Week One:
Film watched in class- La Jetée (1962), Chris Marker
My initial reaction to the film was divided. On one hand I felt a nice sense of completion and resolution as the title character reached the end of his journey and on the other hand I felt confusion at this "resolution". The surprising twist bookmarks the beginning of the film and answers the question, "Who was the man on the Pier at Orly?"
But my confusion quickly follows and my certainty of what happened begins to fade. The protagonist himself speculates that he will see himself as a child as he has just been transported to a moment from his past. However we do not see this, the mise-en-scene is clear, we see the woman and an adult man at the end of the pier. Because of that I found it hard to pinpoint the logic, if there was any to be had, from the end of La Jetée. The main character saw a premonition of his future death but when he visits the memory he sees no boy. Does this mean that he, as a boy, experienced this event at all? Was this simply a prophetic dream, thought to be a memory?
The course is titled "Films about Love" and La Jetée tells the story of a man in love with a memory or a dream. He even realizes that the woman he spends time with is dead in his own time period. This does not stop him from loving her memory, spending time with a phantom. Perhaps this is the residual devotion of a child, echoing from the time when he first saw her as a boy at Orly. He sees her as beautiful, but there is no real romance between them, only comfort and amicable conversation.
As mentioned in Jonathan Romney's article, La Jetée: Unchained Melody, the opening titles classifies La Jetée as a "photo-roman" or a "photo-book". He argues that since films are really just one still image after another in quick succession, La Jetée's sequence of still photos simply takes this concept and plays with the time involved. The idea of the film being a book also brings to my mind the idea that we "read" photos in order to decipher their meaning. The viewer has to read between the lines (or photos...) and participate more actively in viewing the film. This format eliminates the passivity of moving images.
-Claudia
