Third and Last Short Essay Assignment: History/ Memory

La Jetee & Kierkegaard

Human beings place great amount of emphasis on their memories when they need to make sense of their lives. Memories evoke varying emotions in us. Dealing with challenges of the present or uncertainty of the future, we recall them and create our unique relation with time. We can consider our past as a place in which our experiences, knowledge and values are created. In the short movie La Jetee, scientists hopes that they can recue the present by calling on the past and future. But finding a person who can bear such an experiment is not an easy thing for them. One should have mental strength to stand up to the shock of time travel. One of the prisoners become distinguished from others in terms of the clarity and strength of his memories. Here, the key to his past is a memory of a woman and a moment in which he saw a man dies. In this movie, we see that our connection to the past always has an important role in our lives in trying to understand the present and the future, but this connection cannot solve the puzzle of our lives. Although things in the past appear certain to us, they might have completely different meanings which we cannot understand them by looking at them from our current perspectives.

As it is stated in the movie, it is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood without knowing the actual meaning of the image. The man sees his own death but he never realizes it until he returns and dies in his past. We can associate this with the idea of Kierkegaard, is that life must be understood backward but it must be lived forward. Because we cannot understand the progress perfectly when we look into the past. Here, looking to the future is not the solution either. There will always be events which seems not related to each other but require us to see the connection and link them together. Neither past nor future can solve this puzzle for us. To Kierkegaard, we should have the faith in that the dots will somehow connect in the future. This also shows us that we never can escape from the present even if time travel is possible. The present always drags us back into the here and now.

Also, in this movie we see that our civilization and technologic advancements does not only bring benefits to us but also cause distress in our lives. The time travel experiments in the movie take place in the aftermath of the Third World War. It actually reflects the atmosphere of 1960’s which is when the fear of nuclear annihilation was a major source of concern. Also, voices whispering in German gives us the historical context of the movie. This may be an allusion to the Nazi occupation of France which was still present in the French consciousness.