La Jetee

Popef*cker scores once again, this time with the Google Video presentation of Chris Marker's La Jetee, a 29-minute short film from 1964 that's unfortunately more well-known for being remade years later by Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys than for its own virtues.

Missing image - lajetee1.jpg

If you're familiar with 12 Monkeys, you know the story. If not, it involves murder, nuclear war, time travel, and love. It's told almost entirely with stills, resembling a flickering slide show with dissolves, fades, zooms, and other cinematic transitions. The one scene where the film does move (18m 40sec) is breathtaking.

Missing image - lajetee2.jpg

Marker's film has been very hard to find on video and dvd (as has the Bruce Mau-designed book, a natural extension of the film), so its posting on Google Video is just fantastic. It's in the original French narration, but an English transcription is available here. I think the images speak much louder than the narration does, so I recommend watching it the first time without reading along.

(via Pruned)

Comments

  1. Thank you so much for this! Are you aware of an online version with subtitles? I suppose subtitles would get in the way, but I would like to know none the less.

    I am digging around myself, maybe I will try to add subtitles to the video from the script you linked to.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry about repeating, I am trying to track this conversation using cocomment. Same as above, thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  3. shajith - If you can find it, the dubbed narration is very good. When I've seen this in theaters, that's the way it's been presented.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I found a youtube video with 7 minutes of footage from the movie, dubbed in English. No luck finding the whole movie.

    According to the youtube uploader though, there is a compilation on Amazon which has the dubbed version. Gonna see if I can get that!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Err, the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WXMp5BHZ_o

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated for spam.