La Jetée

This weekend I watched a unique, post-apocalyptic, French science fiction film. When Chris Marker made La Jetée in 1962, motion picture technology was churning out such films as To Kill a Mockingbird and Dr. No, but Marker chose to shoot his film as a series of black and white still shots. With only one brief exception, the entire 28 minutes of La Jetée is a slide show of images with narration and orchestral soundtrack. The only dialog is some creepy muttering in German that the original French audience was not meant to understand (and neither did I).

The result of Marker's still-shot and narrative techniques is the manipulation of time- a manipulation in beautiful harmony with the time travel plot at the heart of the story.

The 1962 vision of a scary future is the aftermath of World War III. Germans occupied Paris, took prisoners- then victors and captors alike suffered the same fate of radiation poisoning and slow starvation. Desperate to survive, German scientists single out a French prisoner with a strong link to his past, to send on a torturous journey back in time to a France that had not yet been destroyed in order to obtain food, medicine, and aid. The prisoner's link to the past is the memory of a woman, and each trip back to the time of his childhood, he is drawn to her. The still shots of Paris before its destruction are full of life, light, and hope, in strong contrast to the post-apocalyptic world the prisoner has just left. I especially loved the series of stills in which the prisoner and the woman explore a natural history museum. The taxidermied species on display are a beautiful metaphor for the prisoner. Even the title of the film, while ostensibly referring to the pier on which the film opens, has a second meaning that refers to the prisoner- one thrown out, cast out, tossed back in time.

Although there was a lot of potential for this film to be corny- still shots, narration, ideas, such as WW III, which no longer seem fresh to modern audiences- it was overall a beautiful and intense experience. With the exception of some decidedly 1962-esque visions of humanity's future, La Jetée has aged pretty well. The film also lives on as the inspiration for the well-known 1995 science fiction film, Twelve Monkeys.