La Jetée

Released 1962
Stars Davos Hanich, Helene Chatelain, Jean Negroni
Directed by Chris Marker

First things first. The second word of La Jetée is pronounced "zhah tay" (with the accent on the second syllable). Approximately 28 minutes long, the film is composed entirely of black & white photographs linked together by quick dissolves and direct cuts. Writer/director Chris Marker and montage artist Jean Havel bombard us with one image after another, accompanied by a soundtrack consisting almost exclusively of the soothing voice of the French narrator. The overall effect is fascinating, occasionally bordering on the hypnotic.

La Jetée "is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood", as the film deftly puts it. This nameless man has a distant boyhood memory of a Sunday afternoon watching the planes land and take off at the airport. He recalls the haunting visage of a beautiful woman connected somehow to the event, but just how he isn't sure. The more he thinks about it, the more he begins to think he saw a man die that day. His thoughts are shocked back to the present with the onset of World War 3. The conflict is over in a flash or two, but the entire planet is reduced to a radioactive wasteland, and the survivors are forced underground. He's taken prisoner, and subjected to bizarre experiments. As the film explains,"The only hope for survival lay in time: a hole in time through which to send food, medicines, sources of energy. During the tests to travel backward in time, he meets the woman from his childhood memory.

The 1995 film TwelveMonkeys, starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, was based on this obscure French film.

Summary by www.net-monster.com