There is a disguised correlation between movies that I am beginning to notice. Although each plot is different every movie has a departure that leads to fulfillment which ends with a return. After watching Chris Marker’s La Jetèe and being assigned to write about the film in relation to both a film of my choice as well as the writings in Einstein’s Dreams I had thought it to be impossible but once I dove into the assignment I realized the many directions this could go.
La Jetèe is an interesting film that I didn’t understand until the very ending. It tells the story of an unnamed man whose vivid childhood recollections make him the perfect guinea pig for an experiment in time travel. At the start of the experiment he is sent to the past and falls madly in love with a woman he sees on a pier, towards the end of the experiment he is sent to the future where he meets an advanced race, who offer him the opportunity to journey into their future world, but he instead requests that they send him permanently into the past, where he can be with the woman he loves. A handful of movies came to mind when thinking about which movie I could relate La Jetèe to but Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stuck out the most. A man named Joel Barish, heartbroken that his ex girlfriend Clementine underwent a procedure to erase him from her memory, decides to do the same. However, as he watches his memories of her fade away, he realizes that he still loves her, and may be too late to correct his mistake. Einstein’s Dreams has too many chapters to explain each but to summarize the book it is about a man who works in a patent office in Switzerland who is creating his theory of relativity, and imagines many possible worlds to do so.
The assignment was much like the mathematical transitive property of equality. La Jetèe had to relate to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had to relate to Einstein’s dreams while La Jetèe had to relate to not only Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but Einstein’s Dreams too, an example to brush up on high school math properties. Although it may not be obvious, all three examples I chose are about alternate endings depending on decisions made by the leading character. Each approach is different but the further you get into each story the more you realize the importance of the decisions made by the lead character. The great thing about the three examples I chose are that the directors and author allow the viewer to witness what will happen or what would have happened had the leading character chose to do something different.
The greatest thing about this assignment is the lesson you learn from it: the decisions you make now affect your future and may even change it.
