La Jetée: Montage, Past and Future

What more can be said of Chris Marker’s groundbreaking “photo-novel,” La Jetée (1962)? Its subject matter, concerning a man experimentally sent into the past and future after World War III, influenced William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk. Its heartrate-raising editing inspired Terry Gilliam. David Bowie references it in a music video. No brief blogpost from me can hope to add to the vast pile of interpretations it has received nor speak to the influence it has had.

I suppose I’m writing about it because I rewatched it after about a decade. My first go was on a laptop, sitting on a garden bench with a friend. No lover of film would call such an experience adequate to the text. But it was memorable—the rapid-fire pace of the images, the mumbling German of the experimenters. Not until this time, though, can I say I really appreciated it.

Its power comes from its odd simplicity. Man is in future. War has brought death. His captors experiment on him in an attempt to save the present from its cataclysmic state. All told in still, black-and-white images. It conveys so much with so little. Some ASMR-like evil German here, a woman’s face there. Here, we see a man’s blank stare. There, a gentle laugh amidst a museum of stuffed birds.

Chris Marker conjures a world from stillness. He distils cinema to its most fundamental components (images, editing, sound) and allows our brain to make the connections. We provide the movement; the ever-present need to link series of pictures shows itself as its own essence. Our role as viewers comes to the fore; watching La Jetée feels almost collaborative. What more could one ask for in film? Can we hope for a cinematic future so bright?

That, I suppose, is my takeaway. We have such cinematic treasures to draw on, so simple, there for the taking. Let’s get back to basics.