Movie Type: Psychological Sci-Fi, Romantic Fantasy
Themes: Time Travel, Post-Apocalypse, Future Dystopias
Main Cast: Etienne Becker, Jean Negroni
Release Year: 1962
Country: FR
Run Time: 28 minutes
Plot
The movie that inspired Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, Chris Marker's La jetée is a landmark of science-fiction filmmaking, a 28-minute masterpiece told almost entirely in still frames. Set in a post-apocalyptic near-future, it tells the story of an unnamed man whose vivid childhood recollections make him the perfect guinea pig for an experiment in time travel. After a lengthy and nightmarish period of conditioning, he is sent into the past, where he falls in love with a woman whom he once saw on a pier. At the experiment's conclusion, he is visited by an advanced race, who offer him the opportunity to journey into their future world, but he instead requests that they send him permanently into the past, where he can remain with the woman of his dreams. A singular experience. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide
Review
One of the finest science fiction films ever made, Chris Marker's La jetée is a brilliant philosophical treatise packed into 28 minutes of film. Though it is Marker's only fictional work, it stands as one of the most eloquent visions of his artistic obsessions: travel, images, and memory. Concerning a nameless protagonist who voyages from the radioactive rubble of the post-WWIII present to the verdant past, the film is a travelogue of sorts--a journey through time instead of space--in which the man's childhood memories literally define his existence. Faced with a choice of living in a perfectly ordered distant future or in the moments immediately before nuclear destruction, he chooses to return to the woman from his youthful dreams and live in a vertiginous state of nostalgia. The film's "photo-roman" (still photo) style seems to mirror the impressionistic quality of memory, which the viewer pieces together into a coherent visual experience. Yet, at one point in the film, the protagonist's lover stares into the camera -- until suddenly she blinks. Subtle yet shockingly effective, La jetée brilliantly explodes the rules of what makes a film, forcing the audience to reassess its preconceptions about cinema, as well as about time, memory, and how we experience reality. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Cast
Jean Negroni - Narrator
Etienne Becker; Helene Chatelain - The Woman; Davis Hanich - The Man; Jacques Ledoux - The Experimentor
The survivors of a destroyed, post-apocalyptic Paris in the aftermath of World War III live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send test subjects to different time periods "to call past and future to the rescue of the present". They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally withstand the shock of time travel, but eventually settle upon a male prisoner whose vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the boarding platform ("The Jetty") at Orly Airport is the key to his journey back in time.
He is thrown back to the past again and again to a time prior to the war, when he had been a child. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman from his memory, who was present at the terminal. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the far future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society. Upon his return, with his mission accomplished, he discerns that he is to be executed by his jailers. He is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time, but he asks to be instead returned to the pre-war time of his childhood, hoping to again find the woman. He is returned and does find her, but an agent of his jailers has followed. The man finds that the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult at the hands of the agent.
Production
La jetée has no dialogue aside from small sections of muttering in German. The story is told by a voice-over narrator. It is constructed almost entirely from optically printed photographs playing out as a photomontage of varying pace. It contains only one brief shot originating on a motion-picture camera. The stills were taken with a Pentax Spotmatic[2] and the motion-picture segment was shot with a 35mmArriflex.[3] The film score was composed by Trevor Duncan. Due to its brevity, La jetée is often screened in theatres alongside other films; Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) was the film with which it was first released. In Region 2, the film is available with English subtitles in the La jetée/Sans soleildigipack released by Arte Video. In Region 1, the Criterion Collection has released a La jetée/Sans soleil combination DVD, which features the option of hearing the English or French narration.
Influences
The scene in which the hero and the woman look at a cut-away trunk of a tree is a reference to Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which Marker also references in Sans soleil.[4]
The 2003 short film, La puppé, is both an homage and a parody of La jetée.[5].
In 1996, Zone Books released a book version of La jetée.[6] It reproduced the film's original images along with the script in both English and French and is now out of print,[7] though it was re-released in 2008 by Zone Books.
