Day 7. It Was on Earth That I Knew Joy (2010)

It Was on Earth That I Knew Joy

Céline's Role: Script doctor

Year

     2010

Screenwriter

     Jean-Baptiste de Laubier

Director

     Jean-Baptiste de Laubier

Editor

     Julien Lacheray

Music

     Jean-Baptiste de Laubier (ParaOne)

Form

     Short film (31 mins)

Synopsis

     In this film, Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, squares this hypothesis of Chris Marker: the traces of the time before are no longer contained in the brain of a survivor of the disaster but in computer memories. History having disappeared, carried away by the extinction of men, machines tell each other stories with the images that men have bequeathed to them. Like those of this narrator who could not, he or anyone, survive the final virus but who left on a hard disk images shot from the time he still lived. His travels, family, love. Life. This life and its memory of which our computer heirs hum the nostalgic air, a human feeling that we did not know they were programmed to feel.

 

Available on Vimeo 

https://player.vimeo.com/video/20593779

 

The film poster (above) was the winner of Best Poster / Billboard Design at the Annual Design Awards 2011.

Excerpts from reviews

“De Laubier succeeds in giving fragility to what he portrays. The men we see on the screen are filmed like ghosts, sometimes against the light, sometimes blurry or even veiled. They lose their contours as we lose the memory of faces over time. Nothing seems ready to be fixed eternally in a memory if it is human…
... the film offers a modern interpretation of the place of humanity in an unpredictable and fragile environment. In this anticipatory film, the director succeeds in captivating the viewer over time thanks to an atmosphere that oscillates between dreamlike and nightmarish.”

http://www.formatcourt.com/2011/03/it-was-on-earth-that-i-knew-joy-jean-baptiste-de-laubier-chris-marker-et-fubiz/

 

“Homage to Chris Marker, the film is a necessarily melancholy journey in the memory of a human being of 32 years (...) Overwhelming, It Was on Earth ... is especially by the way it has to move from the intimate to the cosmos, to make personal memories universal."

Les Inrockuptibles

 

About the Film

It Was On Earth That I Knew Joy is a 35-minute science fiction film directed by Jean-Baptiste de Laubier and produced by French clothing label Sixpack France. it is a response by the filmmaker to Chris Marker's short film La Jetée (1962).

The friends and colleagues from their La Fémis days are back together for this film, with the filmmaker Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, the film's creator (writer, director & filming), joined by Julien Lacheray editing the film and Céline polishing the screenplay, as the script doctor. Some shots in the film (the tunnel in the snow) is an excerpt from J-BL's student film The First Communion (2004) that the three worked on together.

The film was premiered on February 20, 2010 at SCION Installation, Los Angeles, with the online premiere on March 9 2011 on fubiz.com.

 

From the program for the film's premier in Los Angeles.

 

Jean-Baptiste de Laubier at the film's premiere in Los Angeles in 2010

Source: https://live.staticflickr.com/4031/4384625049_2e2c99fe0a_c.jpg

 

[Re-watching this film today was a bit challenging, as it is set on post-pandemic earth. Movies about pandemics are a bit close to home right now…]