La Jetée raises two points of interest; it's shots are comprised almost entirely of still photographs, with only one moving frame in the film, a condition which seems to announce the space of hesitation mentioned above. Secondly, it is a film which is explicitly 'about' the relations of space and time, the story told by its science fiction narrative is simultaneously that of the film's mode of production.
The spatial aspects of a photograph are often reduced to the notion of the image being a moment severed from the infinite spatial continuity that comprises our experience of the real. In a photograph, time stands still, another way of saying that it is converted to space. What is less often stressed is that this frozen moment, once severed from the spatio-temporal continuity in which it was found, is thus rendered amenable to re-contextualisation. This implies the possibility of a lateral shift, before re-launching the photograph in a flow of changed circumstance.
This proposition is actuated in La Jetée. The film is set in a fictional society which has no means of crossing space. It is condemned to an eternal stasis with the only hope of salvation being a drug induced life threatening experiment which sends selected subjects on a hallucinatory flight through memorial time. That is the theme of the narrative, but it is also the structure of the film – its form. La Jetée achieves, simultaneously, a formal revelation of its temporal process – it reveals the way in which all films represent time - whilst thematising a type of spatio-temporal confusion at the level of its narrative. It is a film which tries to demonstrate what Walter Benjamin wanted all films to demonstrate - the conversion of spatial fragments – photographs – into a montage of illusary time.
The photographic stasis of La Jetée presents the space of hesitation in which the spectator might investigate the frame as in the stereoscopic experience. In this film, the frame becomes the lowest common denominator (all frames in the shot being identical), but no film can comprise only of static shots when the defining principle of the medium is movement. In the case of La Jetée, the forward flow of narration is propelled by montage and voice-over. Both are important if the film is to communicate to the spectator but, rather than supplying a definitive meaning, this precarious narration is in constant risk of de-stabilisation by one of a number of hypotheses worked up from the stills.
The most vulnerable passage of all is the climax of the film - the single shot which incorporates movement. A conventional reading would have this frame as representing 'freedom,' supplying in the course of the narrative, the 'proof' that the protagonist's drug induced time travels are genuine reminiscences of the real. Movement is ascribed to the image of a girl who the hero ambiguously calls into being from another time. But the time of their first meeting is also the time of the hero's death. Is movement within the frame an indication of readerly freedom, or, a representation of captivity within the system of a moving, time based text?
