Watch La Jetee (1963) – https://youtu.be/nvJzKqdSr-Q

Chris Marker was a French filmmaker, poet, photography, and multi-media artist who challenged both himself and philosophers with his complex theories on time, memory, and evolution. Marker’s short time travel film, ‘La Jetee’ is one of the most influential science-fiction films ever made, surrounding a slave on a journey through his own memories in the wake of WWIII, told through still images.

The film begins with stills of an airport observation deck, before the narrator gives context to the post-apocalyptic setting of Paris in a voiceover, which is prevalent throughout the film’s runtime. The woman on the observation deck is then introduced, before mentioning the climactic event of the film that leaves the protagonist both obsessed and traumatised by the moment. The stills that follow display the ruins of Paris and the voiceover talks about the following war and capture of various slaves as prisoners for the camp directors to experiment on, hiding out in the underground passages beneath Chaillot.

We are then properly introduced to the protagonists as we are shown the results of some of the experiments that the camp directors are doing, before the protagonist starts to be experimented on, being told that humanity is doomed – their only hope being to look through time for the answers.

The protagonist is then sent through his own memories over the following weeks, portrayed through various stills of people, birds, graves, and lakes, until he is eventually dragged into the past, able to move freely as he wishes. This is where he meets the woman from his memories, whom he begins to speak to, spend time with, and falls in love with her as the experiment goes on, only to vanish before her eyes each time he’s sent back to the present.

Eventually, the camp directors deem the experiments a success and attempt to send the protagonist into the future, meaning he will never see the woman again. When he’s sent to the future, he’s met by a small group of people, who offer him a power source that can support and save humanity from extinction. When the protagonist arrives back in the present, he is then left to realise that all that remains for him is his execution, which he waits for in dread. The people from the future contact him in this moment, and offer him a place among them, which he rejects; instead asking to be placed back into his childhood memories again, where he can enjoy the pre-war era with the woman in happiness.

He is once again at the observation deck of the airport, where he searches for the woman, wondering if his younger self is there watching the planes. As he runs to the woman, he recognises one of the camp directors, who shoots him in front of the woman. The protagonist realises in this moment that there is no escape from time, and the moment of his obsession that he’d had since he was a child, was the moment of his own death.

I find the techniques used in the making of this film to be quite unique, and I believe that Marker’s use of still imagery as opposed to the moving images that are typically used in film has a philosophical significance, as it gives the audience time to think over what is happening in the emptier moments, and is less distracting to their trains of thought. This also is symbolic of the characters being trapped in time, as the protagonist in particular is stuck in a life-or-death cycle throughout the whole narrative. Marker uses a lot of transitions between his images, primarily fades, which blend the photographs together much like memories, which I find to be quite relevant to the premise and topics in the narrative. The narrative itself is non-linear, which is a common convention of a lot of time travel science-fiction films, as the story moves back and forth from the protagonists memories to the present moment, which works well as a storytelling device to provide context to the audience.

This film has inspired a change in my approach to cinematography, as it has made me realised that a moving image isn’t always necessary to create a powerful, provoking scene, as long as other film elements are there.