Film Review: La Jetée (1962) dir. Chris Marker

Of all the images in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, one that lingers most is that of a headless statue – her realistic body the perfect imitation of life, but her mind absent. It’s a fitting representation for Marker’s “film” comprised mostly of still images and whose unnamed and voiceless characters are captured equally as life-like and life-unlike. Though the only shot with visible motion is literally as fleeting as the blink of an eye, La Jetée is surprisingly full of energy and life.

In the absence of actual movement the film uses intelligent techniques like dissolving transitions, image-layering, and sound to help the audience make sense of its complex narrative structure. Music – one of the only continuous aspects of the film – reminds the audience of where the characters are in time. The string and woodwind instruments feel delicate and yearning in the pre-war past creating a stunningly romantic atmosphere sharply juxtaposed to the silent static of the more disturbing present. Whilst in the past the characters are “…without memories, without plans. Time builds itself painlessly around them. Their only landmarks are the flavor of the moment they are living…” Suspended in time and visually indistinguishable from the taxidermied animals around them, the still-image has rendered the living and dead in an equal state of motionlessness. Yet they appear happy; captured in a permanent state of pleasure. By extending the time each frame is held the film forces the audience to intimately engage with each individual shot. In doing so it abandons the gimmick of the moving image and severs the associations between movement, life, and the passing of time.

The story within La Jetée is served best in the medium of still-images as it mimics the fragmented nature of memory and how we as humans attach strong feelings to images in our mind. Superficially we may think of the film as an existential statement on the inevitability of death, but drawing from the story and how it is presented invites us to examine the notion that human existence is not defined only by the linear time our body experiences on Earth. We travel in and out of different spaces and times all within our memory and it is this ability that makes temporal existence paradoxically beautiful but doomed to be wasted. Though our bodies are grounded in the present, we spend much of our time within our minds – a place where we are not limited by minutes, hours, or years. Marker’s film both romanticizes and damns this struggle between mind and body and creates firm boundaries between them. It makes us wonder: what if life has nothing to do with the body at all and it is truly or mind and our memories that matter? The romantic at the center of La Jetée experiences the consequences of the body without the mind, but also the liberation of the mind without the body as he yearns for someplace only his mind can reach.

By reducing the film to the simplified and tangible medium of photographs, La Jetée serves as a reminder that life is best represented as the inverse; completely intangible and unconcerned with basic human concepts. Our mind’s preoccupation with time and the death of our bodies may prohibit us from experiencing life for what it can be: moments of happiness, both mindful and eternal, strung together in “motion”. Brought back to the image of the headless statue we may instinctually think how horribly tragic it is to possess a body separated from the vestigial, time-obsessed mind. But perhaps now we will choose to favor what we cannot see and wonder where her beautiful head and the mind within it have come to rest. For its simple-yet-profound use of the medium, unparalleled originality, and deeply affecting quality I consider La Jetée to be one of the best and most visceral meta-representations of life ever put on film.