Richard Neupert

The Willson Center Cinema Roundtable meets to discuss topics of film history, criticism and theory. The roundtables are moderated by Richard Neupert, Wheatley Professor of the Arts and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor.

Title: “Science / Fiction / Time Games: Watching Chris Marker’s La Jetée”
Date: January 25, 3:30 pm
Location: Miller Learning Center, Room 150

This is the first Willson Center Cinema Roundtable to include a screening of the film being discussed, a 27-minute narrative featurette from 1962. Marker, a French filmmaker also known for experimental essay films such as A Grin Without a Cat (1977) and Sans Soleil (1983), was a contemporary of Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda and other filmmakers of the Left Bank cinema movement whose work was tangential to the French New Wave. He died in 2012 at the age of 91.

The roundtable “offers a rare opportunity for students and faculty to discuss this important avant-garde film, which was later reworked as Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys in 1995,” said roundtable moderator Richard Neupert, who is the Wheatley Professor of the Arts and a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of Theatre and Film Studies in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

“La Jetee, named for an airport jetty or gate area where a fateful event takes place, is one of the most famous experiments in science fiction cinema,” he said. “The film, composed of still black and white images, explores time travel and mental subjectivity in a poetic, cinematic format.”

The panel will include UGA faculty members Andrew Zawacki, associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program, and Jed Rasula, Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English, as well as Virginia Bonner, associate professor of film and media studies at Clayton State University and a Marker specialist.