About the filmmaker – Chris Marker

Chris Marker (29 July 1921 – 29 July 2012) was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist who has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. His best known film, La Jetée is one of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made, a tale of time travel.

Full film

A man is a prisoner in the aftermath a nuclear war, where survivors live underground. Scientists 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 deal with time travel, many of them go crazy or die. The scientists eventually settle upon the man, he has a key to the past because he has an obsessive memory from his pre-war childhood of a woman he had seen on the observation platform at Orly Airport shortly before witnessing a man die.

After several attempts, he reaches the pre-war period. He meets the woman from his memory. 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 permanently; but he asks instead to be returned to the pre-war time of his childhood, hoping to find the woman again. He is returned to the past, placed on the observation deck at the airport. He is concerned with locating the woman, and quickly spots her. However, as he rushes to her, he notices an agent of his experimenters has followed him and realizes the agent is there to kill him. In his final moments, he comes to understand that the death he witnessed as a child, which has haunted him ever since, was his own death.