How the Influential Time-Travel Movie La Jetée Was Made (Almost) Entirely out of Still Photographs
In a future where humanity has been driven underground by an apocalyptic event, a prisoner is haunted by the childhood memory of seeing a man gunned down at an airport. A group of scientists make him their time-traveling guinea pig, hoping that he’ll be able to find a way to restore the society they once knew. In one of his forced journeys into the past, he falls for a strangely familiar-looking woman who convinces him not to return to his own time period. Alas, things go wrong, culminating in the final realization that the death he had witnessed so long ago was, in fact, his own.
You may recognize this as the plot of Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, from 1995, and also as the plot of Chris Marker’s La Jeteé, from 1962. 12 Monkeys, a full-scale Hollywood picture starring the likes of Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, attained critical acclaim and box-office success. But La Jeteé, which inspired it, stands as the more impressive cinematic achievement, despite — or perhaps owing to — its being a black-and-white short composed almost entirely of still photographs. That unusual (and unusually effective) form is the subject of the new video above from Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter.
“When you think about it, Terry Gilliam is using still images too,” says Puschak. “It’s just that he’s using 24 still images every second, while Marker uses, on average, one image every four seconds.” In La Jeteé, we’re “forced to sit with every frame,” and thus to notice that “they’re dead: all movement is gone, and we’re left with these lifeless fragments of time, an appropriate thing in a world obliterated by war.” Marker “shows us that the movement of moving pictures, even though it resembles life, is illusory; it’s really just another form of memory, and memory is always fragmentary and lifeless, re-animated only by the meaning we impose on it from the present.”
Yet this photo-roman, as Marker calls it, does contain one moving image, which depicts the lady with whom the protagonist gets involved waking up on one of their mornings together. Puschak describes it as “in the running for the most poignant bit of motion in all of cinema” and interprets it as saying that “love, human connection somehow transcends, somehow escapes the trap of time. It may be cliché to say that, but there is nothing cliché about the way Marker shows it.” Marker’s inventive nouvelle vague colleague Jean-Luc Godard once called cinema “truth 24 times per second” — a definition broken wide open, characteristically, by Marker himself.
Related content:
How Chris Marker’s Radical Sci-Fi Film La Jetée Changed the Life of Cyberpunk Prophet William Gibson
Petite Planète: Discover Chris Marker’s Influential 1950s Travel Photobook Series
A Concise Breakdown of How Time Travel Works in Popular Movies, Books & TV Shows
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.