La Jetée (1962)

La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
English Title: The Jetty

Memory is the thematic and aesthetic core of Chris Marker's masterpiece La Jetée (The Jetty). Set in the far future, during the aftermath of third World War, the film tells the story of a man haunted by a distinct memory from the past, a beautiful woman he has seen as a boy in the airport just before the eruption of the war. That memory makes him a unique and indispensable individual to the victors who in trying to connect with the past and the future to salvage the present from a scarcity of important resources, are experimenting on its prisoners who have concrete mnemonic images. This man's most persisting memory is represented by a still picture of a woman in a pleasantly feminine posture, her face beaming with comforting contentment, and her hair flowing peacefully with the wind. It is his last memory of peace.

It isn't highfalutin science fiction. Actually, La Jetée is simplistic in its science and entirely evasive of the details of time travel, but accurate in the atmosphere and the emotions of being confronted by a recurring image of the past. It is oddly romantic and fluently scary, especially in the way it belabors memory as a fathomable obsession and a manipulated resource. The plot's elliptical form only reinforces Marker's thematic quirk, the way the mysteries of time, of the human mind, and the human heart converge in a highly intimate tale of emotional longing.

La Jetée's aesthetic stance approximates a cinematically unconventional act of mnemonic recollection. While cinema has represented memories as elegant trips to the past through fluid flashbacks which are often granted the same clarity as the present, La Jetée takes a different course, visually experimental but still conventional in its storytelling methods. The film can accurately be described as a photo-montage, where black and white images are flawlessly stitched together. Guided by a narrator, the film takes the shape and feel of a storybook being told from start to finish.

Let not its unique form and style intimidate you. La Jetée showcases Marker as a filmmaker adept in the basics of filmmaking. The twenty nine-minute film is perhaps the most impressively edited film I've ever seen. The black and white stills magically move through the fades to black, the perfectly-timed cuts, and the transitions that are all the more made effective by pertinent yet bare sound effects and the memorably apt musical score. In one sequence, the man is first experimented upon by the victors. The rhythm of his heartbeat provides an unmitigated tension that fuels the ethereally ravishing photographs of the man suffering; his teeth sinking on the reed hammock which serves as his bed and his hands contorting in manifestly pained shapes.

There's a single moment in La Jetée wherein Marker decides to suddenly erupt from the confines of still memory, and allows one of his subjects to move, although very momentarily. It's intriguing because it is both startling yet magical, the way the girl awakes from slumber and truly awakes, blinking and smiling. It is as if the image has escaped from being merely encapsulated as a figment of memory but has become a part of the present, unlimited by the inadequacies of the human mind. But why did Marker choose that moment to break his unique style? It is perhaps it is only in that moment wherein the man has sufficiently let go of the memory, and believed it as a present emotion: of comfort and relief. In contrast, it is only in the museum where the animals of the past have been frozen for perpetuity did the man truly perfect the art of time travel (probably in acceptance that the past, like these frozen animals, need to be immobile for that is memory's most innate nature). That was exactly what the man's captors needed, a perpetuated memory not a fleeting emotion.

La Jetée is a film that is continually changing and evolving. It inhabits the very quality that makes photography a veritable art form, the way it captures a real moment in time for perpetuation and incessant interpretation. Similarly, La Jetée has the story of a man and his obsession with his memory of a girl waiting in the jetty made eternal. Yet beyond that story is Marker's art which plays differently every single time it is seen. The first time I saw it, it impressed me with how the narrative was perfectly told through mere photographs. The second time I saw it, I was left enchanted by its subtle tackling of the interconnections of time, memory, love, and obsession. The third time I saw it, I became fascinated by Marker’s fluency in his medium. Metaphorically put, La Jetée is as open as the clear skies that day when the image of the girl was engraved on the man's mind, and as tremendous and terrifying as the apocalypse that befell the world after it.

Trial of Joan of Arc (1962)

Trial of Joan of Arc (Robert Bresson, 1962)
French Title: Procès de Jeanne d'Arc

Robert Bresson's Trial of Joan of Arc opens with robed steps scurrying towards a ranking church official. We never get a sense as to who exactly are these people until the central figure speaks; declaring that her daughter has lived a religious past and has been convicted and burned for false crimes. She reads her declaration from a scroll of parchment, and we can guess that the speaker is the mother of Joan of Arc. Drums interrupt the declaration, and as the opening credits are shown on screen, the image of the kneeling robed figure presumably still reading from the parchment persists. We learn from Bresson's introductory statement that the opening sequence is from the rehabilitation which took place 25 years after Joan's burning. More importantly, we also learn that no portrait or image remains of Joan, and that the film is completely reconstructed from the minutes of Joan's trial.

We first see the menacled hands of Joan (Florence Delay), atop the bible. The film is predominantly just a series of exchanges between Joan and her inquisitors, the Bishop Cauchon (Jean-Claude Fourneau) --- with Joan recitingly dictating her answers to her judges' interrogations. Whenever she's not in the trial, we see her in her cell; her hands are free but her foot bounded with metal chains. Moreover, there's a peeping hole in the cell where Joan's English guards consistently make remarks on their prisoner's disposition.

The atmosphere is claustrophobic --- when in trial, Joan is always surrouded by the heads of clergymen while being led by the Anglophile bishop to reveal relationships with witchcraft. Even more so while she's in the cell wherein walls of heavy stone (the film was shot in the exact prison where Joan was detained) surround her, and privacy and even remnants of her feminine dignity are being encroached. She claims that her martyrdom is her imprisonment, definitely unaware that her burning has been pre-destined by her English captors.

France is captured by England. The bishops are being controlled by their English-speaking masters. Joan is physically, mentally and psychologically restrained by both her captors and the voices that dwell inside her head. Bresson explicitly explores the struggle for release, for that philosophical freedom, by tackling the enigma of Joan of Arc. Imperatively, he doesn't allow much creative freedom from his actors, restricting their dialogues as to what has been transcribed from the historical trials. There's a feeling that the actors are merely reading their lines (the same way that the mother is reading from the parchment what she thought of was her daughter's life), restricted from enunciation or emotions. Like the characters they are portraying and Bresson is depicting, the methodology is quite restrictive to what is historically preserved from the life of Joan. It's uncomfortably straightforward, spartan in method, and rarely punctuated with humanity (we do see Joan cry, but it is probably due to Bresson's understanding that the lass is merely nineteen and is burdened with a spiritual duty).

From the narrative sparseness and the thematic intensity, Bresson develops a journey from corporeal imprisonment to freedom. There's a curious preoccupation with steps and footwork. Bresson's camera focuses a number of times on the feet of his characters; as if proclaiming our body's gravitational attraction with the Earth. That theme predominantly surfaces in Joan's trial --- the unsurprising uncomplementary nature of spiritual redemption and human politics (bureaucracy, justice, punishment). Bresson again captures Joan's bare feet finally lightfootedly walking towards the stake --- it's quite an unusual walk; it seems that she's scurrying or floating against the cement road; even an onlookers attempt to make her trip is met with failure as she continues her hurried steps.

We first see the free sky (a refreshing scene) when Joan is tied to the stake. While she burns, she says her last words --- that her voices did not deceive her (she begins to understand that she was meant to escape all corporeal imprisonment, not imprisonment dictated by the terms of human relations). When she breathes her last sigh, Bresson cuts to doves atop the canvas that separates the bishops from the sky, then again cuts to the stake with only ashes as remnants of Joan's body-bound self. It's quite a touching depiction of spiritual release.