Discourse, 34.2–3, Spring/Fall 2012, pp. 209–00.
Copyright © 2013 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.
The Disembodied Wound of The Piano
Tuner of Earthquakes: The Quay Brothers’
“Homage to Chris Marker”
Rebecca A. Sheehan
“Who says time heals all wounds? Time
heals everything but wounds. No, instead
it encircles them until what remains is a
wound disembodied.”
—Chris Marker, Sans Soleil
“These things never happen but are
always.”
—Sallust, quoted in the epigraph to
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes
The Brothers Quay set their 2005 film, The Piano Tuner of Earth-
quakes, to a memorable theme song, the very same one that accom-
panies the still images of a man’s memory of love and loss in Chris
Marker’s La Jetée (1962). The song evokes that boy on the pier at
Orly before World War III, his confinement by the victors and his
memories, frozen in time, of encounters with a woman, the image of
whose face has marked him. The Quays tell us in the interview that
accompanies the DVD of The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes—hereafter