The meaning of La Jetée.
"While La Jetée is an eye-opening experience unveiling the processes of human perception when viewing film, it isn’t simply a film about cinema, but also an exploration of human memory. Memory itself, the film suggests, is a form of time travel. Certain images stick in our minds, haunting us and defining the trajectory of our lives and mandating our personal decisions. Memories aren’t recounted in thorough, complete detail with a comprehensive and linear succession of events mapped out, but are segmented and divided, often removed of context or manipulated by interfering memories or wishful thinking. Our mind recounts past events in a fashion comparable to the time traveler’s obsession with a single image lodged in his mind’s eye of the woman on the pier: determined by heavy emotion rather than associated with context or a full understanding of the circumstances. Thus, La Jetée’s ending is rather appropriate, for just as we can recount only fragments of true memories, we can also go back and revisit them – and this re-visitation ultimately changes, clarifies, or manipulates the meaning of a memory entirely as readily as it potentially determines our future. In the world of Chris Marker, time, memory, and cinema are one in the same in that we seek and find meaning to all such things through the collection images we associate them with."
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