La Jetée (1962)
★★★ — La Jetée (1962)
Chris Marker was already known in French film circles as a documentarian and essayist, part of the Left Bank group loosely associated with the Nouvelle Vague, when he made this 28-minute short for Argos Films and Radio-Télévision Française in 1962. Shot almost entirely in black-and-white stills rather than moving footage (a single brief exception aside), it was a formally radical experiment even by the standards of that restlessly inventive moment in French cinema. The film is set in a post-nuclear Paris and draws on science fiction conventions while owing as much to the essay film tradition as to genre storytelling. It would go on to be one of the most influential short films ever made, cited most visibly when Terry Gilliam adapted its central premise into the 1995 feature Twelve Monkeys.
La Jetée (1962) isn’t so much a film as it is a haunting prose poem told through still images, a hypnotic, melancholic meditation on memory, time, and fate. Directed by Chris Marker, it’s built almost entirely from black-and-white photographs, stitched together with sparse narration and an eerie score to tell the story of a man haunted by a childhood memory, pulled across time in the aftermath of nuclear war. It’s minimal, yes, but devastatingly effective. That single moving image (just a few seconds of a woman blinking) feels like a miracle. As a fan of time travel stories, I love how La Jetée treats time not as a puzzle to be solved, but as an emotional loop, tragic and inescapable. It’s more dream than science fiction, more poetry than plot, but it sticks with you. The mood is thick with longing and dread, and the ending is one of the most gutting twists in cinema, made even more powerful by how quiet and inevitable it feels. It’s not traditional “movie” viewing (it’s closer to a radio drama with slideshows) but that’s its genius. And yes, its DNA is all over Twelve Monkeys, which Terry Gilliam turned into a sprawling sci-fi epic, but the original’s power lies in its restraint (even if 12 monkeys was much better) Not for everyone, and definitely not conventional, but essential for fans of experimental film and time travel. A short, silent scream across the decades. Brilliant, bleak, unforgettable.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1962 | Watched: 2025-09-22
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Chris Marker: Letter from Siberia (1957)
More from France: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More romance: The Eagle (1925) · The Last Picture Show (1971) · The General (1926) · The Docks of New York (1928)
