I just watched la jetée - and I can see why it made a mark in cinematic history. I’ve never seen anything like it. The whole 28 minutes consisted of still photographs, combined with cleverly placed music, sounds, whispers, and narration that all built up towards a dream-like reality. The only moving image had a profound impact - when the woman opens her eyes, at the same time the chirping of birds built up until it was almost deafening - and just when he was so close to really seeing her, he wakes in his present time - still trapped in the undergrounds of Paris as a time-travelling experiment.
What really struck me first in this film in the plot is how that childhood image, that traumatic one of seeing a man die at that airport, anchors the story and that image-memory is actually what made the scientists used to bait him into those experiments, taking advantage of such a vivid scene. Soon, he was able to travel to different times - and fell in love. They took walks, walked through gardens. Went to a natural history museum, surrounded by taxidermy animals - I think in French the narration described them as ‘eternal creatures’ but was translated into ‘ageless animals’. That scene was very significant, I think, he realises that was the last he'll ever see of her when he wakes up again. (until the end). The sense of wonder from seeing this nature is really conveyed here - thinking about what Lisa Corrin said in The Greenhouse Effect. I'll put here a section from my dissertation below:
Louis Marin, in Degenerate Utopia, says this about the visitor at Disneyland:
“The visitor is on the stage; he performs the play; he is alienated by his part without being
aware of performing a part. In ‘performing’ Disney’s utopia, the visitor realises the models
and the paradigms of his society in the mythical story by which he imagines his social
community has been constructed.” (Marin, 1997, p. 54)
The element of wonder is also key here. Lisa Corrin, in writing for the Serpentine Gallery’s
2000 exhibition The Greenhouse Effect, argued that wonder is produced by a “confusion
between nature and culture” (2000, p. 44) - the juxtaposition of the ‘real’ and ‘artful’ in
recognising that “wonder is not a by-product of nature at all, but of the museum and its
accoutrements” (p. 42). It is this forced separation of nature and culture in museum
architecture that impacts how we experience knowledge and wonder:
“Wonder became the product of a homogenizing language of display and exhibition-making
that has constructed our relationship to objects and experiences ever since and has failed to
take into account the dynamic interaction of such terms such as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in
everyday reality.” (p. 44)
The buildup of the chirping birds as we see the first and only moving part of the film - when she opens her eyes - seems a contradiction to what came straight afterwards - in the silence of the museum. But the two were not concerned about the fakeness of nature. the man was at the peak of being in love, and the woman seemed to be there too. A lot of this film, as expected from a sci-fi genre (though not cliché at all) is about time. The time-travelling, the use of still photographs vs. the one moving, the traumatic memory, the way time was described in his interactions with the woman(vagueness of dream/memory/realtime), the frozen taxidermy (the undead), the ultimate moment of death when he defies time... it is all very fascinating and is making me think of Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life/Arrival again whereby the aliens do not see time as a linear thing like humans do (which is overwhelming to think about, can't even wrap my head around it) and also a little bit of peter pan (I was thinking a lot about the concept of 'never growing up' in first year) and Alice/dorothy (wanting to return to their own time etc.) and of course other sci-fi sources I need to familarise myself with. and time is such a broad thing that ties literally everything that has ever been created... I saw a comment on the link which talks about time here:
I also watched some commentary videos on youtube around this film:
on the sound of la jetée
also, in this video they say that la jetée is riddled with references to Hitchcock's film Vertigo (especially the music) which acts like a strange déja vu... (I need to watch that too)
director of 12 Monkeys (heavily inspired) talking about the film
the NY times critic's picks
the English version of the taxidermy scene
anyway, watching this masterpiece gave me a lot to think about especially in the way it tackled all these different elements to construct an engaging narrative using basically only still photos. It's a success story of using something unmoving to move the viewer. The dialogue is quite inspiring too, makes me want to write something. I don't even know what kind of tone I want to go for yet (or if I'm even going to do a video) (something quite informative yet creative like The Great Silence? or a complete story? addressing the viewer? etc.) I'm going to watch the other video works of contemporary artists I found the past few days for inspiration in their approach to video work... I have some ideas but I have not really had much experience before... it's quite overwhelming working in a new medium. I have an abundance of photographs, and videos over the years. But I also love found footage. I'm going to keep looking at video works and see where I can take off...
below are screenshots from the film:
