La Jetée, The Fifth Shot (2024) ‘DOK Leipzig’ Movie Review: Probing and Playful Dissection of Cinema and Memory

In Dominique Cabrera’s “La Jetée, The Fifth Shot,” the real is mined for various levels of transference. Revelations pile up as the director’s cousin, Jean-Henri discovers himself and his parents in Chris Marker’s “La Jetée.” There are myriad layers of reflection and recollection in the film. One starts to recognize in the Marker film resonances and convergences with their own life and family. All kinds of unexpected discoveries tumble out as people wonder long and deep about ties binding them to the classic. These realizations spark a complicated emotional response, straying from bewilderment to bittersweetness. Facts transpire of images that hold memories of one’s family. Connections sharpen over the course as the family hovers close over the images in a darkened edit room.

Hidden links are teased out between the film and families which mull the fact they may have been the ones featured in it. Jean-Henri remarks about the uncanny similarity of the ears between that of a boy on screen and himself. Other kin attest to it as well. Even the way someone in a shot from Marker’s film is standing wields a parallel. In an image of the man’s family looking future-ward, the past is dredged up. The eras come into a space of dialogue and speculation.

La Jetée, The Fifth Shot (2024) — A still from “La Jetée, The Fifth Shot” (2024)

There’s a comment in the film by Marker himself about photography being situated in the realm of the double. This is what “La Jetée, The Fifth Shot” continually presses on. These epiphanies bring heartbreak and shock, astonishment and deep-sunk confrontation. The implausibility fades and gives way to something real, grounded and tragically articulate. Suddenly it doesn’t seem very off limits that the convergences are a far-fetched thing. It becomes nearer and nearer to reality than just a string of overt coincidences.

The echoes start resonating wider and larger, pulling people into a web of consideration and reassessment. Boundaries between memory and cinema, the past and fiction turn foggier as the film unravels. There’s a cheeky flush to the film’s reanimating of memories vis-à-vis the cinematic medium. Marker’s work is essentially a collection of images laced with such a suggestive power each shot ignites flashes of an entire history. There are so many equations glimpsed within. These rich evocations are what Cabrera taps with playfulness and lightness of touch. The documentary bobs with mystery but it never feels remote and dense.

Cabrera drapes a twine between cinema and real life. Both clash and commingle. There are disparities, differences in the same breath as there are overlaps. The documentary is full of a wandering spirit, even as the setting remains a confined one. There are no clear-cut answers, only musings and conjecture. These are accorded credence, never dismissed as fanciful and exaggerated. Every claim that comes up is grounded in history, as families ponder varied possibilities that engender the connective tissue between film and actuality. “La Jetée, The Fifth Shot” teems with implication and discovery.