La Jetée: Unchained Melody by Jonathon Romney
La Jetée is a French film by Chris Marker and is comprised
mainly of still photographs with a voice-over narration describing the story of
a prisoner/ slave in a post-apocalyptic Paris after World War 3. When Lawrence
first told us about this film I was sceptical, I didn't think a half hour film
would work in just photography, but it did... I thought it was a beautifully
done film and it got me thinking how I could present my own narrative. Marker
described his work as 'un photo-roman', meaning photo-novel rather than a film;
which seems correct as the word suggests a certain stagnation to the film.
Synopsis
“This is the story of a man marked by an image from his
childhood” The opening line from this masterpiece sets the story for the entire
narrative where a boy saw the death of a man on an airplane jetty; shortly
after the introduction, the audience is greeted with scenes of devastation and
destruction with the iconic Arc de Triomphe lying in ruins. Nuclear attacks
have annihilated the surface of the earth and those that have survived have
taken to hiding underground, all is not so simple as there are two types of
people who have survived. The Victors -
the scientists who control what happens, and the Prisoners - those who
get experimented on by the Victors (we find out that the unnamed main character
is the latter). The scientists are using time travel to try and find an energy
source, or sustenance for those helpless in present day; and the main character
(who I'll refer to as U (for unnamed)) seems to have the strongest link to the
past through a memory of a woman. The story unfolds more as U travels more and
more frequently to the woman and they seem to fall in love; a long sequence in
the film shows the two at a museum in which animals are preserved in timeless
suspension (Romney, 2007); there is a
certain irony to this scene, the animals are described as 'timeless' but surely
the woman could be seen as 'preserved in timeless suspension' as well, U visits
her when he is forced to, but nonetheless she has no say in whether he can gaze
upon her, she is much like the stuffed animals in the museum.
Most of the film is shot in stills, but at the centre of the
film a sequence of shots showing the woman stirring in bed quickly moves to the
"single moment of animation" (Romney, 2007) in La Jetée where she
opens her eyes, looking directly into the camera.
U has finished the first series of tests, and has to begin
travelling to the future. He successfully meets an advanced human race who
eventually give him the power source needed to restore the present day. Knowing
that he has done what was needed, he is aware that his life is in danger. U is
contacted by the technologically advanced people of the future, who offer a
place with them to protect him, he declines but asks to be sent back in time to
see the woman again.
They agree and he is returned back to the jetty where he
sees the woman, As he dashes toward his
love, a series of shots edited in quick succession give his desperate run the
appearance of painfully, suspensefully slowed-down motion (Romney, 2007). But
as he runs to her, a familiar face greets the audience, one of the 'Victors'. U
is killed by one of his captors, and it is revealed that the death he saw as a
child, was his own.
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