#32: La Jetée (1962) (dir. Chris Marker)

One of my absolute favorite films that is a key inspiration for what I hope to achieve with a short work myself someday, only having no characters and no voice-over... here, it works wonders.

Let me begin with a question posed to you: do you believe that events we experience are predetermined? No, it doesn’t have to be God’s will, but maybe the energy in the universe somehow has our time on this planet all worked out somehow. Yes, we could all be living in a video game matrix of some kind or perhaps forces we will never comprehend. The idea of inevitability is an intriguing one. Perhaps in some coded sequence out there, it was predetermined that I would watch this short film in my lifetime only to sit down to write about it now. Regardless, I will be including more still images than usual… for a reason.

I can’t help but wonder if things “happen for a reason” or it’s just pure random chaos. Maybe a combination of the two? But maybe I was destined to become a film and music enthusiast and not necessarily my own free will that made it so. Perhaps there is a cosmic force that already knows when I will expire. Granted, we’ve yet to invent time travel or actually visit an alternate timeline or universe to see if ideas generated by science fiction can in fact occur in waking life. Some of us would like to think that reality is set in stone but unexplained occurrences happen all of the time. Even just finding the right person to wake up with feels unreal and yet necessary to feeling alive. Seeing another face (whether human or not) on a daily basis is essential to even getting out of bed. How can anyone sit through a movie like this and not think of their own past and the times they felt blessed to have been loved and to love.

In Chris Marker’s remarkable short film, time travel is fused with memory and also becomes the harbinger of death. Yes, it is introduced as focusing on "a man that is scarred by his childhood memory,” set in World War III. But there’s a lot more underneath the surface of what we’re seeing. It is an experimental film that feels human, accessible and fully realized in ways that some feature length stories fail to achieve. Part of me thinks it’s about the madness we experience when we live inside our minds to where all we remember are things we wish we could forget. We are also human beings because we remember that we are, and because we remember where we come from. Without the aid of memory, we are nothingness.

“There is no way out of time” is also one of the central statements in Chris Marker’s 1962 time travel short film La Jetée. We begin with a memory that the man has - as a child, he recalls an airport, a man being shot and a woman’s face. That face has never left his mind. He thinks of this memory as a recurring dream in a sense and lives with it. World War III occurs and everything he knows is gone. Years later people who survived live underground and reside in concentration camps where scientists are experimenting on them to travel through time. Early experiments failed and the people who initially attempted this process "went mad" until a man with a "strong image memory" comes in to play. The fact that he has this gift is what makes him the best candidate. The man volunteers.

He spends time together with a woman when he goes back and they fall in love. He is then taken back to present time, before he is once again sent to the future. At times this is akin to Slaughterhouse Five - with a feeling of displacement and a lack of control. He is given aid to help his destroyed society before he returns, yet again, to the present time. When he returns, he learns that he is to be executed. There’s also a group of people of the distant future - they tell him that they want to help and he an be sent to the future permanently. Instead, he asks to go back to the past and be reunited with the woman he fell in love with. He goes back to the moment when he saw her… at an airport.

The narrator says, "other images appear, merge, in that museum which is perhaps his memory.” Sometimes we are privy to random moments or objects in a form of stasis. This is a 28-minute short film that Chris Marker composed entirely of stills and photographs; photographs that he connects with dissolves, cuts, and fades. The narration by Jean Négroni captures the feeling of documentary film-making, creating its own specific atmospheric tension that coexists alongside an intensification of sounds in the film, such as the German speech accompanied by a musical score by Trevor Duncan. It has no dialogue. It has no action, of course, because it has no movement. It is about the image, the moment, the feeling.

Likely inspired by the German invasion of France during 1940, La Jetée maintains a hypnotic quality with diegetic audio of the subjects and a bleak setting in each still frame, all of which have a slight organic shake to them. Many sequences begin wide and progressively tighten to close ups, and this impact is furthered with the employment of complete silence in certain scenes. There’s the poetic language of the voiceover, which evokes a sombre, isolated feel. The film also utilizes frequent chiaroscuro lighting, which helps to convey the darkness of the underground setting where the experiments take place. The stillness, the silence envelops you in a way that is more than just a photographic album experience.

“What sets La Jetee apart from nearly every other film is its form. Marker describes it as a "photo-novel", which is a pretty good label for its mix of crisply edited photo montage with voice over narration and a spare, though effective sound design. It is quite remarkable how these simple means are so effective in evoking the strange psychological territory of the story. The fragmented form helps suggest a world, and a mind, that is broken. The photos are often striking and their stillness helps us focus on their composition and to search for meaning. They force an active concentration that the normal wash of moving images often smooths over. Marker's film is hugely innovative and is in absolute service to its compact, yet fascinating story. It also includes a magical coup de cinema where one of the still images appears to momentarily flicker to life. Somehow this moment is disproportionately moving, as though the man's memories and obsessions briefly coalesce into an intimate fragment of love. That is my interpretation anyway. The beauty with the film's form is that it invites our imaginations to meet it halfway, something that is often a characteristic of great art.” - Hutch

There’s a haunting love story that comes and goes. It’s almost at times like Terrence Malick only if he were a photographer. It’s about fragments, sometimes they all make sense together other times they exist separately without context. The memory of faces is a compelling facet here. One cannot shake the image of the woman’s face lying in bed, waking up, smiling and feeling a warmth that can only come from true, interpersonal connection. The whole film captures a sense of inevitability which comes from the joy of falling in love and accepting the fact that the end comes for us all. We attempt to reclaim and maintain the bliss that comes from feeling comforted and safe. The outside world has other plans. There are destructive forces - contained within the body that leads to cancer or the death of neurons. Or there are those who are dead-set on domination to the point of mass casualties. An ending can come from many places, internally or externally.

It’s hard to encapsulate what makes this movie such an influence for not only science fiction storytelling to come (most of which has already been written about) but it’s inspiration for myself - the idea of not needing movement to tell a story. Every picture does tell a story here. I’ve always been hugely inspired by photography more than painting/drawing. If I were 20 years ago, I might’ve pursued cinematography over score composition because of how connected I feel to the art of a still image. La Jetée is all about the power of that. I find myself overwhelmed to the point of tears based on just one still shot - it doesn’t even need the narration or the story to carry me through. Perhaps this is why so many also respond strongly to the silent film era, still a blind spot for me outside of a transcendent experience of seeing Man With A Movie Camera.

I’d be remissed in not bringing up Terry Gilliam’s re-imagined remake of this as well. 12 Monkeys is a film that feels strange to view during Covid times to be sure. It does have a lot of strange elements that feel undeniably Gilliam, particularly the wide-eyed gonzo performance of Brad Pitt. What keeps that film from being a full-out masterpiece is the fact that it really doesn’t possess the kind of sentiment and sincerity that La Jetée carries throughout when it comes to the love story. They hint at a connection between Madeline Stowe and Bruce Willis to be certain but it never really grows into something plausibly romantic. Perhaps that choice was intentional but the feeling of tragedy at the end is almost undercut. That being said it is still upper tier Gilliam - time travel is something I will always be fascinated by and there are many interesting (and prescient) touches throughout 12 Monkeys that makes it worth writing about entirely on its own in the “future.” (I know there’s also a TV show adaptation but honestly, I don’t need this story stretched out for four seasons, it’s near-perfect as a 2-hour movie max).

La Jetée, on the other hand, is flawless. I believe the connection between the man and the woman. I feel the torture and agony during the experiment underground. And again, I don’t need to hear him yelling. Like any component that makes a cohesive film, when one manipulates a single element (like sound), it adds an unexpected dynamic to the film as a whole. For example, the German speech in this film intensifies the mystery behind the intentions of the experimenters narratively. Just by simply isolating the language with no other obstructions of sound, it is expansive in the feelings it evokes. On the other hand, the musical score can be much more pleasant than any of the other sounds, as Marker employs Negroni to use the score as a way of elevation and infusing the feelings of time and memory by simply attaching the beauty of photograph with the beauty of music (here is the film’s “Girl Theme,” which is powerful, beautiful, and moving.

“I can’t remember another single work of art ever having had that immediate and powerful an impact, which of course makes the experience quite impossible to describe. As I experienced it, I think, it drove me, as RD Laing had it, out of my wretched mind. I left the lecture hall where it had been screened in an altered state, profoundly alone. I do know that I knew immediately that my sense of what science fiction could be had been permanently altered.” - William Gibson

I’ve come to the recent conclusion that both La Jetée and The Duke Of Burgundy belong even higher up on my list of favorite movies because they affect me deeply more than most. (Look at the image above alone! Seriously! How can it not be an all-timer??). Sometimes it can just be about the visual storytelling but I actually connect and identify with the characters in both more strongly over time. It’s similar to what happened with my favorite movie, Mulholland Drive. That’ll be my longest essay without a doubt that when it comes up, it’ll get heavy. But I can’t deny the fact that when I return to La Jetée, my immediate feeling is not only of deep sadness, but of pure inspiration. “I would love to make something that captures what this movie does without ripping it off.” Gilliam came close but obviously, he didn’t do it using still images. As he often does, Gilliam focused on the madness of the human mind - having a savior complex of sorts can be debilitating as much as it is a driving force to survive and find a sense of purpose.

In the end, I can’t really sum up the power of La Jetée in words though obviously I wrote about it anyway. My writing often feels stream-of-consciousness to where I often ignore grammatical continuity to a degree. It just sort of pours out over coffee in the morning and with little to no editing. La Jetée is obviously beautifully constructed and edited meticulously, but like my favorite works of art, it still manages to feel like a dream, a memory, the pinnacle of pure empathy. I can’t write the way these artists tell their stories as a film but I love it when it feels like we’re all on the same wavelength, tapped into some kind of unexplained energy. Maybe this was all predetermined for all of us, or much like love and death, it’s just something that happens.