The man has
to travel to the past by using his memory – it is surely for this reason that
the film’s imagery is presented as it is, for what is a photo if not a memory?
This film is a photobook in which the man returns to the time of the film’s
opening sequence, the event that has obsessed him his whole life. Through the experiment
the man enacts a strange courtship with a young woman that was there on the day
seared into his memory, albeit then a stranger.
On one of
their meetings (separated by gaps in her time, as well as his, as they are)
they visit a cross-section of a giant redwood with historical events pinpointed
on its rings, just as in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo; this explicit reference unveils
other key notions at the centre of the film, the sometimes traumatic nature of
memory, male obsessiveness and the dangerous effects both can have, particularly
when they coincide. The idea of being ‘haunted’ or of ‘haunting’ are
unavoidably applicable in analyses of Vertigo
and so it should be for La Jetée;
James Stewart’s Scottie is haunted by his ‘lost’ Madeleine (in itself a
reference to Marcel Proust’s À la
recherche du temps perdu) just as La
Jetée’s protagonist is haunted by the day from his childhood, and just as
he haunts the young woman through their unusual courtship, appearing and
disappearing as if an apparition. As with Vertigo,
the film concludes with a fatality that could have been avoided were it not for
the protagonist’s selfish single-mindedness. La Jetée’s images haunt the viewer too, lingering on to unveil
their truth in the memory.
