Friday, November 2, 2007
Marker of time: La Jetee
Chris Marker's La Jetee is one of my favorite films. Most notable is its use of still imagery as motion picture grammar and storytelling. Let's face it, the Leica M is so much more portable and intimate than the preferred tool of Marker's French New Wave brethren, the Eclair ACL. And freeze drying time is important. What's more powerful? Elliot Erwitt's image of the Khrushchev/Nixon debate or a newsreel of the event.
Also, the film's post-war futuristic apocalyptic theme will always resonate with my being at the very tale end of the duck and cover generation. And I think it is a most rudimentary human impulse to muse on the nature of memory and the possibility of time travel. The scenes in La Jetee of the time traveler and the woman of his memory in among the natural history artifacts always return to me whenever I am in a quiet corner of a museum.
I showed La Jetee to my GRCP 101 class to begin a discussion about the choices a creator has with media, form, and content, just as a professor did to me thirty years prior. I'm not sure how many times I have seen his film. Probably forty at least. I've seen the English and French versions in 16mm, owned VHS airchecks, borrowed temperamental videos, and now have Criterion's DVD release in our school library. It even lives on YouTube (albeit the inferior, in my mind, English version.)
I'm not sure how many times I have seen his film: Probably forty at least. Just like a favorite symphonic work, there is something both new and reassuring to be rediscovered every time.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:00 PM
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