The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Science fiction

DIRECTOR

Chris Marker

WRITER

Chris Marker

STARS

Jean Négroni, Davos Hanich, Hélène Chatelain, Jacques Ledoux

BEFORE

1953 Marker works with director Alain Resnais on the controversial movie about African art, Statues Also Die.

AFTER

1977 In A Grin Without a Cat, Marker documents political radicalism in the aftermath of the student revolts of 1968.

1983 Marker stretches the documentary genre with Sans Soleil, a meditation on world history and the inability of the human memory to recall context and nuance.

La jetée (The Pier), by the enigmatic director Chris Marker, is a science-fiction classic that retains its power to chill and unsettle, despite being overshadowed by its big-budget remake: Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995). The two movies could not, however, be more different.

Less than 30 minutes long, and with a narrative composed entirely from still photographs, La jetée is about a man traveling back in time to witness a tragic and defining event from his childhood.

“The man doesn’t die, nor does he go mad. He suffers. They continue.”

Narrator / La jetée

A half-forgotten dream

The postapocalyptic world portrayed in La jetée disturbs with subtlety. A softly spoken voice-over narration puts the viewer in the protagonist’s place as he overhears amoral scientists whispering and muttering their plans—the movie’s only dialogue. It is in this stillness and quietness that the terror lies.

La jetée uses time travel as a device to examine the philosophical nature of memory. The protagonist witnesses and participates in moments from the past—a trip to a museum, a romantic encounter, and, most importantly, the traumatic early event that shaped his character—yet feels that his awareness of the event dilutes its reality. The movie implies that once something is in the past, it only exists in a glimpse, or as a photograph, hence the movie’s stylistic structure of using still images. La jetée balances the emotional journey of its protagonist with this thematic intellectualism to create one of the most distinct imaginings of the end of the world that cinema has ever offered.

What else to watch: The Omega Man (1971) ✵ Soylent Green (1973) ✵ Mad Max (1979) ✵ 12 Monkeys (1995) ✵ The Road (2009)