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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Open your eyes., April 25, 2002
'La Jetee' is a pier in Orly airport on the eve of World War 3 and the destruction of Paris; a barely distinguishable harbour in a concrete sea. Despite the title, the only mention of water in Chris Marker's film is to the waves of memory that carry the hero back to his past. He is now a prisoner in an underground labyrinth undergoing experiments by scientists who, space having been made redundant, hope to puncture a hole in time, through which men can be sent to bring back desperately-needed supplies. After many failures resulting in death or madness, they have chosen the hero because of his singular imaginative life, fixated on one moment in his childhood on the pier, the face of the woman who haunts him, staring at an unknown man rushing through the crowd. Meeting her in the past, they go for walks, visit museums, sunbathe, sleep. The journey to the past being so successful, they try to send him to the future.Marker calls 'La Jetee' a photo-novel, and it is composed entirely of photographical stills, except for one montage that secretes a surprise that is one of the most unexpected, literally eye-opening joys of the cinema, all the more precious considering the general gloom of the work, the foreboding atmosphere of death, the images of destruction, the frozen tableaux of torture and sufering. The term 'photo-novel' however, implies that the film could just as easily be enjoyed as a book, and Marker has released 'La Jetee' in such a format. But the film doesn't work this way - not only is the editing and the variation of pacing the images crucial to how we receive them, long-held compositions alternating with abrupt montages; but these sets of images interplay with a typically layered Marker soundtrack. This soundtrack itself has at least three components - the narrating voice, authorial yet phantasmal; the (often sacred) music; and the manipulated ambient sound, whether it is the conspiratorial whispers that accompany the underground experimental sessions, or the sinister, pumping beat that segues imperceptibly into Herrman's score for 'Vertigo' for the sequoia sequence. Like Hitchcock's film, Marker's ur-text, 'La Jetee' is a bleak study in memory, in the tricks it plays, in its fusions with fantasies, desires, lies and repression, in its importance for defining the self or its dissolution. For Marker, this interest has always been political, revealing the fragility of the subject caught in the annihilating marches of history, a history it tries to transcend or evade, but which eventually swallows it up and spits it out. 'La Jetee' is also an early cinematic classic of post-modernity, a vision of a future Paris that, like Godard's 'Alphaville', is a diagnosis of the present. Marker's fearless command of the abstract rooted in the particular gives his films, and 'La Jetee' especially, a heady charge that could be mistaken for the spiritual (some of the scenes of torture are like religious ecstasies sculpted by Bernini), and which is all his own.
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by Chris Marker
DVD ~ Étienne Becker
