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Composed
entirely of black-and-white still photos, La Jetée, Chris
Marker's 1962 meditation on time and memory changed cinma
forever. The French filmmaker's use of text and voice-over
to accompany his futuristic images shocked viewers accustomed to
classical, linear films with actors speaking on screen. The
result was so innovative that La Jetée was talked about as
a visual novel or an essay. La
Jetée (The Pier) runs a short twenty-eight minutes and takes
place in a post-apocalyptic Paris in the aftermath of World War
III. The survivors have moved underground and unsuccessfully
attempt to go back in time to save the world. That is, until
they find a man (Davos Hanich) obsessed by a childhood
memory of a woman (Hélène Chatelain) on a pier at Orly
Airport that permits him to travel to the past. He is then
repeatedly taken back in time until the film's stunning
culmination. While
his colleagues in the Nouvelle Vague such as Truffaut and
Godard were experimenting with long takes and improvised dialogue,
Marker went one step farther. He used jump cuts and
flashbacks to create a mesmerizing photomontage that relied on
altering the time each shot was held in order to create perfect
pacing. La Jetée also seduces on a purely aesthetic
level; the grainy beauty of the photography imbuing the film with
a certain haunting quality. The only non-still image - the
heroine fluttering her eyelashes - is shocking, the only ripple of
movement on the still lake of the film. The
maverick filmmaker influenced several generations of cinema
students and directors. Mamoru Osshii's Akai megane
(The Red Spectacles, 1987) and Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995)
are both cinematic children of La Jetée. Half a
century later, Marker's film still exerts a powerful influence as
it meditates on the utopian desire to travel backwards in time to
fix the future, knowing full well that "yesterday this day's
madness did prepare." Other
films by Chris Marker include the documentaries Le Joli Mai
(1963), La Solitude du chanteur de fond (1974) about Yves
Montand and Sans Soleil (1983).
See:
La
Jetée
Tags:
film
photography
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