Chris Marker on UK DVD: LA JETÉE review

Of all the films that have spun an ambitious, far-reaching story out of practically nothing, Chris Marker's La Jetée still impresses for how much it manages to do with how little. The thirty-minute short tells the story of a post-apocalyptic society living beneath the surface of a ruined Earth, their attempts to travel through time to get help and their first successful test subject, a prisoner who uses his memories from before the collapse of society as an anchor to pull himself back into the past. All this in half an hour of still frames, bar a few seconds of moving footage - the opening credits bill La Jetée as a 'photo-novel'. There are virtually no effects, a couple of simple props and no dialogue bar the narrator's voice, and yet bar a couple of visual motifs that tend towards the kitsch, this simple experiment still stands up nearly fifty years later as an elegant, captivating little number on a par with Asimov's best short stories.

The story opens with the prisoner's memories, scattered fragments of things he can remember before It All Went To Hell; standing on the 'jetty' waiting for new arrivals at Orly airport in Paris; a woman; a falling man, and people's horrified faces. After the city, then the world go up in flames, we join the prisoner (always nameless) among the survivors clinging to life underground. He knows about the scientists' experiments, but not what they're doing, only that people tend not to survive it. When they explain the business of time travel to him, it's pointed out the previous test subjects went mad because they couldn't cope - but he'll be different. His memories ought to be something he can use to keep himself together. It works, but arguably too well. Returning to the world before the catastrophe again and again, against the wishes of his captors, the prisoner starts to piece together the mystery of what his memories really mean.

If this sounds familiar, Terry Gilliam adapted Marker's basic premise for his 12 Monkeys. Part of La Jetée's enduring appeal, though, is how well it endures more than three decades on - arguably eclipses the later film, even with little more than a camera and some cheap and cheerful practical effects. There's a quiet economy to La Jetée for the most part, as if Marker knows precisely how much he has at his disposal and how best to get that single photograph to stand in for several pages of dialogue. The brief moment of actual movement on-screen was apparently down to the director only having access to a movie camera for a single afternoon, but it feels almost perfectly realised, a jolt of energy on both a narrative and a technical level. Many of the key scenes can be read in multiple different ways, and even the most self-indulgent - like an extended homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo - never interfere with the basic progression of the plot.

It doesn't all date so well. The moments the prisoner reaches into the future are narratively sound, but feel a tad kitsch, more Jean-Claude Forest than Moebius. Anyone who's read anything much from science fiction's golden age will recognise the idea of the omnipotent race watching from further down the timeline as everything inevitably goes wrong, but all the filmmaking craft in the world would struggle to make severe makeup and art deco kaleidoscopes seem like credible harbingers of the future. And though Gilliam arguably lost something by layering Marker's purity of vision in Hollywood pyrotechnics and the urge to have it all mean something, the ending to La Jetée feels a little empty in comparison - less a thought-provoking epitaph and more a weary 'Hey, shit happens'.

All the same, it's hard to dispute this is a classic. Marker would go on to explore the themes of time, memory, the cyclical nature of history and the quality of human perseverance in many of his future films - the documentary Sans Soleil talks about all of these at length. But La Jetée is impressive in part because the spirit of these later productions is clearly already there. Even at this early stage in his career Marker comes across as someone with a very definite idea of the kind of questions he wants his work to pose, and though he'd presumably have made a different film if he had the resources there's no sense of compromises - again, the one moment the image moves might have sprung from necessity, but it's arguably the most memorable thing about the film. La Jetée isn't perfect, but it's still a magnificent piece of work, beautiful, heartbreaking and hugely effective for all its flaws. It's obvious why it made Marker's name internationally, and remains essential viewing for anyone remotely interested.

THE DISC:

Optimum Home Entertainment are releasing a UK DVD under their Optimum Classic label collecting La Jetée and Sans Soleil, available to buy from Monday 22nd August. This is a bare-bones release, without the extras available on the recent Criterion edition, for example, but it's still a solid presentation providing an excellent way to see two classic features that could do with more exposure. There are no trailers: the disc launches straight into the main menu, which is a simple, static design but clear and easy to navigate. La Jetée is divided into four chapter stops, and Sans Soleil into eight.

Both films come with two language tracks, a French and English dub in the original mono 2.0. While neither English track is bad as such, both date each film more than any of the subject matter - the narration for La Jetée in particular has the crisp, stilted diction of a radio play. Oddly, one of the best reasons to get this disc is the subtitles employed, not so much because the French audio is better but because whoever wrote the subtitles adopts a far more poetic, less literal translation than the voiceovers are using. Technically, they're fine, well positioned, readable and free from errors but it's the writer's facility in English - and in adapting the original French - that's immediately obvious. Whether Optimum commissioned these or simply bought them up from one of the previous home video releases, they're fantastically well written for both films and make the viewing experience that much more rewarding.

Very little seems to have been done to the picture on both films. La Jetée is very distinct, with some deep, deep blacks, but it looks exactly what it is - a series of photographs taken by a very old camera - and each one appears with several very slight imperfections, judder, grain, dirt and so on. Marker's footage in Sans Soleil is frequently beautifully shot, but subject to a great deal of the minor wow and flutter you'd expect from what is essentially home video footage three decades old, pedantically speaking. When he films the television in his hotel room or includes ancient archival footage these things are even more obvious. It bears reiterating both films are perfectly watchable, and all of this seems to be down to the source material, but the disc would probably suffer a great deal blown up onto a big screen. There are no extras included bar the English dubs for either film.

This DVD represents two great films on a single disc from a phenomenally talented artist who's never had quite the recognition he deserves. La Jetée remains a captivating piece of filmmaking that's awe-inspiring for its craft as much as the poignancy of its brief, yet memorable narrative, and one or two dated moments don't stop it from being an enduring classic. Sans Soleil is a documentary that abandons all notion of the filmmaker's objectivity, and arguably suffers for it, but Marker's keen insight, wit and deep compassion make watching the film a journey worth taking. It's a shame Optimum Home Entertainment couldn't include any extras with their release, but for anyone interested in bold, experimental narrative features with honesty and heart to shame established cinematic convention, this should be an essential purchase.

(Thanks go to Optimum Home Entertainment and EM Foundation PR for facilitating this review.)