NMP - La Jetée - 2
La Jetée 05-02-20
Something I was introduced to again while studying on the New Media module is to the film La Jetée, have been trying to remember when I first knew/saw this but alas lack of memory takes over, can’t remember when, which if you know the story then you would see how apt that is !
I’ll start with my own personal synopsis of La Jetée (now this is my own personal take so forgive any meanderings or lack of sophistication.)
La Jetée by Chris Markham is the story of a boy who witness something so terrible at the jetee of an airport, this memory sticks with him as the nuclear war that is WW3 renders the earth uninhabitable, the human race retreats underground where usual power structures are (re)established leading to experimentation on people with a specific goal of time travel using the power of the mind, our hero is one of these subjects, he becomes increasingly successful at revisiting his past, the next step is that the powers ask him to travel forward, with the idea of asking the future for help, which he does. The reward for this is he is allowed to revisit his past permanently and then there’s a twist which i won’t ruin here. One of the most powerful aspects of this story, the reason behind viewing this in the New Media module is the entire story is told through the use of black and white still images with only a short moving image piece at one point, the entire story is told by an incredibly powerful voice.
The story is a story of love; it’s power over the mind, coupled with the inhumanity that lack of love brings, it also makes a comment on established power structures and the absolute human longing for simplicity.
Truly a tale for our times
Must mention that i love the touching naivety that if a nuclear war did hit that we’d be able to just retreat underground but that’s artistic licence I guess..
One of the conversations was to distil the story into 20 words so here was my attempt at this:
La Jetée 20 word assessment – Fear / War / Wistfulness / Hope / Hallucinations / connections / Chronesthesia / Love / Loss / Heartbreak / Nostalgia / Yearning / Saviours / Death
I’m increasingly understanding the importance of slimming an idea into a small selection of words, it’s something that is coming into play for my final major project of the MA. I realise that I have to hone my ideas and see what’s practical to do and how far reaching some of my previous work has attempted more of that discussion will appear under the UT blog title I think.
So from the words I then started to wonder if you could distil the while film into 20 pivotal images, which I started to do but wonder where and how to post that analysis. Next step I made was, as most who know me will testify that l do too much of, Ito get excited by the process, the idea and got wrapped up in in the spirit of pushing myself and working things to a higher point, started a thought process on recreating it through my own imagery, side thought of how many pictures would/could you do that in 5/10/20 pictures?
I stopped short of doing that as I began to question to what ends I was doing this for? Examined the reasoning behind that, made me switch that exploration, plus it seemed a little disrespectful to continue.