La Jetee
by Chris Marker
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Product details
Actor: Andr? Heinrich, Davos Hanich, H?l?ne Chatelain, Jacques Ledoux, Jean N?groniDirector: Chris Marker
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: French (Original Language), Analog; German (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, Color, NTSC
Release Date: 1998-01-09
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: Tapeworm Video
Studio: Tapeworm Video
VHS Movie Reviews of La Jetee
Movie Review: Criterion will release a new restored version in June 2007!
Summary: 5 Stars
For all of you La Jetee fans out there, good news: Criterion has announced a restored re-issue of the film, in co-operation with director Chris Marker. The DVD will feature both French and English voice-over versions. Worth waiting for!Movie Review: one of the best films i've seen
Summary: 5 Stars
i saw this film in an art class at the art institute of chicago. my teacher had been talking about it for weeks. when i saw it though, i was completely taken aback. la jetee is an amazing work of art. it's simplicity (a series of stills with a voice over) makes it very original and the sheer beauty of the whole film will amaze you. i HIGHLY recommend this film to anyone who can get their hands on it!Movie Review: Magnifique Marker
Summary: 4 Stars
It's true; the picture quality is poor to middling. But all the more evocative for it. I haven't seen any version other than VHS, so I don't know what I'm missing. But it was a captivating film.Movie Review: Breathtaking!
Summary: 5 Stars
Who would have thought that a 30 minute film made up almost entirely of still images could be one of the most riveting films ever made? The print on this VHS copy is old and dirty, and the subtitles sometimes fade into the background, but no matter; five minutes into this film and you'll forget about the problems with the print.To say any more about it would give away too much of the story. Suffice it to say that this is one of the truely great science fiction films.
Movie Review: Open your eyes.
Summary: 5 Stars
'La Jetee' is a pier in Orly airport on the eve of World War 3 and the destruction of Paris; a barely distinguishable harbour in a concrete sea. Despite the title, the only mention of water in Chris Marker's film is to the waves of memory that carry the hero back to his past. He is now a prisoner in an underground labyrinth undergoing experiments by scientists who, space having been made redundant, hope to puncture a hole in time, through which men can be sent to bring back desperately-needed supplies. After many failures resulting in death or madness, they have chosen the hero because of his singular imaginative life, fixated on one moment in his childhood on the pier, the face of the woman who haunts him, staring at an unknown man rushing through the crowd. Meeting her in the past, they go for walks, visit museums, sunbathe, sleep. The journey to the past being so successful, they try to send him to the future.Marker calls 'La Jetee' a photo-novel, and it is composed entirely of photographical stills, except for one montage that secretes a surprise that is one of the most unexpected, literally eye-opening joys of the cinema, all the more precious considering the general gloom of the work, the foreboding atmosphere of death, the images of destruction, the frozen tableaux of torture and sufering. The term 'photo-novel' however, implies that the film could just as easily be enjoyed as a book, and Marker has released 'La Jetee' in such a format. But the film doesn't work this way - not only is the editing and the variation of pacing the images crucial to how we receive them, long-held compositions alternating with abrupt montages; but these sets of images interplay with a typically layered Marker soundtrack. This soundtrack itself has at least three components - the narrating voice, authorial yet phantasmal; the (often sacred) music; and the manipulated ambient sound, whether it is the conspiratorial whispers that accompany the underground experimental sessions, or the sinister, pumping beat that segues imperceptibly into Herrman's score for 'Vertigo' for the sequoia sequence.
Like Hitchcock's film, Marker's ur-text, 'La Jetee' is a bleak study in memory, in the tricks it plays, in its fusions with fantasies, desires, lies and repression, in its importance for defining the self or its dissolution. For Marker, this interest has always been political, revealing the fragility of the subject caught in the annihilating marches of history, a history it tries to transcend or evade, but which eventually swallows it up and spits it out.
'La Jetee' is also an early cinematic classic of post-modernity, a vision of a future Paris that, like Godard's 'Alphaville', is a diagnosis of the present. Marker's fearless command of the abstract rooted in the particular gives his films, and 'La Jetee' especially, a heady charge that could be mistaken for the spiritual (some of the scenes of torture are like religious ecstasies sculpted by Bernini), and which is all his own.
Summary of La Jetee
Director Chris Marker was a determined experimentalist who still sought to entertain, so it's no surprise that his most famous film, La Jet?e, is both bizarre and compelling. Shot as a collage of still images, it tells the story of a man sent backward and forward in time in order to save a war-ravaged world. Packing all of the intensity of a full-length feature into 28?minutes, this densely layered narrative stands up to many repeat viewings. Every moment is fraught with anxiety, longing, and suspense as the unnamed protagonist moves through and across time, trying to avoid death at the hands of his contemporaries, the repeated loss of a past love, and the annihilation of his world in the future. Much more a human story than a science fiction film, it is essentially about the power of memory, and its snapshot format captures the feel of a strongly remembered moment. This film is definitely a masterpiece and is not to be missed by the serious cineaste. (The American film 12?Monkeys was adapted from La Jet?e, though the original is no doubt the superior piece of cinema.) --James DiGiovannaClassics Video
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