Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch La Jetée
1962 · Chris Marker · La Jetée on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice that almost the entire film is made of still photographs. (cutting)
Marker builds the film from frozen images rather than continuous motion, cutting between them like the turning of pages.
Payoff: You feel time passing in the gaps between images, not in anything moving across the screen. In the reading: chronosign. The reading calls this a chronosign: an image that presents time directly, rather than showing it through movement.
Watch the woman's face held in close-up, again and again. (performance)
The camera returns obsessively to her expression, asking her to hold a single quality rather than act out a change.
Payoff: In a film built from stills, her face becomes the only landscape you get to explore. In the reading: icon of quality (qualisign). The reading calls this a qualisign: a face radiating one feeling, held rather than developed into an action.
Listen for the wordless choir returning at the most charged moments. (sound)
A dissonant male choir, without words, recurs whenever the film's emotional pressure rises.
Payoff: The voices sound like time itself, both ancient and eerie.
Listen to how flat and detached the narrator's voice stays. (sound)
The narration is delivered in a measured, affectless French, describing events the way a case history would.
Payoff: The calm voice makes the strangeness of what it describes even harder to shake.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch her face. In a film built from stills, it's the only place anything seems to move.