La Jetée By Chris Marker

La Jetée by Chris Marker is a 1962 science-fiction featurette that experiments with the concept of time travel, memories and one’s mere experience of time. This essay will discuss the use of narrative style in La Jetée by Chris Marker, in relation to the techniques used and their effects, and evaluate its effectiveness in conveying theme and concept, and argue that it was successful to a large extent.

Firstly, Marker uses narration to carry the plot of his film forward. Although La Jetée is a verbal and visual construct, the narration serves as the spine of the narrative, and maintains the suggestion of time. He connects the careful succession of images with a narration which further gives the impression of a narrative moving forward even

“This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood”, was the opening line of the film, and seems to establish the context that was to guide the direction of the rest of the film. The narration help the viewer make sense of the images they see, and direct their interpretation towards a certain direction, relevant to the idea that Marker wants translated to the viewer. For example, the narration seems to give an added dimension to the narrative through the exploration of the notion of memories, in which they voice questions the validity of what he remembers. Such as how “he often wondered if he had ever seen” the woman’s face “or if he had dreamed a lovely moment” and that he was unsure “whether he…made it up or whether he [was] only dreaming”, which is similar to how our memories are often inaccurate and are changed with time. The narrator mentions the character “hears himself say.” This indirect way of perceiving his own

The images seems to gain meaning through their juxtaposition and alluded association to one another. The repetition of images from a previous scene stabilizes the viewer’s impression of those images by presenting identical images in a rearranged order. However, it is also destabilizing in that the viewer is unsure if the images are exactly the same. By seeing repeated images, the viewer is given the impression of recollecting something that they have observed before, which is what the character does while visiting the memories of his past. This experience, while being somewhat disorienting, connects the viewer’s cognitive process to that of the main character, who is likewise muddled in trying to rationalize and reconcile his situation and circumstance. The mind is depicted, through the use of segmented and repeated images, to recount past events in a fashion comparable to the time traveler’s fixation with a single image lodge in his mind of the woman on the pier, which is rather arbitrary but also one of great vividness. This is reflective of how our mind recollects memories in a similarly arbitrary manner, and yet is strangely able to hold strong impressions of a memorable image. It is the single lucid memory that the character has, which is at the same time, lost in the abyss of his other memories, and hence cannot ascertain what led