Temporal Articulation in La Jetee

Temporal Articulation in La Jetée

Chris Marker's La Jetée presents a narrative occurring in three distinct time periods: the past, present, and future, depicted solely through static images. Each time period articulates the temporal relationship between adjacent images differently and through various means, including but not limited to the amount of perceived movement or change within the mise en scene from shot to shot (or the ellipsis between images in a sequence), and the amount and type of voiceover used in any given sequence. The audience's ability to comprehend narrative time remains relatively consistent throughout the film, but the means by which passing time is represented alters in each time period, depending upon the ways in which the above characteristics are manipulated.

On a strictly visual basis, the audience's perception of the passage of time becomes progressively retarded from past to present to future (fabula-wise), and this sensation is achieved through the manipulation of ellipsis between images in a sequence (a sequence being any uninterrupted slice of time occurring in the past, present, or future). Broadly, shot to shot differences in time go from determinate in the past, to less determinate in the present, to almost totally indeterminate in the future. In other words, it is easier to register the passage of time through the change within the image from shot to shot in sequences occurring in the past than it is in sequences occurring in the present, which in turn register the passage of time more explicitly than do the images from sequences occurring in the future.

For example, a sequence in the beginning of the film (occurring in the temporal present of the fabula) depicting of the results of the ...

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...ough to say that La Jetée is a wonderfully rich experiment in the manipulation of the perception of time; despite the complexities elaborated in this paper, the film presents a consistently comprehensible articulation of time, despite and because of an information-impeding stylistic device (still images as opposed to moving images) and a complex, circular narrative laden with potentially confusing time travel.

Notes

1) Only one pivotal shot in the film is not static.

2) Dissolves typically indicate an ellipsis, or a longer ellipsis than is usually indicated by a cut. Thus the dissolves of the woman sleeping in bed could be read as occurring over longer, more indeterminate periods of time in which she has moved very little.

Works Cited

Le Jetee. Dir. Chris Marker. Perf. Jean Negroni, Helene Chatelain, Danos Hanrich and Jacques Ledoux. Argos Films, 1962.