orld War III has come to pass. In Paris, a group that considers itself the victor controls a camp of tunnels and vaults beneath the city, as the world above is riddled with radiation. Of late, this group has been conducting experiments on its prisoners. After a number of failed attempts, a man named H (Hanich) is selected for his obsession with an image from his childhood before the war: on the main pier at Orly Airport, the image of a woman's face, and that of a man dying right before her eyes. H is informed by the Head Experimenter (Ledoux) that the human race is doomed and, space being off limits, humanity's only hope lies in time travel, in the past and the future, from which perhaps some help can be provided.
At first, the past manifests itself to H only as fragmented impressions, although after some time and great suffering he begins to have more rooted and extended experiences. Eventually he meets a woman (Chatelain)--the one from his childhood memory. He comes to spend all of his trips to the past with her. They develop an unspoken trust, even though they're both aware of the strange impermanence of their time together. H can't help but wonder if he's really experiencing all of this or if he's just dreaming. She calls him her ghost.
H is then sent to the future. People are waiting for him there in a rebuilt Paris and provide him with the help that his present so desperately needs.
Returning to his present, having succeeded in his mission, H soon realizes that the next step is for him to be "liquidated." But those he met in the future send him a message: they offer to bring him back to their time. He asks instead to be sent to his past, to the woman who might be waiting there for him. Having escaped to the past, though, H notices that he's been followed by someone from his present....
A true work of art
La Jetée was released in 1964 as a short film attached to Jean-Luc Godard's futuristic, hard-boiled Alphaville. And while both films could be described as New Wave science fiction cinema, Marker's take on the future is very different from Godard's, making a film that's different from most movies, in general.
Except for one sequence a few seconds in length (of the woman blinking her eyes in bed), La Jetée is composed entirely of dramatic, still black-and-white photographic images. Voice-over narration, a few sound effects (including the whispering voices of the experimenters), and an interspersed musical score provide the film's sound. And though they may seem sparse, all these elements succeed in telling a haunting, intimate and fantastic tale that works not unlike a great short story or even a poem.
Marker--a novelist, photographer, filmmaker and video and multimedia artist--describes this brand of storytelling as a "photo-novel" technique. He employs it in a masterfully subtle and complex manner. The images themselves seem at times like documentary photos, at times like pictures taken by lovers on holiday, and at other times like surveillance footage. Viewers also can't help but wonder if what they're seeing isn't simply impressionistic images from H's memory. Memory and its meanings serve as a driving force in the story.
The story's other driving force is the notion of time travel, and, as in any fiction about time travel, La Jetée is filled with paradoxes. As great art can, though, Marker's film approaches paradoxes in such a way that they work in the art's favor.
And even if an apocalypse brought on by a nuclear war doesn't resound with audiences today as much as it did during the Cold War '60s, the world of La Jetée is a deeply felt one, a visceral one. The technology that enables time travel, with all its injections and electrodes, is an electrochemical one that's only as good as the individuals on whom it's practiced. The future's high tech looks remarkably low-tech and personal.
As many may be aware, the 1995 film 12 Monkeys, directed Terry Gilliam, claims to be inspired by La Jetée.
