La Jetée

LA JETÉE

(Produced in 1962; released in 1964)
In French, with English subtitles.
First things first. The second word of La Jetée is pronounced "zhah tay" (with the accent on the second syllable). As in "The Jetty", or more specifically, the main jetty at Orly airport in France, where the defining moment of the film takes place. At the dinner table tonight, hoist your wine glass and say,"This vintage has an understated efflorescence, not unlike the French film La Jetée."

Approximately 28 minutes long, the film is composed entirely of black & white photographs linked together by quick dissolves and direct cuts. Writer/director Chris Marker and montage artist Jean Havel bombard us with one image after another, accompanied by a soundtrack consisting almost exclusively of the soothing voice of the French narrator. The overall effect is fascinating, occasionally bordering on the hypnotic.

La Jetée "is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood", as the film deftly puts it. This nameless man has a distant boyhood memory of a Sunday afternoon watching the planes land and take off at the airport. He recalls the haunting visage of a beautiful woman connected somehow to the event, but just how he isn't sure. The more he thinks about it, the more he begins to think he saw a man die that day.

His thoughts are shocked back to the present with the onset of World War 3. The conflict is over in a flash or two, but the entire planet is reduced to a radioactive wasteland, and the survivors are forced underground. He's taken prisoner, and subjected to bizarre experiments. As the film explains,"The only hope for survival lay in time: a hole in time through which to send food, medicines, sources of energy. The aim of the experiments was to send emissaries into time to summon the past and the future to the aid of the present." The man is told by his captors that his obsession with the image from his past makes him an ideal candidate for their experiments.

During the tests to travel backward in time, he meets the woman from his childhood memory. He also sees the world again as it was before the war: with "real children", "a real bedroom", and "real birds". On subsequent journeys back, he spends more and more time with her and they fall in love. Their final meeting occurs in a museum, surrounded by a menagerie of mounted animals on display.

Encouraged by their success in contacting the past, his captors decide it's time to send him into the future. There he finds the human race has regained its foothold on the earth, but society is now as bland and sterile as a corporate board meeting. Plus the inhabitants have these strange electronic things embedded in their foreheads. He returns to the present with the gift of an energy device which will restart humanity's industries, and the unfortunate knowledge that he is now expendable to his captors. Just when he has accepted his imminent demise, his acquaintances from the future come to his aid and offer him a chance to escape. Rather than fleeing to the future with them, he asks that they return him to the past where he can once again be with the woman he loves.

In the final scene, he finds himself on an airport jetty - the one from his memories, only now he's an adult. He glimpses the woman far off at the other end and begins to run to her. But as he approaches, a man standing nearby turns around - an agent of his former captors has trailed him back through time. The agent fires his gun, and our hero stops in mid-stride and collapses to the pavement mortally wounded. In his final thoughts, he realizes the man he had watched die as a child was himself...

Yes, I know there are all kinds of holes and paradoxes in the plot. That's not the point (that didn't stop you from liking Terminator 2, did it?). The irony of the final scene is but one of the many effective elements of this film. A deeper analysis reveals the story is also about loss - about beauty which can never be regained once it is squandered. Although the mounted animals surrounding the final meeting in the museum can be viewed with a cynical eye, taken at face value they're a reminder of the world which once was, but which is lost permanently after the war. The man himself has the unique experience of witnessing the past, present, and future of the world simultaneously. But more than this, he also witnesses the past, present, and future of his own life: as a child, he witnesses his future, while as a man he encounters his past. One might ask if the future of the man and of the world was locked in the day he watched himself die on that runway.

Although you may never have heard of La Jetée, you've probably encountered its influences. The 1995 film Twelve Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, was based on this obscure French film. Also, the image of the man with his eyes covered by a white "electronic" blindfold during the experiments was later recreated for a David Bowie music video.

I was able to find this movie for rent at Blockbuster in the foreign films section.