film and architecture section: La jetée /The Jetty / The Pier by Chris Marker, architecture and film appreciation

category: Architecture and Film

film index: 24

relationship with architecture:

architecture has a metaphoric presence in telling the story line

study subject in:

The Bartlett University syllabus (click HERE for syllabus)

"film+architecture" Course, Harvard Design School. (click HERE for syllabus)

film: La jetée (The Jetty / The Pier)
director: Chris Marker
writers: Chris Marker
production: France
release: 1962
playtime: 28 mins
visual: BnW
Language: French / German
Subtitles:
Genre: Sci fi
Cast: Hélène Chatelain, Davos Hanich, Jacques Ledoux
size: 401/171 mb

influence on: Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam (click to go to related page)

reference: avaxhome.ws, www.taringa.net, www.foriegnmoviesddl.com, www.tipete.com

Description and download:

La jetée (English: The Jetty or The Pier) (1962) is a 28-minute black and white science fiction film by Chris Marker. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. La jetée has no dialogue aside from small sections of muttering in German. The story is told by a voice-over narrator. It is constructed almost entirely from optically printed photographs playing out as a photomontage of varying pace. It contains only one brief shot originating on a motion-picture camera.

Synopsis: The survivors of a destroyed Paris in the aftermath of World War III live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send test subjects to different time periods "to call past and future to the rescue of the present". They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally withstand the shock of time travel, but eventually settle upon a male prisoner who is up to the task; his vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the boarding platform ("The Jetty") at Orly Airport is the key to his journey back in time...

He is thrown back to the past again and again to a time prior to the war, when he had been a child. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman from his memory, who was present at the terminal. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the far future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society. Upon his return, with his mission accomplished, he discerns that he is to be executed by his jailers. He is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time, but he asks to be instead returned to the pre-war time of his childhood, hoping to again find the woman. He is returned and does find her, but an agent of his jailers has followed. The man finds that the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult at the hands of the agent.

imbd link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056119/
Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jet%C3%A9e

screenshots:

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pages

Friday, November 13, 2009

La jetée /The Jetty / The Pier by Chris Marker, architecture and film appreciation

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