La Jetée
(Chris Marker) 1962
All cinematic expression, in a way, is
the yearning to recreate an artist’s memory of a feeling strongly felt. Even
when the film that’s created is entirely fictional, the director will ideally
have a passionate response to the material, and the energy to make the film will
be borne and recycled from that initial gut response. The race to create the
image held in the mind’s eye before it dissipates seems the foremost challenge
of moviemaking. There’s little that’s truly spontaneous when lurching
through the technical logistics involved in making a movie, and any film that is
shot has to be further condensed and primped in the editing room before it’s
ready for our consumption. As such, one can understand that the medium lacks the
impulsive immediacy in its creation that is inherent in some other forms of
artistic expression. This makes the accessibility with which it ideally strikes
the viewer all the more impressive. Chris Marker’s short film La
Jetée, a science fiction story told almost entirely with still images,
seems to address many of these issues in its construction.
Surely, it can be no mistake that the
method of time travel that the protagonist uses in the story is propelled by his
recreation of past memories. He moves about his memories as if they were
reality, slowly becoming more adept at turning his subjective world into an
objective one. A singular image fixed in his mind opens the floodgates to many
more. The stunning culmination of his desires, in which he comes the closest to
recapturing his past that never was, is a transcendent moment where the stills
achieve brief cinematic movement. That burst of cinema is the end result of the
protagonist’s arduous struggle and his moment of glory. He has been directing
his own story, using a fragment of himself as his inspiration. It has to be
noted, then, that his glimpse of transcendence comes up a bit short, since it
remains something other than the complete recreation of reality that he strives
for. Cinema remains cinema, even if it is closer to being real than a succession
of photographs. The bittersweet ending of the film is the only appropriate one,
because of the hubris of the lead character who believed he could truly
recapture the past in such a way.
Surely then, the film seems almost a
critique of cinema’s fallibility, and that argument might stand a chance if La
Jetée were not such a stunning example of how infallible the best of films
can be. The narrative, despite any metaphysical paradoxes that it might raise,
creates a tight loop of incident in which a man simultaneously realizes his
past, present, and future. The photographed black and white stills have a
uniformly grainy look to them, suggesting memory is a hazy and unreliable
stand-in for reality while evoking the photography that documented France’s
razing during World War II. The images of destruction are recycled ones,
pretending to show us a future yet to come, but in reality showing the past’s
ruin, making their use thematically relevant. That Marker builds a considerable
amount of suspense without the use of traditional performances or tricks is
impressive. That the movie feels kinetic despite its lack of moving objects is
even more remarkable. Though the images remain still, the camera does not. One
gets the impression that his omnipotent camera is scanning these slices of time,
trying to animate them, much like the protagonist attempts to revitalize his
memories. The palpable desire to recreate and rewrite reality (play God?) is the
dominant theme here. Perhaps, as Marker suggests, this is the most fundamental
struggle of the artist. As such, La Jetée,
which eloquently makes that profound struggle its subject, strikes the viewer as
one of the most cohesive expressions found in the art form.
**** Masterpiece
Jeremy Heilman
02-07-02
