La Jetée (2013)

When I first heard about this movie (in film school of course), I didn't think it would be very interesting. A "movie" which mostly consists of still images and a narrator telling a story. Sounds like a combination of a comic book and an audio-book, right? Well, then I saw it and was mesmerized. Even if you know the story this hits me emotionally, every time I see it. Scary and incredibly beautiful at the same time. "La jettée" is probably called a movie, because we don't have a better word to describe what it actually is. For me this is as close as art can get to an actual dream, one of those when you are not really sure if you are in a nightmare or something more hopeful. And while the narrative goes on relentlessly, what's really scary and completely unpredictable are the images that come with it. They do not just illustrate the plot but add another layer to it. Being still images this style almost dissects what a movie does 24 times a second, but it is not as cerebral as this sounds, but actually quite engaging and inspiring. Brilliant.Later this was adapted by Terry Gilliam as a movie called 12 monkeys, which is a good and entertaining science fiction movie, but la jettée is a unique experience.

This modest little film, made up almost entirely of still photography (there is one brief sequence of motion which you will miss if you blink), also happens to be the inspiration for the film and television series "Twelve Monkeys". This I did not realize when I started watching it recently for the first time. Only at the end did I realize that it is the same concept as "Twelve Monkeys" and suddenly remembered hearing that "Monkeys" is based on a 1960s French film.This "movie" (its "movement" is truly illusory even if it is an effective illusion) is affecting and the denouement is worth waiting for (and, besides, the whole piece is only 28 minutes long).The title, "La Jetee", has interesting connotations. The literal meaning of this title is "The Pier", but the average English speaker might not know that airport architecture uses this term, which is taken over from seaports. You usually see signs for "terminals" and not "piers" in airports, but "pier" is more or less what is meant by "terminal" even though there is supposed to be a difference between the two terms. What is interesting historically is that because the film was made in the early 1960s, the pier at Orly Airport, which is near Paris, is an open-air pier where both passengers and their well-wishers can watch the planes load and unload both baggage and passengers. This is no longer possible because terminals now tend to be entirely enclosed and only passengers are allowed to reach the departure point. In more ways than one, watching this movie is a kind of time travel. In it, the pivotal scene takes place outdoors whereas, by the time "Twelve Monkeys" was made in the 1990s, the scene had to be done inside an airport terminal. Also, in the first scene, if you look at the airport tarmac as viewed from the pier, you will see planes with the tail-markings of two airlines that no longer exist, TWA (ceased doing business in 2001) and PanAm (ceased in 1991).

What can I say? Its the best. Consisting mainly of stills. With one simple motion of the eyes from a solitary woman the woman of his dreams... reality. Science fiction, romance, whatever... its the best. From Sight and Sound: "We've saved the shortest and sweetest for last. Not only does Chris Marker's twenty-eight-minute La Jetée have the briefest running time of any film in the Sight & Sound top fifty, it's also certainly the only one made up almost exclusively of still photographs. Yet so much emotional and visual power is packed into Marker's singular work of postapocalyptic science fiction that its inclusion on a list like this is compulsory. The eerily beautiful time-travel tale is set in the tunnels under Paris after a third World War has ravaged the city, though it occasionally flashes back to a brighter past, where a government guinea pig is sent to collect data that might help save the world. Once there, the man, already obsessed with an obscure, romantic memory from his personal past—of a mystery woman watching him from an airport jetty—discovers his own tragic fate."

This is one of these movies you wind up watching in film classes, and it's considered a great classic. Unfortunately, it's pretty tedious. It is essentially an illustrated sci-fi short story made up (almost) entirely of still images. This is an admittedly original approach to movie making, but not an especially engaging process.While leisurely told, the real issue for me with the film is it's not a very good sci-fi story. I was immersed from childhood in science-fiction (my dad taught a college literature course devoted to it) and the story struck me as trite and predictable. Admittedly, I saw it 20 years after it came out (in the 1970s), so the story might have seemed more original at the time, but all-in-all this is sub-par Twilight Zone fare given artistic appeal through it's presentation.There is one stunning moment in the movie, and it's such an interesting moment (you'll know it when you see it), and one that is only possible if the film is made just as it is, then arguably it's a good thing for a film student to see. But it's very dull.