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Plot:
Earth lies in ruin after a nuclear war. The few surviving humans begin researching time travel, hoping to send someone back to the pre-war world for food, supplies and maybe a solution to their dire p...( read more 
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La Jetée (The Pier) Recent Reviews
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Recent Reviews
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MCT:September 21, 2008
I've been thinkin a lot about this movie lately and I guess it's grown on me or somethin'. There are times where I see it simply as a compilation of gorgeous images, and there are times where I see it as one of the greatest sci-fis ever. "La Jetee" really does have an infinite number of nostalgic emotions, though. Although, I personally think its remake is just as great a film.
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MCT:May 29, 2008"He ran towards her. And when he recognized the man who'd trailed him from the camp, he realized there was no escape out of time, and that that moment he'd been granted to see as a child, and that had obsessed him forever after... was the moment of his own death."
Memory is the thematic and aesthetic core of Chris Marker's masterpiece, La Jetée. Set in the far future, during the aftermath of a third World War, the film tells the story of a man haunted by a distinct memory from the past, a beautiful woman he has seen as a boy in the airport just before the eruption of the war. That memory makes him a unique and indispensable individual to the victors who, in trying to connect with the past and the future to salvage the present from a scarcity of important resources, are experimenting on its prisoners who have concrete mnemonic images. This man's most persisting memory is represented by a still picture of a woman in a pleasantly feminine posture, her face beaming with comforting contentment, and her hair flowing peacefully with the wind. It is his last memory of peace.
La Jetée isn't pompous science fiction. Actually, it's simplistic in its science and entirely evasive of the details of time travel, but accurate in the atmosphere and the emotions of being confronted by a recurring image of the past. It is oddly romantic and fluently scary, especially in the way it portrays memory as an obsession and a manipulated resource. The plot's elliptical form only reinforces Marker's thematic quirk, the way the mysteries of time, of the human mind, and the human heart converge in a highly intimate tale of emotional longing.
La Jetée's aesthetic stance approximates a cinematically unconventional act of mnemonic recollection. While cinema has represented memories as elegant trips to the past through fluid flashbacks which are often granted the same clarity as the present, La Jetée takes a different course, visually experimental but still conventional in its storytelling methods. The film can accurately be described as a photo-montage, where black and white images are flawlessly stitched together. Guided by a narrator, the film takes the shape and feel of a storybook being told from start to finish.
Let not its unique form and style intimidate you. La Jetée showcases Marker as a filmmaker adept in the basics of filmmaking. The 28-minute film is perhaps the most impressively edited film I've ever seen. The black and white stills magically move through the fades to black, the perfectly-timed cuts, and the transitions that are all the more made effective by pertinent yet bare sound effects and the memorably apt musical score. In one sequence, the man is first experimented upon by the victors. The rhythm of his heartbeat provides an undiminished tension that fuels the ravishing photographs of the man suffering; his teeth sinking on the reed hammock which serves as his bed and his hands contorting in manifestly pained shapes.
There's a single moment in La Jetée wherein Marker decides to suddenly erupt from the confines of still memory, and allows one of his subjects to move, although very momentarily. It's intriguing because it is both startling yet magical, the way the girl awakes from slumber and truly awakes, blinking and smiling. It is as if the image has escaped from being merely encapsulated as a fragment of memory but has become a part of the present, unlimited by the inadequacies of the human mind. But why did Marker choose that moment to break his unique style? Perhaps for it is only in that moment that the man has sufficiently let go of the memory, and believed it as a present emotion: of comfort and relief. In contrast, it is only in the museum where the animals of the past have been frozen for perpetuity did the man truly perfect the art of time travel (probably in acceptance that the past, like these frozen animals, need to be immobile for that is memory's most innate nature). That was exactly what the man's captors needed: a perpetuated memory, not a fleeting emotion.
La Jetée is a film that is continually changing and evolving. It inhabits the very quality that makes photography a veritable art form, the way it captures a real moment in time for perpetuation and incessant interpretation. Similarly, La Jetée has the story of a man and his obsession with his memory of a girl waiting in the jetty made eternal. Yet beyond that story is Marker's art, which plays differently every single time it is seen. The first time I saw it, it impressed me with how the narrative was perfectly told through mere photographs. The second time I saw it, I was left enchanted by its subtle tackling of the interconnections of time, memory, love, and obsession. The third time I saw it, I became fascinated by Marker's fluency in his medium. Metaphorically put, La Jetée is as open as the clear skies that day when the image of the girl was engraved on the man's mind, and as tremendous and terrifying as the apocalypse that befell the world after it. A masterpiece.
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Chris Marker is now 86. He lives in Paris and does not grant interviews. When asked for a picture of himself, he usually offers a photograph of a cat instead. His cat is named Guillaume. -
MCT:May 24, 2008Not Interested
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MCT:January 7, 2008An interesting little 1/2 hour of moviemaking...or maybe I should call it a storyboard. The entire film is made of still pictures of the various characters in poses following the narration. The story -- what there is of it -- involves the aftermath of WWIII. Paris has been obliterated and most of the survivors live underground to escape the radiation. One man is chosen as a test subject by mysterious scientists who send him into the past. I have to say that I saw the "shock" ending coming. This came across to me as a French Twilight Zone episode. The story was used, in a much expanded form, for the Bruce Willis sci-fi film 12 Monkeys.
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MCT:October 9, 2007I think most people know this short has been credited as a strong influence in movies such as "12 Monkeys" (a remake) and "Terminator". Ostensibly this is a fascinating slide show, with a couple of seconds of motion in the middle. The story is definitely imaginative, and the film has left me with indelible images, but I remain undecided about its emotional impact. The still images barely serve to move the narrative forward, and gives it a memorable remoteness from its subject.
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MCT:November 17, 2008
Unique and different experimental short film which was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's brilliant "12 Monkeys¨
Comments
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Wotanravenposted 337 days ago -
People need to stop calling this the "original 12 monkeys". That's like calling Yojimbo the original A Fistful of Dollars. There's a huge difference,please.
posted 570 days ago
