LA JETEE
dir: Chris Marker
On the tenth day, images begin to ooze like confessions. The peacetime mourning. A peacetime bedroom, a real bedroom. Real children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves. - Narrator
Brief Synopsis
In the aftermath of World War III, a French prisoner is used as a lab rat by his captors to travel back through time to acquire medicine, food, and supplies from the world before the war.
Why It's Here
The only short film in the entire list of 200. Coming in at 28 minutes, this film has tough competition by feature length heavy weights, so the reason it's here must mean it's damn good.
Unordinary filmmaker Chris Marker uses La Jetée to express his concepts and feelings on time, identity, memory, and technology. In less than half an hour, La Jetée asks the viewer to think more than most two hour features do. Tightly edited, the film presents a narrative where a man must travel through time, yet time is still throughout the entire film as it is composed of a series of still images and barely noticeable mere seconds of film. Marker captures time in an instant and uses these instants to tell a story about the vastness of time. When the story makes it brief leap to film, it's impactful, there is a feeling of connection that the frozen images do not give. As the protagonist jumps back through time, he never feels locked in or connected to this world and this is reflected in the audience. It is in this moment, when the woman looks into the camera, that we, the viewer, feel connected as she blinks and stares back at us. This brief moment of comfort is interrupted as the story pulls us back to present time where the doctors look over us with curiosity, and the grip we had on the woman and the past is once again lost.
The tone is eerie with low level abstract sounds and a chilling narrator, while many argue that the English narration is an insult to the native French, I was able to immerse myself better without having to watch the images and read subtitles. The narrator has a voice suitable for the subject that will keep you intrigued and unsettled.
Wildly influential and powerfully different from the usual film, this short packs as much punch as any other film on this list in it's narrative, tone, imagery, and romance, making it an unforgettable piece, at only a fraction of the time.
Unordinary filmmaker Chris Marker uses La Jetée to express his concepts and feelings on time, identity, memory, and technology. In less than half an hour, La Jetée asks the viewer to think more than most two hour features do. Tightly edited, the film presents a narrative where a man must travel through time, yet time is still throughout the entire film as it is composed of a series of still images and barely noticeable mere seconds of film. Marker captures time in an instant and uses these instants to tell a story about the vastness of time. When the story makes it brief leap to film, it's impactful, there is a feeling of connection that the frozen images do not give. As the protagonist jumps back through time, he never feels locked in or connected to this world and this is reflected in the audience. It is in this moment, when the woman looks into the camera, that we, the viewer, feel connected as she blinks and stares back at us. This brief moment of comfort is interrupted as the story pulls us back to present time where the doctors look over us with curiosity, and the grip we had on the woman and the past is once again lost.
The tone is eerie with low level abstract sounds and a chilling narrator, while many argue that the English narration is an insult to the native French, I was able to immerse myself better without having to watch the images and read subtitles. The narrator has a voice suitable for the subject that will keep you intrigued and unsettled.
Wildly influential and powerfully different from the usual film, this short packs as much punch as any other film on this list in it's narrative, tone, imagery, and romance, making it an unforgettable piece, at only a fraction of the time.