“They begin again. The man doesn't die, nor does he go mad. He suffers. They continue”

    Think back to an important moment of your life, that you have a very strong memory about. How do you remember it? The words that were spoken? Does it play like a film? Or is it simply a series of images, almost like photographs?

    Christopher Marker’s avant-garde short film La Jetée from 1926 deals with this idea of memory in one of cinema’s most ambitious experiments. The film only truly became popular when it became the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys in 1995, but looking back, it has a tremendous amount of emotion and brilliance put into it. Cinema is all about what you show, but in saying that, it’s a lot about what you don’t show in the same way. The style of La Jetée perfectly embodies a minimalist approach to cinema where the lack of things becomes the power of the film.

    So what does this 26-minute film accomplish in terms of story? La Jetée has quite a brilliant set up, in both terms of its philosophical themes but also in its science fiction. A professor of mine has commented that the film shows time travel better than any other film he has ever seen, and it is quite true—the film perfectly examines the great philosophical paradoxes associated with time travel. Although La Jetée translates usually into simply “The Pier,” it can also translate into “There I Was.” The film tells the story of a man who has a traumatizing experience where he sees a man shot in killed at the pier near Orly Airport, where he sees a woman, whose face remains in his memory. Soon World War III begins, and the survivors live underground, hoping to research time travel in order to find out how to save their way of life. The problem is, many of the men they send through time do not survive. But the man’s strong memory makes him the perfect candidate, and they begin to send him back in time. In the past, he sees the woman, and continually visits her, falling stronger and stronger in love with her. But what about the moment at the pier?

    What makes La Jetée so fascinating is the style in which the film is presented. It is simply a series of images, with some pans and scans of the photos. Simply put, it’s a photographic montage. Market does use some sound effects, but his characters are silent. The film is told through a voiceover from an unknown source. The source acts as both our guide and our only way to connect to the world. But why present a film like this? Because it feels like a memory. It is not movies we remember, but images. We can’t fluidly put them together—we must let each image set on its own. And although we may remember a voice, it is our own narration that tells the story of the images. La Jetée brilliant recreates what it is like to have a memory.

    So what does it mean when we see the film’s single motion—the woman opening her eyes, starring deeply into our protagonist? It is the confirmation that we do have some moving imagery, but it is only made of our deepest most striking moments—such as this true and passionate moment of love. 

    But the film also deals with the impossibility of time. To the man, the woman is all he lives for. He returns to the past only to see her. To her, he is almost a ghost. And is she even real? Marker makes some specific homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which deals with the same theme of time and life.

    Despite only having photographic images to work with, Marker is able to create the same sort of emotions that cinema creates through his use of editing. In one sequence, where our protagonist is going through a very painful sensation, Marker heightens the tension by quickly editing through the shots, each one more effecting than the last. The holding of specific shots makes the shot a much more draining image that we pay attention to. What Marker does is strip cinema down to its bare essentials; Cinema is a set of images, rolling twenty four of them at us each second. But when Market simply presents us with images and edits, he creates a completely different way to look at cinema.

    At La Jetée’s ending, we have become devastated. The story is one of the most draining and tragic ones to ever grace the screen. Yet Marker has done it in only a fourth of the time as most filmmakers, and without much of the needed effects, actors, cameras, or anything that we usually think that we need to make a film. Marker’s avant-garde experiment works because it takes cinema back to simplicity. He truly brings a unique eye to the screen that has gone unmatched for over 45 years.