Recast as a golden-day Hollywood rebel with Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys – breaking the rules just enough to accumulate a superficial glaze of weirdness – Chris Marker's La Jetée 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 Jetée was released in the most aesthetically radical period of cinema from all time, so "as (blank) as any film since (blank)" has the misfortune of not really working here. Marker's short film is an elegy to the coherent illusion of time as a passive process, as an inalienable fact that must be perceived identically by everyone 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 Should Not Be Banned”?Get an original essayMost films give themselves a safe passage to erase time, to treat time as a background specter in front being shocked by corporeality when a film needs to raise its own stakes via a time bomb or parallel montage that extends time to increase suspense. Films escape time, in essence, and they ask us to escape with them; they take us, projecting a parallel universe where the events of the world are free from death, from age, from vulnerability to the physical realm, to the material reality that conditions their own existence. The protagonist of Marker's film is a wandering traveler from a post-war Parisian underworld tasked with traveling to the past in the hopes of discovering an energy source capable of powering his atomic-ravaged future society. His means of travel is a memory engraved permanently but not necessarily precisely in his mental architecture, the whisper of a moment. visualizing a murder he witnessed at an airport before the war. 12 Monkeys draws as much inspiration, and only that, from Marker's film. Yet if Gilliam's work imagines time travel as a potentially traumatic quirk that his film could engage with as a conditioning device for an adequate but unspectacular '90s thriller, time travel in La Jetée is not a practice of choice – a subject to be studied. voluntarily engaged by a film, to be invited to it. For La Jetée, the past is not only addressed immanently 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 "story dressed in technical gibberish", La Jetée is a journey of another kind, an excursion to the deepest and darkest center of cinema and its construction immanent, not external. time but in time. Marker's film does not introduce time. Time is all around films, it is the tangible and intangible currency of the medium, it is the medium itself. Marker simply demands that we confront it. The lost world in La Jetée 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 recasting and reshaping the first in a half-presence of live time, La Jetée defies the constraint of completely molding a solid mannequin of history, as if observing an objective time passing at 24 frames per second. . This practice common to most films – boldly crossing time and reviving the past – is not a choice but a reality of the medium itself: all films necessarily reintroduce us to the past to the extent that they are a copy of the world whichfilmed them. If André Bazin so eloquently explained that the still image embalms time, projecting a moment from the past in a death mask, Marker's film strikes time, refusing to allow each moment to fully crystallize. We see moments as partialities, glimpsing one image that, after a few seconds, gives way to the next, producing a liminal time that is neither the pleasant normality of 24 frames per second – the illusion of movement without hindrance – nor a pure stillness, allowing us to stare at each image for as long as we wish in the hope of grasping all of its mysteries, similar to a photo or a painting. The Pier is even more cataclysmic. It infects the image with its own 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 a viscous impression of an imprint in the memory of time itself – only to be swept away before it can congeal into more than a haze of a moment given. Gilliam's film is a story. of crystallization, by comparison. Its organizing principle is the linear trajectory from absence to presence, from elusive darkness to sculptural reality. Its essential objective is to corporealize memory by treating it as a story, proverbially "getting to the bottom of things", the thing being the protagonist's haunted imagination of a past event. As with almost all films that withhold information, 12 Monkeys defines absence only as a negative condition for illuminating presence. He withholds information to play with us and eventually congratulate himself on its unfettered revelation. The film visualizes the past, present and future as essentially neutral and interchangeable territories, immediately accessible to the viewer; or rather, the film sees each as a continuing presence, a state of being in the present, not subject to age and withering. Comparatively, the obstruction, in La Jetée, is not something initiated but something immanent; the film is always prevented from accessing the proverbial “whole” 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 reappropriated. Gilliam's project is to soothe us with the thrust of the narrative, to open a path from desire to realization, to understand what event haunts his protagonist. Marker's goal is to open up a fertile region of ambiguity and ambivalence where form and perception rather than facts and discovery reign supreme. Considering the film as a story brought to its conclusion trivializes it. What Marker questions is not what narrative he 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, first demands place a completely accessible past and a story. In other words, what are the preconditions for narrativization? In reality, Gilliam's film is not so much a reduction or watering down of Marker's vision as its diametric opposite, if we're being generous, or a misreading, if we're not. Twelve Monkeys gains access to personal consciousness by destroying it, making its protagonist's memories objective renderings of a world rather than personal perceptions. The film avoids or sands down the thickets of memory and replaces them with a concrete erection of an incontestable history. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Conversely, La Jetée cannot escape consciousness. , born.