Last night's viewing...
Like most people in my generation, I found out about Chris Marker's 1962 film, La Jetée (The Pier), long after seeing Terry Gilliam's 1995 reinterpretation, 12 Monkeys. La Jetée, a 27-minute science fiction masterpiece mostly conveyed to the viewer by way of still photographs and narration, is a loving tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, so fans of all three films appreciate Terry Gilliam's homage-within-an-homage when he includes a sequence in 12 Monkeys where characters are watching a theatrical showing of the Hitchcock film. Less is more when it comes to this particular time travel story concept, though, so my preferences are strongly in favor of Marker's La Jetée over Gilliam's 12 Monkeys.
La Jetée, with its sparse images, is infinitely more haunting than a full-length feature interpretation, because the film forces us to fill in the gaps between the still frames with our own imaginations. As the lead character in La Jetée realizes, our own individual travels through time are rooted in iconic still images from our own memories. His own test trips back to the past begin with a series of still images that gradually take on a life of their own to the point where he is able to meet the woman whose face made an impression on him as a child during a memorable moment at an airport pier. Memory is an unreliable witness at times, however, as the lead character ultimately discovers, and the images that stand out in our minds can often serve to obscure truths that subsequently escape our attention. At one point during La Jetée, a still image comes to life before our eyes, but the rest of the story relies on snapshots and the end result is just as much our own film creation as it is the creation of the director. My own idea of how Paris crumbled in the third World War may be entirely different than yours after seeing the film, and the beauty of this is that neither of us are incorrect.
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Chris Marker's La Jetée are briefly revisited again in Marker's 1983 documentary, Sans Soleil (Sunless). Sans Soleil is a documentary like no other, and it operates under the guise of a travelogue told by a third party female narrator who reads letters written by a friend during his journeys to different countries. The "travelogue" in question is chaotic in nature as the images and discussion often veer without warning back and forth to different settings on a whim, just as the movies of our own minds may jump back and forth to random scenes in our lives. There is no right or wrong way to view Sans Soleil, so my advice to prospective viewers is not to panic if your attention wanders and you lose focus on the narration of specific scenes. This documentary is what the individual viewer makes of it, and the mastery of the exercise is rooted in how the movie exploits the nature of our own mental processes.
La Jetée and Sans Soleil both look and sound great on this Criterion Blu-ray. A handful of supplements are wonderfully informative in the way that distractions can be, and I particularly love a short side trip about a David Bowie video that was influenced by La Jetée.
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