370. La Jetée (The Pier) (1961)

Directed By Chris Marker

Synopsis

After World War III the victors do experiments on prisoners to send them to the past and future so that humanity may survive.

Review

This is a very short film done completely by making a sequence of stills connected by narration. And this is all you need to make a film, sequential images and a plot on screen.

In fact the film is so well paced that after some 5 minutes you start forgetting its particular style and just follow the story of it. This is experimentalism how it should be done, not as a chore for the viewer but as something that the viewer can enjoy at least as much as its creator. So the visual style is challenging? Put some interesting plot in it. The plot is strange, mundane or cryptic? Do it in a visually interesting way. Sometimes both might work as in Yasujiro Ozu's films where the camera is still and the subject mundane but touching, but that is rare indeed.

So the film works great both as a piece of entertainment (which then would give origin to 12 Monkeys) and as an example of what sequential images on a screen can do even without the "moving" image. Somewhere between the Comic and the Film, this is a unique piece of Cinema.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

La jetée has no dialogue aside from small sections of muttering in German. The story is told by a voice-over narrator. It is constructed almost entirely from optically printed photographs playing out as a photomontage of varying pace. It contains only one brief shot originating on a motion-picture camera. The stills were taken with a Pentax 24x36 and the motion-picture segment was shot with a 35mm Arriflex. The film score was composed by Trevor Duncan. Due to its brevity, La jetée is often screened in theatres alongside other films; Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) was the film with which it was first released.

It is online, part 1: