Lisa Presgraves

Photobook

La Jette

Reading about La Jette after viewing the film was a little bit illuminating for me. My initial

reaction was that the film was clever in its presentation and storyline, but it would have been

impossible for me to correctly understand the narrative of the images without the voice

commentary. I’m sure that some other people have had other impressions, but I didn’t think the

images told the same story that the voice narration did. However, the repeated use of certain

images helped link parts of the narrative together in ways I had never thought of doing before,

but I especially enjoyed the cyclical nature of the narrative. While the use of still images to

create a film isn’t entirely novel (since the earliest films were exactly that) I still found it to be

interesting and creative. From the reading, I realize that there were many elements of the film I

had overlooked which make it a remarkable work. “This is a film that finds qualities of

movement and stillness in each, that braids together remembering and forgetting, that points us

in conflicting directions” This is obviously reflected in the story of a man traveling back and

forth along his own timeline, but it is also apparent in the use of those repeated images. The

repetition of images in the middle of the story, as well as the images that begin and end the story,

reflect the theme of past & present (a sometimes future). The reading covered many other aspects

of this films emphasis on time, even philosophical and psychological.