Film screening: La Jetée and Le Joli Mai

Date

Schedule

19:30–22:30

Place

Garage Screen summer cinema

DESCRIPTION

Chris Marker shot La Jetée and Le Joli Mai simultaneously in Paris in 1962. The former became a classic avant-garde and sci-fi movie, the latter turned into a paradigmatic example of new documentary filmmaking and cinéma vérité. Despite their differences, both movies operate as "time machines," sending the viewer into the post-apocalyptic future (La Jetée) or deep into the explosive present (Le Joli Mai). They will be screened on 35mm film.


La Jetée (The Pier)

In post-apocalyptic Paris that survived World War III, the few survivors live in catacombs, while scientists conduct violent time travel experiments aiming to summon the past and future to help the present. One of the test persons is a prisoner who returns to the moment in his childhood when he witnessed an alleged murder at Orly airport.

A classic of both experimental and science fiction cinema, La Jetée is a photographic film, or, in the director's own words, a photo novel constructed from stills that are instantly embedded in memory. It is a reflection on the nature of time, vision and memory, subjectivity and fragmentation of consciousness, as well as the nature of cinema as an art that works with time and, in a sense, is capable of replacing people with their own memories.

The picture's visual solution and nonlinear editing have influenced a whole galaxy of artists and filmmakers, ranging from Terry Gilliam, who almost replicated Marker's plot in his Twelve Monkeys, to Robert Longo whose famous photo series Men in the Cities partially references the expressive figures in the cinematic space of La Jetée.

La Jetée
Dir. Chris Marker
France, 1962. 28 min. 16+


Le Joli Mai (The Beautiful Month of May)

Parallel to La Jetée, in May 1962 Chris Marker and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme (who would later also film Jean Estache's The Mother and the Whore) worked on Le Joli Mai—an epic documentary portrait of Paris and its inhabitants after the Franco-Algerian war, when the "first peaceful spring" began in the city and country—for the first time since 1939.

Marker asks artists, housewives, brokers, traders, workers, priests, young lovers questions on personal, everyday, social, and political topics and often asks what happiness is.

Divided into two parts (the first called Prayer from the Eiffel Tower, the second The Return of Fantômas), this film not only provides a panorama of French and especially Parisian society caught during the deceptive lull between the war in Algeria and the future revolution of 1968 but also effortlessly, with a single touch, reveals the complex interconnections between the personal and the political, the private and the public, the biological and the social. Pierre Lhomme's cinematography is so expressive that it brings to mind the work of the classics of French photography—in the first instance, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau.

Le Joli Mai
Dir. Chris Marker
France, 1963. 165 min. 16+

tickets

Standard: 350 rubles
Student: 250 rubles*

BUY TICKETS

 GARAGE cardholders:  175 RUB.

Tickets for seniors, veterans, large families, under 18s, and visitors with disabilities (with one carer): 175 RUB**

We recommend that you buy tickets in advance. All ticket categories are available online.

* Students aged 18–25 on production of relevant ID
** Please show proof of eligibility at the cinema entrance