La Jetée (1962) Directed by Chris Marker. Written by Chris Marker. Starring Hélène Châtelain, Davos Hanich, Jacques Ledoux, and narrated by Jean Négroni.
There’s a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) in which Madeleine (Kim Novak) and Scottie (James Stewart) visit a forest of old-growth coastal redwoods. They look at a cross section of a felled tree with historical events marked on the rings. Madeleine points out where she was born and where she “died”—it makes sense in context, or at least as much sense as anything makes in Vertigo—and remarks that the longevity of the trees makes her feel her own mortality more acutely.
A scene in Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée both references and echoes that scene from Vertigo. An unnamed time traveler (Davos Hanich) and an unnamed woman (Hélène Châtelain) look at a cross section of a tree trunk on display. The woman is presumed to mention Hitchcock—the narrator tells us that she mentions “an English name”—while they do what the characters in Vertigo did, and indeed what everybody does when faced with a labeled cross section of an ancient tree: marvel at the great span of time and the smallness of a human life within it.
The scene in La Jetée is very different from the scene in Vertigo: a crowded Paris street versus a quiet California forest, still black and white photos versus moody and dramatic shades of green. The time traveler can only place himself far outside of the perimeter of the cross section. This is how he explains that he has come from the future—that he is out of time, beyond the reach of this particular snapshot of history.
This might be the first time in this column where I feel genuinely at a loss for how to approach writing about this film. Not because I don’t have anything to say, but because I don’t know that I can say any of it better than the film itself already does.
So we’ll start with La Jetée’s director, not that he’s much easier to talk about. Just about everything written about Chris Marker, including his 2012 obituary in The New York Times, describes him as “enigmatic.” When even The New York Times can’t confirm your birthplace or surviving family members, that seems like a pretty fair assessment.
It’s not because Marker was reclusive or unknown. He was an extremely prolific and active filmmaker, writer, and artist for decades. He just seems to have had a preference that runs counter to what we expect from auteur directors: he wanted people to talk about his work, not about him or his opinions, to the point where he avoided giving interviews, disliked being in photographs, and would sometimes use his cat’s name and image as an additional pseudonym atop the “Chris Marker” pseudonym. (Note to self: Swap author photo out for picture of my cat for my next book.)
Marker is generally associated with the French New Wave cinema movement, although he spent his very long and unclassifiable career making all kinds of things in all kinds of media: political documentaries from around the world, installation art, experimental films, novels, photography, films about filmmaking (such as a documentary about the making of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran), digital multimedia pieces, and more. A number of his works fall into the broadly-defined category that people call “film essays.” For example, Marker’s film Sans Soleil (1983), which is his best-known aside from La Jetée, is an experimental meditation on imagery, memory, and human experiences around the world that combines a fictionalized narration with video recordings and documentary footage.
La Jetée sits in a similar position of being difficult to classify, because there isn’t anything else quite like it. It isn’t even quite a film in the sense we normally define the medium; it describes itself as a “photo-roman,” or a photo-novel, and is made up of a series of still photographs rather than moving images. A voice-over narration tells the story accompanied by gorgeous choral music by Trevor Duncan and a few well-chosen sound effects. (In French the narrator is Jean Négroni; the English narration is credited on IMDB and in a few other places to somebody named James Kirk. I’m not really sure where that info comes from, and I will let you make your own jokes about the name James Kirk showing up in relation to a time travel film.)
The pier referred to by the title is a viewing deck at Orly Airport in Paris, and that’s where the story begins. The main character is introduced as “the man whose story we are telling,” and this scene at the airport is a vivid memory from his childhood. While visiting the pier, the boy witnesses a sudden, shocking act of violence.
This act of violence, along with the woman he saw right before it happened, forms a powerful memory that stays with him through the onset of World War III, through the subsequent nuclear devastation that drives humanity underground, through his time as a prisoner of war. Because, yes, this is another post-World War II film that presumed the inevitability of WWIII and nuclear annihilation; Cold War sci fi filmmaking was nothing if not consistent in this regard. The next world war is shown in grim aerial images of Paris and close-ups of ruined buildings and, eventually, dark underground retreats where people live in shadows and gas masks. We learn that Paris is, as it was in WWII, a city under occupation, and the survivors and their captors live in tunnels beneath the city.
The unnamed protagonist is chosen from among the prisoners for an experiment: his captors are trying to travel through time in order to ask the past and the future for help in saving the present. Left unspoken, but still very much obvious, is the twisted irony of the supposed victors in this war desperately wanting to travel through time not to prevent the war, nor to alter what has been done, but to save them from dying right alongside their prisoners in the darkness beneath a radioactive wasteland.
The experiments involve forcing the man to focus on particularly intense memories. There has long been a conceptual link between time travel and memory; psychologists, philosophers, and evolutionary biologists have often noted that humanity’s ability to mentally project ourselves in the past and future is a significant cognitive trait. (It’s not a uniquely human trait; research suggests several animal species can do it as well. But it certainly does guide a lot of our human behavior.) The only stated mechanism for time travel in this film is making that mental ability into a physical one. This is where that day at Orly Airport comes in. That event, and particularly the woman he recalls seeing, serves as an anchor to the past. What we see of the experiments are bleakly low-tech: the man’s eyes are covered while he is given injections. He is in agony; these experiments are torture. But, eventually, they work, and the man travels back in time.
Before we travel with him, a note about the casting. There aren’t really any actors here. Hélène Châtelain was a screenwriter and director; Davos Hanich was a painter and sculptor. Most interesting of all is the kindly-looking man carrying out the time travel experiments: he is played Jacques Ledoux, the first curator of the Royal Film Archive of Belgium (also known as Cinematek), one of the largest film archives in the world, which has been collecting and preserving films since 1938. Ledoux is specifically remembered in the film world for archiving, conserving, and publicly presenting all kinds of films, including those made by women and people of color, films censored or illegal in some locations, and works that were simply dismissed as too strange or experimental. He firmly believed that film archives should be public resources, not private collections.
There is something wryly self-aware about a beloved film archivist in this role—especially knowing that many people in Marker’s 1960s New Wave film circles would be well acquainted with Ledoux, even if those of us watching 62 years later are not.
In the film, the time travel is successful, and the man travels back to before WWIII. He meets the woman who anchored his memories, and over several trips they grow close to each other. Their relationship, like everything else in the story, is told through a series of still photographs—with one startlingly effective exception. The only instance of actual video in this film is a brief moment in which the woman wakes in bed. It’s soft and gentle, an achingly intimate break from the moments frozen in time. That small glimpse of motion amidst so much stillness serves to anchor the film for us the same way the memories anchor the time traveler: it makes everything around it feel more real, even if we are left to piece together the images ourselves.
But, of course, the time traveler’s happiness cannot last. After one final day with the woman—they visit a natural history museum and wander among the preserved remains of the past—the man is sent by his captors to the future. We see very little of the future, and what we see is rather off-putting; the man meets cold, uncaring people with electronic devices on their heads. They only agree to help when he appeals to their sense of self-preservation. They give him an unlimited power source and send him back to his own time and to his captors.
If you’re thinking, wait, giving an unlimited power source to people who respond to “winning” a global nuclear war by torturing prisoners into flinging themselves through time does not actually sound like a good way to achieve peace and harmony for mankind, well, you’re probably right, but it doesn’t matter in the end. Because the man whose story we are telling—that’s the only way we ever know him—is only a prisoner, a laboratory rat, a person easily discarded once he’s fulfilled his purpose. His captors plan to execute him, but the people from the future offer to bring him to the future with them. He asks, instead, to return to the past, where he left the woman behind.
And we know where this is going. Here, in 2024, we’re genre savvy; we’re sci fi fans; we’ve already seen 12 Monkeys and dozens of other films and shows with tragic closed time loops. But it’s still effective. We still want there to be a different outcome when the man travels back to find himself on the observation deck at Orly Airport again. We know that he’s doomed. One of his captors has followed him and shoots him as he races to meet the woman—right in front of his younger self, for whom this apparently random murder will become a lynchpin memory throughout his life.
Here’s the thing: La Jetée is brilliant. All the pontificating critics and avowed cinephiles are right about this one; its reputation is entirely deserved. It really is that good. It’s bleak and melancholy and grim, but also gentle and intimate and human. It’s easy to understand why it’s beloved by filmmakers, who speak of it with reverence and awe. From a technical standpoint, it plays with the idea of what a film can be—films, after all, are always sequences of still images, but to slow that sequencing down to snapshots and ensnare our attention is a unique way of forcing us to truly look where we might otherwise only glance.
And the film never strays from telling a tight, emotional story; rather than leaning into narrative cleverness, it is as plain and clear as it can be, and all the more powerful for it. This is what happened. This is how it looked—but not exactly, never quite exactly, because the snapshots are limited, the perspective edited, the scenes incomplete, the memories only ever rendered in black and white, the same way the world might appear to people who have lived in darkness for too long.
I think that’s what I love most about La Jetée, the way it distills time travel stories down to their most uncomplicated essence. There is perhaps nothing more human than obsessing over the past and the future. We are always holding onto the past, both as it happened and as it might have happened, what we didn’t do and what we could have changed. We are always looking toward the future, thinking about what will happen and what might happen, how we might change it and what we can’t predict.
La Jetée feels like a capsule of that very human experience, the same way a shoebox full of old photographs and journals and letters might collect memories and hopes and regrets and dreams all in the same place. We carry all of that with us, all the time, and its lovely to watch a film that captures that feeling so well.
What do you think of La Jetée? Do you have any favorite moments or scenes? I mentioned briefly but did not discuss the score, but I think Trevor Duncan’s music deserves a lot of credit for establishing and maintaining the tone throughout.
Next week: We leave Cold War nuclear fears behind to tell the same story again, this time with bleak mid-90s eco-terrorist nihilism, in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. Watch it on Apple, Microsoft, Spectrum, and as of writing it’s also on Amazon, although sources disagree on how long it will be available there.
