La Jetée

La Jetée

Synopsis

Chris Marker's La Jetée is one of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made, a tale of time travel told in still images. A filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and now videographer and digital multimedia artist, Chris Marker has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his investigations of time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet.

Marker's seminal science fiction photo-roman (photo-novel) is set in a post-apocalyptic present where Paris's surviving inhabitants live underground in the galleries of the Palais de Chaillot. La Jetée's circular, paradoxical narrative frames the story of an individual trapped in time. Experimented on by his captors he is forced to travel within his memory's mental images into a past and future built on recollections and connections. The hope of deliverance, or the pursuit of change, is based on the strength of memory's images, the premise that if one were "able to conceive, or to dream another time perhaps would they be able live in it." As such, he is trapped not only in memory, but also within history, as caught between fragments of still images and text we follow the fractured relations between fiction and memory full circle, from formation to destruction, stillness to movement.