La Jetée- Chris Marker

La Jetée is a 1962 French film by Chris Marker that consists almost solely of photographs. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world in France; the narrative revolves around a man that is sent back in time to find help for the future but the man is transfixed by a memory of a girl he saw on a jetty when he was a boy, he also vaguely remembers witnessing a death that day. As you would expect from a narrative set in a post-apocalyptic world the plot is quite dark and at time unnerving. Personally I had been dubious on how well a film of photos could tell a story such as the one in La Jetée but I was surprised to find the method worked incredibly well, the use of photographs helps to emphasise that what the audience are seeing are moments from the past as that is what we associate photographs with. The photos tend to be fairly dark and grainy, this serves not only to create the dark and unnerving atmosphere but it also helps to create a believable setting without the need for a detailed set that a film filled with moving images would require.

The key tool that truly carries the films narrative though is the voice over that runs over the images, as without the audience wouldn’t grasp the narrative. The voice over is sometimes joined by other sounds such as the beating of a heart or half heard whispers that the audience can’t really make out, this works to keep the dark and sinister tone of the film even while the narrative moves to a story of the man chasing after the woman in his memories. This aspect of the narrative adds a sad undertone to the film as the man chases after a woman that is likely long dead in his own timeline, this undertone works well with the slow lingering pace of the film and the photographs. The use of these undertones throughout the film could be seen as foreshadowing the end where the audience see the man return to the memory of when he first saw the woman but is killed before he can reach her, this brings the narrative back full circle and explains the man that the character saw die when he was a boy was actually himself from the future. This final realization brings home the crushing darkness and sadness of the film as you realise that the man’s life was always going to end in despair from the very start.

The film has a very interesting and unique narrative; its success can be seen by its influence of the film 12 monkeys that was heavily based on La Jetée. After seeing this film both I and my partner have agreed that the use of photographs is the best way to tell the story of our own film, from that you can say that La Jetée is the largest inspiration for my own experimental film. Personally it has also shown me that simple and unique ways of telling narratives, like using only still images, can be just as interesting as traditional ways.

Sound Project 5 - Improvements

After the crit me and Chris began to improve our project in the ways we had outlined, we rerecorded the voices this time using a pop shield in front of the mic to improve the quality of the recordings. Once we had gathered the voices we began to work on editing them together to improve the piece, while discussing how best to edit the piece we came up with the idea of having the sound track repeat itself similar to how Zbig Rybczynski’s experimental film Tango does.

 http://vimeo.com/21175765

I suggested having the repetition start midway through the sound track so that the character’s thoughts began overlapping and becoming more confusing, my idea for this was that the overlapping of the thoughts would be similar to how the individual worlds of the people on the bus overlap by them all being on the bus at the same time. Chris improved upon this idea by coming up with the idea that the repetitions should come from only one direction, for example the first set of thoughts are stereo sounds but the first set of repeated tracks come from the left speaker, the tracks then begin to alternate which side they come from until the final set which is once again stereo. Not only does this add to the confusion of the piece but it also serves to separate the thoughts while forcing the audience to pay more attention to one voice over the others.

We also decided to have the atmos track fade out near the end so that the paranoid character's lines have more impact and to emphasises the idea that while she is having those thoughts the bus has stopped and everyone else has gotten off.

Sound Project 4 - Crit

Today we had the sound crit for our audio projects, where I and Chris presented our project to our seminar group and tutor. For this presentation we showed the first draft that we had created, we explained afterwards that it was our first draft and we still had a fair amount of work to do on it. That said the feedback we received was very positive, besides some issues with levels which had affected all groups, this was due to the speakers not playing the sounds as loud as the headphones in the editing suit did, many people thought that our project sound finished as it was.

We explained that the next step in our project was to rerecord the voices using different actors, other than ourselves, as well as adding other sounds in the background of the dialogue to help explain and reinforce the characters’ thoughts and story.

Sound project 3 - Recording dialogue and some editing

Me and my partner met up after our seminar and gathered a few people to record different audio to a few different characters that Chris had come up with. For the most part we let our actors look at the character they were playing and improvise a few lines that they thought fitted the character in the given situation, if they were struggling we would quickly script a few lines for them to read. This method of recording characters was a good solution to our previous problem of a script being too narrow but recording actual bus passengers would be highly difficult, this method also allowed us to record in a quiet room and overlay the voice over the atmos track. As this was to be our first draft of the project, we had some actors play multiple actors which is something we will avoid in the final production. We decided that I would write the script for the final draft although I will only be semi scripting it as we decided it would seem more real if the actors were allowed to improvise some of their lines. By the end of the day we had managed to record the voices for all of the characters, Chris had recorded two the previous night, and we began the process of editing it.

Chris did most of the editing but I did give advice and suggestion during the process to help refine the project, one such suggestion was turning the volume of the atmos track up slightly because as it was the sound of the bus was lost behind the dialogue and as such the sense of place we had created was lost. The actual editing was fairly simple it mostly consisted of cutting the sound clips to just include the dialogue we wanted and positioning the files in the right order. Although the editing was limited and all we were creating was a first draft the end product sounded pretty good, our plan is to improve it by adding further sounds to support the thoughts in the characters’ heads, we also would prefer a more diverse range of actors to improve the realism of our piece. We’ve discussed some ideas and have come up with a list of possible sounds that we need to record to see how well they fit in the piece, we’ve also started talking about rerecording the dialogue to improve the quality and find other actors to fulfil the character roles where actors doubled up roles.

Sound Project 2 - Recording atmos track

Me and my partner met up to begin recording sound for our project upon meeting we made several adjustments to our idea. Firstly we decided to move the project from a tram to a bus; this was partly due to the cost of having to take a tram whenever we needed new recordings. We also decided to partly script the voice overs that were going to appear in our project and record them at a later date. When we got to the bus station we got permission to record there, we recorded multiple sounds in the station ranging from the general noise inside the station to specific parts of the buses as they drove away. For these more specific sounds we used a shotgun mic to focus in on an area without the general buzz of our surroundings interfering.

Once we had gathered the sounds we needed we moved on to an actual bus, firstly asking the bus driver for permission to record. Once we were on the bus we set up the zoom on its own to record stereo sound at the back of the bus, I recorded multiple three minute tracks so that we had spares to edit with if there was a problem with any of them. We also set up the shotgun mic again to record specific areas in more details, such as the bus door opening and passengers getting on. With these tracks recorded we were pretty confident that we would be able to create a decent atmos track for our project.

When we were finished recording Chris asked if he could take the memory card from the zoom so he could listen through the clips at home and begin editing them. I saw no problem with this so I agreed; I later heard the mock up that he had made. It sounded pretty good and definitely gave the sense that you were in a bus station and getting on a bus.

Sound Project 1

The other day me and my partner Chris Lowe sat down to discuss the ideas we had and decide which one we were going to go with. After some discussion we decided to go with Chris’ idea of recording in a public tram, the idea was inspired by Pejk Malinovski’s sound project ‘Tunnel Vision’. Our idea differs slightly though as where Pejk recorded people talking directly to the microphone our idea was to record snippets of conversations and have them fade in and out over each other. The reasoning behind it is to create a realistic atmosphere of public transport, by emulating the idea that on public transport you are surrounded by people who in a way are in their own worlds and you only ever catch snippets of that world never the full story behind it.

During our discussion I did raise several points that may cause problems with our idea, firstly was that our idea required us to record on a public transport so we would most likely need permission to do so. Chris hadn’t thought of this but said he would email the tram company to see if it was okay and that we would double check with the personnel on the tram when we got there. I also raised the problem that people may not be willing to let us record their conversations, the only solution we could come up with to solve this is to record partly scripted conversations later but that would cost us the diversity that we would get on the tram and it wouldn’t be as natural. In the end we decided that scripting the conversations would be a last resort.

At the end of the discussion we had to decide which roles we were going to take, we decided that I would be the sound recorder and Chris would be the editor. That said we decided that we would both be present for the recording and editing to offer assistance if the other needed it.