LA JETÉE (1962) by Chris Marker and WORLD OF TOMORROW (2015) by Don Hertzfeldt
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Reviews for LA JETÉE:
“Viewers emerge from Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962), a film made almost entirely of still photographs, marked for ever by its imagery yet somehow unsure exactly what they have seen. It is a film that mines deep seams of memory, but whose surface, though hardly forgettable, remains enigmatic in retrospect.” – Brian Dillon, The Guardian
“Time moves differently in this extraordinary essay on cinematic tense, and from the start, our perceptions of past, present, and future undergo strange mutations. The tense of the narrative
shifts between past and present, the latter used predominantly to narrate the hero’s return to a lost past.” – Jonathan Romney, Criterion Channel
Reviews for WORLD OF TOMORROW:
“This 17-minute masterpiece is a hauntingly beautiful rumination on today’s tech-oriented times; on the treacherous swamps of memory; and on the importance of appreciating our lives in the moment, the present.” – Carlos Valladares, The Stanford Daily
“World of Tomorrow is so funny and endlessly inventive that it hardly matters if it takes a couple viewings to catch and digest all of its ideas. Hertzfeldt has created a rich tapestry of concepts
that are both heartbreaking and hilarious, while using the simplest animation tools to create a universe that looks unlike anything else out there.” - Collin Souter, RogerEbert.com
***
O strengthen me, enlighten me!
I faint in this obscurity,
Thou dewy dawn of memory. - Tennyson
For those of you who are still cursing me for making you watch all 200 minutes of JEANNE DIELMAN (one day you’ll thank me), I am offering a warm-weather respite in the form of two short films, made on opposite sides of the Atlantic more than 50 years apart, yet both boldly and brilliantly inventive, and oddly dealing with the same theme of time travel back from a dystopian future in search of a potent yet elusive memory (bet you didn’t have that theme on your GFS 2025 bingo card). We start with Chris Marker’s LA JETÉE, a French New Wave existential sci-fi slideshow that still has the power to stun audiences more than 60 years after its creation. Hard to top that, but Don Hertzfeldt is up to the challenge with his iconoclastic stick figure animation masterpiece from 2015, WORLD OF TOMORROW. These two films may be short, but there will no shortage of things to talk about at our next meetup. Enjoy!
You can watch LA JETÉE on the Criterion Channel, or at the following link:
You can watch WORLD OF TOMORROW at the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PUIxEWmsvI
Happy viewing!
LA JETÉE (1962) by Chris Marker and WORLD OF TOMORROW (2015) by Don Hertzfeldt