Watching Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1961) I was struck by how many of my memories of films are processed as still images. That is not to say that I don’t remember elements of both the primary and secondary movement I witnessed. But even when I think of some of my favorite complex tracking shots they still are recalled in short snippets as opposed to their complete trajectory. I see Henry Hill slipping the service doorman a twenty and guiding his bride-to-be Karen through the back way into the Copacabana (Goodfellas 1990), but mostly it’s composed of small moments within the larger steadicam shot.
I write this because La Jetee is visually composed almost entirely of still images. As 1001 notes, there is a lone shot of movement which, when it comes, reminds us why the movies are so moving. I feel that this is a film to be seen and not described, as in a way it is beyond description, so I’ll keep it brief. With such a short runtime (28 min.) Marker does so much. The DVD case for the film advertises that it was the partial inspiration for 1995s 12 Monkeys and indeed the stories are very much one and the same, but that is where the similarities end. A double bill of these two excellent films would serve as a great lesson in how two directors approach the same material differently.
While I am a fan of 12 Monkeys, and enjoyed seeing the film which influenced it so greatly, I couldn’t help but also feel that the picture was a great inspiration for elements of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). The dark sub-urban shots used for the film’s post-apocalyptic scenes and the costume choices for the primary protagonist all harkened Travis Bickle to me. Of course my earlier paragraph betrays the fact that I am a Scorsese nut, so perhaps I’m reading into the film what I wanted to get out of it. Even if this is so, I’d recommend La Jetee to any film fan. It functions particularly well as a reasonable starting point for the science fiction fan looking to branch into the rewarding world of foreign film.
Grade: 3.0 Hats Off
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