Film Review: La Jetee

The second film we watched from the ‘The Cutting Edge’ film programme was La Jetee, which was directed by Chris Marker and was released in 1962.


La Jetee tells the story of a man haunted by a death he witnessed as a young boy before the third world war. A review from TimeOut states:


"This classic 'photo-roman' about the power of memory - 'the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood' - begins at Orly airport a few years before WWIII." 


This war destroyed Paris and many other places with the survivors living underground. The main character becomes a test subject, with little choice due to being a prisoner which leads him into a time travelling project in which he travels to the future and into the past, as the review from Film4 states: 


"Hanich is the man chosen in some indeterminate, post-apocalyptic future to be the guinea pig in a vital scientific experiment. In a number of sessions he travels backwards and forwards in time."


A review by Bosley Crowther for The New York Times in 1969 states:


"...it does get across a vague impression of Frankensteinian meddling with the brain."


The way that the main characters captors play with the mind is unnerving and a unsettling mainly because they are attempting to manipulate the mind into travelling time, something which shouldn't be explored. The apparatus attached to the main character looks similar to that of a hospital heart monitor suggesting perhaps that this future is not to far the present day and that a third world war could be predicted in the years to come. 


Bibliography


TimeOut (-) La Jetee.
At: http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/77181/la_jetee.html (Accessed on 02.02.11)

Film4 (-) La Jetee.
At: http://www.film4.com/reviews/1962/la-jet-amp-233-e (Accessed on 02.02.11)


Crowther, Bosley (1969) Castles for Two.
At: http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D04EFDD113CE53BBC4E52DFB766838C679EDE&partner=Rotten%20Tomatoes (Accessed on 02.02.11)