to Marker. 

With Proust too there is a kind of impossibility.  In 2005 the journalist Edmund Levin attempted to recreate the experience, at least physically, that was described by the narrator of “In Search of Lost Time.”   He discovers that Proust’s madeleine likely could not have crumbled in the manner described.  When he broke off a piece of the cake, placed it in a cup of tea, he waited for it to begin to disintegrate, to become crumbs in his spoon as Proust had written.  It didn’t happen.  The cake remained whole, with only a small number of crumbs assembling at the bottom of the cup.  Naturally Levin finds Proust’s involuntarily recalled memory, or at least its trigger, inaccessible.  

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