CHRIS MARKER’S LA JETEE

Chris Marker’s La Jetee is a cinematic masterpiece created in 1962 that measures twenty-eight minutes in length. The film, with one exception, is made completely from photographic stills. The film’s plot is based around time travel and memory and chooses a technique ideally suited to this theme. Marker’s method of montage ‘replicates gaps in recollection’ and, as such, stands as a direct parallel to the process of memory. Trained as a photojournalist, Marker exploits the still and its ability to supplement its physical reality with the psychological readings provided by the viewer. The use of the editorial cut is not disguised by the director but rather pushed to an extreme as the film cycles through some several hundred images. The role of memory is central the plot which further emphasizes Marker’s desire to use the image not merely as a single sentence to use a literary equivalent but as a series of pixels that inform a larger composition. The film uses sound to give life to the still image and continually challenges the role of the moving image in cinema. It represents a study in the temporal nature of film.

One significant technique is the choice of the director to use of dissolves over the more traditional fade.
A primary example of this is in the scene where a long series of slow dissolves of a woman in bed lead up to the only actual movement in the film, a shot of the woman blinking. Metaphorically, Marker challenges the nature of vision. In another scene, Marker shows his ability to manipulate the still exquisitely when he chooses the site of a natural history museum. The viewer of course appreciates the static nature of the animals but also must reconcile the fact that the living protagonists are also still because of the serial technique.

In Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 zoopraxograph experiment entitled Sallie Gardner at a Gallop, the still is perceivable because of the minimal frame rate allowed by the technology. While the horse seems to be trotting, it also clear that this sequence is made from a series of images. With the advent of higher frame rates the perception of motion was made more continuous. In La Jetee, Marker resists the technological forces at play that aligned frame rate with believability and chooses instead to create continuity through other elements such as sound and narrative structure.