La Jetee

La Jetee 

La Jetee is a french science-fiction short film created in 1962 by Chris Marker. Even though it is a short film I don't think calling it a short film does it justice. This is because the majority of the film is made up of still shots. Even though the film is mostly still shots it still makes a great story with characters with real feelings and a great strong uncomfortable atmosphere throughout the film.

I personally think the film would not have been as successful as it was if it used moving shots for the whole film. This is because Chris Marker makes the viewer work to understand the story and the post-apocalyptic world it is set in. With films using moving shots especially Hollywood films the viewer is fed the plot and just has to watch and enjoy themselves but with La Jetee you have to focus on each shot or you will get lost. Even just watching every shot is not enough to fully grasp the film in its entirety. I had to watch the film multiple times before I felt like I started to understand the meaning of the film. With the Le Jetee the viewer is forced to come up with their own interpretation of the story because unlike mainstream modern films we are not lead to the meaning the director wants, Chris Marker wanted the viewer to come up with their own meaning.

One sequence of the film which stuck out to me was the group of images which shows the carnage of the third world war and the state that Paris was left in. The photos show no action as in bombs dropping but they show the dramatic change from a city full of buildings to areas full of rubble and the remaining structures of buildings which did not fully collapse. Not only do these shots show the catastrophic change that the character experienced but it also is a great way of showing the passage of time. The director could have just used the directors voice explaining the third world war and then show the characters underground but they decided to visually show the changes made to the world after the third world war. The editing in this section of the film also adds to the feeling of the movement of time. The shots do not cut to the next but instead they slowly fade in to the next image, as the images fade the destruction of the city becomes more visible. The choice of fading instead of just simply cutting takes longer which shows that time is moving. 

Chris Marker

Chris Marker was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. La Jetee is Chris's best known work. Chris Marker was a very talented man, not only with film. You can see his other talents through La Jetee. He was very skilled at photography and some of the shots in Le Jetee show this. Through out Le jetee Chris uses most of the formal elements of photography to add to the atmosphere of the film. For example this still shot from La Jetee speaks more meaning than a moving  shot. This is because of the way Chris has framed this shot. The main formal element of photography Chris uses throughout La Jetee is tone. The close up shots of characters always have dark tones that cover a large area of their face in darkness. The only characters that do not follow this pattern of dark tones is the female and the children. Chris does this to show that the post-apocalyptic has affected the prisoners under Paris in a negative way. The darkness shows negativity and the light shows positivity. This is all shown by the lighting and angle Chris used in each shot. Such an in-depth part of the characters in La Jetee can be explained without using the narrator. 

Influence

Chris Marker was influenced by the public's obsession with advancements in technology at the time. He was also politically left so he was against war so to show the negative affect of wars he used La Jetee to show a post-apocalyptic world like ours which was the result of war, he was associated the Left Bank Movement which were a group of french film makers who were politically left and made experimental film. He was also fascinated with the concept of time and memory. So he put all three of these obsessions to create La jetee