Chris Marker: La Jetée

Wikipedia notes:

Summary

La jetée (English: The Jetty and The Pier) (1962) is a 28-minute black and white science fiction film by Chris Marker. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel.^[1]

In French, "jetée" means pier. When air flight was first introduced, airplanes would taxi up to a concrete walkway built onto the runway that was at the level of the entryway to the plane. As planes changed over time, airports were forced to change to movable walkways and staircases to accommodate ever-increasing diversity.

Plot

The survivors of a destroyed Paris in the aftermath of World War III live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send someone back before the devastating war to recover food, medicine, or energy for the present, "to summon the past and future to the aid of the present." The traveler is a male prisoner; his vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the boarding platform ("The Jetty") at Orly Airport is the key to his journey back in time.

He is thrown back to the past again and again. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman who was present at the terminal. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the deep future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society. On his return, he is cast aside by his jailers to die. Before he can be executed, he is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time, but he asks to be returned to the time of his childhood. He is returned, only to find the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult.

Production

La jetée has no dialogue aside from small sections of muttering in German. The story is told by a voice-over narrator. It is constructed almost entirely from optically printed photographs playing out as a photomontage of varying pace. It contains only one brief shot originating on a motion-picture camera. The stills were taken with a Pentax 24x36 and the motion-picture segment was shot with a 35mm Arriflex.^[2] The film score was composed by Trevor Duncan. Due to its brevity, La jetée is often screened in theatres alongside other films; Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) was the film with which it was first released. In Region 2, the film is available with English subtitles in the La jetée/Sans soleil digipack released by Arte Video. In Region 1, the Criterion Collection has released a La jetée/Sans soleil combination DVD, which features the option of hearing the English or French narration.

Adaptations

• Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995) was inspired by, and takes several concepts directly from, La Jetée.
• In 1996, the MIT Press released a book version of La jetée.^[5] It reproduced the film's original images along with the script in both English and French and is now out of print, ^[6] though it was re-released in 2008 by Zone Books.

Cast

• Jean Négroni as narrator
• Hélène Chatelain as the Woman
• Davos Hanich as the Man
• Jacques Ledoux as The Experimenter
• Ligia Branice as a woman from the future
• Janine Kleina as a woman from the future
• William Klein as a man from the future

References

1. ^ La jetée at the Internet Movie Database.
2. ^ La jetée revue & dvd et site internet. Last accessed: January 8, 2008. (French).
3. ^ "On Vertigo", special feature on the Criterion Collection DVD of La jetée and Sans soleil.
4. ^ Independent Lens La puppé, backgrounder, 2008. Last accessed: January 12, 2008.
5. ^ Marker, Chris (1992). La jetée. New York: Zone Books. ISBN 9780942299670.
6. ^ La jetée at the MIT Press