...the moment I refer to is the one that many have analyzed over the years (easier now with video & DVD for slow motion and instant replay), when the sort of un-written law over La Jetee is bent. We see movement: a woman's eyes blink in slow-motion, and it is literally dream-like with the set-up of the lighting, the eerie music, and the fleeting sense that something may have not moved at all. For those coming fresh to La Jetee not knowing anything about this, it may come as something of a trick or a total illusion, as I thought the first time I saw it ('huh, what?'), and then came to realize it in a film class screening the short. It's a remarkable bit in a short film that offers images everlasting, dramatic, and haunting.
What Terry Gilliam called the 'acorn' from which the script for his 1995 film Twelve Monkeys sprang from, La Jetee deals with the future and the past, if it can be changed or not, and part of the film even takes place at the airport. But make no mistake, La Jetee has been and still is an art-house cult delicacy, a film where images move but are still, and yet give lightly to some wonders. It is slow and unsettling on a first go-around; one really doesn't have an idea of what is happening (that is unless you're well versed in Twelve Monkeys). But repeat viewings give greater light to the film's subtexts, or at least what it has to offer a viewer. It is a particular kind of film, intellectual of course, but also with an emotional core in dealing with this man who is reprogrammed to go through time and find a woman, or a thing, which may help prevent the end of the world. The science fiction parts are startling and rather graphic for the times, the shots in the museum are awe-inspiring in the museum sense, and the ending is as perfectly ambiguous and frightening as imaginable.
Chris Marker, simply put, doesn't hold back in his experiment; it pretends to be anything but a series of science-fiction/apocalyptic images, in stills, that convey a story but mostly with thoughts on the 'meaning' of it all. But I'll be damned if that little moment, with the woman's eyes, isn't a masterpiece of a moment.
What Terry Gilliam called the 'acorn' from which the script for his 1995 film Twelve Monkeys sprang from, La Jetee deals with the future and the past, if it can be changed or not, and part of the film even takes place at the airport. But make no mistake, La Jetee has been and still is an art-house cult delicacy, a film where images move but are still, and yet give lightly to some wonders. It is slow and unsettling on a first go-around; one really doesn't have an idea of what is happening (that is unless you're well versed in Twelve Monkeys). But repeat viewings give greater light to the film's subtexts, or at least what it has to offer a viewer. It is a particular kind of film, intellectual of course, but also with an emotional core in dealing with this man who is reprogrammed to go through time and find a woman, or a thing, which may help prevent the end of the world. The science fiction parts are startling and rather graphic for the times, the shots in the museum are awe-inspiring in the museum sense, and the ending is as perfectly ambiguous and frightening as imaginable.
Chris Marker, simply put, doesn't hold back in his experiment; it pretends to be anything but a series of science-fiction/apocalyptic images, in stills, that convey a story but mostly with thoughts on the 'meaning' of it all. But I'll be damned if that little moment, with the woman's eyes, isn't a masterpiece of a moment.