La Jetée is in many ways an extremely modern film despite it’s actual time of creation. I was extraordinarily inspired by the film because felt like the genre of film that I love and I could see elements of the film that would be brilliant to re-contextualise. I could think of many modern films that could have been directly inspired by La Jetée including Looper and Oblivion. The feeling of the film itself was very sombre and dramatic and I could see why the construction of the film was considered avant grade, though I felt the story itself followed very classical form and could quite easily be turned into a modern blockbuster by removing the voice-over and having a moving frame rather than purely stills.

One of the key elements of film form described by Film Art is the idea of Unity/Disunity. In my opinion, the idea of a cyclical narrative (some would call this elliptical storytelling) is the most obvious form of unity within a screenplay. Many of my favourite scripts employ this technique such as Nolan’s Inception. La Jetée’s conclusion is profoundly successful because of it’s setup at the beginning of his film, though the way in which it is communicated is somewhat vague and took multiple viewings before I actually understood it. I think, from a cinematography perspective, the scene does not have enough repetitive elements to cue the audience that they are at the beginning of the film, we also do not see the main character as a child in the scene at the end which, in my opinion, severely diminishes the effect and the “ah hah!” moment is diminished because the only cue is the narration.

In a poetic sense, the form of the piece is very rondo. Film Art would describe it as a sort of ABACA structure. The character begins at the Jetty (La Jetée), fast forward to the future, the experiment then back to the past the first time, the development and the final time at the Jetty. This is very classical form.