Recast as a fair-weather Hollywood rebel in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys – breaking the rules just enough to accumulate a superficial veneer of weirdness – Chris Marker's Jetee is the real deal. It's as aesthetically radical as any film this side of, well, Hiroshima, Mon Amour three years earlier, at least, but La Jetee was released in cinema's most aesthetically radical period ever, so "(empty) as any film since ( blank)” has the misfortune of not actually working here. Marker's short film is an elegy for the cohesive illusion of time as a passive process, as an inalienable fact that can be perceived identically by all and regurgitated by dozens of films. more or less in unison. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Most films give themselves a safe passage to erase time, to deal time as a background specter to be shocked into corporeality when a film needs to raise its stakes via a time bomb or parallel editing that expands time to heighten suspense. Films escape time, essentially, and ask us to escape with them; they drag us away, projecting a parallel universe where the events of the world are freed from death, from age, from vulnerability to the physical sphere, to the material reality that conditions one's existence. The protagonist of Marker's film is a wandering traveler in a post-war Parisian hellscape tasked with traveling to the past in hopes of discovering an energy source that can power his future atomically devastated society. His travel channel is a memory permanently but not necessarily carefully etched into his mental architecture, a whisper of a moment visualizing a murder he witnessed at an airport before the war. 12 Monkeys takes this, and only this, from Marker's film. However, if Gilliam's work imagines time travel as a perhaps traumatic quirk that his film grapples with as a conditioning device for an adequate but unspectacular '90s thriller, time travel in La Jetee is not a practice of choice - a subject to consider. willingly engaged in a film, to be invited. For La Jetee, the past is not only immanently addressed in all films – which are by definition simulacra of a world once filmed and now represented – but perhaps the essence of all cinema. If 12 Monkeys is a science fiction film in the conventional sense of "narrative dressed in technical mumbo-jumbo", La Jetee is a journey of a different kind, an excursion into the deepest and darkest center of cinema and its immanent construction not beyond out of time but in time. Marker's film does not introduce time. Time is everywhere around films, it is the tangible-intangible currency of the medium, it is the medium itself. Marker simply asks us to deal with it. The lost world in La Jetee is the uncertain and ambiguous geography of the past itself, not a specific past but the flow of time as a whole. A death march of still images, each reformulating and reshaping the previous one into a semi-presence of live time, La Jetee defies the compulsion to completely create a solid mannequin of history, as if observing objective time tick by at 24 frames per second. . This practice of most films – courageously crossing time and reviving the past – is not a choice but a very fact of the medium: all films necessarily reintroduce us to the past to the extent that they are a copy of the world that filmed them. If Andre Bazin articulated so eloquently that the still image embalmstime, projecting a moment from the past into a death mask, Marker's film hammers time, refusing to allow each moment to fully crystallize. We consider moments as partials, we glimpse an image that, after several seconds, gives way to the next one, producing a liminal time that is neither the pleasant normality of 24 frames per second – the illusion of unobstructed movement – ​​nor pure stillness, allowing us to stare at each image for as long as we want in the hope of grasping all of its mysteries, similar to a photo or a painting. Jetee is even more catastrophic. It infects the image with its fragility and ephemerality, an understanding of transience that denies each image its completeness. Each moment is given to us long enough to partially solidify – like the viscous impression of an imprint in the memory of time itself – only to be swept away before it can solidify into anything more than the mere haze of a given moment. Gilliam's film is a narrative of crystallization, in comparison. Its organizing principle is the linear trajectory from absence to presence, from elusive darkness to statuary reality. Its essential impulse is to materialize memory by processing it as history, proverbially "getting to the bottom of the thing", being the protagonist's tormented imagination of a past event. Like almost all films that withhold information, 12 Monkeys defines absence only as a negative condition to illuminate presence. He withholds information to play games with us and ultimately pat himself on the back for his unhindered disclosure. The film visualizes past, present and future as essentially neutral and interchangeable territories, immediately accessible to the viewer; or rather, the film sees each of them as a continuous presence, a state of being of the present, not subject to age and withering. By comparison, obstruction, in La Jetee, is not something to be initiated but something immanent; the film is always denied access to the proverbial “everything” of an event. Told (almost) entirely in still images, Marker's film is not just a story but a philosophy of time, an investigation into time that cannot be recovered. Gilliam's project is to pacify us with the thrust of narration, to open a conduit from desire to realization, to understand what event haunts his protagonist. Marker's is to open up a fertile region of ambiguity and ambivalence where form and perception rather than fact and discovery reign supreme. Seeing the film as a narrative brought to a conclusion trivializes it. What Marker questions is not what narrative it can create, but how time is constructed even in the mind's eye, and why the mind, and the medium of film as a sculpting tool, requires a fully accessible past and narrative in the first place. . What, in other words, are the preconditions for narrativizing? In reality, Gilliam's film is not so much a reduction or watering down of Marker's vision as its diametric opposite, if we are generous, or a misreading, if we are not. The Twelve Monkeys access personal consciousness by destroying it, interpreting the protagonist's memories as objective representations of a world rather than personal perceptions. The film avoids or digs past the thickets of memory and replaces it with a concrete erection of indisputable history. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay In contrast, La Jetee cannot escape consciousness, cannot evade her own subjectivity and her own defiant inability to give back to us.