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Time Travel And Memories In La Jetee By Chris Marker

Decent Essays

La Jetée by Chris Marker is a 1962 science-fiction film that experiments with the concept of time travel and memories. This essay will discuss the use of narrative style in La Jetée by Chris Marker, in relation to the techniques used and their effects, and evaluate its effectiveness in conveying theme and concept, and argue that it was successful to a large extent.

Firstly, Marker uses narration to carry the plot of his film forward. Although La Jetée is a verbal and visual construct, the narration serves as the spine of the narrative. He connects the careful succession of images with a voice-over narration which further gives the impression of a narrative moving forward even if the images are not. “This is the story of a man marked by an …show more content…

As more obvious and gradual transitions than a cut, dissolves, fade-ins, and fade-outs suggest longer time lapse. La Jetee repeatedly uses dissolves in order to create the feeling of elapsed time in an otherwise still visual atmosphere. The succession of images connected in quick sequence seems to signal the mind’s inherent ability to perceive the succession of single images as movement itself. Thus, despite the spatial and temporal disruptions and the stillness of the images, the sequence preserves the illusion of movement and time elapse. The flow of frames is reassembled by the viewer’s mind due to the perceptual process of “persistence of vision” which creates the illusion of autonomous motion. However, by breaking the narrative down into a series of discontinuous stills, each held at some length, Marker reminds the viewer that the filmic illusion of motion is always composed of a series of still images. In presenting the viewer with a series of frozen images, Marker dramatizes the breakdown of the progression of time into a succession of visible moments, and drag out the viewer’s experience of time. The pauses between each image seems to be representative of the fragility of memory and replicates gaps in recollection. Memories are not recounted in its entirety with every minute detail in a comprehensive, linear or chronological succession of events, but are often fragmented, removed of context or manipulated by other interfering memories or wishful thinking, determined by heavy emotion rather than associated with context or a full understanding of the circumstances. Just like the characters in La Jetee are trapped in time, the audience of La Jetee is trapped in the stillness of the images. Therefore, Marker use of photo sequencing is largely

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