Marker’s 28-Minute Masterpiece
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Perhaps the most resonant science fiction movie ever made, Chris Marker’s “La Jetée” (1962), percolates on so many levels that its pleasures seem endlessly repeatable. That’s rather fitting for a short film (28 minutes) about a time traveler obsessed with an image from his childhood: a beautiful woman, her hair swept across her face by the breeze, standing at the end of a long jetty at the Orly Airport in Paris, as a strange man collapses in an apparent accident. That the “film” is composed almost entirely of still photographs given the sense of cinematic movement by a 35 mm Arriflex camera only adds to the work’s aesthetic and philosophical complexity.
Yet, ironically enough, “La Jetée” has been as scarce as it has been influential. Until today’s spiffy DVD release by Criterion, which has packaged it with Mr. Marker’s even scarcer (and likewise brilliant) 1983 “Sans Soleil,” fans have had to make do with foreign versions or scope it out at revivals or on bootlegged copies.
For anyone who hasn’t seen this futuristic postcard from the past, the Criterion version will be an epiphany. Like the doomed emissary who is sent back in time from a post-apocalyptic underworld to an idyllic Paris on the eve of a devastating war, our collective pop subconscious has long been haunted by its ideas and images: The man, falling backward with an arm outstretched in a violent thrust, whose death begins and ends the film, recurs in the work of the artist Robert Longo, for instance, and can be felt in the real-life iconography of the famous “Falling Man” photograph of the September 11 jumper from the World Trade Center.
Mr. Marker collected his images on his Pentax camera, ostensibly killing time during a production break on his 1963 film “Le Joli Mai.” In a wonderful twist of fate, the main set for his futuristic sequences was the Palais de Chaillot galleries, shot as a spectral subterranean labyrinth, which later became the archives of the Cinémathèque Française.
Though much is made of “La Jetée” as Mr. Marker’s homage to Alfred Hitchock’s “Vertigo” — whose spiral symbolism and psychological fixations it emulates — the piece has in turn inspired many cinematic glances back toward its own themes and motifs. Terry Gilliam’s 1995 “Twelve Monkeys” was a fairly explicit, and thoroughly unexpected, remake as a Bruce Willis action flick that lost much of the original’s melancholy eloquence for automotive pyrotechnics and its star’s sweat-soaked brow, but kept the essential timeloop concept intact. And as film theorist Constance Penley pointed out in an astute and playful essay penned for a 1986 issue of journal Camera Obscura, the film served as the blueprint for “The Terminator,” in which a man from a post-apocalytpic future is sent back to a peacetime Los Angeles to save the world but is driven by his lifelong obsession with the image of a woman (in this case, Linda Hamilton).
The theme got dumbed down for the late 1985 blockbuster “Back to the Future” and its sequels, but such adaptability only shows how powerful such a story is, whether you want to engage its pop-Freudian edges (as Ms. Penley, and “Future” star Michael J. Fox did), or simply groove on the essential fantasy of, literally, having “done there” and “been that.”
At the end of “La Jetée,” when the time traveler, having exhausted his masters’ need for his skills at leaping through the temporal continuum, senses he is about to be put to death, he engineers an escape through the agency of a society even farther into the future. But instead of going there, he chooses to place himself at the time and place that has always been glued to his memory’s eye. Only now, of course, he is not the child watching the woman — he is the man the woman watches, the man whose death is this very moment, assassinated by a tracker from the future. It’s the kicker that has always made “La Jetée” a perfect, circular narrative, sticking audiences in a cinematic moment they can’t escape.