At the edge of the runway

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Movie
German title At the edge of the runway
Original title La Jetée
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1962
length 26 minutes
Rod
Director Chris Marker
script Chris Marker
production Anatole Dauman
music Trevor Duncan
camera Jean Chiabaut
Chris Marker
cut Jean Ravel
occupation

La Jetée (Original title: La Jetée ) is an award-winning science fiction - short film by French filmmaker Chris Marker from the year 1962. He is the one seconds long except moving image only of still images - in own name, a " photo novel " - and uses instead of dialogues a narrator; only the scientists depicted in the film can be heard speaking off- screen , albeit in German. The black and white film shot in 35 mm format is inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's classic Vertigo - From the Realm of the Dead .

The film gained notoriety in the mid-1990s and became a top seller among foreign independent film classics in the United States after serving as the template for the script for Terry Gilliam's Hollywood film 12 Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt .

The French original title La Jetée literally means something like “jetty” and refers to the Paris-Orly airport terminal , which is the starting point and destination of the plot.

action

It tells the story of a nameless man who, as a child, saw a woman on a viewing platform at Paris-Orly airport who fascinated him for years; only later does he realize that he also saw a man die on this platform that day.

World War III breaks out only a little later . Some of the survivors found in underground catacombs beneath the destroyed and the nuclear war radioactively contaminated Paris a new, but inhospitable habitat. German-speaking researchers from the ranks of the war winners experiment with time travel in which prisoners are used as test subjects. The aim of the trips is to procure food, medicines and energy sources from the past or the future for the otherwise doomed survivors. However, these experiments are unsuccessful, as the test subjects go mad or die as a result of the mental shock of the time travel. The search then focuses on prisoners with “strong mental images”, especially dreams or memories , because these people are believed to be able to survive the shock of time travel.

The man with the intense and mysterious childhood memory is then selected as a test subject. The experiments are indeed successful and he can meet the woman of his memory during sojourns in the past. An unusual love story begins, while the man is never quite sure whether he is only dreaming about the time in the past. When the experiments are satisfactorily finished, the scientists instead send the man into the future, where he should ask for help as the target of the experiments. In fact, he can convince the people of the future to give him a “power plant” to help the humanity of his time.

After returning to the present, however, he came to believe that he had only served the scientists as a means to an end and that he would soon be executed. In a kind of vision he communicates with the future people who are ready to accept him as part of their community. Instead, however, it is his wish to go back to the time of his childhood memories. There he meets the woman he fell in love with - on the very airport observation deck of his memory. But while he is walking towards them, he is shot by an agent of the scientists who has been chasing him and realizes that he himself is the man whose death he saw as a child on the platform.

Emergence

La Jetée is inspired by the Hitchcock classic Vertigo - From the Realm of the Dead , from which he takes the theme of the desperate search for a person from the past . Some motifs from Hitchcock's film, such as a scene at a large tree disc, can also be found in Marker's film.

In an interview in 2003, Marker stated that the project at the edge of the runway was unplanned: During the filming of Le Joli mai , he was completely immersed in the reality of Paris in 1962 and discovered the “immediate cinema” (cf. Cinéma vérité ); When the film crew had a day off, he photographed a story that he himself didn't quite understand. It was only when the film was cut that the pieces of the puzzle came together and he had problems viewing the film as his merit.

Criticisms and interpretations

On the edge of the runway has been named as a science fiction or "dark time travel classic" and as an example of a film that deconstructs time . The film is best known for its use of still images and the one “moving” shot in which the woman loved by the time traveler opens her eyes when she wakes up.

In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung the second of the moving image was described as “one of the most poignant, surprising and philosophical moments of waking up in film history”: “She suddenly opens her eyes and looks at the viewer head-on, demanding , asking. In this brief, self-reflective inversion of the situation, the image is no longer impregnated and consumed by the gaze of the audience, but becomes seeing in the movement of the eye opening itself and thus questions the viewer's perception. ”The moment becomes with Theodor W. Adornos "Aesthetic theory" in context, in which the "moment when the portrait opens its eyes" is described as a "utopian [r] state of redemption, in which the work of art will one day no longer be saturated with capitalist production conditions, but genuine autonomy and its own truth will have attained. "that moment was in La Jetée not significantly, to the end, but as a" been set anticlimax "in the middle of the story, because the love is still alive here, but later as a result of scientific experiments tragic end.

In a 2003 article by Chris Marker in the New York Times , the film was named as an example of Marker's “Moments of Immortality” and scenes that are like axes of rotation in media history . In the “extraordinary short film” the “moving” moment is “wonderful”, a “magical way” of saying about films that they have a special relationship with the passing of time, with change and fading, memories or oblivion.

Reception and tributes

On the edge of the tarmac was the inspiration for David Bowie's music video Jump They Say (1993), in which Bowie, as a businessman, believes his colleagues were experimenting with him. David and Janet Peoples used Marker's film as inspiration for the script for Terry Gilliam’s 1995 Hollywood film 12 Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt; Gilliam himself said that he saw the short film for the first time at the premiere of 12 Monkeys , when it was shown as a supporting film. Influences on other films are often discussed.

In Clermont-Ferrand , France, a building was named after the original title that houses the offices of Sauve qui peut le court métrage - the host of the prestigious short film festival Festival du Court-Métrage de Clermont-Ferrand  - and the Auvergne Film Commission and a center belonging to it with resources on short films are housed. In the district of Shinjuku of Tokyo bar after the film was La Jetée known what markers 2003 commented by saying: "Knowing that for nearly 40 years, a group is slightly drunk Japanese every night at my pictures - that's worth more to me than so many Oscars ! "

Awards

In 1963, director Chris Marker was awarded the prestigious Jean Vigo Prize for On the Edge of the Runway . In the same year, the film also won the Grand Prize at the Trieste International Science Fiction Film Festival (held until 1982, predecessor of the scienceplusfiction festival ) and the first prize awarded by the Giff- magazine published by the Club des bandes dessinées (later CELEG ). Wiff .

Publications

On the edge of the runway has been published with French and English narrative text. In Germany, the film was shown for the first time in October 1963 as part of the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival . The film was released in 2003, together with Marker's film Sans Soleil (1983), on DVD Region 1 in French with English subtitles. In 2007 Criterion released the two films on Region 2 DVD with a choice of French and English narrative texts. A version with a German narrative text also exists as a movie.

In 1996, the images of the film with the French and English text were also published by MIT Press as a 258-page book, which is out of print.

literature

  • Bensmaïa, Réda (1990). From the Photogram to the Pictogram: On Chris Marker's La Jetée . Camera Obscura, Vol. 24 , pp. 138-161.
  • Coates, Paul (1987). Chris Marker and the Cinema as Time Machine. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 14 , pp. 307-315.
  • Corinn Columpar (2006). Re-Membering the Time-Travel Film: From La Jetée to Primer . Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, Vol. 9.
  • Del Rio, Elena (2001). The Remaking of La Jetée’s Time-Travel Narrative: Twelve Monkeys and the Rhetoric of Absolute Visibility. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 28, pp. 383-398.
  • Ferrer, Carolina (2003). The evolution de la fin: De "La Jetée" à "12 Monkeys". Cinémas, Vol. 13, No. 3 . Pp. 53-77.
  • Ffrench, Patrick (2005). The Memory of the Image in Chris Marker's La Jetée . French Studies, Vol. 59 (1) , pp. 31-37.
  • Roger Odin (1981). Le film de fiction menacé par la photographie et sauvé par la bande-son (à propos de La Jetée de Chris Marker). Cinémas de la modernité, Films, Théorie , Colloque de Cerisy directed by Dominique Cateau, André Gardies and François Jost. Paris: Éditions Klincksieck S. 147-171.
  • Sandro, Paul (1999). Singled out by History: La Jetée and the aesthetics of memory. French Cultural Studies, Vol. 10 (1), pp. 107-127.
  • Thompson, Deane C. (Aug 1974). (Review of) La Jetee by Chris Marker. The History Teacher, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 616-617.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the edge of the runway in 1996 was temporarily the best-selling film of the non-profit independent classic sales Facets Multi-Media : Peter M. Nichols (June 23, 1996). FILM; A Hard Sell, Those Little French Films. New York Times (accessed February 25, 2008)
  2. ↑ Samuel Douhaire & Annick Rivoire (May / June 2003). Marker Direct. A rare interview with one of cinema's most secretive filmmakers. e-mail interview with Chris Marker on www.filmlinc.com ; ( Memento of February 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) originally published in the French newspaper Liberation on March 5, 2003 / Antoine de Baecque (English; accessed February 26, 2008)
  3. ↑ Alexandra Stäheli (July 10, 2006). Heroes beyond. John Maybury's film "The Jacket" and Hollywood's spiritualism. ( Memento of November 16, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Neue Zürcher Zeitung (accessed February 25, 2008)
  4. ↑ taz journalist Andreas Busche (December 21, 2006) in an interview “A film is like an animal, it lives” with Alejandro González Iñárritu , taz.de (accessed February 26, 2008)
  5. ↑ a b Alexandra Stäheli (December 22, 2007). The moment when the portrait opens its eyes. About some motives for awakening in the film. Neue Zürcher Zeitung (accessed February 25, 2008)
  6. ^ David Thomson (June 1, 2003). MOVIE; Chris Marker: Already Living in Film's Future. New York Times ( Memento of the original from April 22, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English; accessed February 25, 2008): It was miraculous, as if one was seeing and feeling in an instant the revolution by which still pictures became cinema. It was a magical way of saying, "Look, there is the message, there is the thing about movies: they have a special affinity for passing time, for change and evanescence, for memory or forgetting." @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / query.nytimes.com
  7. ↑ "Reputation is everything". Interview by Bert Rebhandl with Terry Gilliam on January 8, 2007. taz.de (accessed February 26, 2008)
  8. ↑ z. B. taz journalist Andreas Busche (December 21, 2006) in an interview "A film is like an animal, it lives" with Alejandro González Iñárritu , taz.de (accessed February 26, 2008)
    Corinn Columpar (2006). Re-Membering the Time-Travel Film: From La Jetée to Primer . Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, Vol. 9. ( Memento of August 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed February 26, 2008)
  9. ↑ http://www.clermont-filmfest.com/00_templates/page.php?m=73 (Link not available)
    http://www.clermont-filmfest.com/00_templates/page.php?m=85 (Link not available)
  10. ↑ Hello, Tomoyo! To know that for almost 40 years, a group of Japanese are getting slightly drunk beneath my images every night - that's worth more to me than any number of Oscars!
    Samuel Douhaire & Annick Rivoire (May / June 2003). Marker Direct. A rare interview with one of cinema's most secretive filmmakers. e-mail interview with Chris Marker on www.filmlinc.com ; originally published in the French newspaper Liberation on March 5, 2003 / Antoine de Baecque (English; accessed February 26, 2008)
  11. ↑ La jetée. Un court métrage de Chris Marker (about the broadcast of the film on Arte on June 1, 2005). arte.tv ( Memento from April 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) (French; accessed February 26, 2008)
  12. ↑ La Jetée in the Arsenal's film collection (accessed on March 22, 2012)
  13. ↑ Chris Marker (1996). La Jetée. Ciné-roman. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ( Memento of October 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) ISBN 978-0-942299-67-0 (out of print)