I've been hosting a free sci-fi film series with the Dallas Film Society at Look Cinemas. It's been fun looking at the themes and images that pervade science fiction, and picking the audience's collective brain. But this Thursday's screening, the penultimate of the series, is the one I've been looking forward to.
It's a double feature. The headliner is Twelve Monkeys, Terry Gilliam's time-travel fantasy starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. Good movie. Then there's the opener, which is the reason I'm excited. La Jette remains, to quote the Monty Python guys, something completely different. Chris Marker's 28-minute experiment from 1962 is the basis for Twelve Monkeys, and to my mind it's the more distinctive film.
For one, it's comprised almost entirely of stills. Marker took the idea that the shot is the most fundamental building block of cinema and ran with it, cutting together a series of black-and-white images to tell a story of a man out of time, chasing the tail of his past in an attempt to save the future. It's a haunting piece of work that slowly casts an uncanny spell. A common reaction for first-time viewers once the lights go up: What did I just see?
I've long wanted to show the two films together. We'll view and discuss and do a little intertextual comparison. Please note the early 7 p.m. start. RSVP here. The series will conclude next month with the often overlooked Dark City.
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