LA JETÉE (The Pier, 1962) *** In 28 minutes, almost exclusively using stills, Chris Marker raises more substantive philosophical issues, and explores them more thoroughly, than most directors do during a lifetime. Is it possible for the past and future to rescue the present, and if it is might we entice it to do so by bobbing near the surface of Existenz? Can humans sense and seek one another across time and dimensions unknown? What else would we do, anyway? Those snapshots in our mind and the magnetism that holds them there, can you truely believe that it is random or reliant on the ethereal associations that are visible and known? If technology breeds war, and war breeds destruction, why do we put so much effort into the potentialities? At the expense of what? There's a sense of being followed, a sense that something ominous is always there. Héléne Chatelain and Davos Hanich do a phenomenal job of acting in the stills, invocation of the living familiar through the medium of the frozen and distinct. Intransient temporary taxonomy for beginners-first we must love.
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