014 - La Jetee, 1963, France; Dir. Chris Marker.

Saturday, January 14, 2017

014 - La Jetee, 1963, France. Dir. Chris Marker.

Have you ever been haunted by a memory?

What is your earliest memory that has stayed with you the longest?

Do you have any images of childhood that continue to influence you today.

Have you ever had deja vu?

You are in a place, in a moment, and suddenly it seems as though you have been there before, in that moment.  The layout of the room, the objects, the people, the things people say and the order in which they say them.  You have experienced it before.

"The memory of a twice-lived fragment of time."

What if the deja vu, the experience in the present, were a memory from the past?

Could a memory from your past be an image from your future?

Let us meet a man who has had this happen to him.

He is a little boy, and his parents take him to the airport to watch the planes take off and land.  He is happy.

La Jetee means the jetty, and it is translated as pier.  It refers to the rooftop deck of the airport terminal, in this case in the city of Orly in France.

Imagine an airport terminal, that long strip of building where the planes pull up and park on each side, and the travelers embark and disembark through portable hallway bridges called jetways.

Now imagine that the rooftop had been constructed as one long deck available for visitors to walk out on and watch the planes.

Like a jetty.  Or a pier.  Only instead of going out into the water, it goes out into the tarmac.  This is how it used to be.

The boy on the pier sees two things.  One is a beautiful woman.  The other is a man die.

That moment on that day remains with him, as you can imagine.  He will remember the woman's face for the rest of his life.

Years pass.  He grows up.  The world goes to war.  World War 3.  Paris is destroyed.

Some survivors become leaders.  Others become victims.  They live underground in the catacombs, as the surface is filled with deadly radioactivity.

The leaders begin to conduct experiments to save society.  They need someone to travel through time to rescue the present.  If a man could go to the future, he could retrieve a power plant strong enough to put all human industry in motion again

They select our man.  His memory from childhood makes his brain strong enough to withstand the rigors of time travel.  He does not know, however, that they will be sending him to the future.  They must lure him first, by sending him to the pleasant places of the past.

He wants to meet the woman.

They conduct experiments.  Time travel is not easy.

On the 10th day he begins to see images.

On the 16th day he arrives at the pier at Orly.  He sees different women.  He tries to find the one.

On the 30th day he finds her.  He is sure she is the one.  But while he is discovering the world around him, she disappears.

The experimenters send him back.  He finds her again.  She responds like a dream.  "He says something.  She doesn't mind.  She answers."

They begin to spend time together.  They go on walks.  They go to gardens.  They look at a sequoia tree.  They go to museums.  They go to one particular museum.  They develop trust.  They fall in love.

The experimenters continue to send him back and he continues to meet her.  She takes it as natural that he appears and disappears out of what is to her the future.  She calls him her ghost.  He never knows whether he is acting completely freely or whether he is being driven, whether he is fully experiencing it or whether it is a dream.

Eventually he returns to the present, to the laboratory, and he realizes that the experimenters were sending him to the past to practice and develop their ability to time travel, and that his real mission is to go to the future to retrieve the power plant.

He does so, but now he is being chased, chased through time, chased by men who want to kill him.

He brings back the power plant.  The present is saved.  He asks to go back to the time at Orly with the woman, where he will feel safe and happy and loved.

He does.

He arrives on the pier.  He sees her.  He runs to her.  But he also sees the man who has been chasing him and he realizes that he cannot escape time.

He remembers the memory of his childhood, of seeing the beautiful woman and of seeing a man die.

Now he knows who the man is that he saw die when he was a child.

Watch the movie and find out whom.

La Jetee is 27 minutes long, and it is a slide show.

A slide show.

The word movies is short for moving pictures.  This is a series of still pictures.  Is it a movie?  Or is it a set of stills?

A stillie.

Chris Marker was in the middle of filming a travel documentary when he had this idea.  It came to him all at once.  He took a camera and some people and went and shot still pictures and pieced them together into a montage that tells this story.

Criterion calls it, "One of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made."

It influenced the plot of Terry Gilliam's film 12 Monkeys.

It influenced David Bowie's music video "Jump They Say."

If you have ever watched a movie and used the phrase dystopian future to describe it, then it may have been influenced by this film.

Chris Marker himself tells the story of making a montage when he was a child, using a device known as a Patheorama, a story told by a series of stills.

He showed it to his friend.  His friend criticized him.  "Movies are supposed to move, stupid.  Nobody can do a movie with still images."

Chris says, "Thirty years passed.  Then I made La Jetee."

The rest is history.

See you at the stills.