About

Chris Marker's monumental La Jetée is a shining example of nuclear-inflected science fiction. The film is a dystopian puzzlebox; it tells the story of a man drafted into time travel experiments in an attempt to avert the nuclear devastation wrought by a Third World War. His almost monomaniacal obsession with a childhood memory of a woman on a jetty has granted him a unique level of mental resilience against the pressures inherent to the experiments.

Marker employs the unusual technique of using (almost) exclusively still photographs with narration. His arresting monochrome photography establishes a world shrouded in shadows and decay, set against the comparative resplendence of pre-war scenes in Paris. Despite only playing a minor role in the plot, the film's nuclear connection reveals itself in this fascination with the titanic destruction of a society and the desperate isolation of those left behind. It also engages with conceptions of memory, guilt, and trauma.