JETLAG 2010 / A Poetic Vision Lost in sky

JETLAG 2010 / A Poetic Vision Lost in sky

Jetlag 2010 is a poetic stop-motion film created during my first journey to Los Angeles. Rather than documenting the destination itself, the project focuses on the suspended moment of travel between continents, exploring the physical and psychological experience of jet lag. The film observes what happens when the human body leaves one rhythm of time behind and struggles to adapt to another, transforming a long-haul flight into a contemplative visual experience.

Crossing an ocean by airplane offers one of the most extraordinary perspectives available to human beings. From thousands of metres above the ground, landscapes lose their familiar scale. Mountains become abstract textures, clouds resemble oceans, and cities dissolve into constellations of light. During these long hours suspended above the Earth, ordinary perception changes completely.

This transformation of perception became the starting point for the film. Rather than treating air travel as a simple means of transportation, jetlag2010 considers it as an intermediate state, a space where time, geography and consciousness temporarily lose their usual points of reference.

Jet lag itself is a complex physiological phenomenon. After crossing multiple time zones, the body’s internal clock no longer corresponds to the local cycle of day and night. Sleep, concentration and perception become temporarily disrupted. Although this biological response is shared by many travellers, each individual experiences it differently depending on physical condition, emotional state and personal sensitivity.

Instead of illustrating these medical effects directly, the film approaches jet lag through sensation. Slow stop-motion sequences transform ordinary aerial views into dreamlike visual fragments. Time appears to stretch while movement becomes almost imperceptible, reflecting the strange sensation of existing between two worlds without fully belonging to either.

Clouds occupy a central place throughout the animation. Floating endlessly beneath the aircraft, they become abstract landscapes rather than meteorological phenomena. Their constantly changing forms reinforce the impression that the journey exists outside ordinary geographical space. Above them, the sky appears almost motionless, while below them the Earth continues its invisible rotation.

As darkness falls, another landscape gradually emerges. Cities appear as immense carpets of light extending across the horizon. Roads become luminous networks connecting distant neighbourhoods, while individual buildings disappear within vast constellations of artificial illumination. Seen from the aircraft, urban space no longer resembles architecture but rather a living organism illuminated from within.

These aerial images leave powerful impressions upon the traveller. During long overnight flights, visual memory becomes saturated with fragments that often seem impossible to organise logically. Clouds, reflections, cabin lights, distant cities and endless horizons merge into a succession of dreamlike images that remain suspended somewhere between memory and imagination.

The film attempts to reproduce this psychological state. Rather than constructing a conventional narrative with a beginning and an end, Jetlag2010 assembles a sequence of impressions whose meaning emerges through their association. Each image influences the interpretation of the next, encouraging viewers to build their own emotional continuity.

This approach is partly inspired by the Kuleshov effect, which demonstrates that meaning in cinema often arises from the relationship between successive images rather than from individual shots considered independently. By placing seemingly simple aerial views in sequence, the film invites viewers to project their own emotions and interpretations onto the journey.

Like Toujours à sa fenêtre and Every Day Life, this project belongs to a series of films exploring time through observation rather than narrative. In each work, everyday reality is transformed into a contemplative experience through rhythm, editing and careful attention to visual detail. The objective is not to explain but to create space for reflection.

The stop-motion technique reinforces this suspended perception of time. Instead of reproducing continuous movement, the animation reconstructs the journey from individual still images. This fragmented temporal structure echoes the traveller’s own altered perception during long-distance flights, where hours often become difficult to distinguish and memory is organised through isolated visual moments.

The emotional atmosphere of the film is completed by an original musical composition from my longtime friend Vincent Baudry. His score moves gently between melancholy and hope, perfectly accompanying the emotional ambiguity of long-distance travel. Certain passages evoke nostalgia for the place being left behind, while others suggest the excitement of approaching an unknown destination.

Rather than dominating the images, the music creates an invisible emotional current flowing beneath the visual narrative. Like drifting clouds, it carries the viewer through moments of uncertainty, contemplation and anticipation before gradually opening toward the promise of new discoveries waiting beyond the horizon.

Ultimately, jetlag2010 is less about aviation than about transition. It explores the rare moment when the traveller temporarily exists outside familiar time and space, suspended between departure and arrival, memory and expectation, wakefulness and dreaming. Through stop-motion animation, aerial imagery and Vincent Baudry‘s evocative soundtrack, the film transforms the experience of jet lag into a quiet meditation on travel, perception and the emotional landscapes that accompany every journey across the world.