387 La Jetée and Sans Soleil

[warren oates]

Oh, you don't have to be all backhanded and condescending about it, Oates, I think La Jetee is fundamentally a more interesting work too but pulling the 'pff maybe you're just not working hard enough, go back to Hollywood movies' thing isn't going to lead anyone to want to follow what you're saying. Moreover, I see no reason why the brilliance of La Jetee has to be at the expense of 12 Monkeys, which you evidently haven't even watched.

Oh I've seen all of 12 Monkeys and I'm not sure I'd say it wasted my time completely. I just caught it again a few weeks ago on cable for a few minutes and found it, again, to be laughably bad. One film doesn't have to be bad so the other can be good, yeah, obviously. But dad seemed to be almost implying as much above and, frankly, I jumped on it because part of what I love about Marker's film defines most of what I love about films and sci-fi period, as does what I dislike so intensely about Gilliam's work.

It's not all that challenging to make an audience believe in your imagined future if your are say, Ridley Scott or Stanley Kubrick with the full budget of a major studio behind you (and both have made excellent, wonderful films this way). But try convincing the audience that you are showing them a vision of an apocalyptic future when you can't even afford motion picture processing (except for one shot), or that your hero has built a working time machine in his garage with not a single VFX shot or that your protagonist, who appears to be crossing an empty field of overgrown grass is actually stepping into multidimensional minefield of unknown traps by photographing only what we can see. Those are the real manly-man visionary acts of balls-out sci-fi imagination in my book.

[matrixschmatrix]

I'm not disagreeing that Marker's achievement is remarkable, I just don't think it reasonable to see it as detracting from Gilliam's. As it happens, there are places in 12 Monkeys in which Gilliam uses similar techniques to make the familiar seem alien- a lot of the giant underground future sets were little-altered practical locations in a disused nuclear power station.

[colinr0380]

I like La Jetee and 12 Monkeys both, although for different reasons. La Jetee is personal, even intimate, and feels to be not just about romantic love but also feels like a yearning for a pre-war, pre-apocalypse time. Maybe even a time of childhood, before self awareness and awareness of the world around us along with the weight of responsibilities to that world which this awareness brings. An innocence that can never be returned to, or can only be returned to for a short time through isolation and avoidance until even that becomes too difficult to prevent outside concerns from intruding.

12 Monkeys meanwhile opens out the central doomed love story (to the extent that even on rewatching it always kind of takes me by surprise when the film moves into the airport and Gilliam begins to manoeuvre the characters into position to 'officially remake' the Marker film) with sci-fi dystopia and a darkly ironic sense of Brazil-style embellishments and dead ends complicating the relatively simple plot, along with the sense that in trying to avert the crisis the scientists of the future seem to have created it (and were they ever really interested in saving the world, or of just being able to continue their existence in the post-apocalyptic one?)

They are both doing different things but are both great films. Though I have to admit to preferring La Jetee slightly more!

dad1153, have you got the Criterion edition of Kurosawa's Ran? If so I would highly recommend checking out Marker's making of documentary A.K. next. That was the first film I saw by the director and in retrospect it works as a really nice introduction to Marker's sensibilities and his way of pointing out little incidental details and amusing or thought provoking juxtapositions of the production (I particularly like the extras in samurai garb trooping past the line of 80s cars to get onto the set!)

[matrixschmatrix]

The time loop seems to have different meanings in the two works, too- in 12 Monkeys, it suggests self-fulfilling prophecy and an overwhelming sense of inevitable fate, while in La Jetee (where it feels more questionable that time traveling is occurring at all) it suggests more a journey into one's own memories, and a collapse of memory and experience that makes elapsed time meaningless. It's not just a detail that the actual method for traveling through time is so different between the two- Gilliam's is a journey outward, done with giant machines and so forth, and it reflects a movie that is exploring a real space. Marker's is a journey inward, done with drugs, and it's a fundamentally introspective film.

[HerrSchreck]

I love THE BRAIN THAT WOULDNT DIE at the specific expense of BREATHLESS. ( insert smiley with ditty bop shades).

[dad1153]

dad1153, have you got the Criterion edition of Kurosawa's Ran? If so I would highly recommend checking out Marker's making of documentary A.K. next. That was the first film I saw by the director and in retrospect it works as a really nice introduction to Marker's sensibilities and his way of pointing out little incidental details and amusing or thought provoking juxtapositions of the production (I particularly like the extras in samurai garb trooping past the line of 80s cars to get onto the set!)

I have "Ran" and I did see (and liked) the documentary. Man, I had already watched stuff Marker made (on the "Ran" and "Last Year at Marienbad" extras) before I saw "Sans Soleil" and "La Jetée" without knowing who he was. I'm such an ass! :(

[warren oates]

I like Marker's documentary about Tarkovsky too Une journée d'Andrei Arsenevitch, which is out on DVD from Icarus.

But about the question of when and if it's okay to compare and contrast:

I love THE BRAIN THAT WOULDNT DIE at the specific expense of BREATHLESS. ( insert smiley with ditty bop shades).

I don't know. It's obviously silly to claim in the abstract that you can't like _________ if you like _________ but when it gets down to it like this, in stark specifics, when we're talking about two films both made from the same story, by two totally different filmmakers whose aesthetics, world views and production apparatuses are in many ways inherently if not diametrically opposed, it does beg a kind of Kierkegaardian question of Either/Or. Godard once said something like "tracking shots are a matter of morality." Well, yeah, and so is every other artistic decision that gets made by a director in any given film.

More often then not Marker's decisions add up to a kind of endlessly interesting experience for me where as Gilliam's mostly strike me as loud and obvious. I would rather have seen a big budget Hollywood version of La Jetée by any number of other directors (Kubrick, Spielberg, Ridley Scott, David Fincher, Alfonso Cuaron, Danny Boyle). I know Marker's publicly endorsed 12 Monkeys as a valid adaptation of his short. I just don't have to care. Maybe it's that, to me, Gilliam will always be the cartoonist he started out as, drawing everything like a caricature. I remember Brazil being like Kafka in a clown suit. And regular Kafka was always funny enough for me without being goofied up and all in my face.

[matrixschmatrix]

The point is not "do you like Terry Gilliam's movies", it's "does your distaste for whatever of his movies have anything to do with La Jetee." Evidently, it does not- you already disliked Gilliam's cinema, so it seems as though you're just using the comparison to the Marker as an excuse for an irrelevant sideswipe.

[warren oates]

Marker's visionary minimalist no-budget approach to sci-fi in La Jetée doesn't have anything to do with the bloated maximalist cartoon of 12 Monkeys -- except that the later film wouldn't exist without it and doesn't add to it in any interesting way.

And yet there's the undeniable fact that a significant number of people who now come to see the Marker short for the first time do so carrying the baggage of the Gilliam feature. I wouldn't have bothered "swiping" at Gilliam at all if dad in the posts above hadn't started out by practically asserting that La Jetée only seemed relevant to him as a curious footnote to 12 Monkeys. How is it not relevant, then, to this discussion that Gilliam seems to me one of the worst of all possible choices for expanding La Jetée into a feature? I mean, I'd rather have seen the Zach Snyder or Francis Lawrence versions. Though I'll grant you that Michael Bay probably would have been worse than Gilliam.

I'm simply trying to make the case that sometimes it's worth drawing lines in the sand like this. La Jetée is a masterpiece worth rewatching as many times as you can. 12 Monkeys is a big budget Hollywood film from the 90s that would be merely middling if it didn't have the added burdens of living up to its source material and having a helmer who doesn't seem capable of keeping a straight face about anything.

[dad1153]

I wouldn't have bothered "swiping" at Gilliam at all if dad in the posts above hadn't started out by practically asserting that La Jetée only seemed relevant to him as a curious footnote to 12 Monkeys.

That's my personal experience/reason for sampling "La Jetée," but that doesn't mean it's everybody's experience. Especially in this forum I can see many people seeking out this and "Sans Soleil" on recommendations or Marker's reputation. You obviously dislike Gilliams' work/style and resent he was the director that expanded on (or ripped off if you don't believe him when he says he hadn't seen "La Jetée" before the filmed "12 Monkeys") Marker's original work being the reason some viewers prejudice themselves before seeing "La Jetée." But in my case I wouldn't even have bothered checking Marker's version if I didn't feel curious enough to compare it to Gilliam's movie. And I've said over and over that I'm not closing the door on Marker or these two movies for future re-evaluation, which is more than "12 Monkeys" ever got from me. Jeez!

[warren oates]

dad, I'm not judging you or trying to prescribe what you ought to feel about Marker's films, just using your honest initial reactions as a springboard. For me this is more of an opportunity to stake my claim for the territory I reside in when it comes to art, narrative, films and especially sci-fi. Like I alluded to in previous posts, the real acts of imagination for me aren't ones that result in films where we get to see or understand everything instantly. Or where the world the filmmaker creates is all about futuristic art design and monumental set pieces. The best sci-fi strikes me as being about ideas. The short stories, books and films that have managed to make the most out of their ideas, to create a kind of poetry out of visions of a possible future, are the ones that continue to thrill me and inspire me.

[matrixschmatrix]

Once again, you seem to be creating a false dichotomy, as though one had inherently to choose between impressive art design and philosophical depth. Moreover, I think insisting on La Jetee as science fiction isn't entirely fair either to the Marker or to science fiction as a genre- La Jetee is about as science fictional as Slaughterhouse Five, it uses a sci fi explanation for what is essentially a modernist narrative conceit but it's unconcerned with a lot of the traditional elements of sci fi. It is part of the genre- and if we ever do a sci fi list I'll be happy to vote for it- but saying 'good sci fi is like La Jetee and not like (say) Blade Runner' means discrediting a lot of the things science fiction can do uniquely well.

It also limits what La Jetee can be, as it implies a scientific reading of the film rather than the dreamy metaphysical one that Marker's other work would seem to demand.

[warren oates]

Oh it's not a false dichotomy and I'm not seeming to create one. In this case I'm arguing that it's a very real dichotomy, but just for me. Eiither I value and define as good sci-fi what 12 Monkeys is or I choose La Jetee. One bores me, the other fascinates me endlessly. Anything I've written is an attempt to get at something of why.

As for the idea that I'm suddenly and single handedly cheapening one of my favorite films just by discussing its obvious genre, well, whatever. I guess I'll be reductive to a few other classics now just for the hell of it: The Wild Bunch is a Western, Goodfellas is a gangster film, Chinatown is a detective story, A Man Escaped is a prison film, Bringing Up Baby is a screwball comedy. Deal with that!

Where I come from most of what passes for sci-fi is really action adventure spectacle and/or fantasy that's about world creation, creature/vehicle/weapon design. And just as most costume dramas are too concerned with the superficial trappings of their era to bother telling a great story, so too do most so-called sci-fi productions become too much about world creation at the expense of the quality and depth of what actually ends up happening in that world.

So yeah, though Blade Runner has a great story, I'm a bit put-off by the over the top (and for me very much overrated) art design, which is really just Tokyo meets Metropolis. I get why it's important and why I should like it, but I think Ridley Scott strikes a better balance in Alien.

The best sci-fi stories in any medium use visions of possible futures and speculative technology as metaphors to get closer to the heart of what it means to be human. 2001 and Solaris, for instance both explore an alien intelligence as wholly other and ultimately unknowable as a way of getting at deeper themes about consciousness, infinity, the destiny of mankind, the nature of reality and the importance of love. I'd put La Jetée in the same company. Marker uses the conceit of time travel and the speculation about a future apocalypse to explore the essence of memory.

So just how is La Jetée "unconcerned with the traditional elements of sci-fi"? What are those elements exactly and how does an appreciation of the film that centers on any of what I've mentioned above imply a simple scientific take on it?

[colinr0380]

But isn't Blade Runner all about what it means to be human? Or whether such a division really matters if the 'replication' is close enough that it is almost impossible to tell the difference. (Blade Runner appears to suggest that it is your experiences which create your individuality to some extent, making it another veiled take on the 'nature or nurture?' debate)

As for the idea that I'm suddenly and single handedly cheapening one of my favorite films just by discussing its obvious genre, well, whatever. I guess I'll be reductive to a few other classics now just for the hell of it: The Wild Bunch is a Western, Goodfellas is a gangster film, Chinatown is a detective story, A Man Escaped is a prison film, Bringing Up Baby is a screwball comedy. Deal with that!

As fruitful as it is to study films based on genre norms (as the ongoing list project is showing), I think seeing films purely as good or bad examples of a genre can sometimes also be reductive - for example as reductive as seeing the worth of a film purely defined by Auteurism above all and dismissing a film which doesn't fit neatly into that philosophy could also be. These groupings are good tools for understanding (especially when we get into self-referential westerns and so on), yet all those films you mention are both great examples of their genre and great films beyond those confines as well. Goodfellas isn't just a gangster film, Bringing Up Baby isn't just a screwball comedy etc - a truly great film can speak to something more profound than that, I feel.

[warren oates]

But isn't Blade Runner all about what it means to be human? Or whether such a division really matters if the 'replication' is close enough that it is almost impossible to tell the difference. (Blade Runner appears to suggest that it is your experiences which create your individuality to some extent, making it another veiled take on the 'nature or nurture?' debate)

Look at my post again. I'm not knocking the depth of the themes or the story in Blade Runner just the distraction (for me personally) of the overweening production design.

And yeah, none of those films are JUST genre films, which was my point precisely. I didn't do anything to reduce them by naming their genres or discussing them in those terms. In fact, I'd say it's not really possible to have a useful or interesting discussion of a great film that exists within a clear genre without discussing its genre elements in detail.

You write that "a truly great film can speak to something more profound than that." But I have to wonder how, for instance, The Wild Bunch would speak any more profoundly about its characters and their world if it were somehow possible to separate them from the closing of the American West?

[Jazzkammer]

What a pedantic argument. I am seeing matrixschmatrix giving warren oates an unreasonably hard time, for no good reason. warren oates articulates himself well, but what he has to say keeps getting taken out of context and twisted around. People are getting on his case for his comparing 12 Monkeys to La Jetee, as if the two films somehow did not warrant comparison (when they so obviously do). Is this because he is new to the forum? Give him a break.

[warren oates]

Thanks Jazzkammer for the supportive words about my posts.

Though, in truth, I'm kind of the one who keeps pushing it. And I think I can handle matrixschmatrix, if and when he's game to continue. The funniest part of this whole deal for me is that I'm pretty sure we both agree about at least one of the most important things at stake here: that the true subject of the greatest science fiction films is nothing other than an exploration of "dreamy metaphysics" got to by way of speculation about future times and tech. And if the film is interesting enough, then whether said future tech is elaborately produced and visualized or merely hinted at glancingly is almost beside the point for me.

[Tribe]

Anyone wanna bet this discussion, which is getting pretty redundant, gets moved to the hallowed halls of Navel Gazing?

[bottled spider]

<solipsistic interjection unrelated to the discussion at hand>

My favourite part of Sans Soleil: there's a mesmerizing sequence of footage of kamikaze jets taking off from air craft carriers, manipulated to looks something like images from an infra-red camera, prolonged almost to exhaustion, when suddenly we cut to the view from the window of a passenger airplane -- and we hear birds singing. The effect is so refreshing, so exhilarating, that it takes a split second for it to sink in that song birds don't fly at that altitude, and you couldn't hear them if they did.

</solipsistic interjection unrelated to the discussion at hand>

[matrixschmatrix]

The funniest part of this whole deal for me is that I'm pretty sure we both agree about at least one of the most important things at stake here: that the true subject of the greatest science fiction films is nothing other than an exploration of "dreamy metaphysics" got to by way of speculation about future times and tech. And if the film is interesting enough, then whether said future tech is elaborately produced and visualized or merely hinted at glancingly is almost beside the point for me.

See, that's the thing- I think that subject's a fascinating one, and I think that La Jetee uses sci fi trappings to approach it, but it seems terribly silly to think that's the best or the only sort of thing that sci fi can accomplish well. Metropolis is virtually nothing but elaborate visual design, and it's an absolutely astonishing film- and it and La Jetee and Blade Runner and 12 Monkeys can all exist in the same filmic universe without any of them detracting from any of the others in the slightest.

[zedz]

The funniest part of this whole deal for me is that I'm pretty sure we both agree about at least one of the most important things at stake here: that the true subject of the greatest science fiction films is nothing other than an exploration of "dreamy metaphysics" got to by way of speculation about future times and tech. And if the film is interesting enough, then whether said future tech is elaborately produced and visualized or merely hinted at glancingly is almost beside the point for me.

See, that's the thing- I think that subject's a fascinating one, and I think that La Jetee uses sci fi trappings to approach it, but it seems terribly silly to think that's the best or the only sort of thing that sci fi can accomplish well.

Not as silly as trying to back-handedly assert that this is what warren oates is claiming. I don't know how this bee got into your bonnet, but it's probably time to take yourself - bonnet and bee included - outside and let it fly away.

[matrixschmatrix]

Not as silly as trying to back-handedly assert that this is what warren oates is claiming. I don't know how this bee got into your bonnet, but it's probably time to take yourself - bonnet and bee included - outside and let it fly away.

I'm sorry, how else am I to read

the true subject of the greatest science fiction films is nothing other

than as an assertion that the quality under discussion is the best thing sci fi can accomplish?

[warren oates]

Not as silly as trying to back-handedly assert that this is what warren oates is claiming. I don't know how this bee got into your bonnet, but it's probably time to take yourself - bonnet and bee included - outside and let it fly away.

I'm sorry, how else am I to read

the true subject of the greatest science fiction films is nothing other

than as an assertion that the quality under discussion is the best thing sci fi can accomplish?

Fresh from my umpteenth or so viewing of Tarkovsky's Solaris, I'm happy to say that this is exactly what I mean. The best and highest aspiration of the science fiction genre goes beyond envisioning possible futures and creating and populating those imaginary worlds (no matter how brilliant a film like Metropolis may be in all its gleaming surface), toward exploring in depth what it means to be human in the hypothetical "then" and so by implication in our ever present "now."

I do appreciate all the people standing up for me. But matrixschmatrix doesn't strike me as being unfair. Nor does the passionate hairsplitting we've engaged in on this thread seem to me excessively academic or more obviously worthy of exile to an ignominious subforum than, say, some of the on-going chatter in the Dragon Tattoo discussion. Still, I'll apologize to everybody who feels we've repeated ourselves too often or marched too far off topic.

[Emak-Bakia]

I recently stumbled upon this interesting release: the soundtrack to La Jetée on vinyl. Could make for a nice pairing with this, à la those old children's books that were paired with 45s.

[Mr Sausage]

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