Bracing Against the Future in La Jetée
Chris Marker’s La Jetée stretches our expectation of what makes a film. Consisting of still images with simple voiceover and infrequent musical score, Marker’s film lasts less than thirty minutes.
Despite its simple structure, La Jetée builds a complex story. It begins with the formation of a memory: a young boy at Paris’ Orly airport is struck by the expression on a woman’s face seconds before witnessing a man fall to the ground. Dead. But the image that etches itself into the boy’s life is that face.
In time, the world falls into the chaos of another world war, this one more total than the previous. Humanity is forced underground, subsisting off what little is left of sustenance and hope. The boy become man is a prisoner of an unspecified group that begins running experiments on the people they’ve captured. In time, they select the man, and he learns that this group is trying to connect people to the past and future. The hope is that other people of other times will come to the aid of the present. It may be a noble goal, but those in power are clearly not noble people. They bear little empathy with their victims, even as they claim hope for greater humanity.
To realize their goal, they need someone with a strong, sensual grasp of the past: an unwavering memory. They select the man and send him to the past, where he connects with the woman he saw at Orly. Over multiple “trips,” they bond and grow in their relationship. It’s a little unclear whether these events actually take place or are borne in the mind—but what matters is sense of life he discovers with her. In this lowest point of humanity, this man recaptures an unexpected joy with another. Forget sustenance: this is the world’s best hope.
It’s a sci-fi set up (one that Terry Gilliam would build on in Twelve Monkeys), but Marker’s interest is in the psychological complexity. The way that memory expands to something real, how it cultivates an aim toward the future, particularly when the present is barren. Marker wields the images and score with care, guiding the emotion.
Like someone staring at you unblinkingly in a crowd, La Jetée arrests the attention. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why the film is so effective despite its simplicity, but you don’t stop to question it. The images and story carry you along. In a way, the still photographs hone a sense of both anticipation and ephemerality. We brace for the future, even as we fear the present slipping into the past.
