LA JETE

Film: La Jete (1962)

Director: Chris Marker

Writer: Chris Marker

Stars: Etienne Becker, Jean Negroni, Helen Chatelain

            This is an abstract film shown in an apocalyptic style, written in a way which prophesizes a cataclysm in which evil forces are destroyed.  The main character in this film is a man who is a prisoner and is being experimented on.  He is injected with drugs and forced to travel through time where he visits the past, present, and future; including the events following a fictional World War III.  His objective is to replenish the food supply, medicine and energy.  However, he is attached and obsessed with a woman whom he desires to be with instead of following futuristic people to their planet.  His choice to return to his childhood results in him being transported to an airport where he witnesses his own death.  What makes this film interesting is the way it was created; a series of narrated pictures dubbed with music.  “Identified as a photo-roman, a photopraph-fiction, a term that readily evokes its complex narrative strategies.  The visual track consists primarily of still photos connected by straight cuts, fades, and dissolves, the editing rhythms and the variations in camera position are so like those in conventional moving pictures that the spectator may feel s/he is watching a movie rather than a comic book.” (15, Kawin) 

            This is an experimental film that is also a short because it is only 28 minutes long.  The scenes of the airport and museum are shot in France.  One of the most memorable scenes is when the man is in the museum with his lover surrounded by preserved dead animals.  These animals can be seen as metaphors for many different things; some which include the people that died in the war and the memory of this couple’s primal love.  The thesis of this film is “one cannot escape form time.”  This film explores with the concept of time and how the prisoner goes back and forth experiencing events in both the past and future. “Time is often described in this film as a series of waves, it is significant that La Jete can also mean breakwater, something that extends or projects into the sea.” (16, Kawin)  The thesis of this film is that you cannot escape time and that it is intertwined with your life. The scene in the museum also suggests that time is in a state of stasis; with the statues, animals, and pictures that donot move- suggesting that this relationship, like the objects are dead.  Metaphors can be used in film as a powerful visual media concept.  

            Even though this is a hypothetical movie of fictional events instead of historical events, this film does touch upon the post-war era by showing scenes of a destroyed and dilapidated future after the war.  This type of environment after a war is very expected and possible. “The chaos after the Second World War differed from the chaos after World War I.  Real shortages and physical destruction were more pervasive, and continental Europe was occupied by the victorious armies, not by freelance soldiers like those who had refused to demobilize after World War I.” (397, Smith)