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"La jetée" is a million years ahead of its time. To make a movie in 1962 about World War III, time traveling and a distant future that is still genuinely disturbing and not in the least outdated comes close to a miracle.

Here's a short synopsis of the story: After World War III Paris is lying in tatters. The earth has been contaminated and survivors of the war have to live underground imprisoned by the victorious nation (it's never said explicitly which nation that is, but they are talking German). Scientists are looking for a way to secure the survival of mankind by exploring the possibilities of time traveling. In the process one of the prisoners, who has a strong connection to the past because of a recurring dream of his childhood, serves as their guinea pig. As the experiments go on the time traveler falls in love with a woman from the past and comes face to face with the childhood memory he's been obsessed with all his life.

The story might have a familiar ring to you. It's basically the same story Terry Gilliam used in "12 Monkeys". But while "12 Monkeys" is a great movie, ultimately it will be "La jetée" that will stand the test of time (no pun intended). Director/screenwriter Chris Marker's approach is amazingly clever and effective. His movie is a sequence of beautiful black and white photographs with somebody narrating the story. The pictures and the perfect music make the whole thing seem like a documentary on World War II and give the movie a disturbingly realistic feel. Marker never makes the mistake to show too much. The destruction of Paris, the experiments and the future are all hinted at rather vaguely in the pictures and in the narration. A lot is left to our imagination and when The Man, as the main character is simply called, drifts through time it almost seems like a feverish dream to the viewer, too. What's more concrete is the relationship of The Man and The Woman and the contrast between the short untroubled moments The Man spends in the past and his enslavement in the present. Marker concentrates on those aspects and almost shrugs the time traveling off as a negligibility and the result is nothing short of amazing.

With its 26 minutes running time "La jetée" accomplishes more than some epic trilogies do. It remains a classy work of art that looks fresher than any other movie from the 60's that I've ever seen and in 50 years from now it will not have lost any of its appeal, either.

This is one of the most stunning short films ever made. Marker has pieced together an oblique, sci-fi setting for marvelous still photography; when there is movement, it is a cause for joy! Everyone who is a cineast should see this film: it's that good and it's that important!

I first saw "La Jetee" in an introductory journalism class in the spring of 1973. The class was large, so large, in fact, that it was held in an auditorium rather than a conventional classroom. But when the film ended, there was about 30 seconds of stone-silence before the murmuring began. I sat slack-jawed and stunned and looked at Mary Ann, a girl who sat next to me and who I was slowly becoming friends with, to check her reaction. She looked equally stunned.

Thirty years have passed and I have occasionally revisited that moment. Despite wanting to know Mary Ann better, I was too timid and never saw her again after that semester ended and despite being stunned by the film, for some reason, I had lost track of its title. All I remembered was a haunting scene at an airport with a guy wearing glasses. That was it.

Just the other day and for no reason at all, I remembered the title "La Jetee" out of the blue. The name just popped into my head. And, even stranger, when I was checking the TV listings earlier today, I found that "La Jetee" was being shown on the Sundance Channel later.

I just finished watching it and I am as slack-jawed and stunned as I was thirty years ago. I guess the next logical thing will be to hear from Mary Ann. Just so long as I don't have to meet her at the airport.

'La Jetee' is a film about movement made up entirely of photographic stills. Well, not entirely. For one transcendent moment the photo moves, ironically at the film's stillest moment, as a woman we have starred at sleeping in the sunny dawn wakes up. It is typical of Marker that a film spanning centuries, millenia, war, torture, experimentation, murder, dreams, time travel, destruction, love, joy, should have as its epiphanical moment an elusive, delusive moment of utter calm, that of a sleeping woman opening her eyes. In a film whose body is the stuff dreams are made on, such a moment is truly cataclysmic.

Like all Marker's masterpieces, 'Jetee', ostensibly a work of science-fiction, is profoundly concerned with Time, Memory and History. Such abstracts treated in lesser hands have a tendency to become vague, airy, removed from life; but Marker, the old leftist, always grounds his philosophy, humanisises and politicises it.

'Jetee', though a short, is rich with ambiguity and irony - the freedom of dreams, to reinvent the past, to escape from circumstances, is exploited by a totalitarian oligarchy, and ultimately fatal for the dreamer. Such is our desperate need to dream, to escape, forget/reinvent, that it is easy to forget that the Man's relationship with the Woman is a phantom, an entire history blown out of a brief glimpse, like that Baudelaire poem where he is stunned by a brief glimpse of a woman he never sees again.

It is this act the tyrants need, this gesture of recreation - by embodying what never happened, by making real or factual what is ultimately desire, he has destroyed history; this paves the way for the vision of 3000, where history is destroyed, and along with it humanity; a Houhnyhm-land of disembodied intelligence. This idea of the death of history, of the victory of post-modernity, would be most eloquently in Marker's chef d'oeuvre, 'Sans Soleil', which was shown with this film at the screening I attended.

But Marker's great achievement here is his creation of the future as a regression, as a descent into medievalism, part-Les Miserables, part-Occupation, with all the signs of French progress and pretension destroyed, with all Haussman's modernity and prosperity run to earth by nuclear contamination, the survivors living in sewers with rats, as their ancestors once did.

Marker's vision is terrifying in its mixture of ruined symmetry and a sickening moral blackness, the general silence punctuated by impenetrable whispers and noises - this is one of the most frightening soundtracks I've ever heard. This medievalism also means a bypassing of the intellect, of literal Enlightenment, and back to a kind of spiritual murk, with pastiche sacred music flooding the film, and parodies of religious kitsch obtruding (the godlike light seeping into dense interiors; religious slogans; the compositions of survivors like beatified saints) on the relics of civilisation, the graffiti, the now-impenetrable codes.

This chaos is contrasted with the Paris of the dream, especially in the museum scene, even more chilling with its statues looking like petrified relics from a volcanic disaster; the mute, stuffed animals warning humans of their fate; the exquisite composition of architecture, trapping the couple in a web of order, boxes, classification, obsolescence, the doomed attempts by mankind to order the universe.

yet this dream is so moving because it offers love, connection, gardens, talk, dreams, Paris, even if they are illusory. because, although this is a dense, difficult, allusive, modern film, it also illuminates a simple, ancient truth 'In the midst of life, we are in death'. As Morrissey once responded, 'Etcetera'.

In 1995, Terry Gilliam made one of the finest movies in the nineties: "Twelve Monkeys". To explain how he made this awesome movie, he openly declared that he drew his inspiration from a French short film: "La Jetée". It is true that the 2 opus have similarities: both present a devastated earth caused by man's madness, survivors who take refuge in underground rooms and try to improve their grueling living conditions and especially both feature a jaded and manipulated main character.

A short film that is a reflection about time, happiness and love, entirely composed of static shots, "la jetée" is a powerful and mesmerizing work and it may appear as a cornerstone in French cinema. 42 years after its release, it kept all its strength and has not aged a bit. The quality of the editing, the photography and the commentary add to the success of Chris Marker's work.

Highly recommended and the influence of Chris Marker's short film on "Twelve Monkeys" shows well a thing: French cinema inspired a great number of American movies.

If you can find this rare film, you must see it. Unique in film history, this experimental short film consists of a series of still shots tied together by narration. It is the story of a post-apocalyptic Earth and time travel. Each still shot is a work of art, and the plot is compelling. A man with a strong memory of a past event witnessed as a small child (a person being shot at an airport), is periodically sent back into that pre-war period by "experimenters" with devious purposes. While visiting the past, the hero falls in love with a woman from that past.

Watch for the one and only scene that contains any movement and natural sounds (birds in the background, while the woman wakes up next to her lover). Coming in the midst of the relentless still shots, it is one of the most sublime moments in all cinema. You are doing yourself a disservice if you do not see this film.

The first time I saw this movie it was on a local educational TV channel (PBS was barely starting) in 1969. I was a youngster and it made such an indelible impression that I remembered it all these years. Luckily, to my surprise I discovered a copy recently at a video rental store.

The movie is only approximately 30 minutes in length and is composed of black and white still photography (except for one scene, where they show a mans eye blinking). It is a powerful depiction of the end of the world, human love and memory. The French narration adds to the poetic subtlety and drama. To my dismay, I heard there was a new DVD version available, but with English narration. Hopefully, the original French version will be made available, as it seems to add so much more to the dramatic effect of the movie.

To the average movie viewer, this film would be best described as avant-garde in nature. It is a prime example of how science fiction and drama can be produced with nuance and subtleties, rather than overuse of technological effects and gratuitous titillation and violence.

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

I had never seen such an original film that works so well. The artist with no budget decides to make a film that could have appealed to the commercial masses. That is what is scary about it. It's the kind of story that we would consider "blockbuster gold". A journey through time, sci-fi, and romance. And yet, it requires no special effects, it requires no big budget. Marker laughs right at the face of conventional cinema and uses stills to let out imagination read between the lines.

Is this fiction? Yes, to some extent. The post-apocalyptic story that it recounts would make Waterworld blush with embarrassment, true. But once again, the arty film looks at us to find a meaning for the story. At the end of the day, are we more taken aback by the technical aspect in which Marker engages, or by the shocking finale. Would the finale have been so shocking had Marker used a Bolex camera? I fear not. The bit where he's running towards the girl in the end feels like an average nightmare, where you're running, but you can't get to wherever you want to get to. It's a feeling we have all felt, and the lack of movement within the frame conveys a certain feeling of helplessness and entrapment that could only have been achieved this well with stills.

And we must say, these stills are amazing. It's not only the elaborate mise-en-scene, or the design of the sets and the props (the french sci-fi glasses are extraordinary). It's also the placement of the camera, that has a ghostly versatility that often adds to the lack of comfort of the restless characters.

I must also give a shout for the score that is amazing, which is strange if we count that your average experimental film hardly ever employs such "cinematic" scores, always going for the more minimalist (and generally less expansive) ones.

The story is interesting and influential, and I give this short film credit for being groundbreaking in the area of time travel (and/or time loops, time paradoxes, etc). It captures the science fiction aspects and its dystopian elements well, but it also has very humanistic touches in the elusiveness of those little moments in time with someone you love, and how all of us in the end cannot escape time. Unfortunately, the storytelling left me flat both times I watched it. The repetition of still images, the monotone delivery, and slow pace made it tough to fully enjoy. It's a good cure for insomnia though.

...the moment I refer to is the one that many have analyzed over the years (easier now with video & DVD for slow motion and instant replay), when the sort of un-written law over La Jetee is bent. We see movement: a woman's eyes blink in slow-motion, and it is literally dream-like with the set-up of the lighting, the eerie music, and the fleeting sense that something may have not moved at all. For those coming fresh to La Jetee not knowing anything about this, it may come as something of a trick or a total illusion, as I thought the first time I saw it ('huh, what?'), and then came to realize it in a film class screening the short. It's a remarkable bit in a short film that offers images everlasting, dramatic, and haunting.

What Terry Gilliam called the 'acorn' from which the script for his 1995 film Twelve Monkeys sprang from, La Jetee deals with the future and the past, if it can be changed or not, and part of the film even takes place at the airport. But make no mistake, La Jetee has been and still is an art-house cult delicacy, a film where images move but are still, and yet give lightly to some wonders. It is slow and unsettling on a first go-around; one really doesn't have an idea of what is happening (that is unless you're well versed in Twelve Monkeys). But repeat viewings give greater light to the film's subtexts, or at least what it has to offer a viewer. It is a particular kind of film, intellectual of course, but also with an emotional core in dealing with this man who is reprogrammed to go through time and find a woman, or a thing, which may help prevent the end of the world. The science fiction parts are startling and rather graphic for the times, the shots in the museum are awe-inspiring in the museum sense, and the ending is as perfectly ambiguous and frightening as imaginable.

Chris Marker, simply put, doesn't hold back in his experiment; it pretends to be anything but a series of science-fiction/apocalyptic images, in stills, that convey a story but mostly with thoughts on the 'meaning' of it all. But I'll be damned if that little moment, with the woman's eyes, isn't a masterpiece of a moment.

I don't want to say that this movie was totally crappy and should definitely not be seen. It IS interesting to watch for people who are interested in film history, in that what we call "Avantgarde", or experimental movies, with an interesting thought behind it. This is "La Jetée", but it is nothing more. Definitely it is no masterpiece, I wouldn't even call it art, because it is such a "mess", like someone said before me. I'll tell you the reason for my negative opinion.

First, it should be obvious that there are undoubted differences between still pictures and moving ones, in their structure as in their way of "telling" something. So if you put some photos together, all you get is a boring, poetically uninteresting movie. Alright, so it's not meant to be a film at all but a "photo-novel". First, then you could print it, make a book out of it, with pictures and a text. Why did Marker choose to make it as a movie? I don't know and it is really not important. The problem is, that the photos shown in this, as it is some kind of flowing pictures I'll rather call it like the following, movie are really put to a confusing mix. If there is a picture, showing the typical structure of a photo, the next one seems to be a single still photo, taking from an actually continuing movie. So neither could you call it an arrangement of good photos nor a good movie, as still pictures with the mise en scene, the maybe poetic, but in any case specific structure of a movie, have no life, no importance, they are just insignificant! It's like taking one single tone out of a symphony. It can not live without the rest, the work of art as a whole. So seeing this confusing mix, as I called it, I couldn't think of it as one thing, never mind what it is meant to be, I couldn't see it as a unified piece of work, not to speak of art. That's the first reason why I would go so far to call it a failed experiment.

The second is the plot which, in my opinion, tells too much of this kind of aftermath, a thing which we have seen in enough other movies. Maybe not at the point of its release, but art should always be relevant, doesn't it? The story of this man is pretty interesting, and the end also seemed really good, not only in comparison to the rest of the movie but in comparison to this man, his story, taking away from the rest of the film. Anyway, my point was the style of putting photos together, not the plot.

I am sorry for accusing the movie of such a bad way of making, as Chris Marker was kind of an interesting man, as it seems. I have to confess that I didn't watch any other movies/documentaries of him, but what I saw in "La Jetée" is enough to tell of him as a man with only good intentions, I guess. And that's why I give 6 points, to emphasize it as better than things like "Avatar".

La Jetée from 1962 is often hailed as a groundbreaking piece of cinema, especially known for its unique storytelling technique, using still images to weave a narrative. While I can appreciate the innovation and the artistic vision behind this experimental short film, it didn't quite resonate with me as I had hoped.

The film explores themes of time travel, memory, and the aftermath of a nuclear war. It's deep, thought-provoking, and undeniably creative in its approach. However, the experience of watching it felt somewhat disjointed and abstract to me. The reliance on still images, though artistically interesting, made it challenging to connect with the story and characters on an emotional level.

I give La Jetée a 3/10. It's a film that certainly has its merits and has earned its place in the history of avant-garde cinema. But as a personal viewing experience, it was more perplexing than enjoyable. It's one of those films that might appeal to a niche audience but didn't quite hit the mark for me.

La Jettée (1962) is not only the most important work of science-fiction cinema since Fritz Lang's masterwork Metropolis (1927), but is also one of the most staggering achievements in the entire history of film. Here, filmmaker Chris Marker presents the audience with the ultimate cinematic dystopia; a futuristic, industrialised landscape of underground tunnels, colourless streets and jarring 60's architecture. The results are beautiful yet somewhat anachronistic, as the filmmaker employs a similar approach to that of Godard in Alphaville (1965) - or more recently, Winterbottom's Code 46 (2003) - albeit, with a less straightforward attitude to plot and ideology.

The basic narrative outline of the film is built around various reflective layers - similar to what Tarkovsky would use in his later film, Mirror (1975) - which allow Marker to create a certain feeling of mirroring between the notions of fact and fiction, life and death, reality and fantasy and so on. This, in turn, further develops the characters and the world of which they inhabit. The reason the film works without becoming a cold, lifeless lecture is because it anchors the images of nuclear holocaust and scientific exploration within humanistic characters and a sense of unashamed romanticism. But this is only one part of an elaborate puzzle; lest we forget that we are dealing with certain narrative paradoxes, not to mention an assortment of linear and non-linear story elements each unfolding simultaneously. Just when we think we've got the whole film worked out, our perspectives immediately change, and our ideas are lost in the blink of an eye.

However, aside from thematic visual palindromes, what is most remarkable about La Jettée - and the reason it has retained its reputation as a work of genius - is the way in which Marker manages to relate his story of travel and movement through the use of still images. By presenting these pictures to us in a sort of photo-montage - complete with brooding voice-over and various sound effects - the director somehow manages to bring the stillness of his film miraculously to life. It is, without question, a work of pure, unadulterated imagination, and a staggering testament to Marker's genius ability to convey a multitude of feelings, ideas and emotions, through a series of simple, static, though nonetheless, deeply evocative images.

As another reviewer said, this film is "timeless". Although it is from 1962, its story could be relevant in 1862 or 2062. The images presented show an apocalyptic world but also show happy images from another time. The story told is the main composition of this film and although it is short you become connected to the story as its eeriness makes the film unsettling at times.

Overall, its a great film and an amazing piece of art!

La Jetée by Chris Marker is a masterpiece of short film making that explores the themes of time, memory and fate. The film is composed of still images, except for one brief moment of motion, that create a haunting and poetic narrative. The film follows a man who is sent back in time by scientists after a nuclear war has devastated the world. He is drawn to a woman he saw as a child at the Orly Airport, where he also witnessed a man being killed. He falls in love with her, but he also learns that the man he saw dying was himself. The film is not a conventional sci-fi story, but rather a philosophical and artistic reflection on the nature of human existence. The film is influenced by Proust's concept of involuntary memory, where a sensory trigger can evoke a past experience. The film also inspired many other films that deal with time travel, such as 12 Monkeys, Terminator and Looper, but none of them can match the originality and depth of La Jetée.

"La Jette" is a strange short film, that many are familiar to the fact that it inspired the Terry Gilliam film "12 Monkeys". It centers on the hypothetical aftermath of World War III. It is assumed that the world had been scorched by nuclear weaponry, as we see a young man strapped down and blindfolded by a group of ominous scientists in an underground refuge. What the man is being subjected to is a time machine that sends him back to the time, and his mission is to collect goods, and send them back to the present day in order to feed the survivors of the war. He is sent back to the near moment when his life ended, and all he remembers seeing is a strikingly beautiful young woman, standing over a pier while an unknown man falls to his death. Instead of following orders, the man stalks the female throughout the city of Paris, in order to figure out why he remembers her, and what significance she has to him before the bomb hit. What happens is quite lovely actually. You see, the man begins to talk to the young woman, and they begin a pleasant Parisian love affair. Needless to say, this makes the underground scientists none too pleased. For several times over, the scientists keep sending the man back to the beginning of the time warp in order to complete the mission, only for the man to keep pursuing the young lady every time. The two inter-dimensional lovebirds even manage to squeeze in a museum visit, where they gaze at the wonders of the animal kingdom. Hey, even in a time warp, you have to stop and smell the roses. After many attempts, the scientists play a trick and send the young man to a strange, scary future that warns him of the consequences of a malnourished society. The people where black clothing, and stare deeply into his eyes. Do you think that would scare him into doing the right thing? Of course not! He's got to get the girl. Angry about his failure, the scientists bring him back to the past, to meet the girl, only to have him assassinated by another time traveler. In the end, he suffered the exact same fate as the man he saw before the war. He was the fallen man from his own past.

All this is shown in glorious frames per second… no not 24, just frames. Like a slideshow gone horribly wrong, the story progresses through images, which coincide with the fact that Marker himself is an acclaimed photographer. Does it even matter in the end? Not for me. I was deeply invested in every moment of this great short film. As a matter of fact, in the genre of Science Fiction, I don't think I've ever seen a finer film. Marker masterfully places fear in the hearts of his viewers. Whatever future we have to look forward to, it looks awfully bleak for Marker. There is nothing to look forward to, but the imminent arrival of a nuclear holocaust. As with many films in tune with "Nouvelle Vague", the politics are visibly liberal. "La Jette" is an early anti-war picture. In the wake of WWII, and the arms race happening in Europe, Marker constructed a film that allowed us to think about the social and physical implications of nuclear war. In the process, he allows an intimate look at the past, and how our main character, keeps trying to hang onto it as long as he can, for tomorrow is hopeless. The woman he seeks is in itself, a metaphor for peace and good memories. Good memories are precious, and beautiful, and visceral. When you think about good memories, you want to plant yourself back in time and relive them. We sympathize with our main character, and we feel for him when he dies in the end. I believe the moral of it all is to remember what thrived before, and try to prevent what this film tried to envision for our future, which consists of nothing.

I watched this movie about a year ago while studying film where we were told it was the basis for 12 Monkeys. 12 has nothing on this film and is a mere shadow of Jetee. The images were hard to forget for quite a while after I saw it and the effectiveness of it's simplicity are genius. Imagine reading an incredibly rich, thought provoking book where one is forced to create his or her interpretation with the visual aide of a page containing an illustration; that's La Jette.

This movie is one most people today won't enjoy since nowadays, we're used to meaningless explosions and the like. If you are the type of person that loves to explore meaning and love beautiful imagery. This is the film for you.

Who among us is not haunted to some degree by images from early childhood? They accompany us through life, albeit at sporadic moments, and can tinge our perceptions in various ways. Some gradually fade away; others stubbornly remain, perhaps undergoing subtle mutations.

La Jetee appears to be a reflection on, and expansion of, this role played by memories from early childhood. An event early in a man's life comes to color everything he sees in subsequent years, and ultimately emerges as the central event (...or, "events"?) in his life.

La Jetee should also be seen as proof of what can be accomplished with quite limited technical means: it is essentially a black-and-white slide show with sound. Nonetheless, it manages to evoke unexpected levels of sadness and poignance. In contrast to ordinary Hollywood-style movies, it is more nearly like cinematic poetry, in the sense that the viewer is called on to fill in much of what is left unsaid. ...I think I've just talked myself into raising my score for this movie from an 8 to a 9....

This experiential movie is told almost entirely via a series of still images, a suitably distinct way of conveying its decidedly distinct story. Telling the tale of a man forced to travel through time for the good of his post-apocalyptic society, 'La Jetée (1962)' remains an enigmatic and engaging experience throughout. It has a palpable atmosphere and an equally tangible texture, feeling like a cohesive whole despite its literal lack of movement. Its story is rather emotionally engaging, too, as it focuses on the smaller human moments which make up its sci-fi narrative, portraying its difficult-to-grasp central concept solely as the experience of a single individual. It has a lot to say about memory and the nature of time, weaving its thematic musings into its plot seamlessly. Even after the flick's iconic twist ending, there's a lot to think about. 7/10

This is one of these movies you wind up watching in film classes, and it's considered a great classic. Unfortunately, it's pretty tedious.

It is essentially an illustrated sci-fi short story made up (almost) entirely of still images. This is an admittedly original approach to movie making, but not an especially engaging process.

While leisurely told, the real issue for me with the film is it's not a very good sci-fi story. I was immersed from childhood in science-fiction (my dad taught a college literature course devoted to it) and the story struck me as trite and predictable. Admittedly, I saw it 20 years after it came out (in the 1970s), so the story might have seemed more original at the time, but all-in-all this is sub-par Twilight Zone fare given artistic appeal through it's presentation.

There is one stunning moment in the movie, and it's such an interesting moment (you'll know it when you see it), and one that is only possible if the film is made just as it is, then arguably it's a good thing for a film student to see. But it's very dull.