To speak of the experience of La Jetée would be futile. For around fifty odd years, the flamboyant circles of cinephiles and critics have done just that. What leads me to speak of the infamous La Jetée is in part due to its semblance that I think I’ve witnessed to Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.
Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival are the products of different eras of time, yet they highlight a transgression of the physical and temporal divide. The ideas both texts try to articulate using the language of cinema are entwined. What is remarkable about the former is that it has created an arena of expression that paves way for filmmakers like Villeneuve. In other words, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival are products of different variables that bring to the foreground of cinema a common debate i.e. the filmmaker’s understanding and portrayal of time.
In the early decades of the 20th century, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, experimented with a rather simplistic method of editing. He alternated a shot of a rather sombre faced man with that of a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin etc. Each time the audience saw these alternating shots, they had come to varying conclusions. The face of the man followed by the bowl of soup led viewers to believe that the scene and particularly the face of the man signified hunger. The same face followed by the girl in the coffin led people to believe that the face of the man signified sadness. This little experiment cemented Kuleshov’s belief that editing did play a vital part in the creation of meaning which was further influenced by the viewer’s own emotional inclinations. This phenomenon can never be considered a technique or an invention by the Russian filmmaker, just like how Newton gave gravity a vocabulary, so did Kuleshov.
La Jetée and Arrival both exhibit the Kuleshov Effect right in the beginning of the narrative. Both films exhibit a compulsive tendency to create their own universes in the pursuit to further critique the reality of our daily lives and lived experiences and not just mirror our collective experience of reality. If most films under the science fiction genre look outward beyond star clusters and galaxies for meaning, La Jetée and Arrival have an eerie sense of looking inwards, into their own absurd selves to make sense of it all. The Kuleshov Effect for Marker and Villeneuve is not a way of justifying the narrative but a way of making sense of it. Hence the resultant effect is that in both films our understanding of time is subverted and for a brief while in our existence, we as an audience remain in awe of an experience of time that is non-linear and encompassing.
The moment any work of art is put beneath the violent gaze of the critic it bares itself in defiant submission and we see the skeleton and soul of that work, the structure and its theme. For me, the thematic or the content should be a gentle reflection of the nuances of the structure or form (for if the reflection did not complement why would Nárkissos stay so long by the pool of water in which he met himself?)
In La Jetée and Arrival the presence of the Kuleshov Effect becomes the cementing force that merges the thematic with the structural. For instance if we were to look at the early scene in La Jetée in which the narrator states that; ‘This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood. The violent scene that upset him and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later…’ followed by the image of the man crumpling to the ground we are led to believe everything that happens after this scene is the linear progression of time.
The same can be told of the opening sequence of Villeneuve’s Arrival as well. The montage that shows us Louise Banks and the resulting tragedy of her daughter in film followed by Banks at her school on the day of the alien’s arrival and our deductive understanding of Bank’s emotions creates the Kuleshov Effect in Villeneuve’s Arrival. Evan Puschak at the Nerdwriter explains this scene and goes on to say that the resulting effect forces us, the audience, to infer meaning from the two scenes and posit the character’s indifference as despondency.
For me the presence of death and the non-linear timeline that disrupts our conditioned understanding of cause and effect becomes a willing performance of the narrative in which narrative elements of the film amalgamate into the structural elements or the structural cohesion of the film.
There is no escape neither from La Jetée nor Arrival once you hit play. Both Marker and Villeneuve are in conversation with each other. It is beside the point for one to argue whether or not this homage Villeneuve ultimately pays Marker is a conscious one or not. As a movie goer, for me it is important for cinema to converse and cut across the boundaries of space and time. The ability for a film to talk back to another separated by almost half a century and a millennia of technological difference mirrors how our own thoughts exist and find voice. Ideas are never independent, and when ideas are conveyed through images why should they remain isolated?
Thomas Sterne Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent says ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must see him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” In an age of where there is an ‘Epidemic of Passable Movies’ it is reassuring to see Marker and Villeneuve walk past each other amongst a crowd of filmmakers, an avalanche of images, a sea of sound and gently nod at each other with an air of subtle reassurance.
Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival are the products of different eras of time, yet they highlight a transgression of the physical and temporal divide. The ideas both texts try to articulate using the language of cinema are entwined. What is remarkable about the former is that it has created an arena of expression that paves way for filmmakers like Villeneuve. In other words, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival are products of different variables that bring to the foreground of cinema a common debate i.e. the filmmaker’s understanding and portrayal of time.
In the early decades of the 20th century, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, experimented with a rather simplistic method of editing. He alternated a shot of a rather sombre faced man with that of a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin etc. Each time the audience saw these alternating shots, they had come to varying conclusions. The face of the man followed by the bowl of soup led viewers to believe that the scene and particularly the face of the man signified hunger. The same face followed by the girl in the coffin led people to believe that the face of the man signified sadness. This little experiment cemented Kuleshov’s belief that editing did play a vital part in the creation of meaning which was further influenced by the viewer’s own emotional inclinations. This phenomenon can never be considered a technique or an invention by the Russian filmmaker, just like how Newton gave gravity a vocabulary, so did Kuleshov.
La Jetée and Arrival both exhibit the Kuleshov Effect right in the beginning of the narrative. Both films exhibit a compulsive tendency to create their own universes in the pursuit to further critique the reality of our daily lives and lived experiences and not just mirror our collective experience of reality. If most films under the science fiction genre look outward beyond star clusters and galaxies for meaning, La Jetée and Arrival have an eerie sense of looking inwards, into their own absurd selves to make sense of it all. The Kuleshov Effect for Marker and Villeneuve is not a way of justifying the narrative but a way of making sense of it. Hence the resultant effect is that in both films our understanding of time is subverted and for a brief while in our existence, we as an audience remain in awe of an experience of time that is non-linear and encompassing.
The moment any work of art is put beneath the violent gaze of the critic it bares itself in defiant submission and we see the skeleton and soul of that work, the structure and its theme. For me, the thematic or the content should be a gentle reflection of the nuances of the structure or form (for if the reflection did not complement why would Nárkissos stay so long by the pool of water in which he met himself?)
In La Jetée and Arrival the presence of the Kuleshov Effect becomes the cementing force that merges the thematic with the structural. For instance if we were to look at the early scene in La Jetée in which the narrator states that; ‘This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood. The violent scene that upset him and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later…’ followed by the image of the man crumpling to the ground we are led to believe everything that happens after this scene is the linear progression of time.
The same can be told of the opening sequence of Villeneuve’s Arrival as well. The montage that shows us Louise Banks and the resulting tragedy of her daughter in film followed by Banks at her school on the day of the alien’s arrival and our deductive understanding of Bank’s emotions creates the Kuleshov Effect in Villeneuve’s Arrival. Evan Puschak at the Nerdwriter explains this scene and goes on to say that the resulting effect forces us, the audience, to infer meaning from the two scenes and posit the character’s indifference as despondency.
For me the presence of death and the non-linear timeline that disrupts our conditioned understanding of cause and effect becomes a willing performance of the narrative in which narrative elements of the film amalgamate into the structural elements or the structural cohesion of the film.
There is no escape neither from La Jetée nor Arrival once you hit play. Both Marker and Villeneuve are in conversation with each other. It is beside the point for one to argue whether or not this homage Villeneuve ultimately pays Marker is a conscious one or not. As a movie goer, for me it is important for cinema to converse and cut across the boundaries of space and time. The ability for a film to talk back to another separated by almost half a century and a millennia of technological difference mirrors how our own thoughts exist and find voice. Ideas are never independent, and when ideas are conveyed through images why should they remain isolated?
Thomas Sterne Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent says ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must see him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” In an age of where there is an ‘Epidemic of Passable Movies’ it is reassuring to see Marker and Villeneuve walk past each other amongst a crowd of filmmakers, an avalanche of images, a sea of sound and gently nod at each other with an air of subtle reassurance.
