Gabriel Molina: Response to La Jetee

La Jet ée (1962) is a beautiful film from director Chris Maker. This is a peculiar film, not being content with being black and white; it also is a still motion picture. I really feel connected to this movie because of how it plays like a graphic novel. Putting a lot of pictures, drawn or not, is the process in which a graphic novel works, in the graphic novels one doesn't really get to hear the characters' voices. The only voice we get to hear, the narrator, could be our own mind voice while reading something, with pictures or not.

This film develops in a beautiful way, thousands of pictures where taken, and then put together, much like an animation, but with human characters. It is slow, but it manages to show in its 26 minutes a lot of the expressions of the human being. Acting is like posing, but in a faster way. At the beginning it also shows some beautiful, but heartbreaking drawings, depicting a destroyed Paris after WWIII explodes.

The voice of the narrator is the main determinant to the progression of the still images. The narrator's voice keeps the pace, much like an orchestra director. As we are being told the tale, the images keep on moving, showing us the expressions of the characters. Being black and white, also allows the director a better way to play with light, and darkness. He uses this contrast to make a sad face sadder, or a maniacal face even more disturbing, drawing from the deepest wells of insanity that a human face can create, like the experimenter when he gets his new "guinea pig". One of the things about this method of filming, I really like, is the still image, because of the time the audience gets to swallow the expressions, to really think about what the characters are feeling.

It is also the genre that fits with the way it was filmed; it is pretty much like a science fiction graphic novel, but with images sent to the audience, instead of read by. Time travel in a simple way, without all the special effects, but clearly understood. Nowadays special effects are needed to create a time travel scene, with great machines, and millions of watts used just to power up a car, or some sort of vehicle that will be able to travel through time. Light and Dark also play a grand effect to mark the differences between a past that is a utopia, and the post apocalyptic sewers of destroyed Paris. The contrast helps to set those differences, with "real bedrooms, real kids, real birds, real cats, and real graves." For me the movie is like a dream, we never get to hear nothing from the characters besides real quiet mumblings while 'the man' is getting drugged.

The tree trunk, at the park, represents something like a clock, determining the still-movement in a way only a tree could, showing how old it is by the lines in it. He points at some part of trunk, way out there, far away from the center. This gives emphasis to the advance of time, but with a still image, showing again the contrast between time travel and stillness, how we can be at two points of time at the same moment.

The emphasis about the stillness of the movie is also made when the couple is visiting museums in the past. The main irony is made in the museum of natural history; they are admiring the animals, non-extinct, but stuffed animals. For me this makes more of an emphasis in the stillness of movie, setting in that the way Chris Maker made this still motion movie was not an accident. A more passionate way to admire the animals would have been to go to the Zoo, to see how they would behave while alive, but it would not have fitted as well as the museum scene did.

The scenes, or pictures, that take place at the future are foggy, like when a camera felt to the water before the film was developed. This fogginess means to me how the future is uncertain, and how an image from the future can be something that may change from one moment to the other. It seems to me that past, present, and future are all the same, that all depends on perception, on how we perceive ourselves in the 'now'. Now is always in the past.

The couple, the man and the woman seemed to have fallen in love, and that is when we get the only motion in the movie. The woman is in her bed, but we can only see her in a deep sleep, while waiting for her ghostly friend maybe. The scene of her in her bed takes many shots, of her switching positions on her bed. Here is where we get the first, and only motion of the movie, when she opens her eye to the camera, and then it hangs there for a couple of seconds.

We are in the past now, in he airport, where his child persona is waiting for something at the airport. The man, as an adult, sees the woman, and he starts to run towards her. The way the man runs, or how Maker makes the man seem like running, is like an animation; a bounce of the came, or of the picture, how his left arm hangs behind his body while his right arm is ahead, the process repeats itself a couple of times, until he gets shot, and it seems that he falls in slow motion, but it is only the illusion of it, of the man falling.

This movie shows how a great mind can shape a photo album into a great tale. This experimental way of doing a movie, expresses a full gamma of human feelings and expressions, also a difference between our idealized past to create a better future, all by letting the audience see the details a little longer.