Contexts of Practice: La Jetee

La Jetee- Chris Marker

“This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood.” That’s the opening (the first voice) of Chris Marker’s film. The phrase broaches a story (the hero will travel in time toward that childhood image); the destruction of cities and the devastation of the earth’s surface have threatened the very reality of the present and have thus let loose temporal virtualities normally locked up or held captive in the past (the past consisting only of a series of images that have become autonomous, tied to the living only by some affect or trauma). The fiction of La Jetée is thus a certain kind of work—whose object is the film’s hero—concerning the paradoxes of memory, concerning the inclusion of the past that lives on within the hero as an image, as a secret that the laboratory experiments in the underground camp will try to make him confess. The realization of the confession comes with the death of the hero himself as he relives a moment of his past, as he meets once again the girl whose image has haunted him.

On La Jetée by Jean-Louis Schefer — Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory. 2013. On La Jetée by Jean-Louis Schefer — Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.chrismarker.org/jean-louis-schefer-on-la-jete/. [Accessed May 2013].

Time travel, still images, a past, present and future and the aftermath of World War III. The tale of a man, a slave, sent back and forth, in and out of time, to find a solution to the world's fate. To replenish its decreasing stocks of food, medicine and energies, and in doing so, resulting in a perpetual memory of a lone female, life, death and past events that are recreated on an airports jetée.

La Jetée (1962) - Plot Summary. 2013. La Jetée (1962) - Plot Summary. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056119/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl. [Accessed May 2013].