La Jetée (2013)

Thanks for the memories!

It is a performances centric movie

Good concept, poorly executed.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

SPOILERS impliedIn La Jetée, post-apocalypse charlatans fixate on their delusional hope of escaping certain annhilation in the atomically irradiated catacombs of an obliterated Paris. Their 'experiments' consist in interrogating victims for their most personal memories - an 'À la Recherche du Temps perdu' for these perdurantists, who seek to identify and retrieve the separate exploded temporal parts of a life deliberately shattered, atomised and alienated from its context, in a surgical manner operating on consciousness to analyse it for clues to the nature of human existence in time. This primitive procedure, which is more superstition than science because it is the expression of a fanatical, desperate hope in the face of Death, employs torture in order to tear out of the sacrificial victim their very soul, in an agonising unnatural birth. This is science as cult, seeking to conjure the ghosts of the past, and to convert the living - marooned in the present - into deathly ghosts that can in turn haunt their own future: In this way the mad scientists believe they are stitching together the temporal parts of various interrupted lives into one monstrous, eternal life - a temporal Frankenstein's monster, yoking together heterogenous experiences into the appearance of human life. The fitful, flickering, frozen, stiff, rigor mortis of the light projected from the magical cave of the survivors, entombed in the Paris Catacombs along with the dead, attracts time-visitants from the actual future who police and cleanse the deranged, diseased gestalt of the immediate post-holocaust period: The one surviving experimental subject/victim of that benighted time who manages to emerge fitfully, blinking into another period - the pre-war past just before the bomb fell - , and who is symbolically poised to take flight at La Jetée (Orly Airport) to any destination, allowing the deranged phantoms of the doomed survivors of World War III to spread throughout the rest of time, like the immense and dangerous glowing persistence of radioactivity, must be contained within the hermetic capsule of human history's quarantined, off-limits era of Death. This unwilling wanderer through time, this lost soul and harbinger of others that would spill out of the maw of Hell after him, must be destroyed. He is. Shot? Or just reaching the limit of his own abruptly inconclusive memory? In love with a dream-girl, but more in love with his own death, which releases him from the circles of a false and futile gyre of tormenting rebirth into the same horror he was recoiling from. Damaged souls, driven mad by existential horror, must die so that time is not trapped forever in the brief flash of their immolation. Frozen photographic memories must be expunged from the screen of the future, so that new shadows can be made to play across it. 'The Man' cannot be free of the chain (he lies about it to the dream-girl) that binds him to his own sensory Cave of Perception, and therefore cannot join those Travellers he meets who are truly free of Time. From disappointment, disillusion, despair, horror and tragedy, there is no release, except in Death. We are the Prisoners of the Cave in Plato's Allegory. But in Death, we are individually free - it is for those muttering Nazi doctors that the phrase 'Escape is futile' should be addressed, not their suffering victim!Persistence of vision is deterministic: The image moves, yet only moves back to the point where it began (the unnamed Man dies). Time loops round like a noose, trapping us before a finite narrative. Of course our failing mind takes excursions into the surrounding darkness, but there the shadows crowd together too thickly to be discriminated from the huddled mass, and we are thrown back into our own small circle of light. Defined. Sanctioned by the inky mark on the illuminated page. Our Pass - our passing into an unknown region. Flight. Arrest.

When I first heard about this movie (in film school of course), I didn't think it would be very interesting. A "movie" which mostly consists of still images and a narrator telling a story. Sounds like a combination of a comic book and an audio-book, right? Well, then I saw it and was mesmerized. Even if you know the story this hits me emotionally, every time I see it. Scary and incredibly beautiful at the same time. "La jettée" is probably called a movie, because we don't have a better word to describe what it actually is. For me this is as close as art can get to an actual dream, one of those when you are not really sure if you are in a nightmare or something more hopeful. And while the narrative goes on relentlessly, what's really scary and completely unpredictable are the images that come with it. They do not just illustrate the plot but add another layer to it. Being still images this style almost dissects what a movie does 24 times a second, but it is not as cerebral as this sounds, but actually quite engaging and inspiring. Brilliant.Later this was adapted by Terry Gilliam as a movie called 12 monkeys, which is a good and entertaining science fiction movie, but la jettée is a unique experience.

The film is best known for being the basic idea of "12 Monkeys"."La Jetée" is one of the more special that I've ever seen. A short film (30 mins long) that is in reality a series of images with a narrative voice in the background. It tells the story of an experiment in time travel after a nuclear war, but The story at the end is not so important in the overall pictureThe relentless succession of frames with the thrill of having to wait until the next scene change makes it really effective.I must say that in a sense I was shocked after seeing him. I consider this film a masterpiece 9/10

It's the moments we live through that define us. We may try to run away from our fears and put our pasts behind us to an extent, but we cannot evade the inevitable. La Jetée reveals life shortly before a World War that leaves the world in ruins. We see how society and the ways of life transform over the course of time yet how memories and actions remain constant in people. It's often difficult for us to truly comprehend the impact all our experiences, relationships and thoughts have on our futures. It's even more bewildering how passions like love and happiness can be sustained even after calamitous events. This film is told primarily through still images, and captures particularly distinct memories of a man who vividly remembers the day he once saw another man die at an airport before the war while he was a young boy. It's a moment that sticks with him throughout his life and one that he cannot simply forget. Beautifully, this movie demonstrates that time is but a figment of the mind and that the world depicted in our minds is not as absolute as we may think.