Comparative Film Practices: La Jetee

La Jetee is one of the most unique films I have encountered in a very long time. Everything about the film is almost immediately engaging, but to understand why it is I want to bring down the whole film first. I want to understand why this film was so engaging to me and brought me into the world that it created.

Nearly the whole film is still images. There is a moment of moving footage at a point during the movie, but for the most part the film is made up of individual pictures accompanied by a narration which tell the entire story. The characters speak, but none of them have individual voices as they are all covered by the narrator as well. What this gives us is a very unique movie that relies even more heavily on the cinematography and the composition of each shot to keep our attention. Since of course, one could easily become bored if they're essentially watching a dubbed over slideshow.

It really made me think again about how relevant and important those two factors are. I mean I knew they were key, but it's sometimes easy to forget how dependent a film is to good framing and imagery. You can lose an audience as quickly as you draw them in by a couple of crappy shots and a lack of interesting imagery. La Jetee has all the right kind of shots in spades.

This leads into the aesthetic for the film. As you can see above, the film is in black and white, which emphasises the importance of lighting in the movie. Everything is very bleak in the ravaged world of tomorrow. Life has been forced underground where the "victors" perform experiments to find someway to escape the hell that they've created. When we return to the past though and see the world as it was before, everything is much brighter.

There is always a dark cloud hanging over the main character, represented by the dark half of his face above, that shows that despite being in this much better place he dreads what is to come in the far future. The rest of the shot is bright though, a sign of a world still spared from a post-apocalyptic conflict. It's an intentional contrast that just adds so much to the narrative and scenes these too characters share. It's one of those things audiences don't even really notice, and likely assume it's just a cool effect, but somehow on a subconscious level we all seem to understand the tone and the mood it creates.

The film 12 Monkeys, which in many ways is a remake of Le Jetee, heavily influenced Terry Gilliam in his film career, and it's easy to see why.

There's so much emotion and horror in most of the frames that make up this film. It's inspired me to look at film a new way too, and I hope it's influences are evident in my film for this module.

Biblography:
Film

• La Jetee. France: Chris Marker, 1966. video.

Website

• Chris Marker,. "La Jetée: Academy One By J.G. Ballard ~ Chris Marker". N.p., 2016. Web. 28 Jan. 2016.
• Filmslie.com,. "La Jetee Chris Marker Analysis | Experimental Film". N.p., 2014. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
• Senses of Cinema,. "Surprised By La Jetée". N.p., 2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.