Kurious Jorge v3.1
04-08-2008, 08:43 AM
http://folk.uio.no/idakso/bilder/forside.jpg
It is fitting that La Jetee, a radical time travel film told through a series of photographs and narration, contains the most perfectly composed still in the history of film (pictured above). It may be a shot from La Jetee, but this image reveals all the mysteries and tricks of another film, a film that plays with memory and gets away with it because it operates on irrational time. It is a shot that plots two points in time as one convergence, meshing present memory with past reality, the memory of child witnessing the death of his adult self when everybody knows you can’t be in two places at once.
It sounds like a temporal mix-up, but in the case of La Jetee, the past is the reality and the present is actually a memory from the future of a reinvestigation of the past. With this dizzying and romantic notion of time, the film instills the same temporal vertigo on the viewer that the final death scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo does, to the point where there is question of which is memory and which is reality, or are they one and the same? Marker’s film begins with the child witnessing the man’s death and ends with his death being witnessed by the child. The only thing that shifts is our perspective. It is one of the great cerebral cons in cinema, but it owes everything to Vertigo, a film that wasn’t originally considered all that great until people like Marker read it at more than face value and realized the titular “vertigo” was not referencing the main character’s affliction but our inability to perceive anything differently from what we are told to remember.
It is impossible to talk of La Jetee without referencing the Hitchcock film, because Vertigo is the main thematic inspiration for this film and many of Marker’s other works. An obsession of Marker’s seems to be the vertigo of time, the idea of distinct images or places of the past floating through the vast expanse of time. In the case of James Stewart’s character Scottie in Vertigo, a memory of tragedy becomes an investigative playground for a new sustained reality in which he tries to reconstruct and possibly alter the memory. However, the temporal vertigo arrives like a sucker punch in both films as both characters carry images of the past into the present to an unavoidable outcome.
In La Jetee, the narrator is forced to travel through time, from a post-apocalyptic Parisian future to his pre-war childhood past. While other guinea pigs go mad from the ravages of these time travel attempts, this man is grounded by distinct images of the past, specifically one day at the airport pier where he saw a man die and of a woman’s face that he saw at the end of the pier. He navigates and lives in these images of the Paris of his childhood in search of precursors to the outbreak of World War III. His travels into the past become less about what his superiors want him to find than what he wants to find, the woman whose face he saw on that same day at the pier, the last moment of stillness and peace before the destruction.
In similar fashion, Vertigo also has a man searching for a woman across the plane of memory and time. He is a retired detective played by James Stewart, who falls in love with a woman named Madeline, played by Kim Novak. He believes that Madeline is under the spiritual control of an ancestor because he is told this by her husband. The woman who controls Madeline is intent on taking her life and he fails to save her in time as she jumps from the top of a church bell tower while his vertigo keeps him from ascending to the top of the tower to stop her. Grief stricken, he holds onto the image of the woman as the last moment of love until he finds her again, only she is a completely different girl named Judy whom he eventually models into the image of his dead love.
In the second act of Vertigo, Scottie relives the events of the first act according to the terms of his own wants, which is to construct a new reality from his tragic memory by modeling a new girl of striking similarity to the deceased into the image of the ghost of his love. However, Scottie’s remodeling of the “new” Madeline can’t escape the specter of death that claimed her predecessor. Even when Scottie remolds the memory of his love against the vertigo of time he can’t avoid the convergence of memory and reality. They don’t just converge, they switch. As Scottie finds out, the two Madelines’ are actually one and the same, just a simple girl hired to play this woman so the real Madeline could be bumped off by her husband. What should ring unusual and alarming for a suspense film is that we are told about the whole murder plot and cover up in exposition long before Scottie finds out about it.
Just as Scottie can’t reconstruct a memory, neither can the man in La Jetee construct a new temporal reality with the woman he finds, and he eventually winds his way to and confronts the death he saw as child, which was his own death. Basically, neither character can restructure their awful memory even when past and present are superimposed upon each other. Neither character is looking to prevent anything because they don’t know they are reliving the time before. Even in La Jetee, where we are aware he is living the time before, he doesn’t know that seeking out the woman whom he believes is the image of stillness and peace will advance to his place on the pier that day and his death. It is only when the two points of time converge that he realizes it.
In the still image pictured above, one of the final shots from La Jetee, we are shown the imposition of the past and the present and can’t decipher which is which. We are currently in the state of mind of the adult narrator because we have been following his travels through the past, forgetting that we are witnessing this day on the pier through the eyes of the child. This is the child’s memory that began the film and the present scene wouldn’t exist without the memory. We see not only the adult narrator falling backwards to his death while trying to reach the woman at the end of the pier, but his incarnation as the specter of death itself. His body falling into the shadows becomes the hood and cloak of death in the same way the shadowed nun coming up the stairs looked like the specter of death that caused the death of Madeline for the second time in Vertigo.
By imposing the specter of death upon the fallen hero, La Jetee does in one shot what takes Vertigo an ancillary character to create. However, in Vertigo, the nun emerging from the shadows that scares Madeline to fall off the bell tower a second time is only the specter of death to Madeline, for Scotty never sees the “apparition” or what frightens Madeline to jump. The man in La Jetee, in his rush to reach the woman at the end of the pier, receives the same sort of shock by recognizing his assailant even though he knows his fate is unavoidable for he has seen this event as a child, there is a reason to embrace death. The narrator even acknowledges that the child is bound to be at the airport at that day. He remarks that his assailant has been following him ever since the labor camps of the time he traveled from. His death comes in the form of time, with past and present, memory and reality converging into one point, his temporal escape cannot give him shelter anymore. The dizzying belief that time would present itself in a different shape or form when revisited is gone.
Just as the man in La Jetee drives himself to his own death by seeking out the woman from his memory, almost knowing where it will lead in the face of time, Scotty drives the new Madeline to her death simply by forcing her to embrace her own temporal vertigo, that of returning to a distinct place in the vast expanse time as a different person, a place from the past that has haunted her in the same way the man from La Jetee has been haunted by his childhood image of witnessing his own adult death on the airport pier. The man cycles through his memory trying to avoid the unavoidable. In this shot of La Jetee, we see the man’s death, his arms twisted akimbo in an inhuman shape just as James Stewart’s arms were in Vertigo as he stands helpless after failing to stop Madeline’s death from reoccurring in the same way as he remembered it, and we seem to be forgetting one thing. If we are watching the child’s perspective of the same event unfolding again in La Jetee, whose perspective are we watching the second time in Vertigo? The answer is nobody. It never happened. We have spent the entire second act of Vertigo traveling Scottie’s memory based on the concrete images we remember from the first act to ground us into perceiving it as reality so as to not go mad from this vertigo of time.
It is fitting that La Jetee, a radical time travel film told through a series of photographs and narration, contains the most perfectly composed still in the history of film (pictured above). It may be a shot from La Jetee, but this image reveals all the mysteries and tricks of another film, a film that plays with memory and gets away with it because it operates on irrational time. It is a shot that plots two points in time as one convergence, meshing present memory with past reality, the memory of child witnessing the death of his adult self when everybody knows you can’t be in two places at once.
It sounds like a temporal mix-up, but in the case of La Jetee, the past is the reality and the present is actually a memory from the future of a reinvestigation of the past. With this dizzying and romantic notion of time, the film instills the same temporal vertigo on the viewer that the final death scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo does, to the point where there is question of which is memory and which is reality, or are they one and the same? Marker’s film begins with the child witnessing the man’s death and ends with his death being witnessed by the child. The only thing that shifts is our perspective. It is one of the great cerebral cons in cinema, but it owes everything to Vertigo, a film that wasn’t originally considered all that great until people like Marker read it at more than face value and realized the titular “vertigo” was not referencing the main character’s affliction but our inability to perceive anything differently from what we are told to remember.
It is impossible to talk of La Jetee without referencing the Hitchcock film, because Vertigo is the main thematic inspiration for this film and many of Marker’s other works. An obsession of Marker’s seems to be the vertigo of time, the idea of distinct images or places of the past floating through the vast expanse of time. In the case of James Stewart’s character Scottie in Vertigo, a memory of tragedy becomes an investigative playground for a new sustained reality in which he tries to reconstruct and possibly alter the memory. However, the temporal vertigo arrives like a sucker punch in both films as both characters carry images of the past into the present to an unavoidable outcome.
In La Jetee, the narrator is forced to travel through time, from a post-apocalyptic Parisian future to his pre-war childhood past. While other guinea pigs go mad from the ravages of these time travel attempts, this man is grounded by distinct images of the past, specifically one day at the airport pier where he saw a man die and of a woman’s face that he saw at the end of the pier. He navigates and lives in these images of the Paris of his childhood in search of precursors to the outbreak of World War III. His travels into the past become less about what his superiors want him to find than what he wants to find, the woman whose face he saw on that same day at the pier, the last moment of stillness and peace before the destruction.
In similar fashion, Vertigo also has a man searching for a woman across the plane of memory and time. He is a retired detective played by James Stewart, who falls in love with a woman named Madeline, played by Kim Novak. He believes that Madeline is under the spiritual control of an ancestor because he is told this by her husband. The woman who controls Madeline is intent on taking her life and he fails to save her in time as she jumps from the top of a church bell tower while his vertigo keeps him from ascending to the top of the tower to stop her. Grief stricken, he holds onto the image of the woman as the last moment of love until he finds her again, only she is a completely different girl named Judy whom he eventually models into the image of his dead love.
In the second act of Vertigo, Scottie relives the events of the first act according to the terms of his own wants, which is to construct a new reality from his tragic memory by modeling a new girl of striking similarity to the deceased into the image of the ghost of his love. However, Scottie’s remodeling of the “new” Madeline can’t escape the specter of death that claimed her predecessor. Even when Scottie remolds the memory of his love against the vertigo of time he can’t avoid the convergence of memory and reality. They don’t just converge, they switch. As Scottie finds out, the two Madelines’ are actually one and the same, just a simple girl hired to play this woman so the real Madeline could be bumped off by her husband. What should ring unusual and alarming for a suspense film is that we are told about the whole murder plot and cover up in exposition long before Scottie finds out about it.
Just as Scottie can’t reconstruct a memory, neither can the man in La Jetee construct a new temporal reality with the woman he finds, and he eventually winds his way to and confronts the death he saw as child, which was his own death. Basically, neither character can restructure their awful memory even when past and present are superimposed upon each other. Neither character is looking to prevent anything because they don’t know they are reliving the time before. Even in La Jetee, where we are aware he is living the time before, he doesn’t know that seeking out the woman whom he believes is the image of stillness and peace will advance to his place on the pier that day and his death. It is only when the two points of time converge that he realizes it.
In the still image pictured above, one of the final shots from La Jetee, we are shown the imposition of the past and the present and can’t decipher which is which. We are currently in the state of mind of the adult narrator because we have been following his travels through the past, forgetting that we are witnessing this day on the pier through the eyes of the child. This is the child’s memory that began the film and the present scene wouldn’t exist without the memory. We see not only the adult narrator falling backwards to his death while trying to reach the woman at the end of the pier, but his incarnation as the specter of death itself. His body falling into the shadows becomes the hood and cloak of death in the same way the shadowed nun coming up the stairs looked like the specter of death that caused the death of Madeline for the second time in Vertigo.
By imposing the specter of death upon the fallen hero, La Jetee does in one shot what takes Vertigo an ancillary character to create. However, in Vertigo, the nun emerging from the shadows that scares Madeline to fall off the bell tower a second time is only the specter of death to Madeline, for Scotty never sees the “apparition” or what frightens Madeline to jump. The man in La Jetee, in his rush to reach the woman at the end of the pier, receives the same sort of shock by recognizing his assailant even though he knows his fate is unavoidable for he has seen this event as a child, there is a reason to embrace death. The narrator even acknowledges that the child is bound to be at the airport at that day. He remarks that his assailant has been following him ever since the labor camps of the time he traveled from. His death comes in the form of time, with past and present, memory and reality converging into one point, his temporal escape cannot give him shelter anymore. The dizzying belief that time would present itself in a different shape or form when revisited is gone.
Just as the man in La Jetee drives himself to his own death by seeking out the woman from his memory, almost knowing where it will lead in the face of time, Scotty drives the new Madeline to her death simply by forcing her to embrace her own temporal vertigo, that of returning to a distinct place in the vast expanse time as a different person, a place from the past that has haunted her in the same way the man from La Jetee has been haunted by his childhood image of witnessing his own adult death on the airport pier. The man cycles through his memory trying to avoid the unavoidable. In this shot of La Jetee, we see the man’s death, his arms twisted akimbo in an inhuman shape just as James Stewart’s arms were in Vertigo as he stands helpless after failing to stop Madeline’s death from reoccurring in the same way as he remembered it, and we seem to be forgetting one thing. If we are watching the child’s perspective of the same event unfolding again in La Jetee, whose perspective are we watching the second time in Vertigo? The answer is nobody. It never happened. We have spent the entire second act of Vertigo traveling Scottie’s memory based on the concrete images we remember from the first act to ground us into perceiving it as reality so as to not go mad from this vertigo of time.