Introducing la Jetee

We are starting our course with Chris Marker's famous 1962 film la Jetee for a number of reasons. One is that I want to use it as a tutor text for demonstrating some classic features of camera shots and editing. Because of its stylistic simplicity it helpfully highlights a number of basic cinematic "building blocks" that are so familiar to us we no longer "see" them.

But another is la Jetee's most recognizable and defining element: it is movie that doesn't move. la Jetee is a film constructed out of a series of still shots, it almost entirely withholds the illusion film is most famous for: moving images. (The film does quietly lapse into movement for a brief and important moment.) By challenging spectator expectation in such a simple, yet shocking fashion, this film also gives us a good place to begin thinking about the assumptions and preconceptions we bring to all our encounters with narrative, both visual and written.

As one of the most influential and important films, la Jetee has generated a great deal of commentary. Although the technical style of the film provides a large portion of its arresting charm, the essential storyline is constructed in surprising detail for such a short piece. In part, this effect is achieved through the choice of superlative black & white photographs. The stills are grainy enough and shot in such a way that the immediate impression is of wartime photojournalism---in fact some of them are photographs of WWII ruins which still existed in 60's Paris. And because the shots are so stylistically layered, they can suggest more than they literally depict: Marker's spare story-telling style draws on conventions of visual representation we all are familiar with: of war, of science, of romance, of rural tranquility, of urban bustle, and so on.

The film also makes use of the complete vocabulary of conventional film shots and editing. As Franz Cruz remarks, "The twenty nine-minute film is perhaps the most impressively edited film I've ever seen. The black and white stills magically move through the fades to black, the perfectly-timed cuts, and the transitions that are all the more made effective by pertinent yet bare sound effects and the memorably apt musical score." Cross cutting, wipes, subjective camera, POV shots, reaction shots, jump cuts, synchronous and non-synchronous sound: the film contains a textbook's worth of cinematic example. Perhaps the most significant result of la Jetee's visual style is that the basic structures of film, of narrative itself, are stripped bare and revealed.

In his review of the Criterion Collection's release of the DVD version of la Jetee and Marker's other early film, Sans Soleil, Dan Schneider wrote: "What is so good about the film is that it shows how superfluous much of the ‘motion’ in motion pictures is. Film, after all, is a medium founded and nurtured by the written word. Without a good screenplay, a film is just shadows on a wall... And, most of all, when one recalls [la Jetee], the mind fills in the gaps of motion, and one ‘sees,’ in memory, the film as a real film, filled with pictures in motion, even though that is not so (save for one brief 2-3 second scene). Marker fully plays on the human imagination to fill in the blanks, both narratively, and visually. In short, his film trusts the intelligence of his audience."

That the film is, among other things, an extended meditation on memory and its representation, is a point made in nearly all commentary on la Jetee. Paul Smith remarks, "the originality of Chris Marker's film obviously resides, as has been regularly demonstrated, in the work of the image itself: a framing of the most obscure zones of memory's fragility and unpredictability; and a montage that replicates gaps in recollection." And Sander Lee focuses on issues of representation and memory in his essay, Platonic Themes in Chris Marker's la Jetee, from Senses of Cinema.

It's easy to see how the science fiction trope of time travel connects with the film's exploration of memory, but the genre also dovetails with la Jetee's self-reflexive take on cinema itself. One of the most recognizable images of early filmmaking is this still from Georges Méliès 1902 film, Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon):


Besides referencing film's science fiction origins, la Jetee contains other allusions to the medium's history, like the setting of the galleries underneath the Palais de Chaillot where Henri Langlois hid the Cinémathèque Française film archives from occupying Nazis, or the reference to Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film, Vertigo, in the scene of the lovers before the segment of giant redwood whose rings are marked with historical dates.

As you watch this film in class, you may want to notice how conventional the film truly is. As mentioned before, despite it's lack of motion, the film makes use of nearly every formal convention of cinema in its use of sound, camera shots, and editing.

And you may also want to observe how conventional a narrative it is: it has a 3rd person narrator who describes and explains all actions and their meanings, it is linear with a clear sense of past, present and future which enables the "flashbacks" and "flashforwards" necessary for the time travel motif, it has a main character and also gives him a love interest, it has a strong sense of closure where the story is wrapped up in a thorough and final fashion.

And yet, because of a few changes to formal conventions, the film seems much more unconventional than it is. Why this is will be interesting to explore in class. I think la Jetee is an evocative film with which to begin our class because it's tweaking of conventions reveals a great deal about them, and also about the assumptions that structure "spectatorship:" audience expectations and familiar habits of reading and viewing.

(The version we will be screening in class Tuesday is a recent remastering by Marker himself which replaces the original French voice-over with a beautiful narrative in English. It supersedes an earlier print with English subtitles. Unfortunately, I can't find a good complete version of either this or the  subtitled one online. They used to exist. They don't now.

There are a few clips available on YouTube: some nice bits a few minutes long and one nearly impossible to watch 3-parter that seems to be a videotape shot off the film screen. The best I could come up with is a very visually bad copy on Google Video. I hesitate to include a link to this version because of the level of image degeneration: the digital artifacts here are so bad they almost create an illusion of movement in the stills. Nevertheless, for those that want a preview, here it is.)