La Jetée (1962)

There are short films, and then there are short films that lodge themselves so firmly in the cultural imagination that they effectively rewrite the rules of what cinema can be. Persona did something similar in 1966, stripping the medium back to its barest psychological bones. La Jetée, released four years earlier in France, goes even further. Running to just twenty-nine minutes, it is a science fiction film set in the aftermath of a third world war, following a prisoner selected for a series of time travel experiments because of his unusually strong attachment to a single memory from childhood. A memory of a woman, and of something witnessed on the observation pier at Orly Airport. That much, at least, is on the tin. What Chris Marker does with that premise is something else entirely.

Marker was already an established figure in the French film essay tradition by the time La Jetée appeared, known for work that blurred the line between documentary, travelogue and personal reflection. His 1957 film had demonstrated his willingness to treat cinema as a vehicle for ideas rather than conventional narrative, and La Jetée carries that sensibility to a logical, if radical, conclusion. Produced by Argos Films and Radio-Télévision Française, the film is composed almost entirely of black-and-white still photographs, narrated in the manner of a spoken short story, accompanied by music and fragments of ambient sound. It is, on paper, a format that should not work as dramatic cinema. That it does, rather spectacularly, is the central curiosity and pleasure of the thing. The principal performers, Jean Négroni as narrator, Hélène Chatelain and Davos Hanich as the woman and the man at the story's heart, along with Jaques Ledoux and André Heinrich in supporting roles, exist largely as photographic subjects, their faces and postures carrying a weight that conventional screen acting rarely manages.

The film arrived at a particularly fertile moment for French cinema, a period when filmmakers across Europe were questioning the grammar of the medium and finding that audiences, at least some of them, were willing to follow. It has since become one of those films that critics and film students treat almost as a touchstone, a polished but unremarkable description doing it no justice at all. Its influence on science fiction specifically has been considerable and well-documented, not least in the direction of a certain 1995 Hollywood production that expanded its premise into something considerably louder. Whether that expansion was an improvement or a dilution rather depends on your temperament, and on which version of this story you encounter first.

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.

For me, that point about restraint is really the key to the whole thing. There is a temptation, with a film this formally unusual, to treat it primarily as an artefact or a curiosity, something to admire from a respectful distance rather than actually feel. But La Jetée refuses that comfortable detachment. It gets under your skin precisely because it asks more of you than a conventional film does, and rewards you in proportion to what you bring. If you have enjoyed other French films reviewed on this site, whether something as grounded as Sugar Cane Alley or as quietly unusual as Little by Little, you will already know that French cinema has a particular gift for making smallness feel enormous. La Jetée might be the purest expression of that gift there is. Twenty-nine minutes. One brief flicker of movement. An ending you see coming, and that destroys you anyway.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1962  | Watched: 2025-09-22

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Trailer

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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)