La Jetée
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| La Jetée | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Chris Marker |
| Produced by | Anatole Dauman |
| Written by | Chris Marker |
| Starring | Jean Negroni Etienne Becker Davis Hanich Jacques Ledoux Helene Chatelain |
| Music by | Trevor Duncan |
| Cinematography | Chris Marker |
| Editing by | Jean Ravel |
| Release date(s) | 1962 |
| Running time | 28 min. |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
La Jetée (1962) (literally "The Jetty") 28-minute science fiction film in black and white by Chris Marker.
It tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed, i.e., optically printed, photographs playing out as a photomontage of varying pace with no dialogue and a narration consisting of a voice-over. It contains only one brief shot originating on a motion-picture camera. The film score was composed by Trevor Duncan.
Due to its brevity it often accompanies other films; Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) was the film it was first released with.
Contents |
[edit] Plot
In the movie, the survivors of a destroyed Paris in the aftermath of World War III live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send someone back to before the devastating war to recover food, medicine, or energy for the present, "to summon the past and future to the aid of the present". The traveller is a male prisoner, his vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the main terminal ("The Jetty") at Orly Airport is used as the key to his journey back in time. He is thrown back to the past again and again. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman who was present at the terminal. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the deep future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society. On his return, he is cast aside by his imprisoners to die. Before he can be executed, he is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time, but he asks to be returned to his childhood. He is returned and finds the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult.
[edit] Roots and references
- A scene in La Jetée (about tree rings) is an explicit reference to Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 Vertigo film (which is the adaptation of D'entre Les Morts, a 1954 French novel, by Boileau-Narcejac).
- Mamoru Oshii's Akai Megane (a.k.a. 'The Red Spectacles') is a 1987 live-action film that was inspired by La Jetée. It features a scene on the Tokyo jetty which is a tribute to La Jetée, one of the Japanese director's favourite films.
- The David Bowie Jump They Say music video contains a reference to La Jetée.
- The 2003 short film, La Puppe, is both an homage and a spoof of La Jetée.
[edit] Other versions
- Terry Gilliam's 1995 Twelve Monkeys, an Americanized remake of La Jetée, helped the introduction of this '60s cult film to a broader audience. In Gilliam's version, however, the plot was changed significantly.
[edit] Trivia
- A tiny and world-famous bar in Japan is named La Jetée in homage to Chris Marker's movie. The bar is located in the Golden Gai section of Kabukicho, Shinjuku, in central Tokyo, and the seating charge was ¥700 per person as of 1 August, 2006.
- A digitally restored version of La Jetée is available on video, with English subtitles, in the "La Jetée/Sans Soleil" DVD digipack released by Arte Video. This, of course, is a Region 2 PAL DVD, and will only play on American/Canadian/Japanese players that are region-free.
- Recent DVD releases, condoned by the director, replace the original French narration and English subtitles, with a new English narration (which alters the meanings of certain phrases). Some fans of La Jetée have decried these changes, calling for an available DVD version which preserves the French narration.
- In French, 'La Jetée' is a homophone of 'there I was' ('là j'étais').
[edit] External links
- La Jetée at the Internet Movie Database
- La Jetée at Google Video
- La Jetée 's script
- Senses of Cinema: Platonic Themes in Chris Marker's La Jetée
- La Jetée: analysis of themes and storyline
- La Jetée: Famous Cinema Bar in Tokyode:La Jetée
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