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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Charles T
This French short film, made in 1962 at the height of the Cold War, tells the story of an unnamed man who travels through time looking for help for the destroyed city of Paris. It served as the basis for "Twelve Monkeys," and, I theorize, may have kick started the central idea in "The Time Traveler's Wife." Translated as "The Pier," the film opens on a Parisian airport pier, where people can watch planes take off and land. The film has no dialogue aside from the narrator and some hushed whispering, so we are told that the unnamed Man (Davos Hanich) remembers being at the airport as a child before World War III, and watching a man fall and die. The image stayed with him forever, as did the face of a mysterious woman who was also there. Paris has been obliterated in a nuclear holocaust, and the survivors have retreated underground. The Man has been taken prisoner by the war's victors -we never learn who "won"- and is subjected to experimentation by a Doctor (Jacques Ledoux). Other prisoners have died or were turned into vegetables by the experiments, but the Man might be different because he has strong mental images, like the airport, to fall back on. What the Doctor wants to do is send the Man either back into time, or ahead into the future, to get help for the present. The Man is injected with drugs, has a wired blindfold placed over his eyes, and begins time travelling, albeit very slowly. After a week and a half, he does see images like his central image of the airport. Then, after almost a month, he meets an unnamed Woman (Helene Chatelain). The Man is somewhere in the past, and keeps popping in on the same woman. They tour gardens together, and finally the Man explains why he is there, as the Woman listens patiently. What worries the Man most is that he does not know if he is popping in and out of the past, dreaming the Woman up, or remembering that he really did meet her, and only now thinks of her. The ending is sudden, and memorable.
I forgot this was the basis for Terry Gilliam's best film but what stuck in my head was how this story could have been the Eric Bana point of view of "The Time Traveler's Wife." The Man wonders what the Woman must think as he randomly shows up to be with her. Thanks to the O.Henry-like story construction, omnipotent narration, and early 1960's black and white photography, I would compare this to a very good "Twilight Zone" episode. Aside from a few seconds of the Woman blinking, the film is all done with still-shot photography and voice over narration. While some of you might be reminded of film strips from your school days, the technique is easy to get used to, and serves as an oral history for the viewer, watching a glimpse of a future war. It is difficult to turn in a performance on what amounts to a series of photographs, but Hanich and Chatelain use their faces expertly. Writer/director Marker does not try to turn this into a science fiction epic, the war is hinted at and the time travel makes little sense. He does hold the viewer's interest by keeping the Man in the dark as well. As he discovers things, so do we. The finale is very sad and effective. I found the musical score a little too overwhelming here and there, but maybe we were experiencing the score based on the Man's reaction to falling in love with the Woman, and thereby sentimentalizing his feelings. "La Jetée" is a very strong short film, and it is easy to see why it was turned into the better Gilliam effort. In this rare case, I would have liked to see Marker expand on this sad vision of the world.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
10/08/23
Full Review
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
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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
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