by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I went to the
“Vintage Science-Fiction” screening at the Golden Hill Micro-Cinema, whose
proprietor showed three movies,
all made between 1956 and 1962 (they were shown in reverse chronological order)
and all not only dealing with time travel but dealing with post-apocalyptic
futures and the people in them who attempt to escape or alter their fates by
exploiting someone who has traveled forward in time from our (or at least the
filmmakers’) present to their dystopian future. I don’t know if I’ll get to
commenting on all the movies tonight but the first one was La Jetée (variously translated as “The Jetty” or “The
Pier”), a 1962 French film by Chris Marker. It was a 28-minute short and, with
only one fleeting exception, all the shots in it are still photographs which
illustrate the story while a narrator tells us what’s going on. The film deals
with a post-apocalyptic future in which World War III has occurred and been
followed by a great plague that has wiped out most of mankind. The survivors
have taken refuge underground and have formed a highly stratified society
consisting of a handful of “victors” and a mass of people they’re exploiting as
slave labor. They seize on one particular individual (Davos Hanich) because he
has a particularly strong memory of an image he saw as a child of a woman’s
face, which he witnessed at the Orly Airport, where the titular pier or jetty
was actually a sort of balcony where people could stand outside and watch the
planes come in. Just after he saw the face, out of the corner of his eye he saw
a corpse descend off the jetty and he realized he had witnessed a man die, but
he had no idea who the man was. In a series of experiments, a group of
scientists (the narration notes that he expected a Dr. Frankenstein and the
person running the experiment proved to be flat and ordinary) sends him back in
time, using his image of the woman on the jetty as his reference point, and
while he’s traveling back in time he meets her, they date, they have an affair
and, in one quite remarkable shot, she’s shown slightly moving her head and
blinking her eye as she wakes up: the only actual live-action movie scene in a film that’s otherwise simply a
collection of stills. The context isn’t spelled out but, this being a French
movie, we’re pretty obviously supposed to read this as the woman waking up
after just having had sex with the mystery man from the future who’s been
dating her.
The film’s climax, if you can call it that, occurs on the jetty,
where emissaries from the future have come hunting down the man, and he sees
the image of the woman on the jetty just before he falls to his own death — the
corpse the child saw on the jetty was himself, returning from the future and
dying there. Before the screening, the proprietor commented that this was a
film frequently shown in college film appreciation classes — and by coincidence
that happened to be where I first saw it, at the College of Marin in 1972 (though I believe that
version had the narration in French, with English subtitles, while the one we
watched last night had a narration in English — since no one is shown actually
delivering dialogue, it’s a film that could be dubbed into a different language
without hurting it much), and I vividly remember not only the film itself but
pissing off the teacher of the class by suggesting in the post-film discussion
that it would have worked better as a conventional live-action movie. “You mean
you actually would have wanted to see all those mad scientists running around?” he sneered. La
Jetée is the sort of movie that
transcends the conventional boundaries of science fiction; it’s a rich,
romantic and ultimately tragic story of doomed love set against the backdrop of
a dystopian future. Marker, who both wrote and directed, seems to have meant
the film to be a romantic tragedy of the atomic age, but it’s more than that;
it strikes a vein of romanticism almost never tapped in science fiction either
on the printed page or on film. The only other sci-fi film I can think of
that’s as romantically wrenching as La Jetée is Solaris (the 1972 Russian version directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, not the Classic Comics version Steven Soderbergh made
with George Clooney starring in 2003), and La Jetée manages to be equally moving and unforgettable at
about one-sixth the length.
