La Jetee

La Jetee transfers into English as The Jetty, an outcropping of land sort of, kind of like a dock or a port.  The first thing that comes to my mind is the Spiral Jetty in the Salt Lake, Utah.   Its a land and rock formation of a spiral reaching out into the waters, the spiral shape was also in my mind while watching this short film because of the memory theme La Jetee has, the spiral representing a gateway into another state of being.  Images of your own memory spiraling through your mind in stills much like the film has done by using only pictures and a narrator.  This was much more of an experience than it was a film, it was like being a little kid listening to someone read you a story as you only look through the pictures.

The plot of La Jetee is a spiral as well, its post Apocalypse France and the last remaining people are living underground.  A group of scientists begin experimenting with time travel to try to save their planet.  They are having problems with the people they are sending though, it seems they come back and are just not mentally stable enough.  So they come up with a brilliant plan, they have a prisoner who is obsessed with a traumatic event he witnessed as a child, a man being shot on an airport jetty.  They put him in a hammock with these huge bra shaped eye pads on him and send him into time travel!  They send in to the past where he meets a woman, he eventually begins having a romantic relationship with this woman.  They send him to the future to get supplies for their survival, once he is back from the future with the supplies he learns that the people forcing him to do this are going to execute him.  The people from the future tell him that they can save him but he will be in the future permanently, instead he was them to send him to the past so he can find the woman he loves, they send him to the past and he finds her.  She is standing on an airports Jetty with the wind blowing in her hair, he calls to her and begins running, suddenly he notices one of the guys trying to kill him and he is shot!  It is in this moment when he realizes that the man he saw die on the jetty when he was a kid was in fact himself getting shot.

The film takes you in one giant circle of this man's traumatic event.  The aesthetic of the film keeps the viewer in this storybook trans almost, it gives imagination a turn to play so to say.  A picture is just one moment in a sea of zillions of moments, it is like a statue, something created to represent a moment of importance, there is no way to recreate an exact moment on every angle but a picture is a good way.  The memory theme is very successfully dominant in La Jetee.  The narrators voice also played into the way the film progressed, he spoke slowly and flowed very nicely, it was not hard to understand what he was saying, I liked that a lot about this film.  It told you a story just like a friend may tell you a story, it was a monologue.  It also got me thinking about the purpose of memory and how everyone's memory is fluid, it can change and flow into something else because no one can remember things the exact same way.