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DVD Tuesday: La Jetée -- The Ultimate Sci-Fi Movie
La Jetee courtesy Criterion Collection
Could La Jetée -- the original Twelve Monkeys -- just be the most perfect science fiction film ever made?
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!
This is the shortest movie I'll ever feature in DVD Tuesday, and it's the ultimate vindication of the saying that good things come in small packages: Chris Marker's 28-minute, 1963 science-fiction jewel La Jetée, which Terry Gilliam reworked into the film many fans consider his masterpiece, Twelve Monkeys (1995). La Jetée is also the most unconventional film I've featured to date: It's composed almost entirely of black-and-white still images and has no sync sound, just a narrator. It's Marker's only fiction film. And it's mesmerizing, thought-provoking and utterly haunting; I like Twelve Monkeys, but I love La Jetée.
It begins in Orly airport, where a boy on a family day-trip to watch planes take off instead sees a commotion on the ground. Allow me to quote the film's narration: "A sudden roar, a woman's gesture, the fall of a body and the cries of the crowd. Only later did he realize that he had seen a man die. And soon afterwards, Paris was blown up."
Marker then flashes forward to a postapocalyptic future, in which the ragged survivors live underground and a group of scientists have developed a way to travel through time. Their plan is to appeal to the human race of the future for help — food, medicine, or new technologies that could help them rebuild the world — and they've found a guinea pig in a nameless survivor (Davos Hanich) whose memories, especially his memory of a childhood outing to Orly, are so powerful that they can be used as a bridge out of the present.
The scientists send him into the past as a test, and he meets the woman (Hélène Chatelain) whose face made such an indelible impression on him all those years ago; he falls in love with her. He's abruptly recalled by the scientists and sent to the future, but all he wants is to return to the past. He finally gets what he wants, but time and memory are tricky things.
The difference between La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys is one of scale and detail: Marker doesn't care about fantastic machines or bizarre imagery, whereas Gilliam does, and Gilliam hopscotches his protagonist (Bruce Willis) around various pasts and alters his mission — he's supposed to find the origin of the virus that poisoned the world and bring back a sample so future scientists can find a cure.
Marker's interest lies in the vivid, almost brutal power that fragments of memory — unreliable, subjective, easily misunderstood — have to shape our thoughts, character and perception of the world. A single blinding memory can color everything, and yet who hasn't shared some childhood recollection — a story you've told dozens of times — with a relative who was there, only to have him or her say, "But that isn't the way it happened at all"?
La Jetée came out on tape in 1998, but it's just been released on DVD by the Criterion Collection, paired with Marker's tricky 1982 documentary Sans Soleil. It looks breathtaking and includes some interesting extras.
Things to consider:
The cliché of science-fiction movies is that they're all rockets, robots and ray guns; the reality is more complicated. What makes a sci-fi movie (or TV show) sci-fi?
Genre historians often argue that Dracula was the first horror novel and Frankenstein the first science-fiction novel. What's their point?
La Jetée is consistently ranked among the cream of sci-fi movies, and its influence can be seen in places as diverse as Blade Runner (the scene in which the photo of Rachael's "mother" briefly animates, the overall theme of unreliable memory), the video for David Bowie's "Jump They Say (in fact, sci-fi imagery is a recurring element in his songs), Jack Finney's 1970 novel Time and Again (time travel through mental connection to the past) and The Terminator (a man from the future drawn to the preapocalyptic past by the image of a woman). So what's so special about it?
They're called "movies" and "motion pictures" because they move and "flicks" — short for "flickers" — because of the visible flicker your eyes perceive when a movie is projected at slightly more or less than 24 frames per second, as often happened in the earliest days of the medium. La Jetée doesn't move, except for a few seconds, and yet it's undeniably a movie. Thoughts?
Previously in DVD Tuesday
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
http://community.tvguide.com/thread.jspa?threadID=800073953#comments">Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also: This week's new DVD releases
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Jun 19, 2007 1:54 PM
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Well, obviously if the movie is science and fiction, you got sci-fi, but with movies, like Frankenstein, most people would consider it a monster movie. I think it depends on where the focus is. For example: Gattaca could be considered a sci-fi movie, but I felt it was more of a support for the drama. Of course, I think Frankenstein is more of a sci-fi movie than a monster movie. Most monsters or villians kill several people and usually don't care too much that they do, but I always felt bad for Frankenstein, he was a misunderstood creature.
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Jun 19, 2007 2:11 PM
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Even though it's kind of considered a "chick flick," I enjoyed "Somewhere in Time" because the idea of being able to will yourself back in time by just believing it was kind of interesting....
Besides, I love the John Barry score too and Jane Seymour is pretty easy on the eys too....
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Jun 19, 2007 2:26 PM
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Now this is a topic I like! I haven't seen La Jetée (I'm sure as hell gonna try and find it now, though), but I do savour any opportunity to discuss the artistic merits of SF.
As to your first question, I think we all know approximately what SF is. It's murderously hard to define precisely, I just looked in the excellent Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (most likely the greatest reference work on SF ever written), and the entry for "Definitions of SF" is approximately four pages long. It is simply one of those cases where "I know it when I see it" applies.
I think a much more interesting question to raise is "What makes great sci-fi great?" In my opinion, truly fantastic SF uses the essential limitlessness of the genre to explore questions about humanity that we cannot as easily deal with in other genres. For instance, what better way is there to ask about the essential nature of humanity than theorising about thinking machines? What better way to explore identity is there other than inventing drugs that split your psyche in half and suits that make you look like everyone and no-one at the same time? (a little A Scanner Darkly nod, there  )
That's the great thing about SF: if there is anything the writer or film-maker needs to make a symbolic/philosophical/psychological/whatever point, he can use any thing he can imagine. That is what makes great SF so great, in my opinion.-
As for Horror vs. SF, I would argue that your distinction between them isn't at all as clear-cut. I would argue that they are both horror-stories, but at that time horror and SF were, essentially, the same thing. Think of (for instance) Jekyll & Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Many people would clearly label that as horror, but if it were written today, it would clearly be SF.
What constitutes the first work of science fiction depends obviously on your definition of science fiction. As earlier stated, that is not an easy thing to do. If you define it simply as fiction that is aware of science and is able to take advantage of it, then Frankenstein certainly applies. But if you used that definition, Jekyll & Hyde would be excluded, and if we are counting Frankenstein, I really don't think we should leave Jekyll and Hyde behind! That would be most unfair!
I would argue that all these early works that straddle the horror/SF divide should really be labelled as proto-SF. SF proper didn't really start until Jules Verne and HG Wells started writing.
I have no idea whether I answered your question, but those are my thoughts on the subject in any case 
Cheers!
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Jun 19, 2007 3:32 PM
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My personal belief is that SF is the genre about the effects that science [not necessarily technology] has on humanity and the various ways we might respond to these effects.
After all, Richard McKenna - who wrote SF classics like Casey Agonistes declared his novel The Sand Pebbles to be SF - the science being social anthropology [and that would, of course, make the movie adaptation SF, too...].
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Jun 19, 2007 4:02 PM
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I totally agree with Oskar about what makes sci-fi. I cannot define it, but "I know it when I see it". And that makes it subjective.
For example, many people think The Fifth Element is sci-fi. I think it's just an action movie.
And perceptions can change. The technologies of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea seemed an impossibility back in 1870. Now we take them for granted. But it's still a science fiction story. It won't be much longer before 2001 space flight seems old hat.
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Jun 19, 2007 5:16 PM
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Those of you who know sci-fi when you see it have been thinking about it -- consciously or not -- for a long time.
I can get behind the proto-science fiction line of reasoning, and I think the term applies perfectly to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. It is, after all, not magic or myth that gives birth to Frankenstein's sad monster, but medical science. The many and various movie versions of her novel often (though not always) skip lightly over that part in favor of monster-on-the-rampage scares, but it's front and center in the source material.
And if you want to talk about being precient, some of Shelley's ideas were way ahead of their time. We still can't bring life out of death, but we can transplant cadaver parts and create viable human life in a lab.
Yesterday's speculative fiction always runs the risk of becoming yesterday's news: Look at cloning. A decade ago cloning sophisticated life forms seemed like something scientists would be doing around the time they started commuting to work in their flying cars. The flying cars aren't here yet, but cloning cats and dogs and farm animals is officially mundane reality. Ditto the so-called "franken-foods," which are manipulated at the genetic level. You may not see the fish genes in the corn, but they're there.
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Jun 19, 2007 7:06 PM
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You and I always seem to have such similar tastes in films. It's rare that I've found women who are as interested in darker themes like the ones you discuss. I am going to try to look up your book too. My husband is a HUGE Italian horror fan. He even has T-Shirts of Argento and Fulci films. hah!
Thanks for posting about this. I am so addicted to dystopian films and books that I must buy this. I love Criterion. I don't know what us film geeks would do without them! It's one of the first "weirder" films that I remember seeing and helped open me up to seeing all sorts of great films that I wouldn't have otherwise.
I have always been such a big fan of 12 Monkeys. It's actually one of those movies that I throw in for comfort. HAH! I know. It's not because it was filmed here in Philadelphia either.
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Jun 21, 2007 3:26 PM
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I originally saw La Jetee in college in a French Literature class I was taking, maybe the year before Twelve Monkeys came out. I have to admit that of the two, La Jetee is the movie I remember the most vividly. An absolutely fascinating view of time travel and its paradoxes.
And thanks to having seen La Jetee I actually had a vague idea about how Twelve Monkeys' plot worked. But my friends just did not like Twelve Monkeys, while I thought it was interesting, but not nearly as intriguing as La Jetee.
Thanks for letting us know that it was out on DVD. I am interested to see how well my memory is working or if it has been playing tricks on me.
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Jun 21, 2007 5:10 PM
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snmoe1997: I hope the new DVD release of La Jetée will help broaden its audience, because I really believe it's one of the most haunting films ever made. Most movies are like cotton candy: You consume them and an hour later you don't remember a thing about them. But La Jetée burrows into your brain and waits there, surfacing when you least expect it: It's cool and creepy and thought provoking and profoundly moving all at the same time.
As I said in my original post, I'm a fan of Twelve Monkeys, but La Jetée cuts me to the quick -- for my money, that's the sign of one of the greats.
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Jun 24, 2007 11:14 PM
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