In considering the statement that “parallel worlds […] are a journey into the ‘misremembering of the future’,” I could not help but think of the works of Chris Marker –which often deal explicitly with journeys, memory, and the future. Furthermore, the concept of parallel worlds and its relation to travel and the exotic led me to think particularly of Marker’s “travel films”.
How does the parallel world of the foreign land –misremembered in advance by the traveler –change in a globalized world, when she/he is always already linked to this parallel world through rapid transit and mass communication?
To investigate this change, it seems worthwhile to consider Marker’s travel films (and the parallel worlds which they present) alongside the panoramas of the 19th century. These panoramas (according to Norman Klein), which appear initially as obvious Artifice, result eventually in an immersive parallel world, merging the machine and nature to (often imperialistically) improve up the latter. The travel films by Chris Marker, however, while presented initially under the guise of documentary, persistently subjugate this form to the digressive nature and compositional whim of a singular subjectivity, i.e. that of the traveler –a merging not of the machine and nature (as is the case for panoramas), but of the machine and the subject.
So, in a world where the traveler is always already connected to the destination, it seems that the “misremembering” of the foreign land must take on different characteristics. Marker’s travel films seem to suggest that globalism, by revealing the infinite connections of the traveler, has led the exotic and imperialist totality of panoramic artifice to dissipate from the parallel world of the foreign land, only to be replaced by the inescapable mediation through both the subject and the image. In the wake of this transformation, is the foreign land still a parallel world?
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