Updates, Live: Chris Marker: La Jetée (1962)

(http://ktartwork.blogspot.com/2011/02/review-on-la-jetee.html)

La Jetée (The Pier), a 28 minute short made by Chris Marker in 1962: after WWIII everything is destroyed and radioactivity has made life on Earth impossible. Survivors live in underground shelters, winners and defeated together. The defeated are enslaved and used in horror experiments, causing eventually death or madness. They are forced to voyage in time, in search for solutions (somewhere in the past or future) for the present. One of them proves particularly fitted for these time travels, as he is obsessed with an image from his remote childhood. He was only four or five years old when it happened. He was on the pier of a big airport (Orly in Paris), he noted a beautiful woman and a man who was running toward her. The man suddenly fell down and died.

Now in his forced journeys in the past he is trying to find the mysterious woman, maybe also to elucidate the enigmatic death he had witnessed. A strange love story emerges between him and the woman. A story without history, without projects, without development: it begins each time he is sent in the past. In the end he will arrive on the pier at Orly, a small boy will look at him, the woman will be there, he will be killed by a policeman sent from the present to keep an eye on him. The image obsessing him for all life was the moment of his death.

A movie of 28 minutes offering multiple levels of interpretation: SF, dystopia, love story. Behind and beyond, a poignant meditation on the power and limits of remembrance. The power of the images we keep from the past, our quest to understand them, to fill the gaps, to be in control, to accomplish, to escape out of time - through our imagination, through our dreams. Our impossibility to escape.

Chris Marker used for this movie exclusively still photos! A photo-montage edited very skilfully: the impression of movement is suggested by the rapid succession of the still images. Over them the voice-off of the narrator. That's all! Past is just that, a succession of stills, you cannot act again there, you can be only a viewer. There is an episode when the two, man and woman, are visiting a museum of petrified animals, and their feelings are as mutually close as it can be: as he realizes that this is all he can get, moments now petrified.

There is however a moment, only one moment, when the movie leaves the stills. The woman gets awake, her face bathed by the light of the sun. She notices his presence, she is blinking: the only blink in the movie. Their love has won over the laws of time. For only one instant.

This movie reverberated in many other cinematic works. The best known example is Twelve Monkeys, openly inspired by La Jetée, but the idea of trying to enter your memories, to be there again, just to be stopped by reflecting mirrors or petrified stills obsessed also Tarkovsky, also Mira Nair. La Jetée was in turn created on the reverberations of Vertigo. And Chris Marker will go further with Sans Soleil, in 1983.