Pre-Reading La Jetée and Man with a Movie Camera
These two films, you will notice very quickly, are not mainstream or “classic Hollywood.” Here is a little info to help orient you:
La Jetée
This is considered a “French New Wave” classic—an avant guarde film of the 1960s. You’ll notice, right off, something rather peculiar: the pictures do not move! It’s a motion picture with no motion; just stills and voice-over.
The story is set in a futuristic, post-World War III world. The only people to have survived the (presumably nuclear) holocaust have been forced to live underground. There scientists are experimenting with time-travel as a way to escape their own devastated lives. They do this through a form of dreaming, and, in the main plot, we experience the dreams of one of their test subjects.
The story is ultimately about memory, desire, the nature of time and our place in it. It was the basis for director Terry Gilliam’s recent and brilliant Twelve Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis and Madeleine Stowe.
Man with a Movie Camera
This rather odd, zany film was made by an experimental director in Soviet Russia, 1929—not long after the Russian Revolution. The Russian world was turned upside-down; a completely new government was installed, the social fabric and class system were completely disrupted, and hope was strong for a new “worker’s state” in which everyone was cared for in a centralized, communal, non-capitalist economy. (It can be hard for us today to appreciate just how radical the change was in that country. Studies have revealed that even everyday body language, posture, and dinner manners were transformed during this period. People actually walked differently!)
And! The film camera was a young invention. What could it do? Was it really only good as a kind of a passing social trifle—a curiosity set up in street fairs so that people could see the spectacle of a running horse?
Dziga Vertov, the director of Man with a Movie Camera, believed that film could be much more. He believed that “kino-eye”—the eye of the camera—could help us see in revolutionary ways. Man with a Movie Camera is a “story,” in a sense, of what the camera is capable of.
Many of its effects probably don’t seem, at first, very impressive. Mind-blowing, computer-generated, multi-million-dollar special effects are utterly common in movies these days, and so it may be hard to appreciate exactly how dazzling Vertov’s film really was. But nothing quite like it had before made before, or has been made since. We take the camera, the reproducible image, the moving image so for granted today—and motion pictures are now so utterly dominated by global-corporate media empires—we have perhaps lost a basic wonder at what this technology might do.
So: watch this film with a certain innocence.
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