La Jetée

La Jetée, I believe, is a perfect example of how film is accepted as a fine-arts product.  Walter Benjamin, a German literary critic, once spoke of how plot inevitably gets in the way of film as being art because it distracts from the composition.  If you look at La Jetée as being a response to Benjamin's critique of film, then I think it has to be a success.  This film elevates photography to a whole new level its stillness forces individual-focus of each frame onto the viewer.  It does for photography what traditional animated-film does not always do, in that sense.  It is essentially a photographic essay in the form of a motion-narrative.  I think that something like this forces you to take in the full visual emotion of the story.  It is isolating sound and visuals, in a way in which you recognize that they are independent forces, while still amalgamating them to work together within a compositional narrative.  What this creates is a new way of story-telling-- or rather, it affirms that there are other ways to create emotionally-charged visual narratives.  Just as a circle with two-dots and curved-line is read successfully as a face, so is La Jetée read as an emotionally-impactful film.