La Jetee

How long I had heard about 1962's LA JETEE, director Chris Marker's classic short film.  A work of art that is essentially a photomontage, a series of photos edited together to give the viewer just as compelling a narrative as what would otherwise have occurred via a standard motion picture.  My first awareness of it was via TWELVE MONKEYS, the 1996 sci-fi fantasy of a criminal who is sent back in time to prevent the dissemination of a global plague.  Many ideas in Terry Gilliam's film were lifted from LA JETTE, including a moment that in turn was lifted from Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO.

A man lives in the bowels of the underground of Paris.  World War III has left the surface unlivable, teeming with radioactivity.  He remains haunted by a childhood memory, the image of a woman from the jetty at Orly Airport.  Before the War.  Now he is a prisoner, a perfect subject for time travel in efforts to save the Present.  This in part involves travelling back to the Past.  He meets that woman.  He begins a relationship with her.  It all seems so odd yet pleasant.  But there is another memory from the Jetty.  A death.

If you've seen TWELVE MONKEYS, you may know how this story ends.  Tragically, and what fascination Marker finds in this idea of seeking out the past, the danger of it!  To return to youth with the wisdom gained with age, something we all conjecture.  Nostalgia, almost like a drug.  The Present, always there to evaporate it.  Does the man truly travel in time? Is he only making the journey in his mind? Can you save the Present, but lose yourself? Maybe you only belonged in the Past?

Aside from one moment, LA JETEE plays out entirely in stills, with an ominous narrator.  It is a mesmerizing technique, and thematically appropriate as it resembles a waltz through an old photo album, pages handled by one homesick for Youth, for lost love, for The Way It Was.  Flashes of memories.  Also, frightening images from Past, Present, and Future frozen in time, from the perspective of a lab rat subject for science.  One doesn't need a nuclear holocaust to reach such a state.  What Marker achieves in less than one half hour should be the envy of most filmmakers, and the film's influence is all over many subsequent novels and films, science fiction or otherwise.