Among all the possible interpretations of this film, I would like to draw attention to the psychoanalytic one, which is also so common in the culture of modern (= post-war) France, and therefore seems quite appropriate. (Especially in the Lacan version).
One can detract from the "fantastic" plot and imagine the relationship between the two "real" characters of the film - by the way, "male" figures - between the Man and the Experimenter as a patient-psychoanalyst relationship. Some details hint at this: the hammock in which experiments are conducted on the subjects resembles a couch; we hear a whisper that introduces the patient to a state of hypnosis - by the way, they are considered in German (Freud's language). Finally, the main character of the film remembers . The important question is, does he talk about what he remembered, what he experienced and saw? Perhaps the voice of the narrator is the voice of the man.
If we follow this interpretation further, we can understand that Marker not only described another clinical situation, expressing it in the language of cinema, but approached the realm of myth. So what kind of trauma did the patient experience? What should he return to in his memories? At the time of his death.
Here we inevitably encounter Christianity - it remains to be wondered whether Marker leads us to this. To see one’s own death is to experience it, or to rise again. Resurrection, as we know, is inevitably associated with redemption. Now the Experimenter is the punishing and stern Father; he is taken from the bottom and looks down at his son. A man (patient, son) suffers, as reported by the voice of the author. He voluntarily suffers for the sake of others. He agrees to die for others and be executed. (By the way, there is also the motif of the catacombs, in which those who lost took refuge, which can also be seen as a parallel with the history of Christianity.)
It is also worth dwelling on the relationship between Men and Women, which can also be represented in a religious-mythological, but rather Old Testament key. The motives of the park, the museum of animals ( not having age=prehistoric), carefree time (or timelessness?), past - perhaps this is an indication of the paradise state in which the main character wants to remain. After the fall, staying with a woman - who blinked, that is, revived, who let time in - history begins, contact with people of the future is established.
The last myth is meeting yourself. Here you can remember Orpheus (so beloved by the French), like whom the Man also hopes to see the face. A woman waiting for him on the runway. And the moment she turns around, he dies, having recognized himself in the child who saw his death. Has he been given redemption?
If someone thought of making a film about the revolutionaries of the New French Wave in the cinema, the film should be called “Breaking the Prohibitions”. But the movie is like that, and it’s about something else. We will not talk about it anymore.
The runway is one of the largest experiments of the New Wave, even though it lasts only 28 minutes. Director Chris Marker told the story of time travel, where the present is the future seen through the past. Christian-François Bush-Villeneuve (this is the real name of Chris Marker) created a canvas that anticipated the idea of the Terminator and inspired Terry Gilliam to stage 12 Monkeys. To do this, the author needed his experience as a documentarian, photographer and writer. As for the “live pictures”, then in this photo novel there is only one “cinema” frame – the face of a waking girl.
The world after nuclear disaster. Paris is in ruins. Somewhere in the dungeons, the Experimenter is looking for opportunities to travel in time, since there is nowhere to move in space. His test subject is a man. The beginning of the journey is a recollection of a tragic incident at Orly Airport and Woman. There is also the Narrator, whose voice accompanies a successive set of photographs or, more correctly, stopped moments of life.
“Memorable moments are no different from others – only later do we remember them because of the scars they leave behind.”
Chris Marker described himself as a famous author of unknown films. He suggested thinking about memory in geographical terms. Memories are islands, continents, swamps, deserts, and even previously unseen territories. And, of course, white spots. And the pictures in his film are the footprints on which the Man repeatedly returns to the starting point. His memories, like contour maps, he fills with new details, moving back and forward at the same time, drawing a route. It is not an external movement, but an internal one.
In 20 years, Chris Marker will direct the film Without the Sun, which will partially continue the theme of the Runway, stating: Memory is not the opposite of forgetting, rather, it is its underside. Like history, it is constantly rewritten.
Intellectuality, as a distinguishing feature of French New Wave films, is not always the case for young filmmakers. For example, director Jean-Paul Le Chanois once said: The directors of this wave are representatives of the well-to-do class. Their work is not for a wide audience, but for snobs. They have nothing deep or real behind them to tell. They say they are looking for new forms. And I think their so-called modern style is just a lack of knowledge of their profession. It is as if the literature had declared ignorance of the rules of spelling and punctuation a new style.” Chris Marker says, “The journey will end soon.” Only then will we know if the meaning lies behind the set of images.
8 out of 10
The protagonist is a prisoner who is haunted by an episode from his childhood in which he witnesses a murder at an airport. He is forced to travel back in time to save humanity. Each time he is thrown further and further into the past, where he meets a woman who was with the murdered person.
About the movie.
The runway is one of the first initiators of the post-apocalyptic genre in cinema. Simultaneously walking foot in step with the representatives of this genre, this photo-novel stands out among the rest with its atmosphere and manner of narration. The film has a maximum level of immersion. Perhaps we feel the atmosphere so strongly because of the delay of the frame for a couple of seconds, and perhaps because of the most professional setting of the frame. It has its own character, its charisma and to compare it with films of this genre is simply unacceptable.
It’s only by putting ourselves into this film, by plunging into it and pondering each frame that we can understand the philosophy that Chris Marker wanted to bring to us.
“The Runway” is the most popular work of Chris Marker (pseudonym Christian-François Bush-Villeneuve) in a rare style of photo novel, telling about the last Parisians, after the Third World War, hiding in the underground galleries of Chaillot Castle. Here, scientists conduct experiments on selected experimental subjects on time travel through memories, so that they find help in the past and future to the distressed and starving present. Strangely, people seem to claim that the human race is doomed, and yet they continue to look to the bright future. However, the selected subject for life attached to a childhood episode in the airport terminal - the death of a person. Getting the first thing in this period of time, he meets a woman who, as he gets acquainted, can no longer leave. But the system is ruthless. Making periodic references to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Marker explores the possibilities of human memory, which, in his opinion, is able to fully give life to a moment from the past. The main thing is to overcome this most “vertigo” and gain a foothold in it. It is also interesting that Marker's past is saturated with fantasies of the person being moved. But, as follows from the finale, another time for the traveler is only a decorative lawn, which is not allowed to walk, and the change of fate threatens a cyclic loop (this topic is more popularly described by Terry Gilliam’s remake of “12 Monkeys”). Which only embarrassed... These scientists are driving people crazy by experimenting with time travel, and at the same time they already have a time police that quietly watches the hero. It was about the uniqueness of the individual. Who would have followed him in the past?
There are films that are made for tens of millions of dollars, with complex shooting, many special effects, and you watch once, and such a movie is instantly forgotten immediately after the end of the credits. The other category is films that are made in a kind of unpretentious way, with a minimal budget, and yet they fall into the history of cinema as certain milestones of development. It is to the second category can be attributed perhaps the most famous film of the French documentary filmmaker and experimenter Chris Marker.
The plot by today’s standards will seem quite standard, but in 1962, when the “cold” war was in full swing and from minute to minute threatened to result in the Third World War, the director created a dystopian universe in which people experienced the full force of a nuclear strike, and the few survivors of their struggle for existence, trying to change the existing reality, for this, through a series of experiments with psychotropic drugs, they plan a journey in the time continuum by transferring human consciousness to one point or another in an infinite time line.
The main character, whose name we will never know, still vaguely remembers that world when there were no wars, and all the beauty of life was possible to appreciate. For him, the change of reality from a terrible post-apocalyptic present to a peaceful France from his childhood memories is an outlet, an opportunity to feel at least a little like a person, someone who can live, feel, love, dream, and not just exist in anticipation of death.
Despite the small temporal format of the duration and the unusualness of the cinematic language - in fact, what happens on the screen more resembles good old films from the diaprojector, where each frame was connected linearly with others and was an important chain in the construction of the general canvas of the narrative - Marker shot an outstanding film with a minimum of artistic means, it is difficult to evaluate the acting, however, before us not flashing photos, but integral images, characters of absolutely different people. This is perhaps the main magic of the director. His grandiose idea, as well as the most relevant and to date the theme of the film allowed to create without fear of this word “masterpiece”, which had a huge impact on other outstanding directors like Terry Gilliam, who many years later will try to make his remake, but this is a completely different story.
10 out of 10
A 28-minute black-and-white photomontage, or as it was called fifty years ago, a photo novel, is the runway from which the genre of modern paintings about time travel began, but Chris Marker, the French writer, photographer and director, the creator of "Rise Strip", is tightly within the framework of one genre. He pushes the boundaries and his film acquires the features of anti-war post-apocalyptic fiction, reflecting on the fate of humanity, created in a restrained and even more painful, documentary manner. But the runway is much more than fiction. This is a piercing story of lost love and a passionate desire to find it, lost in time, so tangible, living in memory. Memory is the main theme of the film, its power over us, its insistent appeal, the power of images imprinted in it and do not let go throughout life.
Black and white photos, replacing one another, are accompanied by voice-over and mournful enlightened music. As you look, you dive into them and merge with the deceptive reality they create, turning the pages of a life that has been lost so far at the crossroads of time, but has seen the truth that illuminated its last moment. At the same time, images peer into you, they say, silent, with you and, still, penetrate into the repository of hidden feelings, vague outlines and dormant deeply, almost forgotten memories. One single picture of a young woman awakening from sleep under the bird chirps of a young woman on the verge of reality and dreams is perceived as a miracle, as a shock in the world of silent stillness.
How did a documentary about the fall of civilization in World War 3 and the quest of a few survivors to save the present while trying to understand the past and reach the future become the inspiration for all subsequent films on the subject? Why are his static images so penetrating that you want to follow them indefinitely, even though you know for sure that this story will never have a happy ending? Like the nameless hero of the Runway, an unwitting traveler through the curves of time, marked by an unforgettable, memorable memory of childhood that haunts him in the past and in the future and in the shattered underground present, the viewer of the Runway falls under the magic of the expressively silent images of the film that remain with him for a long time.
Thirty-plus years from now, Runway will serve as the inspiration and almost complete storyboard for Terry Gilliam’s iconic dystopia 12 Monkeys. Both films should be watched together to be fully appreciated. One thing is for sure - without Chris Marker's restrained-sad images, without his hero's constant return to the same persistent memory, there would be no dark, cautionary visions of Terry Gilliam.
I was just watching because of the idea. After all, it is not every day you meet a “photoroman”, which is so advertised.
Yes, it’s a kind of unique picture, if only because it’s just a sequence of photos, with a narrator filling the voids that have arisen. This is a difference from 99 percent of all cinema. So there is still a picture of the apocalypse, experiments with the psyche, time travel. In general, a whole "bucket".
By themselves, memories and life after the Apocalypse are already quite interestingly combined. What is reality? The person chosen for his or her good memory must understand all this. After all, most of the time he spends not in the real world, but in an experiment. And the "guinea pig" is just himself.
In that world he has love, a quiet quiet quiet life, but still the creators and here weave death: firstly, Paris is no longer, and between all this time and death, and secondly it turns out that one of the shocks of childhood, so remembered by the narrator is, no less, his death.
Honestly, the future is not very clear. Somehow a little unfinished, but probably this is the beauty of the film: it does not give a clear answer, forcing you to think it all the way you would like.
It is also worth noting the magnificent installation - the sound range is perfectly combined with the image and plot, the background heartbeat further enhances the live atmosphere. Well, what can I say, the photos themselves are simply gorgeous... A little bit about the plot. Unusual and original, a person lives a life of memories. It is not clear what is more real here, his memory, or that he is in the catacombs of Paris. Atmospheric first. The most amazing thing is that a person sees his death from the outside. French art house as always causes deep respect and delight. 10 out of 10 Original