far from the last word

Dating from 1963, directed by Chris Marker, it is one of the more influential pieces of cinema in the latter half of the 20th century. Why it's taken so long to see it again, I'm not quite sure. It's been on the queue for months, and finally made it to the top. Possibly one of those pieces of work that you know is supposed to be fabulous, but is so out of currency that it becomes something like a chore to watch it again?

The credits actually list Marker as the creator of this photo-roman, rather than as le directeur. According to the included interview with Marker's friend Jean-Pierre Gorin, they were a form of popular entertainment in post-war Italy and France. It's not clear whether La Jetee was the first of its kind, to be put on film rather than paper, but certainly through the usage of montage and sound, it achieves a remarkable sense of movement and story telling. A film about time travel from a post apocalyptic Paris, this collection of still images put on film has a remarkably gentle tone to it. The connection between the male prisoner/time traveler and the woman he meets regularly in the past is not a typical film romance, but a meeting of individuals giving freely.  Marker is primarily interested in memory and time, both particularly well suited to investigation through images and their manipulation. Adding density to the story, he makes reference to Hitchcock's Vertigo, another film concerned primarily with images about memory, time, and image.

Although it's been since 1975 that I last saw this 25 minute classic, and nothing in particular was remembered about it other than it's structure and look, the power of the single moving image - set amidst all the other stills - in which the woman blinks her eyes has never been forgotten. This lone shot - using the artificiality of motion pictures which is after all nothing but a succession of still photographs which our minds put together as movement due to the persistence of vision - shatters the simplicity of the remainder of the film, moving it to a level of abstraction and obvious greatness.

Update on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 07:31PM by KMW

After another viewing of La Jetee before sending the disc back to Netflix Roanoke, I was struck by the music. Knowing now that Vertigo had a large influence on Marker, it's obvious to hear the similarities as well as see some of the visual references. According to this article on the composer Trevor Duncan, the score for La Jetee is "library" music. Who then made the selections, and were they in order to sound eerily similar to Bernard Hermann's score for Vertigo? Only Marker knows for sure...