La Jetee

La Jetee Poster
Originally uploaded by livingfilm.

I just watched Chris Marker's 1962 short film La Jetee, and I loved it!

La Jetee, is entirely made up of still photographs, and was considerably better than Robert Altman's earlier film The James Dean Story that used the same technique -though I wouldn't trade the laughs I get from that movie for anything! It's really priceless. La Jetee is set in the France of the future, after the Third World War. The few survivors of the war now live underground of course! I never get sick of that premise, both The Time Machine and Logan's Run have similar visions of the future and have always stirred my imagination. Having run out of resources necessary to survive, a group of scientists experiment with time travel to hopefully bring the supplies needed to save the human race. To successfully achieve time travel, someone is needed who can emotionally survive the concept of time travel, and our hero is chosen because of an image of his past that haunts him. It is at the Jetty (La Jetee) before the War in Paris, he sees a beautiful woman, and the death of a man.

La Jetee was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's film 12 Monkeys. Curiously, while watching La Jetee I noticed a scene that is an obvious homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Masterpiece Vertigo, where our hero and the woman of his past examine the lines in a fallen tree stump, while we look at a photo of the woman's hair which is styled in a twist the same way Madeline (Kim Novak) does in the Hitchcock film. Now this is the cute part, I was instantly reminded of how that scene of Vertigo appears in 12 Monkeys, which is then actually an homage to an homage, made by using the original inspiration, and in effect bringing everything full circle, which is actually what both films are about in the end.

I highly recommend watching this film, and considering it is only 28 minutes long, it won't take long for you to watch another French New Wave classic. Enjoy!