La Jetée

I first saw "La Jetee" in an introductory journalism class in the spring of 1973. The class was large, so large, in fact, that it was held in an auditorium rather than a conventional classroom. But when the film ended, there was about 30 seconds of stone-silence before the murmuring began. I sat slack-jawed and stunned and looked at Mary Ann, a girl who sat next to me and who I was slowly becoming friends with, to check her reaction. She looked equally stunned.

Thirty years have passed and I have occasionally revisited that moment. Despite wanting to know Mary Ann better, I was too timid and never saw her again after that semester ended and despite being stunned by the film, for some reason, I had lost track of its title. All I remembered was a haunting scene at an airport with a guy wearing glasses. That was it.

Just the other day and for no reason at all, I remembered the title "La Jetee" out of the blue. The name just popped into my head. And, even stranger, when I was checking the TV listings earlier today, I found that "La Jetee" was being shown on the Sundance Channel later.

I just finished watching it and I am as slack-jawed and stunned as I was thirty years ago. I guess the next logical thing will be to hear from Mary Ann. Just so long as I don't have to meet her at the airport.

I had never seen such an original film that works so well. The artist with no budget decides to make a film that could have appealed to the commercial masses. That is what is scary about it. It's the kind of story that we would consider "blockbuster gold". A journey through time, sci-fi, and romance. And yet, it requires no special effects, it requires no big budget. Marker laughs right at the face of conventional cinema and uses stills to let out imagination read between the lines.

Is this fiction? Yes, to some extent. The post-apocalyptic story that it recounts would make Waterworld blush with embarrassment, true. But once again, the arty film looks at us to find a meaning for the story. At the end of the day, are we more taken aback by the technical aspect in which Marker engages, or by the shocking finale. Would the finale have been so shocking had Marker used a Bolex camera? I fear not. The bit where he's running towards the girl in the end feels like an average nightmare, where you're running, but you can't get to wherever you want to get to. It's a feeling we have all felt, and the lack of movement within the frame conveys a certain feeling of helplessness and entrapment that could only have been achieved this well with stills.

And we must say, these stills are amazing. It's not only the elaborate mise-en-scene, or the design of the sets and the props (the french sci-fi glasses are extraordinary). It's also the placement of the camera, that has a ghostly versatility that often adds to the lack of comfort of the restless characters.

I must also give a shout for the score that is amazing, which is strange if we count that your average experimental film hardly ever employs such "cinematic" scores, always going for the more minimalist (and generally less expansive) ones.

In 1995, Terry Gilliam made one of the finest movies in the nineties: "Twelve Monkeys". To explain how he made this awesome movie, he openly declared that he drew his inspiration from a French short film: "La Jetée". It is true that the 2 opus have similarities: both present a devastated earth caused by man's madness, survivors who take refuge in underground rooms and try to improve their grueling living conditions and especially both feature a jaded and manipulated main character.

A short film that is a reflection about time, happiness and love, entirely composed of static shots, "la jetée" is a powerful and mesmerizing work and it may appear as a cornerstone in French cinema. 42 years after its release, it kept all its strength and has not aged a bit. The quality of the editing, the photography and the commentary add to the success of Chris Marker's work.

Highly recommended and the influence of Chris Marker's short film on "Twelve Monkeys" shows well a thing: French cinema inspired a great number of American movies.

I note that most of the comments I've seen have been written by people who saw 12 Monkeys first and then chose somehow to see La Jetee.

Comparisons are useless beyond the basic feel of the story.

When I first saw 12 Monkeys I didn't know its relationship to La Jetee, a film I had not seen in 25 years. Yet, I recognized this relationship almost immediately, even though I could not remember the name of the movie. This I realized through the feel of the story ... down to the very end.

In many ways the short film was much more stimulating ... even though I had forgotten the name of the film I had never forgotten the images or the impressions it made upon me. I guess that's strange, but as I recall I saw it at Rice University as a part of a film festival back in the 60s.

Granted, films must sustain themselves somewhat through the years to maintain their value as true art, but one must always remember the context of the film's original audience.

I wonder now if the dependence on stills to portray the story had any influence on Ken Burns? Heh ... he's made a reputation on the same technique.

My point ... accept both movies on their own merits.

The first time I saw this movie it was on a local educational TV channel (PBS was barely starting) in 1969. I was a youngster and it made such an indelible impression that I remembered it all these years. Luckily, to my surprise I discovered a copy recently at a video rental store.

The movie is only approximately 30 minutes in length and is composed of black and white still photography (except for one scene, where they show a mans eye blinking). It is a powerful depiction of the end of the world, human love and memory. The French narration adds to the poetic subtlety and drama. To my dismay, I heard there was a new DVD version available, but with English narration. Hopefully, the original French version will be made available, as it seems to add so much more to the dramatic effect of the movie.

To the average movie viewer, this film would be best described as avant-garde in nature. It is a prime example of how science fiction and drama can be produced with nuance and subtleties, rather than overuse of technological effects and gratuitous titillation and violence.