![]() ![]() The opening shot of Chris Marker’s La Jetee ![]() The opening shot of La Jetee creates the illusion of time through zoom out. The film’s cinematography is static, unlike Johnny Depp’s psychedelically moving camera in his experimental documentary Stuff. Just like the characters in La Jetee are trapped in time, the audience of La Jetee is trapped in the stillness of the images. The film emphasizes the illusion of time lapse and movement perceived both by the characters within the film and the audience of the film. La Jetee is a an experimental time travel film, but temporality and movement are opposed visually with the still images. And just like Michael Haneke calls the 24 frames in each cinema second “24 lies,” Chris Marker emphasizes the false perception of film movement by simply slowing down the pace of the still images.Īfter all, film movement relies only on the unreliability of the human perception, while “real-life” movement is relative, as Einstein’s theory argues. “The human brain forgets the cuts,” Michel Gondry said about film. Both films share the themes of time, memory, and perception, but unlike Nostalgia which abandons narrative in favor of structure, La Jetee tells an elaborate science fiction story, which ultimately deals with the perceived illusion of cinematic movement. Nine years before Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia and Poetic Justice used still images to examine the question of cinema temporality, Chris Marker composed La Jetee (1962) almost entirely of still shots. The main character’s run is paralyzed and trapped in time ![]()
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