Art and cinema - Assignment Example

February 5, Part I La Jetée inspires Twelve Monkeys in depicting time-space travel through using camera shots, angles, editing, and framing that jar the audience’s ability to differentiate time zones, reality, and dreams. An example is a scene from La Jetée in the museum of ageless animals. The scene shows the woman and man enjoying each other’s company. See Figure 1 where the woman is in front of the man. She looks at something at her side, while the man looks up. It is a two-shot of them apart, but happiness is apparent from their body shot at eye-level, where the man is in wide shot and the woman is in mid shot.

They seem to be at peace with themselves and those around them. The disruption in narrative convention is apparent in the man’s time-space travel, where nothing is lasting and completely certain. The man and woman are as temporary as the dead animals they are gazing at. The parallel scene with Twelve Monkeys is the scene where the animals run free and James Cole (Bruce Willis) and Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) see the animals for the first time. See Figure 2. James and Kathryn are in mid cut away shot at eye level.

The impact of them together and the animals running free is the perceptions that they are not free compared to the animals. Like the animals, as in La Jetée, the only time they can assuredly have is the present. The future is unreliable in giving happiness for it may even lead to their separation or death. The narrative is disrupted by the constant reference to life’s temporariness. Figure 1: Museum of Ageless AnimalsSource: La JetéeFigure 2: Animals Run FreeSource: Twelve MonkeysPart II In the clip from Godard’s Band of Outsiders, Odile (Anna) Karina recites from “Les Poètes” by Louis Aragon.

Odile is represented in a different light from the woman in La Jetée because the former is darker and less hopeful of the future. In this scene, Odile looks forlorn, as she says: “All they’d ask for was a light. They settled for so little. They had so little anger in them.” The sad tone of her voice and poem suggests that she is unhappy and she longs for something better in the future that she cannot enjoy at present. She is different from the woman in La Jetée who no longer questions the comings and goings of the man.

She just enjoys every moment they have. Odile is similar with the woman though because she also strives to be happy. She is unsure how, but she does want to have true happiness in her life. In the essay, “On Photography,” Susan Sontag explores the meaning of photography, based on its uses and impacts on human behaviors. She argues that photography is a process of collecting the world through its images. The process of photography, however, is both interventionist and non-interventionist. On the one hand, photography is interventionist in the sense that photographers choose what to shoot and how it is presented,1 thereby affecting the evidence2 it presents to their audience.

It is also interventionist in terms of giving power to people of recording their experiences, something anyone can do and no longer reserved to the rich and influential.3 On the other hand, photography is non-interventionist because it turns photographers into voyeurs, instead of active subjects in the images.4Sontag helps inform the viewing of La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys because of the disruptive effect of voyeurism on the objects of photography and incompleteness of captured images. In La Jetée, an agent is always watching the man, waiting for him to succeed or fail, but still ready to kill him.

The man is the gazed upon without true free will and freedom. Sontag helps to perceive these pictures also as incomplete in depicting the whole identity of a person who is in search of truth and happiness. James of Twelve Monkeys wants to change the future, but the past has doomed him to have no future. As he goes through different times and places, Gilliam grimly suggests that James will remain an observer of human history- unable to change it for the better. Sontag suggests that James can never fully understand history, so that he can save the future because he is also part of it, changing and dying in the process of living it.

Works CitedLa Jetée. Dir. Chris Marker. Perf. Étienne Becker, Jean Négroni, and Hélène Chatelain. Argos Films, 1962. Film. Band of Outsiders. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Anna Karina, Sami Frey, and Claude Brasseur. Columbia Films, 1964. Film.Twelve Monkeys. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Perf. Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Brad Pitt.Sontag, Susan. “On Photography.” Communication in History: Technology, Culture, and Society. 6th ed. Eds. David Crowley and Paul Heyer. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2010. 174-178. Print.