La jetée is a fascinating science fiction movie made by Chris Marker, composed almost entirely of still photographs. The short film (27 minutes) deals with time travel after the destruction of Paris in World War III. The narrator tells us we are concentrating on a man who has a very vivid memory of his youth, standing on a jetty or pier watching planes land. He sees a woman, a man falling from somewhere and that is all.
The man with the memory is picked as a subject for experiments dealing with time travel, trying to see if he can go backwards in time and actually exist in it. After many painful attempts, the man does go back and falls in the love with the woman he had remembered from his childhood. She calls him her phantom and they don't discuss how he got there. They have one perfect day and his experimenters decide that he should go into the future. What he finds and how the film resolves itself makes it memorable.
It is rather fascinating to study a montage of still pictures telling a story. We don't view it same way we view moving images, where we tend to concentrate more on the motion than on the composition. In this film each moment is held long enough for us to really study the composition, lighting, context and we put them together like a comic book frame by frame.
The film reminds me of another short film I found a couple of years ago called "Leave Me," directed by Dustin Ballard, one of the most touching short films I know.
La jetée (1962) ****
Leave Me (2009) *****
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