It was on earth that I knew joy
2011 · 31m
Directed by Jean-Baptiste de Laubier
Genres: essay film, experimental, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In 2090, long after human life has vanished from Earth, a tape recorder and a camera converse amid fragmentary images of the world that was, in an homage to Chris Marker's La Jetée.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A La Jetée remix where inanimate objects philosophize about extinction—it's genuinely weird, but it knows exactly what it's doing in the lineage, which makes it too self-aware to truly unsettle me.
De Laubier's disciplined homage rewires Marker's found-image poetics into a dialogue between machines, a formal conceit that respects its source while staking new ground in essay-film genealogy; the restraint is what makes the melancholy land.
The decision to make a tape recorder and camera the sole witnesses—voices without bodies—transforms what could've been derivative into something economical and strange, a constraint that does all the emotional lifting.
Reviews
De Laubier réussit à donner de la fragilité à ce qu'il met en image... Le réalisateur réussit dans ce film d'anticipation à captiver sur la durée le spectateur grâce à une atmosphère qui oscille entre l'onirique et le cauchemardesque.