Chris Marker

Chris Marker

1)Co-directed his 1st documentaries with Alain Resnais in early 50's
2)His films are a blend of fiction and nonfiction
3)Films driven by narration.
4)He is often said to be one of the originators of the "essay film."

La Jetee (1963)
1) His best known film (Although I loved Sans Soleil)
2)The film relies on narration (words, voice-over)
3)It is almost entirely made up of still images
   (I read they could afford a little film one day and did a small movement with film)
4)Sci-Fi film
5) It is a film about an experiment in time travel 
6)Set in the aftermath of World War III
6)Insipired Terry Gilliam's  12 Monkeys (1995)

The Clip
1)You get a sense of how Marker's use of still photography and voice-over narration
2)creates a unique effect unlike other films of the era.
3)Included the other NW and LB filmmakers.

My notes - he has a tribute to hitchcock in his film - here it is

La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1963):

The beginning of film is French text written out and we hear the narrator speak it.
This is a film about a man marked with an image from his childhood (how the clip starts)
This is the story of a man, the violent scene that upset him, and whose meaning he was to graps only years later, happened on the observation deck at Orly Airport a few years before the outbreak of World War III.

Then the photos begin and he says he realized he saw a man die. (it turns out in the end that it was himself that he saw when he goes space travelling.

I clips we see the after effects of war and Paris bombed out. 
The survivors living underground with funny glasses. 
(One of the men is from the Belgium National Film Archives that is one of the scientist torturers). They don't speak in words just soft mumble sounds. 

David Bowie did a tribute video to La Jetee

Reminds me of Agnes Varda doing pictures and her narrative in Beaches of Agnes. Further thought - it's like the rappers of music who borrow beats from other artists

Here's a clip I found not the same but also the beginning Click Here

An article from a film magazine Click Here

Another film magazine article Click Here

Two comments:

Vertiginous, amazing, mysterious, visually stunning, this miraculous "gem" of creative cinema dares to face the theme of the identity between individual and universal while (agreeing and quoting the Italian critic Farassino): "it introduces a typical theme of French cinematic science-fiction: the time-travel". (RM****)