A Short Review(ish) of La Jetée
La Jetée by Chris Marker is a brilliant experimental and science fiction film from 1962. The video embedded is the full movie, all 26 or so minutes. Though the narration was originally done in French, Marker preferred the English dubbed version. I posted the English version, but I’m sure the French version is on youtube somewhere. Fair warning: the images are really important in this short film and since there is no dialogue, only narration, the French version may detract due to the large subtitles often found on videos available over the web.
The short film is set in post- apocalyptic Paris after World War III. The city has been driven underground due to radiation and separated into two groups: the victors and the prisoners. The victors fear for their survival due to dwindling resources and come up with a solution: time travel. The story follows a prisoner or the Man (Davos Hanich) as the narrator refers to him whose fixation on a strong image of his history made him a prime candidate to be experimented on.
What is particularly astounding about Marker’s short film is the incorporation of the plot into his approach to cinematography. The film is mostly comprised of black and white still photographs with one notable yet subtle exception: a few seconds of movement to jar the viewer. Photographs, especially snapshots, are considered as memories however contrived they can be. This is what Chris Marker alludes to: the act of holding onto a memory, a capture in a moment of time. This is what the Man’s ability to travel through time without going insane or dying hinges on: his obsession over a past memory.
Time travel is not a new concept in science fiction, but in Marker’s hands, it becomes uniquely surreal. The Man lies withering in agony on a hammock; his eyes covered with white blinders attached to wires. A scientist (Jacques Ledou) injects a needle into the Man’s arm. The film then shifts somewhere else as the Man sees flashes of a countryside, a cat looking up from a bed and a woman appear onto the screen. The viewer is left unsure if the Man is physically transported or merely his conscience is projected in a different dateless time which I found, despite the vagueness of the science behind the time travel, enforces the surreality of the moments in the past.
La Jetée is a film often overlooked, but is an unforgettable experience; unique and alluring, the surreality is fantastical.
-J
Something which stumps me about digital equipment buyers…
Why would anybody dole out the big bucks for a really high-resolution digital camera only to rape the resulting file down to a low-res, low-fi looking thing that could only be printed reasonably at postage stamp size?
I know more than one photographer who use a 21 megapixel Canon 5D MarkII that costs around $3000 USD only to Photochop (chop is not a mistype) almost all of the images to such extremes they might as well have been made with a $140 USD 4 megapixel point & shoot pocket camera. In fact, I’ve made better, clearer images with just such an el-cheapo device in my hand. It stumps my brain and makes it throb unending. Please, God. Make it stop.
- M
Remote blogging
We are now posting from our phones on location or from bed. 
Real things
A photograph is a noun.
Yikes!
“Ask yourself if you might not prefer to hang your prints unmatted with magnets (put roofing nails in the wall behind the 4 corners of your print). This is becoming quite a common practice at swanky photo galleries (including Blue Sky). You can be hip and frugal at the same time.” – Chris Rauschenberg
Chris hopefully is kidding. Hip and frugal?
Read the entire post at Conscientious Redux…
Sunport
© Matt Wade