La Jetee / Meditation

(above: Image frame from "La Jetee")

Scoped around the internet and checked out what the web had of the French “film” La Jetee. The various short (7 to 9 minutes) segments found on YouTube was actually different parts of the larger film which totals 28 minutes. Made in 1962, by Chris Marker, La Jettee is “made from a series of stills and a voice-over narration that tells of experiments carried out on a prisoner in the underground camps to which everyone has been forced after the holocaust of World War III. The experiments will purportedly save humanity by sending "emissaries" into both the past and the future to bring back help. The experimental subject (the film suggests this is the narrator himself) is chosen because of his obsessive attachment to an image of the past½a young woman on the quay (la jetée ) at Orly Airport when he was young. Under the auspices of the experiment, he reaches the past and spends time with this woman; but he is then brought back by the experimenters and sent to the future. The people of the future offer him refuge with them, but instead he asks them to return him to his past, to the quay at Orly and to the woman--and, as it turns out, to his own death.”

This is a strangely beautiful film. The black-and-white still images are superbly done, capturing the essential imagery of the narrative. It is as if we went through a well-shot film frame-by-frame, and then frame captured the best still images that told the story, then threw away the rest of the frames. Because of the lack of traditional film/video motion, this film, to me, sort of exists in that twilight zone between still photography and film. Sort of in the same “zone” where Fiona Tan’s video art piece "Corrections" can be found in the categories of my mind.

Where "Corrections" haunts us with the play of imagery, La Jetee’s power was in its total immersion in word/voice and image. And as strong as the still images are, the film mostly hits us with the sound of the human voice speaking the human word. The sound and narration is just absolutely beautifully done. Sort of like a sound sculpture of an individual human being, in contrast to what I want to do—which is a sound sculpture of the entire human landscape.

Another interesting thing about "La Jetee" and "Corrections" is that they both have a unusual meditative quality to them. Something that I find in neither the still photography or video/film media. For "La Jetee", it is as if the still imagery halts the mind from moving forward in the narrative. In doing that it stills the mind while, on the other hand, requires the mind to do more work with the imagination. The result is a more mindful and meditative viewing/listening. I feel this is a good effect, especially for my project.

I’m going to get my hands on the full-length version. Let the feeling of the piece (of the sound) settle inside of me. Definitely will provide an influence on “Our House.”