Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Memory time travel ( La Jete`e)

La Jete`e
Memory time travel

It is interesting to see everything in black and white photograph to tell a story that is in motion. The motion is not always movement in the pictures but motion through time and kind of space and is difficult to see that in pictures. When this time traveler goes back he does not use a machine per se rather he travels in his mind to the past. In a way he's traveling into his memories like one would reflect back on something that happened where he would remember something and be there. Every time he would go back into the past he would search for this girl, woman who he was infatuated with, it was interesting to see how every time he went back she would not be able to remember him but he could remember her. Sort of like him having a memory of a memory in which the memory just remember. When he would go back in time even though he was using his head he still looked the same as if he was in the present odd because usually in the mind you're able to change your perspective on things and appearances as well. There's another strange point where he's in the past with the woman and she points to a Sequoia that's been cut in half and you can see the rankings around that symbolize time and she points to a particular time to say something and he points off the tree to an empty space where the tree has not grown that far yet and he says that's where he's from the time in the future. And the whole shadow and a black-and-white photos and how that expresses emotions of each individual character in the photo is interesting because you're able to see things in an unusual way that express emotions like suffering or fear and you're able to somewhat eat off of it. Probably though the most unusual thing is the parallelism between the past and the present and how it's related. For instance as a child seeing some one die gave him this strange interactive imagination which in the future allowed him to travel back into time and ultimately be killed be that same moment that inspired him as a child, watching himself die.

Labels:

2 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

I really liked how you cleverly mentioned how motion is not always movement in the pictures, but it can also be in time and space. I didn't think of it that way before I read your response, but it makes sense. It is great to think differently sometimes. You made me think outside of the box! =)

2/13/2007 9:47 PM  
Blogger thoughtsthatcantwait said...

i agree - it was really interesting that the story could still be told only showing pictures. It was almost like a slideshow and the narrator was giving a presentation. What else is interesting is that normal movies are actually not too different. They are made up of many individual pictures. The difference is that the frames are changed 24 times per second as opposed to maybe .25 frames per second on la jetee. The frames per second seem inversely proportional to the narration. The more frames there are, the less narration there needs to be. The fewer frames per second there are, the more narration there needs to be. It'd be interesting to see someone make a silent film using pictures. The frames per second would be low and the narration would be absent.

4/30/2007 12:29 AM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home