La Jetée
Directed by Chris Marker
- drama
- romance
- science fiction
The story
A man confronts his past during an experiment that attempts to find a solution to the problems of a post-apocalyptic world caused by a world war.
What it’s like
Almost entirely still black-and-white photographs, held for long beats and cut together with a hard, rhythmic edit, so the film plays like a slideshow of ghostly stills rather than moving footage. The images are grainy and high-contrast: a shattered Paris under grey daylight, the bright hard glare of a Parisian terminal, dim museum corridors and underground corridors lit by single bulbs, a woman's face turned in soft lamplight. A near-silent soundtrack of a narrator's hushed voiceover, a few ambient rooms tones and a rare swell of music gives it an eerie, hushed texture, with long silences that let each frozen frame settle. The mood is elegiac and melancholic, a sombre dream about memory, loss and the pull of one remembered face, paced slowly and deliberately, with almost no motion to break the spell. Violence is absent on screen; the apocalypse is implied through ruined cityscapes and a brief, haunting image of death, with no gore and only quiet dread. Suited to a late-night, lights-low viewing, a contemplative evening alone, or for people who love experimental, image-driven cinema and time-travel stories told with restraint.
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