When I began to look at the relationship between Chris Marker's film, La Jetee, and Roland Barthes's book, Camera Lucida, I was thinking only about their most obvious link: photography. The more I looked, though, the more Marker and Barthes seemed to have in common. It was almost uncanny. Some things had to be twisted a little, but the strangest sort of interplay between the two works seemed to be happening, and it felt as if I were the first to discover it. For example, the first lines in the film, “ This is the story of a man marked b ....