La jetée (1962)

Director:

Chris Marker

Writer:

Chris Marker (screenplay)

Release Date:

16 February 1962 (France)

Genre:

Short | Drama | Romance | Sci-Fi

Plot:

In a devastated Paris in the aftermath of WWIII, The few surviving humans begin researching time travel...

Plot Keywords:

Time Travel | Childhood Memory | Childhood | Memory | Surrealism

Awards:

1 win

Cast

Jean Négroni	...	Narrator (voice)
Hélène Chatelain	...	The Woman
Davos Hanich	...	The Man
Jacques Ledoux	...	The Experimenter
André Heinrich
Jacques Branchu
Pierre Joffroy
Étienne Becker
Philbert von Lifchitz
Ligia Branice	...	A woman from the future (as Ligia Borowczyk)
Janine Klein	...	A woman from the future
William Klein	...	A man from the future (as Bill Klein)
Germano Facetti		(as Germano Faccetti)

Also Known As:

The Pier (International: English title)

Runtime:

28 min

Country:

France

Language:

French | German

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Singapore:PG | Argentina:Unrated | Finland:K-8 | UK:PG

Filming Locations:

Orly Airport, Orly, Val-de-Marne, France

Company:

Argos Films

Trivia:

Comprised entirely of still shot photography, except for a shot of the woman opening and blinking her eyes.

Quotes:

Narrator: Above ground, Paris, like most of the world, was uninhabitable, riddled with radioactivity. The victors stood guard over a kingdom of rats.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Chillingly controlled to stick in the mind.

One way movies tend to be memorable is when a certain image they create is so powerful it sticks right into the mind and refuses to leave. This is a film created to do just that, and one method is to remove a level of the motion to create haunting images that stay static on the screen until they're burned on the cornea. Memory, however, is not just visual, and as if the film needed any help, the disturbingly saturated music and sound helps implant everything in this movie until it's not to be forgotten.

A man is haunted throughout his life by the image of a beautiful woman, and the death he witnessed after seeing her. Soon afterward, a bomb hits Paris and sends the survivors scurrying underground to survive nuclear fall-out. A scientist then uses the man's clinging focus on the past memory of the beauty and death to send him through time to try to prevent the bomb.

This is not a movie that needs to be remarked upon by saying, "Every frame is like a photograph!" because every frame is a photograph. However, it keeps away from being considered merely a slide-show by the emotive use of sound and narration and the surreal look into time and memory, a look that's quite adequate for truly representing the sort of imbalance and dizziness that would be created by time-travel. It recreates the sort of objective detail of memories wherein the movement through space and time is certainly recognized as your own, but your inability to control it since it's already been done makes you sort of an outside spectator to your own actions. That, I believe, is the focus that drives this narrative along and it's done so well, it's difficult to imagine anyone not being sucked into it.

--PolarisDiB