La Jetee: The Time-Travel Masterpiece Told in Stills

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000

There is a single moving shot in Chris Marker’s La Jetee, and it lasts a few seconds. A woman lies asleep in soft morning light, and her eyes open. Everything else in the film’s twenty-eight minutes is a photograph — hundreds of black-and-white stills, cut together over a narrator’s voice and Trevor Duncan’s music, held long enough that you begin to read them the way you read a comic panel or a memory. When that one image finally stirs, when the sleeping face blinks, the effect is genuinely startling, and Marker has spent the whole film loading the gun. He turns the most ordinary thing in cinema — motion — into the rarest, and by rationing it he makes you feel the difference between a photograph and a life.

Chris Marker - vo.rs

La Jetee: The Time-Travel Masterpiece Told in Stills