For this week of film class, we watched a movie called La Jetée for the year 1962. This movie was incredibly unique, mostly because it was all still images with a narrator over it. There were no speaking actors with lines or even movement, which is why it was so interesting. While it was only 28 minutes long, the director, Chris Maker, was able to fit a lot of detail into each clip. To break it down, the movie was about a time machine experiment after a nuclear war. You can tell that this was a low budget, although that makes the director use his strengths to the best of his abilities to make it work.
Unfortunately, I did not really like the narrator's voice. It sounded very raspy, slow, and honestly creepy. It was hard to listen to him, so eventually I just turned off the volume and kept reading the subtitles. I have to say however, turning black and white still images into a movie is exceedingly difficult, yet they made it into a movie we still watch today. For this movie, I was having a challenging time thinking about how we have advanced in such little time. It only took our world 60 years to progress from still image clips with narration to the technology influenced films that we see today. It is amazing to watch a movie with incredible sound effects, graphics, and creative art, although these older films have so much influence in our society.
The older films that I watch, the more respect I gain for creators in that time. It took so much effort, creativity, and time to create these movies with no reliance on the resources that we have today. They also did not have the budget for films that we have today, whether it was due to wars or smaller directors with no backing, those are the films that have stood the test of time. I will continue to watch different older films that have impacted generations, mostly because I think they have so much more to offer than corporate billionaires spending money on the most famous actors and most expensive equipment.
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