Worksheet 5 - Worksheet five The principal figure in La...

Worksheet five
The principal figure in La Jetée is a time traveller who journeys back to his childhood
and his memories of it and forward into a future that rejects him like a barrier he cannot
cross. Except for the slightest movement in a single image, the images of the film are
photographs, still images, photographs, each one fragile and delicate because they are
memory images, suspended moments. The photograph is an image of an instant in time,
excised, removed from time, immobile, atemporal. As the principal figure enters
memory, the return to the past is a return to time and to frozen still moments which
cannot be connected, cannot move forward, are tenuous and vulnerable because they are
also caught up in an imaginary love story belonging to the past. It is a love desired all the
more for being unattainable, beyond grasp, because the images have already been, not as
memory exactly but as imagination. The images, like the love affair, are constantly
placed at risk by time, hence their preciousness, precariousness and intensity. The closer
the traveller-dreamer gets to these moments, even to the border of their flickering