That’s surprisingly difficult.
We are used to works of art being misunderstood. Sometimes, though, they suffer from the opposite problem. And La Jetée is a prime example.
The biggest impediment to seeing the film with fresh eyes is its relationship with history.
Because La Jetée came out when the prospect of imminent nuclear holocaust was on everyone’s mind, it made sense to take the film’s post-apocalyptic scenario at face value. World War III was a terrifyingly real possibility, not a literary conceit.
La Jetée’s place in film history also binds it tightly to the time of its creation. Once critics perceived its numerous references to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, it became almost impossible to disentangle the two.
Neither way of thinking about La Jetée is wrong. On the contrary, together they provide an interpretive framework that maximises its significance as a Cold War text. But if we want Marker’s film to speak more forcefully to the most pressing concerns of our times, we need to extricate it from its historical context, both geopolitically and cinematically.
Luckily, I first saw the film before the internet had made it possible to research almost any topic in seconds. Even though I already knew a good deal about postwar European cinema, I walked into the theatre with a vague sense that La Jetée was important, but nothing more.
To be honest, I stumbled into the theatre, short of breath and brainpower, which only made the experience more impactful.
It was July, 1996. My fiancé and I had driven down to Los Angeles from the San Francisco Bay Area for a long weekend to see art and stretch out by the pool. We got a room at the Westin Bonaventure on the northwest edge of downtown. I’d wanted to stay at that hotel specifically, because an analysis of its confusing multi-story atrium features prominently in Marxist critic Frederic Jameson’s book Postmodernism; or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
The night we arrived, in fact, we headed to the open bar on the atrium’s bottom floor, where I proceeded to read aloud the section about the Bonaventure. A few sentences in, an air raid-style alarm went off. But despite its deafening volume, nobody else in the hotel seemed worried. That felt like a perfect distillation of Jameson’s argument, as if we were experiencing a deranged “cover” of The Eagles’ song “Hotel California” that retained its message but turned the music into architecture.
The next day, after predictably struggling to find our way out of the Bonaventure, we finally made it to street level. Instead of driving across downtown, the way Angelenos surely would have, we decided to walk to the day’s destinations.
There was a bad inversion layer hanging over the city, making it look the way it had in the late 1960s, before California’s pollution controls had begun cleaning up the air. To be more precise, it looked like an establishing shot from Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner, which takes place in a 2019 far more technologically advanced than 2019 ended up being.
By the time we arrived at the Geffen Contemporary on the other side of downtown, we were covered in a layer of grime and giddy from all the fumes we had inhaled along the way, both petrochemical and psychoactive. Entering the cool darkness of the museum felt like walking into the Mayan concrete apartment building of Blade Runner protagonist Rick Deckard.
The contrast was overwhelming. Exhausted from our journey and anxious that our fellow patrons might discern our altered state, we stumbled into the museum’s theatre and lay down on its carpeted risers to recuperate. We hadn’t even looked to see what was playing.
Imagine our surprise, then, to be confronted by more of a slide show than a conventional motion picture. Because the audio track featured both a voice-over and music, it reminded me of the educational film strips I’d watched as a grade-schooler in the 1970s.
It opens with an overhead view of passenger jets parked alongside an airport terminal. As the credits roll, we hear mournful choral music. We then cut to the sort of explanatory intertitle found in silent pictures, but doubled by a male voice’s spoken narration: “This is the story of a man marked by an image from childhood.”
After explaining that this image derives from a trip to Paris’s Orly Airport, the film delineates its narrative present. In the wake of a conflict that turned the city into a radioactive wasteland, a small group of people struggles to survive underground.
Desperate to improve their lot, they begin experimenting on prisoners of war, hoping to secure help from the past or future. Unfortunately, their test subjects are unable to withstand the rigours of temporal dislocation.
That’s where the protagonist comes in. Being marked by a single childhood memory makes him different. Yes, this memory involves witnessing a man’s death. But that traumatic content proves crucial, since its hold on him is strong enough to carry his mind past the war and back.
Once the protagonist’s captors realise his affinity for time travel, they zero in on the face of the woman in his memory. By sending him back to the Paris of his childhood over and over, they flesh out the details of her character, transforming her from a stranger seen from afar into a love interest.
Finally, everything clicks. Instead of just encountering this woman for a short time, he spends an entire afternoon with her, touring a museum full of taxidermy. We see the two of them looking at all manner of creatures, enjoying each other’s company.
This trip into the past is so successful that the protagonist’s captors decide that he is ready for the much more difficult task of travelling into the future. He manages that feat, too, securing from the human beings he meets there a power source that will enable the people of his time to rebuild civilisation.
Sadly, completing this heroic mission does not help him personally. On the contrary, his captors plan to execute him. Although the advanced beings he encounters in the future offer him refuge in their timeline, he asks them to send him back to the past, where he hopes to reconnect with the woman he met there.
This brings the story full circle. The protagonist sees the woman at the end of the airport jetty and begins running towards her. As he nears her, however, he realises that one of his captors has pursued him. He suddenly understands that the childhood memory that marked him so deeply involved witnessing his own demise.
Although La Jetée would be hard to understand from its black-and-white images alone, the voice-over narration compensates for their minimalism. Indeed, for a tale of time travel, an inherently confusing subject, the film is surprisingly lucid.
That’s why my fiancé and I were able to follow the plot despite our condition. The stillness of the images burned them into our brains. Words hit with extra force, too. When the woman in the film opened her eyes, briefly—the only scene in the film featuring motion—the effect was earth-shattering.
Because I watched La Jetée with so little foreknowledge, my response to it differed from people who were already aware of its style and content when they saw it for the first time, .
My lingering paranoia directed my attention away from the film’s invocation of nuclear war and towards the way in which its protagonist was being manipulated. I connected his recollection of a moment before the war with Blade Runner. The artificial humanoids Deckard is tracking down only have a five-year life span. Despite being “born” as adults, however, they have distinct memories of childhood.
I exited the theatre at the Geffen Contemporary, certain that La Jetée was about the dangers of trying to reconstruct the past from a few distinct images. The horrified face of the woman who witnessed the protagonist’s death had provided sufficient details for the protagonist’s captors to turn her into a believable character. In other words, she came from the future almost as much as he did.
Maybe it was because of my lingering oxygen deprivation or because the world seemed to be trending in a mostly positive direction back in 1996, but I left La Jetée convinced that Chris Marker had used nuclear war as a framing device.
While my response may seem ridiculous, it suggests a way to make the film more relevant for our own times. Nuclear war remains a constant danger, of course. But the horrors it would unleash are not the only ones we have to worry about.
Climate change seems more and more like nuclear war in very slow motion, rendering the planet uninhabitable a little bit at a time, instead of all at once. And then there’s artificial intelligence.
We also find ourselves confronting a world in which life is being destroyed more insidiously, through the relentless expansion of technologies intended to replace it.
Not only are the environmental and economic impacts of AI potentially catastrophic, but its use is also threatening to destroy our relationship with the past. The less we rely on our own powers of recollection, the more likely our individual memories will dissolve into the soup of LLMs.
La Jetée exposes the fragility of the memories that make us individuals. The Singularity threatens to rob us of our singularity. That’s what makes its Cold War tale of post-apocalyptic existence so relevant right now.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
