La Jetée (1962) Film Review

Figure 1. Movie Poster

Chris Marker’s La Jetée (The Pier) is a French film consisting of stills and narration to convey a story of a prisoner after the first world war, who is used as a test subject for time travel, he is able to sustain the shock of time travel. When he was a boy he saw a man die at an airport, he wasn’t sure what he saw only that a man died he also saw a woman who stayed strongly in his memory, when he goes back in time he goes to find this woman and forms a romantic relationship with her. Able to travel back he is sent into the future and is eventually brought back to the present to learn he is to be killed by his jailers, he is contacted by people of the future who offer him a permanent stay in the future but wishes to be sent back to the past to be with that woman, one of the jailers follows him back and just when he meets the woman again at the airport he is shot, the man he saw die as a kid was his future self.

The story telling in this is unique, "It is composed of a still shot of an airport, but because of the fast zoom out the scene appears alive and moving in time. The feeling of movement is enhanced by the realistic airport sounds. Here the film uses sound and visuals together to explore the concept of movement" (Ignoramous, 2014). The sounds in this film are key to what makes it a master piece, it is "the only truly continuous element in La Jetée. As such, it is the main source of temporality and rhythm, ... Sound appears both in the form of soundtrack, sound effects, and voice-over narration." (Ignoramous, 2014). The sound effects are minimal - they're not too loud or dominating like in ordinary day life and they usually convey well known sounds such as airport sounds or footsteps.

La Jetée Stills Collage

Another unique element of La Jetée is unlike other films this collection of stills (see fig 2) is like going through a old photo album to emphasize that this film is a "classic 'photo-roman' about the power of memory" (TD, 2016) as we have albums to treasure memories this emphasizes the themes of time and memory. The camera shots of the stills are different in every picture to reveal or exaggerate something on screen, for example in fig 3 you can see him looking at the woman some straight away may think admiring gaze but this is emphasized in fig 4 when you can see his whole face at a different camera shot. All together the photographs, narrator’s words work well together to create tone, "The soundtrack's texture is similarly sparse, and the fluid montage leads the viewer into the sensation of watching moving images." (TD, 2016).

Fig 3. Camera Angle 1

Fig 4. Camera Angle 2

The science fiction story itself is interesting as time travel is impossible and it challenges our beliefs, the photographs allow us to observe with sharp focus everything in the scene where as in usual footage the movement slightly knocks our focus as we watch people move about the screen.

Bibliography:

DT. (2016) La Jetée. At: http://www.timeout.com/london/film/la-jetee (Accessed on 12 January 2017)

Ignoramous, L. (2014) ‘La Jetee Chris marker analysis | experimental film’. At: http://filmslie.com/chris-marker-la-jetee-analysis-temporality/ (Accessed on 12 January 2017)

Illustration List

Figure 1. La Jetée Movie Poster. (2016) [Poster] (2016) Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. At: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jet%C3%A9e (Accessed on 12 January 2017)

Figure 2. La Jetée Stills Collage. (2011) At: http://internationalfilmstudies.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/la-jetee-france-chris-marker-1962.html (Accessed on 12 January 2017)

Figure 3. Camera Angle 1. (2010) (2010). Roused to Mediocrity. At: https://rousedtomediocrity.wordpress.com/page/19/ (Accessed on 12 January 2017)

Figure 4. Camera Angle 2. (2012) At: https://theseventhart.info/tag/chris-marker/ (Accessed on 12 January 2017)