shot 1 - xls, establishing, setting style
This chapter asserts the importance of sound to the total package of a film or to television, be it in terms of noise, music, or dialogue. Some of the best insight focuses on the quality of sound in television versus that in film. Television audio should be restricted to low definition to complement it's cooler environment. This counters the common sense notion that greater fidelity is always better. Uses of audio in these different contexts can range from the pervasive and unconscious to the apparent. Often, sound is used on the unconscious level to set mood, space, or as a leitmotiv, affecting the audience without them noticing. Of course dialogue is the most common form of audio and has special considerations for film and television, where narration and direct address is better suited due to the mediums more iconic nature.
La Jetee's protagonist is an un-named man with a boyhood memory. This memory haunts his dreams, especially the face of a woman who becomes his main motivation. In personality he is an everyman, moral but not especially gifted. He is passive in his actions, merely following orders until the end, but he is always in a state of lounging for the woman both of his memory and of his travels to pre-war Paris. It is this desire for a solace unattainable that gives emotional momentum. The antagonist comes in the form of a leader. This man is described as "a victor ... ruling over a kingdom of rats" that is french society after the nuclear fallout of WWIII. Though his mannerisms are amicable, his concern is only with power and his societies survival.
The film begins with a memory of modern day Paris, but quickly moves to the future setting of the film of post WWIII Paris. These two worlds, pre- and post-war, are continuously juxtaposed through time travel, making time always in flux while setting remains fixed to the city, with the exception of a brief journey to a future society on another planet. The event that starts the story rolling, after the memory and WWIII are established, is the protagonists being selected for time travel experiment. It is central to the story's theme that it is his personal memory that gets him caught in the situation in the first place. The action is carried forward on emotional terms as the protagonist encounters his memory woman and establishes a romance in subsequent visits. Once the antagonist feels he is ready to travel to the future, the plot begins to role to it's end. The protagonist returns from the future with salvation in hand, establishing the climax. The antagonist will be able to keep control of society and the protagonist is offered a life in the distant future. But of course he declines in favor of a life with his love interest in the past. The final scene begins with joy but ends with a plummet into tragedy. The protagonist Is shown running to meet his lover on the same pier of his boyhood memory, only to be shot and killed by one of the antagonists cronies.
The still images that make up La Jetee's visuals are more center to the statement than the plot or character development. Their beauty and often stark compositions create a foreboding mood well suited to the post-apocalyptic setting and the theme of memory. The film is a comment on memory and the detachment of history as revealed by photography. Every experience is made removed from the protagonist, as if his entire life were a dream. This is why the only moment of live action takes place in bed with his lover, where life briefly becomes lived rather than observed. The use of still images in combination with the plot create a poetic comment on alienation.
While the music and sounds enriched my experience, I found the narration to be dry and often distracting. It may be asking too much, but I would have preferred the story had it been told through pictures alone, though it's complexity makes this near impossible. Other criticisms are the non-personality of the love interest, who seems to have no opinion of this time traveling stranger, the lack of explanation for the protagonist's murder, and the cheesy dots of the foreheads of the future citizens. With these exceptions, I found La Jetee to be an beautiful and original film whose influence is undeniable.
As with all artful films, the aspect that most engages me is it's pacing. The amount of time given to each still image is crucial to maintaining mood and energy. While the art of photography is new to me and there is much I can learn from any developed photographer, the sense of pacing is a talent I can extract right now.
Ernst Friedrich, from "War Against War!" date
These images from WWI were meant to shock the viewer into opposition; to inflame anger and intolerance against violent conflict. Here we have a war veteran whose face has been profoundly mutilated and his eyes destroyed. I chose this photo from among many because of the man's expression. His casualness contrasts with his state and informs me that he must live with the war's aftermath like we live with college debt. War is not an event that passes and this man in particular has to find normalcy with it. And so his dead pan attitude very much asserts Sontag's notion of acceptance, that we should remember "what human beings are capable of doing." War is a part of daily life.
Sontag brings this work up to illustrate the ineffectiveness of this shock treatment against war. But war can not be ended, not by pictures or policy or anything short of miracles. What we can ask for is mitigation. I got this picture from a anti-Iraq War site, that featured this quote above Friedrich's text:
"And because cruelty has always been man’s most awesome weapon— capable of shocking entire nations, entire peoples, into submission—the spoils of victory went to those who showed mercy the least, who knew cruelty the best."
— TRIAGE, novel by Scott Anderson
If war photography is a "war" against war, then cruelty is also it's weapon, which well situates Friedrich's work.
Jeff Wall, "Dead Troops Talk," 1986
This image never took place. Sontag explains that it is a fabrication depicting the fictional aftermath of an ambush during the Russian-Afgahn War. She interprets the soldier's refusal to acknowledge the living as suggesting that war is an experience beyond the comprehension of the living. But the fiction gives it's subjects an opportunity to act human in a way usually unattainable in photojournalism. The way these subjects interact with one another, their informality and playfulness, humanizes them and somehow makes their experience relatable, as if dealing with such a circumstance is a kin to our experiences. In reality our similarities are few, but that relatability is still precious, even if built on such fictitious grounds. War could happen to anybody.
Nhem Ein, taken in Tuol Sleng, 1975 - 79
The only thing I can infer from this woman's expression is anger. She is about to be executed and her last human communication is not of pleading fear but one of frustration and rage. There were so many photos from this prison, taken just before the subject is killed, and they each have an incredibly personal quality, but I could not find another representing this much bravado. Once again, my connection with the subject is much imagined but nonetheless precious. In this way I see that massive suffering is real, approachable, perhaps even mitigable. Sontag describes these subjects as "anonymous victims" to whom we will never truly relate, unlike with an American soldier whose closeness makes his death face taboo. This is certainly true of dead Americans, that we unfairly detest their suffering more, but our human ability to empathize can connect us with the face of a foreigner, if we can be provoked to imagine the mind behind their eyes.
Walker Evans, "The Fields Family," 1936
Margaret Bourke-White, "Russian Women's Brigade," 1941
Walker Evans is brought up in one of Sontag's footnotes as a historic example of disdain for beautification in photojournalism. Apparently Evans hated Bourke-White's work, whose images have become icons. Comparing these two images shows what Evans point might be. His take on impoverished farmers does not hold any punches, revealing much destitution, but he does not sacrifice the individuality of his subjects. I can tell myself a story about each family member by their expressions, postures, and most especially their feet.
Bourke-White's image depicts farming life as something communal and joyous, even if laborious. With each of their tools held in the air they become uniform through aestheticization, their personalities suppressed under a visual gimmick. One wouldn't exclaim "What a spectacle!" but one might at least chuckle. I don't think it's wrong to laugh at people, but this image would benefit from a contrasting darkness, as Evans tragic depiction relies on the naked child's laughter. It is through that complexity that we can imagine a personality.
Sebasiao Salgado, "Serra Pelada Gold Mine," 1986
In contrast to my other selections, this photo depicts a gold mine full of laborious suffering as if it were an epic film. As artwork it is truly incredible, but I find it impossible to place myself in it's setting. Perhaps this feeling of distance is more true, that the situation of these workers are beyond my experience and I should believe that what they deal with on a daily basis is simply incredible. But I do not think this distance serves the subject. By staging the scene so beyond the viewer we can not imagine a way to involve ourselves in it's mitigation. It is happening in a world beyond our experience; "too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention." I do not think Salgado is exploiting his subjects by making them religious-esque, but great art is not always great activism. An epic character is nothing like a real person, and so the viewer can not as well empathize.
