La Jetée is a science fiction short that was written and directed by Christopher Marker in 1962. This is the fourth short film in the Archive 100 within the1962 to 1968 time period. It’s made up almost entirely of black and white still photographs. It clocks in at 28 minutes. “La Jetée is one of the strangest movies ever conceived, and also one of the most beautiful and sad.”(Christley par.6) The story takes place sometime before the outbreak of World War III. It’s truly unique, implementing a series of hundreds of motionless pictures, skillfully edited together to tell a mind-bending story of time travel that doubles as a glum allegory about memory, loss, childhood, and destiny.

In essence the storyline is pretty easy to follow. The Earth lies ruined in the aftermath of a nuclear war. The few surviving humans begin researching time travel, in hopes of sending someone back to the pre-war world in search of food, supplies, and hopefully some sort of solution to mankind's demise. (Cassady) The protagonist is a man whose retention of a single, vague childhood memory (that of witnessing a murder on the jetty at Orly airport) is the basis for his being chosen to travel back in time. His journey leads him towards an unfathomable and ironic destiny.

La Jetée is considered Marker’s best-known work, thanks to 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), which adapted its premise to suit a 129-minute movie with high-profile stars (Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe). Also for more of an original version, versus the above mentioned release go to the jetty site and it has a short video clip of the original film to view. I’ve seen the clip and it’s lengthy but also still cut down a lot not to seem too boring. The link to the movie clip is listed below. Also in the Lied Library you can look for La Jetée by Christopher Marker in the UNLV Book Stacks. (PN1997 J444 1992) This is a book that really has good visuals. The link is a more advanced form of the text. There are so many vivid pictures that even if you did want to write this film off as uninteresting, you couldn’t because the visual images are so eye-catching.

This short was very fascinating to research. I think I got more out of the research than I would if I had just watched the short alone. I found so many different aspects of the story to be very interesting. The photo above I felt was very touching. I was really caught up in this story and it wasn’t until this point in the story that I realized he was the man being mentioned and it was his own death that was so significant at the end of the story. I would recommend this story, just to see the differing views on the story, and what other classmates gained from the story in text form and compact disc.

Work Cited

Cassady, Marty. IMDB page.

Christley, Jaime. Senses of Cinema page. 1992
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Frazer, Bryant. Internet Movie Database page.

La Jetée Video Clip. Jetty homepage.