La Jete Film Review

1962 dir. Chris Marker

Figure 1: Movie Poster

La Jete is a French short film directed by Chris Marker. It is set in a futuristic world in France, during the aftermath of world war III. Experiments are performed to send a man back in time to try and fix what has happened. It is made up almost entirely of photographs, with only one scene including filmed footage. The film involves a science fiction plot, and uses black and white stills to tell the story. Since each still is on screen for a number of seconds, this allows the audience to focus on them as individual photographs; it seems that each one has been shot specifically to capture interesting angles which serves to make the film visually pleasing to the viewer. Illustrative photographs combined with having narration throughout, it feels like a virtual story book being read by a parent to a child. The filmmaker termed it an un photo roman or photo novel, referring to its unusual construction. (Sondhi, 2012)

Figure 2: performing experiments

Despite the unusual style in which Marker has chosen to tell his story, the film succeeds in making the viewer to feel the pain that the main character (played by Davos Hanich) is going through whilst being experimented on. The image above shows a still of the man being experimented on, which is shown frequently throughout the film. This type of striking imagery appears often in the film, and many images reflect a German post-world war 2 era. Its easy to imagine that for a long time the war and the experiments on bodies, where humanity becomes laboratory material, were a German thing. (Schefer, 1990)

La Jete has been the direct influence for Terry Gilliams Twelve Monkeys, made in 1995. It has been an influence on science fiction films as a whole. The films paradoxical time travel premise has become a science-fiction staple, most famously exploited in James Camerons The Terminator (1984), as well as 12 Monkeys. (Romney, 2007)

Figure 3: Twelve Monkeys

Sources
Images Figure 1: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f7/La_Jetee_Poster.jpg/220pxLa_Jetee_Poster.jpg Figure 2: http://www.thebostonbachelor.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/la-jetee-man-2.png Figure 3: http://www.impawards.com/1995/posters/twelve_monkeys_ver2.jpg

Quotes Romney, Jonathon (2007) http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/485-la-jetee-unchainedmelody (accessed 11/01/13) Schefer, Jean-Louis (1990) http://www.chrismarker.org/jean-louis-schefer-on-la-jete/ (accessed 11/01/13) Sohndi, Jason (2012) http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2012/07/30/la-jetee/ (accessed 11/01/13)