La Jetée (2013)

I love this movie so much

Fantastic!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is one of these movies you wind up watching in film classes, and it's considered a great classic. Unfortunately, it's pretty tedious. It is essentially an illustrated sci-fi short story made up (almost) entirely of still images. This is an admittedly original approach to movie making, but not an especially engaging process.While leisurely told, the real issue for me with the film is it's not a very good sci-fi story. I was immersed from childhood in science-fiction (my dad taught a college literature course devoted to it) and the story struck me as trite and predictable. Admittedly, I saw it 20 years after it came out (in the 1970s), so the story might have seemed more original at the time, but all-in-all this is sub-par Twilight Zone fare given artistic appeal through it's presentation.There is one stunning moment in the movie, and it's such an interesting moment (you'll know it when you see it), and one that is only possible if the film is made just as it is, then arguably it's a good thing for a film student to see. But it's very dull.

Many movies today are designed for lazy viewers, with the director showing us everything he wants us to see and trying to communicate his own vision. La Jetée isn't like that. In fact, it can hardly be called a "movie" since Marker composed it almost entirely of still images rather than moving footage. Marker uses vivid imagery and innovative presentation to etch a story definitively in each viewer's mind. The viewer is forced to fill in the gaps between the photos on his own, to build a story in his own mind, working off the many associations the images call up in his memory. As a result, the film feels interactive and personal. Furthermore, the film is resonant. Whereas many movies leave only vague memories of a plot in their wake, this one lingers in the mind with so many distinctive images: the woman's face, the man in the glasses, the eerie moment when the woman blinks as she lies back in bed. The moment when the protagonist regards his sleepy lover as she blinks, the only moving footage shown in the whole film, is one of Marker's most clever moments in the film, feeling more vivid than any other. Every other plot point — the time travel, the experiments, the scene on the dock — seems hazy and half-forgotten, like a dream. But this moment, with this woman, seems real. The film involves time-travel, but there are no blinky spaceships to be found, and it doesn't feel like dated sci-fi at all. (Well, aside from the eyeliner.) Time-travel plays a marginal role and is used only to illustrate the film's true concerns: memory, loss, and humans' need to dream. The protagonist is sent back in time by his cruel post-apocalyptic government to recreate the past, to weaponize it. Our pilgrim's mind is able to withstand all this without snapping because it has an anchor, in the form of a woman's face, glimpsed years ago from afar and never forgotten. Nothing ever came of this glimpse, but he cherished that one hope in his heart and built his whole being around her image. People's minds are irrational that way, and Marker knows it. His gap-riddled narrative and ambiguous ending play with the audience's irrational minds and force them to feel, well, something.

The film is best known for being the basic idea of "12 Monkeys"."La Jetée" is one of the more special that I've ever seen. A short film (30 mins long) that is in reality a series of images with a narrative voice in the background. It tells the story of an experiment in time travel after a nuclear war, but The story at the end is not so important in the overall pictureThe relentless succession of frames with the thrill of having to wait until the next scene change makes it really effective.I must say that in a sense I was shocked after seeing him. I consider this film a masterpiece 9/10

What is it, where is it, how will it affect me? In a devastated Paris in the aftermath of WWIII, the few surviving humans begin researching time travel, hoping to send someone back to the pre-war world for food, supplies and maybe a solution to their dire position. One man is haunted by a vague childhood memory that will prove fateful. La Jetée, only running for twenty eight minutes, is a fascinating tale told through a narration and a selection of still images taken and arranged by Marker. The content, all-bar-none of which is of utmost beauty of both the light and dark sides of one's heart, is truly remarkable. If a novice to the staggeringly pure and sublimely clever world that La Jetée can conjure second-nature, it's almost best to take it in twice consecutively, once without subtitles to listen to the soothing yet (for most average viewers) unintelligible and ambiguous French poem whilst absorbing the pulchritude of the images that Marker arranges for us. Starting at the pier of Orly Airport in Paris, the crisp sound of jet propulsion graces our ears before gallery-worthy stills of a crumbling, hysterical city roam across the screen. The silent and sans-audio watch will then adorn the audience's eyes with the jewel-like pictures of the menacing, imperious looking doctors who present the equally intriguing and chilling apparatus for the planned psychological time-travel. Upon embarking through past and future, much warmer images to the post-rapture subterranean Paris appear: a museum of taxidermy specimens and a bustling, a beautiful and blissfully ignorant girl with long hair and a pretty smile, and a sunny day back at the airport pier. A perplexing figure then appears, in all his aesthetic glory yet again, but our minds, void of aural explanation, can't piece together what has happened. Upon a second viewing with the disposable narration, La Jetée's deeper, sophisticated philosophical magic is unlocked. We learn of the situation of post-apocalypse and the reason why we've been drawn to this sadist affair in the tunnels below Paris. It continues, just as beautifully and perfectly balanced. The museum is revisited, and we hear: "In fact, it is the only thing he is sure of, in the middle of this dateless world that at first stuns him with its affluence. Around him, only fabulous materials: glass, plastic, terry cloth. When he recovers from his trance, the woman has gone." We learn of the relationship between the prisoner and the woman in his mind, how she succumbs to him so readily, and why she is weeping in despair as the figure reappears on the pier as the twenty eight minutes of unfolded faultless direction, narrative, sculpture and innovative poetry. La Jetée's size and its one-of-a-kind take on stop motion cannot let it fool a perspective audience into missing such a display of technical brilliance and interpretative richness.