Chris Marker's "La Jetee" has been a totem for nearly half a century. It's a haunting half-hour film enshrouded in mystique.
Marker (born Christian Francois Bouche-Villeneuve in 1921, either outside Paris, as many sources say, or in Ulan Bator, as the writer and director has claimed), has a godlike reputation among cinephiles, thanks both to the ingenious and often playful nature of his essayistic films (he's made dozens) and to his obscurity. He grants few interviews and almost never allows himself to be photographed. Only a fraction of his movies are available on DVD.
Thankfully, "La Jetee" is one of them. Marker's only fiction film, it was made in 1962, and chances are that either you've never heard of it or you think it's a masterpiece. (Maybe you've seen Terry Gilliam's "12 Monkeys," a feature-length remake and homage.)
"La Jetee" is the story of a man "marked by an image from his childhood," as the voice-over narration informs us, a man who becomes a soldier during World War III and then the subject of time-travel experiments in civilization's post-apocalyptic remnants under Paris. The film consists almost entirely of still photographs and that voice-over.
In "Chris Marker: La Jetee," Janet Harbord attempts to unravel the film's mysteries and confirm its significance. Her short book is part of a series called "One Work," which aspires to be "a veritable library of works of art that have made a difference."
"I cannot be sure whether I can separate out various memories of watching the film," Harbord writes, "because what binds them all is a gasp, a collective bodily intake of breath in every auditorium and theater and lecture hall, when a woman on the screen opens her eyes, looks at us and blinks, when the film slips from still images to a brief sequence of movement. It is a gasp close to an experience of the erotic or the religious or possibly both."
A British film scholar and author of two other books on motion pictures, Harbord has immersed herself in the movie, and her close reading justifies the book's awed tone. "La Jetee" isn't merely a science fiction tale with an eerie twist ending (being a scholar, the author reveals the twist in her opening paragraph), but also a contemplation of time, memory and mortality.
