La Jetée

 

‘This is a story of a man marked by an image from his childhood.’

So begins Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée.  These words are uttered by an unseen narrator who tells us the story of survivor of World War III inhabiting rat-infested tunnels beneath a ruined and irradiated Paris.  This post apocalyptic underworld is ruled by a cabal of ‘Directors’, experimenting with time traveling by seizing upon survivors’ memories that might act as lifeboats to the past or the future.  The protagonist retains a particularly vivid image from his past and he is sent in search of it. He becomes an unmoored somnambulist, stumbling through episodic encounters with random details of the pre-apocalyptic world until he finds the woman he thinks he remembers from that moment in his childhood.  He befriends her, ‘She calls him her ghost’.

The 27-minute black and white film is made up almost entirely of still imagery shot with a Pentax 35mm camera.  Despite or actually because of its technical limitations, La Jetée is unique in the history of cinema.  It has inspired artists, writers and filmmakers, although few have dared to copy it.  Like the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, La Jetée has garnered an aura of unapproachability. It is a sacred text for acolytes to watch over and over, as if making pilgrimage.