FANTASIA OBSCURA: The Cult Short Film That Would Inspire a Terry Gilliam Classic
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, a lot of important moments in time are recalled as small flashes of stillness…
La Jetee (1962)
Distributed by: Argos Films (Janus Films in the US)
Directed by: Chris Marker
It all comes down in the end to a question of scale.
Too many times, when people start production on a film, there’s an assumption that big events need to be staged on a scale to match (or exceed) what’s being depicted. Two lovers finding each other explodes into sound swells and camera tricks, and gunfights devolve beyond just two people pulling pieces on each other. And don’t even contemplate how staging a battle or apocalyptic disaster will end up in most hands.
Which makes the short work done to the end of the world by this short film all the more daring, in how little is expended on it.
We’re told in narration (Jean Negroni) with text on display that we are watching the story of a man haunted by an upsetting childhood image. He saw it at Orly Airport right before World War III started, but did not understand what he saw until years later.
We watch as the memory unfolds, seeing what the child sees as he recalls his trip to the airport to watch the planes come in. The most vivid element of the time is the face of a woman (Helene Chatelain, her one credited acting role before going on to direct documentaries) who enchants him with her serene expression, before pandemonium erupts.
The child has a few moments to process what he’s seen that day, that a man died in front of him, before Paris is nuked into ruins…
The surface of the planet is a radioactive wasteland, and society underground has split between the bullies and the bullied. The man has grown up (and when we see him, he’s played by Davos Hanisch, his only acting credit), and is among the later, living under horrible conditions underground under bleak circumstances.
Ultimately, the bullies under the boulevards decide that our subject’s turn has come to be part of an experiment they are running: A researcher (Jacques Ledoux, in the first of two acting gigs he took in the midst of his career as a cinematographer) has discovered the means by which people can project themselves through time, a process that either kills or drives insane all the subjects so far.
The researcher uses the man as his latest subject, and the man makes his way back to a time before the bombs go off. When he gets to the past, he meets the woman who he first saw as a boy at Orly. The two are drawn to each other, and as he makes successive trips to the past their relationship deepens, their dates leading to intimacy as he enjoys breaks from a desolate present in the past
Ultimately, with enough trips to before the war to show this process is a success, the man is sent the other way: He goes to the future, to appeal to what his overseers hope is a more advanced era to have the future folks send help to get the survivors through their time. But can he convince his more developed descendants to provide assistance to the victims of the bombs?
And closer to home, what’s in the man’s future if the appeal is a success? What will the bullies he’s under do to him when he’s no longer needed…?
Marker certainly did what he needed to do with this film. Time travel has always been difficult to depict, either conveniently casting aside any potential casual effects from such trips, or getting so convoluted in trying to carefully track the effects of the effort that the plot trips on itself and falls over to cause self-injury. As depicted here, the effort to go to another time, and how its effects are depicted, are precise and well-supported within the frame of the piece; it’s just the right size for the story it’s trying to tell.
The only other work around the time this film came out that conceptualized time travel so neatly was the Harlan Ellison script for the episode “Demon With a Glass Hand” for The Outer Limits. There’s nothing to suggest that Ellison was aware of Marker’s film, and the fact that they took such similar approaches simultaneously is certainly worthy of wonder.
In terms of how Marker’s story is told, that in and of itself makes this piece of particular interest. While we could certainly call Le Jetee a “film,” it would be hard to classify it as a “motion picture.” Marker’s piece is a collection of still images, shot in succession with narration and a soundtrack composed by Trevor Duncan performed at parts by the choir of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral of Paris.
A brief example of this approach to telling the story can be found in this clip (narrated by James Kirk for the English release):
The entire film is shot and presented in this manner, save for one motion sequence where the woman opens her eyes as she wakes up in the morning. What might seem limiting in theory actually works to Marker’s advantage, allowing for shots that can focus on a particular image for the viewer to digest fully, the same way the man in the story has images burned into his brain that allows him to travel in time 
successfully.
What allows this approach to work so well is the time devoted to the story; the film’s run is just 28 minutes in length. It’s not certain that had the film been a feature length presentation that it could have sustained this style for its entirety. As is, it’s a short subject that contains a lot of potency in its dosage, with images inspired by the “new realism” school of art that still give the film an edge that makes it haunting and disturbing even in our time.
And the film has haunted and disturbed many over the years, including Terry Gilliam, for whom the small 28-minute masterpiece would ultimately inspire one of his better-known works:
An acknowledged by Gilliam adaptation of Le Jetee, his film Twelve Monkeys would become a hit in theaters when released in 1995, ultimately leading thereafter to the adaptation as the television series 12 Monkeys in 2015. While both of these took more conventional approaches to telling a story of using time travel to save humanity, their bigger budgets and more sweeping scopes cannot approximate the more intimate connection that Marker’s shorter stills montage had with his audience.
It all comes down in the end to a question of scale.
NEXT TIME: Speaking of Gilliam, let’s look at that time early on when he was still trying to figure out how to do a good film, let alone a masterpiece…
