Lost in Translation

French being my first language, I have decided to re-watch “La Jetée” and compare and contrast my experiences, the same way we compared the digital and film version in class.

I cannot even begin to explain how unbelievably different my experience was watching the movie in French. It is astonishing to me how the same movie can have such a different impact on the viewer with only one change in the variables in this case being the language. The music was the same, the audio cues are the same and the images are all the same yet the dialogue seemed to touch me infinitely more. I somehow felt like the French dialogue brought so much more to the movie. The voice was soothing with a strong Parisian accent, but at the same time cold and slightly unsettling.

When I watched the movie in class it seemed like the images were chasing the dialogue, as if the pictures were being jerked and then explained. The French version on the other hand flows with poetic elegance. The dialogue gives it depth and warmth and the silences and whispers give it that cool eyrie feel. Upon my first watch I was curious as to why the director had chosen to do a photo essay rather than a film. After having watched the original however it seemed so obvious to me. The man’s fixation on the scaring memory on la Jetée was indeed an image or still of that moment burned in his mind. It only made sense for him to relive the past in these sorts of time warped images. His confusion as to who he is, where he came from and what the meaning of his necklace was, also made sense at once. How can he know these things if he technically isn’t born and the war hasn’t started yet.

As I kept watching the French version I seemed to find meaning in the small details. The first thing that struck me was the still of the woman’s face when the man is shot down in the openning. She seemed to have an expression of longing, yet completely unfazed by her surroundings. When we see her once again in the closing scene, her hand is on her face, but her expression does not hint towards any sort of shock or horror. Right when the still starts to dissolve he narrator says quite blatantly “ils compris qu’on ne s’évade pas du temps”. Her expression still rattles me, why did she react this way? Maybe she actually understood the meaning of their relationship, that there was indeed something horribly wrong. Perhaps she was awaiting this moment, and simply taking a breath pondering his twisted fate. Perhaps she was a part of this plot all along, perhaps she was a pawn in the post apocalyptic experiments too. I cannot be sure but her expression is haunting.

WHAT ARE YOU THINKING WOMAN!

WHAT DOES THIS LOOK IN YOUR EYES MEAN!

She is a puzzle and I love to hate it! 

 Another ingenious detail was in the title of the film. La Jetée is a homophone for a variety of different things. The first homophone being “La j’étais” which means there I was. Also Jetée (Jeter) is actually a French verb, which means to throw away. The clever title suggests that he was throwing away the opportunity of the future for the memory of the past. The term jeter is also used in various classical ballet movements the most famous being the ‘grand Jetée’. This move involves the dancer taking a large leap into the air in a perfect split. The man had 2 options to go into the future or go back to the past and he chose to take the leap to “la J’étais” (there I was).

Given the popularity and commercial success of CGI-heavy films in recent years, using either Davis or Rombes, discuss this phenomenon in conversation with your own experiences of blockbuster films

I found Rombes’s take on virtual humanism absolutely captivating and there were a few concepts that really struck me. In this Journal entry I will be experimenting with some of his concepts and comparing them to Avatar and other CGI based films.

The first concept that really struck me in Rombes’ piece was how avant-garde art now gains so much popularity that it becomes mainstream, and therefore less appreciated by some. (Rombes) So many of my classmates/friends criticized Avatar due to it’s lack of plot originality, whereas I saw it was an experiment in today’s technological abilities. I admire James Cameron for pushing the boundaries and developing a film along with a new sort of genre. Rombes talked about a certain scenes in X-men and he says “if you freeze a single frame from that scene you will find a surreal visual elegance and a screen composition that scrambles realism” (Rombes, p.152) I think that perhaps that was the whole purpose of the Avatar film, to capture this sense of surrealism by depicting images that human’s in general can be mesmerized, enthralled by but at the same time shake us by the sheer detail of the digital work. Mr. Cameron (and his teams) work indeed seemed to “scramble realism”. Bellow are a few still I found to be absolutely mystifying, elegant and captivating. These were the reasons I enjoyed the film so much!

  Stunning staging, as he discovers this new forest so do we. 

The sheer detail and proportions are mind-blowing when Jake fist enters his Mutant body.

Although the pure elegance and captivating visuals grasped by attention at first, the media started to ruin the picture for me. It wasn’t the criticism but rather the excessive amounts of articles depicting the making of this new film. They completely lifted the veil and I am sure I am not alone in saying that the whole illusion started to crumble. One thing I loved so much about Upstream Color was that in an interview the Carruth mentions how he had no need for special features in the DVD because the film simply…is the way it is (SXSW, 2013). Sometimes I simply watch a movie because I want to escape and be entertained. To have it stripped a few days latter by the making of kind of shatters the glass between what is real and the surreal world depicted in the movie.

My mind when the illusion is broken 

One other heavy CGI movie that I found quite disconcerting was the Great Gatsby, they seemed to have smothered the whole film with heavy glitter and cartoonish setting. When I came out of the movie theater that night I felt uneasy like something wasn’t right and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. My friend on the other hand absolutely loved it she was completely compelled by the whole esthetic. It finally made sense to me when we watched/discussed aspect of the making of the movie in class. When I realized that the film was heavily edited using CGI for practically every single scene I finally understood my distaste for the film. Perhaps I was distraught, because to me such movie shouldn’t have the need to be glazed over by a coat of superficial editing. When I was reading Rombes’ peice the whole esthetic started to make more sense to me. He mentions that “special effect are so seamless, so natural that its very surrealism lies in the fact that it dis-guises itself as reality”(Rombes, p.153) It is one thing to create a new world with elegant ‘avant-guard’ visuals, but to be discussing and masking reality is something I simply cannot get used to.

Since when does Leo look like someone straight out of Jersey shore. 

The excessive editing on his face was irksome. 

sources: 

Carruth, Shane. An Interview with Carruth James Jonathan. Texas, 2013.

Rombes, Nicholas. Cinema in the Digital Age. London: Wallflower Press, 2009.