Kristin Seymour Response to The Jette
The film The Jette was very confusing as a contextual piece but
composition and mechanical wise it was a success in my opinion. The film was a compilation of still photographs with music and narration in the background. The use of still images was very different yet interesting compared to what I am used to. At first I thought of it, as a slideshow similar to one that iphoto would play after importing images off a camera. I liked the photographs being used to create a film because it gave me time to look around the image and get every meaning out of it. When watching a moving animated film the images fly by so fast that viewers miss important things within the image. Clearly Marker wanted a far deeper connection between images in the film then in a slideshow. I felt that the narration might have helped if it was clearer in tone and in meaning. The narration was so conceptual that I did not understand much of it at all and began to realize that I was barely even paying attention to it at all. I began to pay attention to the images and the images only. My mind began to braid the images together to try and form a story. Much like in any art exhibition/film the conceptual meaning that the artist is trying to convey does not always come across to the viewer in the same way. I did not put together the same story as Marker intended. I would not have known he was trying to show time travel if it were not for Colby mentioning it. I saw the film as a man being tortured by a bunch of Nazi scientists in a cave somewhere. The
man was looking back into his past and his dreams. I did not think he himself was actually time traveling. I understood the idea of the different transitions in the film as meaning different things. For example, the fading meant that the events were happening at the same time. Fading to black meant a new set of time and short cuts were meant to shock us or build suspense. The quick animation in the climax of the film was very surprising. The quick cuts between images that made the female appear as if she were moving were very successful. I can only image the people who first watched this movie and were not used to such a technique. Also, the repetition and re-‐implementation of images created different feelings. When the photo of the hallway was placed before an image of the man in the hammock it was scary. It was meant to make you feel as if you were heading into torture, but when the same hallway image was placed after seeing the man it appeared as an escape. I was not clear about the meaning or intentions of Marker until I read the pdf that we were provided. The book did well to explain the film but in my opinion there were not enough images. Also, I think they should have been placed within the text directly before or after the reference to them. I had to go looking for the images the writer was talking about. I really enjoyed some of the quotes from the film that were in the book as well as just the text in general. Here are some notable quotes from the book that I enjoyed and could relate to real life: “One photographs things in order to get them out of one’s mind.”
“Forgetting is not an abandonment of the past, but permission to elaborate, to reconstruct differently” “How it is that memory is infected by the photographic, and, conversely that photographic devices have come to serve the requirements of memory.” “There could be no hope ‘no present without forgetfulness. ’” “The past is in itself a question”