matthias s
"La Jetée" is a captivating short film that effortlessly weaves a first-class storytelling experience with an innovative approach to filmmaking. This avant-garde gem, directed by Chris Marker, has stood the test of time, remaining a cornerstone of cinematic excellence. The film's brilliance shines through its brilliant plot, leaving you in awe of its unique narrative structure, primarily composed of still images that evoke a haunting sense of time travel.
One of the standout elements of "La Jetée" is its mesmerizing music, which beautifully enhances the emotional depth of the story. However, the pacing is a tad uneven, with moments of intensity contrasting with quieter sequences. While this unevenness adds a layer of unpredictability, it might not be everyone's cup of tea.
The only minor hiccup is the ending, which left me somewhat unsatisfied, craving a more definitive resolution. Nevertheless, "La Jetée" remains a must-watch for cinephiles, providing a thought-provoking experience that lingers in your mind long after the final frame.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
11/15/23
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Matthew B
"After all, what is time? A mere tyranny," the heavenly Conductor pronounces in Powell and Pressburger's fantasy film, A Matter of Life and Death.
Time and tyranny are the themes of Chris Marker's short movie, La Jetée. I call it a movie, but is it really deserving of that title? Marker himself referred to it as a photonovel, or photo-roman if you prefer the French expression.
Perhaps the best argument for denying La Jetée the right to be called a movie however is that it is not a motion picture. There is almost no motion at all. The film is a series of still images played against haunting music, some of it choral, and with a narrator telling the story. There is no dialogue.
There is only one brief moment when the images move. We see the mysterious woman (Hélène Chatelain) waking from a sleep. Her eyes flicker open and she blinks. The movie stirs into life for just a few seconds before returning to still images of photographs.
Then again, what is a movie but a series of pictures played so rapidly that they give us the illusion of motion? All Marker has done is to freeze time – to slow down the normal processes of a film, and reduce scenes to a few images, rather than what we see in every other movie – the rapid split-second jumps that seems like movement when they are not.
The freezing of time is a major theme of La Jetée. The man (Davos Hanich) and the woman wander around a museum filled with stone figures and stuffed animals, the past preserved in stasis. The sun that shines on the jetty is described as frozen. Characters sleep, another suspension of movement.
It would be unfair to reveal the ending, but it confirms the movie's central idea that we are caught in the present moment. We can change the future, but we cannot live in it. We can change our perceptions of the past, but we cannot alter the past to suit our liking.
Our reality lies in vision – what we see with our eyes and mind. Eyes feature prominently in La Jetée. The man is blindfolded for the experiments. Later he wears sunglasses when he returns to the jetty. The leading experimenter (Jacques Ledoux) wears peculiar goggles. The people from the future have curious markings on their head. Is it perhaps a third eye?
While it may seem like a collage of photographs, Marker uses the techniques of cinema to bring the images to life. The film is like a photomontage, and montage is a recognised cinematic method. The images frequently cut to different angles depicting the same occurrence, just as the camera angles in a movie often change during a scene. The camera zooms in and out. Sometimes it lingers on scenes, and sometimes there are rapid cuts. Scenes dissolve or fade out.
It hardly matters what La Jetée is. It is a worthy visual art form that stimulates the mind and provokes discussion. It condenses more meaning into its short running time than many films that are considerably longer.
I wrote a fuller appreciation of the film on my blog page if you would like to read more: https://themoviescreenscene.wordpress.com/2020/03/12/la-jetee-1962/
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
08/25/23
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william k
A masterpiece short film tells its haunting and mesmerizing sci-fi story in exquisitely composed images and is enormously effective with a mind-boggling ending.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
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Audience Member
Particulier. Fiction. Etrange. Bref. Bravo. Un poème.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/18/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Well that was quite poignant. I read somewhere beforehand that the director wanted to make the film but couldn't afford the equipment for moving images so made it with still photographs instead (except that one brief clip of the smiling woman) and knowing that must affect how I saw the film. I actually thought the still images worked quite well artistically, they give us that intimacy and reflectiveness of the humanity of the film and also that distance and separateness of the inhumanity. The story was obviously quite science fiction-esque with the alternate reality and time travel and science fiction films do often have some strange link to morality and human values but I found La Jetee much more poetic than most, maybe it was the nostalgic feel from the photographs or the prominence of the romance but there was something very human and very sad about it. The ending was significant, that the moment from the past he had obsessed about his whole life was to be his death, also I think he would not have had it any other way, apart from any philosophical meaning he would rather have gone to that moment and died than not so and lived, such is our nature of obsession, that we have come to call love.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/18/23
Full Review
Audience Member
A neat bare script for the later 12 monkeys. The core sci fi element and plot is there but the execution is simple. Effective short film but not as captivating as Gilliams follow up.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/28/23
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