La JeteeLa Jetee
      Year: 1963
      Production: Argos / Arcturus Films
      Director: Chris Marker
      Starring: Helene Chatelain, Jacques Ledoux, Davos Hanich
      Screenwriter: Chris Marker
      29 minutes, B/W


      This celebrated French short film is often seen as a breakthrough in sf 
      narration that has yet to be equalled. With voice-over narration and 
      composed entirely of still photographs (though there is one brief sequence 
      - a close-up of a girl winking - that gives the impression of movement) 
      the film is nearer in theme and approach to the new-wave sf of the 1960s 
      than to traditional time-travel stories in the cinema or in literature. 
      Set in a post-holocaust Paris where the concept of passing time is 
      disappearing and the principle of cause-and-effect is therefore lost, this 
      subtle and complex film shows an attempt being made to send back in time a 
      man obsessed by his memory of a woman's face, since the existence of 
      memory suggests that time still exists for him. He is also sent into the 
      future where he finds the remembered face is a witness to his own death. 
      The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction


      Marker, a novelist, photographer and cineaste, is one of the rare artists 
      whose every film allows us to discover what a marvellous cinema we could 
      have. Alain Resnais described him as "The prototype of 21st century Man 
      ... He appears human but he may well be from the future or from another 
      planet. I'd rather think he is from the future because then we can believe 
      that a couple of centuries from now, all earthlings will resemble Marker." 
      La Jetee was released on the bill of the 1960s as the short accompanying 
      Godard's Alphaville (1965). Is it a short, unique and fragile masterpiece 
      exploring the very edges of cinema itself. With an explicit nod towards 
      Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), Marker proposes a central character, H 
      (Hanich) living in a post-nuclear-war Paris where survivors are trapped in 
      subterranean vaults. The logic of cause and effect, and therefore of 
      sequentiality, has been disturbed, locking the survivors in a timeless 
      present. H, however, is obsessed by a memory image of a woman's face, 
      possibly glimpsed on the pier at Orly airport. This tenuous link with the 
      past, and this with time, provides an enigmatic, somewhat menacing 
      scientist (Ledoux) with a chance to reconnect with history through H's 
      imagination. Subjected to experiments, H extends his memory and is also 
      projected into the future where he finds that the scene he remembered is 
      that of a woman witnessing his own violent death. Except for one brief 
      moment, the entire film consists of still images accompanied by a 
      voice-over narration spoken by Jean Negroni. With this photo-novel 
      technique, Marker explores the links between memory, time and vision. Like 
      much of his work, the movie is deeply paradoxical. Ostensibly marking the 
      borderline between a cinematic past (Lang, Hitchcock) and a future best 
      exemplified by Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967), it can equally well be 
      seen as remembering Wavelength and anticipating the post-modernist cinema 
      of a Marguerite Duras; the paradox is that wherever or however one cares 
      to draw a dividing line between a past and a future of cinema, that is 
      where La Jetee seems to belong. It seems to live on the fixed, yet 
      constantly shifting, edge between the cinema we have and the one we could 
      have, or between cinema and not-cinema. In philosophical terms, the film's 
      position is undecidable. Pointing to possible futures, is also reorganizes 
      our understanding of what must have gone before, making it a movie in the 
      future anterior tense, which is, strictly speaking, impossible. Marker's 
      photo-novel technique was used previously in James Young's Pup on a 
      Rampage (1900), but it took Marker to make the device historically 
      meaningful. The picture was awarded first prize at the Trieste festival in 
      1963. 
      The Overlook Film Encyclopedia - Science Fiction


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