La Jetée (Marker, Korea, 1962) – Analysis Sheet for Evaluative Commentary
Part 1: Brief Reference
| What did you like about the film? I liked the idea of the story | What didn’t you like? It was only photos. There was no real acting. |
| What ideas could you use? Narrative or style? I would use normal talking acting instead of photos | What ideas won’t you use? Why? I will not use just music and pictures because I feel like we cant see it in detail |
Part 2: In-Depth Study – Narrative
| Narrative Feature | Example | Your own example |
| Establishing protagonist – what information do we find out? How is it conveyed? | Introduced only in narration – first in third person as “a man marked by an image”; then in first person -memory of incident at the airport. We don’t see him until the first experiment is shown. This shows how core the act of remembering is to his identity – indeed we find out very little about him (he remains nameless) apart from his ‘remembering’ (even when he is travelling in time). | We find out that it is experiments on a man, we can see his dreams and what he is thinking about in that moment. The man remains nameless and so does the woman, accept it’s the woman that died when he was younger, he seems to be thinking about her a lot. We find out a lot of different details about his childhood throughout the short film. He has a lot of things attached to his face and head so the people can track all of his thoughts. |
| Establishing other characters – what information do we find out? How is it conveyed? | The Woman is the first person we see (“the only image to survive the war”) – and she is defined only by the fact the narrator remembers her. Feminist critics may comment on the fact she barely seems to exist outside the experiences of the narrator and her growing belief in him. | The woman in this film, she was killed in a plane accident when the man was a child, the woman seems to pop up in his memories a lot through put his dreams. Only the man can remember the woman showing up in the memories from when he was younger. |
| Establishing location (time and place) – what information do we find out? How is it conveyed? | We are told immediately that the location is Paris. The bombed out wreckage of the city (real WW2 images) don’t immediately establish that this is the future until the narrator mentions radiation. The underground location beneath the Palais de Chaillet is shown by intercut images of broken cherubs and other sculptures. | We find out at the very beginning of the short film that we are located in Paris. And it shows us images of real WW2 photos of how Paris looked at that time. The underground location is shown by intercut of broken sculptures and different structures; this is telling us that the current state of Paris was not doing very well from the war. |
| Creating Enigmas – what are they? How are they created? | The image the narrator obsesses over is the central enigma: who is the man he witnesses dying? How does he die? Who is the woman? The still images and voiceover powerfully evoke the nature of memory. | This short film should make us think, who was the woman that died? How does the man die? Why is he there? Why did they choose to experiment on him? The voice over narrative makes us think we are in his head. |
| Narrative binary oppositions | The ‘Living Present’ vs Past/Future. As the film progresses, what constitutes the ‘present’ (for the protagonist) seems to shift from his dystopian subterranean society to the ‘past’ of pre-apocalypse Paris. This is conveyed by the faster rhythm of the montage and the sequence (18:00-18:49) where the images almost become like traditional cinema. | As the film progresses we can see that it shifts a lot from his childhood to more recent memories of him that are more like dreams because the woman is actually dead. The traditional photos they use of different times are brought into the films like the war photos and the pictures of the man and woman together as adults |
| Crisis – how was this conveyed? | Is it the first experiment? The moment the man spots the woman from the airport? Or is it when the future society offers him the chance to escape to the future? | The moment the man when he was a little boy spots the woman at the airport with her bags waiting for the flight, this was the scientists first thought of them bing confused. |
| Resolution – is it closed or open narrative? | The narrative is closed – but it is also in a loop: the narrator is both the dying man and the child watching the scene. This ‘time paradox’ has inspired films as diverse as The Terminator and Looper (as well as 12 Monkeys which is almost a remake). | The nattative is a closed one, because the people do not actually speak, there is sometimes a weird whispering noise because the scientists are discussing the dying mans dreams and memories. |
Part 3: Meaning and Effect
| What did you think was the intention of the filmmaker(s)? Intellectual message? Emotional response? Everyone is trapped in their time – they cannot escape it, even through memory. It is also about concept of photography and cinema itself, trying to ‘freeze’ time with images despite time always being in motion. | How was this achieved? The use of photomontage separates each frame of the story into a frozen image – even though these are joined together using traditional narrative film techniques such as voiceover, dissolves, fades and music. As the man begins to ‘live’ more and more in the ‘past’ with his lover, the space between these frames speeds up to resemble ‘motion picture’ speed at one point. The stuffed animals in the museum are also ‘frozen’ in a single moment. Your own idea: The message was that I the old times they actually could not read minds, and we still cannot not, its showing the effects that the war had on people. |
| Aesthetic binary oppositions The use of still photo images are combined with traditional narrative cinematic techniques that bring them ‘to life’… until the moment around 18:00 when they flow together. | Effect of these oppositions? Shows the intensity of emotion the narrator feels with his lover: like he is finally ‘living’ in moving time rather than a series of frozen, separated moments. Your example: The use of using a narrator was really good because we could still understand what was happening in that moment but only seeing the photos, so the narrator explaining the story was good. |