Week One: La Jetée

Film: La Jetée(1962), Chris MarkerI am often awed by the power of memory, especially in relation to love. The idea that a single image, once remembered, can push a man through the boundaries of space and time intrigued me. As I watched the images flip by like snapshots of a person's life and listened to the dark narration of this time-traveling lover over the rhythmic beating of his heart, I felt tied to his pilgrimage, swept up in his longing for this woman he saw once at the end of a pier. La Jetee excellently captures the thrill of a romance, from the breathtaking moment when the protagonist first sees the girl of his dreams standing there at the end of la jetée, to the last painstaking second of his life, which a bullet ends right in front of his long-lost love on the pier where they first met.

The unfolding of their potential relationship, which exists only outside of time, only landmarked by the things they experienced together, was beautifully melancholic. Having experienced the heartbreak of separation, long-distance as it were, this plotline struck particularly close to home. Their relationship was akin to this, but more desperately so. Each fleeting moment could very well have been the last or at least the last for a long while, each moment was therefor spent fully enraptured in the other. It was a heartbreaking sequence to watch, especially with the interruption of the scientists back in the "present" who were clearly sending this man through time with ill intent.

The one moment of the film that struck me was its only moment of animation: the girl opening her eyes whilst laying on a bed assumably in front of the narrator. In the blur of stationary pictures, this one moment of real movement acts as a seductive center to the film's storyline. In this, not only do we see the narrator getting seduced, we ourselves are seduced, pulled into his plight so that when the end comes, we long for them to be together. And it is through this scene also that we get a break from the rhythmic motion of still images, propelling us further from a conscious state into a similar one to that of the protagonist. Johnathan Romney points out the correlation between this lack of consciousness and the strings of images in his article La Jetee: Unchained Melody. In it, he says, "This sounds at once like an ideal romantic state and a deathly condition, beyond desire or even consciousness. However, Jean Ravel’s subtly rhythmic editing restores a fluid energy to the film’s succession of frozen moments."

I was stunned by this film, and thusly have high hopes for the rest to be viewed in our class. The exploration of love, it seems, can be infinitely meaningful, and infinitely attributed to different meanings. Here we saw one of those: love as a powerful force that could make the protagonist choose to go back to when love could flourish, even in the face of a future utopia, even in the face of death. I'm anxious to further explore the meanings of love.