A Pista

I first saw "La Jetee" in an introductory journalism class in the spring of 1973. The class was large, so large, in fact, that it was held in an auditorium rather than a conventional classroom. But when the film ended, there was about 30 seconds of stone-silence before the murmuring began. I sat slack-jawed and stunned and looked at Mary Ann, a girl who sat next to me and who I was slowly becoming friends with, to check her reaction. She looked equally stunned.

Thirty years have passed and I have occasionally revisited that moment. Despite wanting to know Mary Ann better, I was too timid and never saw her again after that semester ended and despite being stunned by the film, for some reason, I had lost track of its title. All I remembered was a haunting scene at an airport with a guy wearing glasses. That was it.

Just the other day and for no reason at all, I remembered the title "La Jetee" out of the blue. The name just popped into my head. And, even stranger, when I was checking the TV listings earlier today, I found that "La Jetee" was being shown on the Sundance Channel later.

I just finished watching it and I am as slack-jawed and stunned as I was thirty years ago. I guess the next logical thing will be to hear from Mary Ann. Just so long as I don't have to meet her at the airport.

'La Jetee' is a film about movement made up entirely of photographic stills. Well, not entirely. For one transcendent moment the photo moves, ironically at the film's stillest moment, as a woman we have starred at sleeping in the sunny dawn wakes up. It is typical of Marker that a film spanning centuries, millenia, war, torture, experimentation, murder, dreams, time travel, destruction, love, joy, should have as its epiphanical moment an elusive, delusive moment of utter calm, that of a sleeping woman opening her eyes. In a film whose body is the stuff dreams are made on, such a moment is truly cataclysmic.

Like all Marker's masterpieces, 'Jetee', ostensibly a work of science-fiction, is profoundly concerned with Time, Memory and History. Such abstracts treated in lesser hands have a tendency to become vague, airy, removed from life; but Marker, the old leftist, always grounds his philosophy, humanisises and politicises it.

'Jetee', though a short, is rich with ambiguity and irony - the freedom of dreams, to reinvent the past, to escape from circumstances, is exploited by a totalitarian oligarchy, and ultimately fatal for the dreamer. Such is our desperate need to dream, to escape, forget/reinvent, that it is easy to forget that the Man's relationship with the Woman is a phantom, an entire history blown out of a brief glimpse, like that Baudelaire poem where he is stunned by a brief glimpse of a woman he never sees again.

It is this act the tyrants need, this gesture of recreation - by embodying what never happened, by making real or factual what is ultimately desire, he has destroyed history; this paves the way for the vision of 3000, where history is destroyed, and along with it humanity; a Houhnyhm-land of disembodied intelligence. This idea of the death of history, of the victory of post-modernity, would be most eloquently in Marker's chef d'oeuvre, 'Sans Soleil', which was shown with this film at the screening I attended.

But Marker's great achievement here is his creation of the future as a regression, as a descent into medievalism, part-Les Miserables, part-Occupation, with all the signs of French progress and pretension destroyed, with all Haussman's modernity and prosperity run to earth by nuclear contamination, the survivors living in sewers with rats, as their ancestors once did.

Marker's vision is terrifying in its mixture of ruined symmetry and a sickening moral blackness, the general silence punctuated by impenetrable whispers and noises - this is one of the most frightening soundtracks I've ever heard. This medievalism also means a bypassing of the intellect, of literal Enlightenment, and back to a kind of spiritual murk, with pastiche sacred music flooding the film, and parodies of religious kitsch obtruding (the godlike light seeping into dense interiors; religious slogans; the compositions of survivors like beatified saints) on the relics of civilisation, the graffiti, the now-impenetrable codes.

This chaos is contrasted with the Paris of the dream, especially in the museum scene, even more chilling with its statues looking like petrified relics from a volcanic disaster; the mute, stuffed animals warning humans of their fate; the exquisite composition of architecture, trapping the couple in a web of order, boxes, classification, obsolescence, the doomed attempts by mankind to order the universe.

yet this dream is so moving because it offers love, connection, gardens, talk, dreams, Paris, even if they are illusory. because, although this is a dense, difficult, allusive, modern film, it also illuminates a simple, ancient truth 'In the midst of life, we are in death'. As Morrissey once responded, 'Etcetera'.

I note that most of the comments I've seen have been written by people who saw 12 Monkeys first and then chose somehow to see La Jetee.

Comparisons are useless beyond the basic feel of the story.

When I first saw 12 Monkeys I didn't know its relationship to La Jetee, a film I had not seen in 25 years. Yet, I recognized this relationship almost immediately, even though I could not remember the name of the movie. This I realized through the feel of the story ... down to the very end.

In many ways the short film was much more stimulating ... even though I had forgotten the name of the film I had never forgotten the images or the impressions it made upon me. I guess that's strange, but as I recall I saw it at Rice University as a part of a film festival back in the 60s.

Granted, films must sustain themselves somewhat through the years to maintain their value as true art, but one must always remember the context of the film's original audience.

I wonder now if the dependence on stills to portray the story had any influence on Ken Burns? Heh ... he's made a reputation on the same technique.

My point ... accept both movies on their own merits.

If you can find this rare film, you must see it. Unique in film history, this experimental short film consists of a series of still shots tied together by narration. It is the story of a post-apocalyptic Earth and time travel. Each still shot is a work of art, and the plot is compelling. A man with a strong memory of a past event witnessed as a small child (a person being shot at an airport), is periodically sent back into that pre-war period by "experimenters" with devious purposes. While visiting the past, the hero falls in love with a woman from that past.

Watch for the one and only scene that contains any movement and natural sounds (birds in the background, while the woman wakes up next to her lover). Coming in the midst of the relentless still shots, it is one of the most sublime moments in all cinema. You are doing yourself a disservice if you do not see this film.

This is one of the most stunning short films ever made. Marker has pieced together an oblique, sci-fi setting for marvelous still photography; when there is movement, it is a cause for joy! Everyone who is a cineast should see this film: it's that good and it's that important!