La Jetée
Encyclopedia
La jetée is a 1962 French science fiction film by Chris Marker
Chris Marker
Chris Marker is a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La jetée , A Grin Without a Cat , Sans Soleil and AK , an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa...

. It is also known in English as The Jetty or The Pier. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. The film runs for 28 minutes and is in black and white. It won the Prix Jean Vigo
Prix Jean Vigo
The Prix Jean Vigo is an award in the Cinema of France given annually since 1951 to a French film director in homage to Jean Vigo. It was founded by French writer Claude...

 for short film.

The 1995 science fiction film 12 Monkeys was inspired by, and takes several concepts directly from, La jetée.

Plot

A man (Davos Hanich) is a prisoner in the aftermath of the Third World War, in a destroyed, post-apocalyptic Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 where survivors live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. Scientists research time travel
Time travel
Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space. Time travel could hypothetically involve moving backward in time to a moment earlier than the starting point, or forward to the future of that point without the...

, hoping to send test subjects to different time periods "to call past and future to the rescue of the present". They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally withstand the shock of time travel, but eventually settle upon the prisoner, whose key to the past is a vague but obsessive childhood memory of a woman (Hélène Chatelain
Hélène Chatelain
Hélène Chatelain is a French actress who appeared as "the woman" in Chris Marker's La jetée and later worked with playwright Armand Gatti and Iossif Pasternak...

) during an incident where a man was killed on the boarding platform ('the jetty') at Orly Airport
Orly Airport
Paris-Orly Airport is an airport located partially in Orly and partially in Villeneuve-le-Roi, south of Paris, France. It has flights to cities in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, North America and Southeast Asia. Prior to the construction of Charles de Gaulle Airport, Orly was...

.

After several attempts, he reaches the pre-war period. He meets the woman from his memory, and they develop a romantic relationship. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the far future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society.

Upon his return, with his mission accomplished, he discerns that he is to be executed by his jailers. He is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time permanently, but he asks instead to be returned to the pre-war time of his childhood, hoping to find the woman again. He is returned and does find her, on the jetty at the airport - however, an agent of his jailers has followed, and assassinates him. In his final moments, he realises that the death which he witnessed as a child, which has haunted him for his entire life, was none other than his own.

Cast

  • Jean Négroni as narrator
  • Hélène Chatelain
    Hélène Chatelain
    Hélène Chatelain is a French actress who appeared as "the woman" in Chris Marker's La jetée and later worked with playwright Armand Gatti and Iossif Pasternak...

     as the Woman
  • Davos Hanich as the Man
  • Jacques Ledoux as The Experimenter
  • Ligia Branice as a woman from the future
  • Janine Kleina as a woman from the future
  • William Klein
    William Klein
    William Klein is a photographer and filmmaker noted to for his ironic approach to both media and his extensive use of unusual photographic techniques in the context of photojournalism and fashion photography...

     as a man from the future

Production

La jetée is constructed almost entirely from optically printed
Optical printer
An optical printer is a device consisting of one or more film projectors mechanically linked to a movie camera. It allows filmmakers to re-photograph one or more strips of film...

 photographs playing out as a photomontage
Photomontage
Photomontage is the process and result of making a composite photograph by cutting and joining a number of other photographs. The composite picture was sometimes photographed so that the final image is converted back into a seamless photographic print. A similar method, although one that does not...

 of varying pace. It contains only one brief shot originating on a motion-picture camera. The stills were taken with a Pentax Spotmatic
Pentax Spotmatic
The Pentax Spotmatic is a range of 35mm single-lens reflex cameras manufactured by the Asahi Optical Co. Ltd., later known as Pentax Corporation, between 1964 and 1976. The original 1964 Spotmatic was one of the first SLRs to offer a through-the-lens exposure metering system, initially using...

 and the motion-picture segment was shot with a 35mm Arriflex. The film has no dialogue aside from small sections of muttering in German. The story is told by a voice-over
Voice-over
Voice-over is a production technique where a voice which is not part of the narrative is used in a radio, television production, filmmaking, theatre, or other presentations...

 narrator. The scene in which the hero and the woman look at a cut-away trunk of a tree is a reference to Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...

's 1958 film Vertigo
Vertigo (film)
Vertigo is a 1958 psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Barbara Bel Geddes. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A...

, which Marker also references in Sans soleil
Sans Soleil
Sans Soleil is a 1983 French film directed by Chris Marker. The title is from the song cycle Sunless by Modest Mussorgsky...

.

Influence and legacy

Terry Gilliam
Terry Gilliam
Terrence Vance "Terry" Gilliam is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Gilliam is also known for directing several films, including Brazil , The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , The Fisher King , and 12 Monkeys...

's 12 Monkeys (1995) was inspired by, and takes several concepts directly from, La jetée. In 1996, Zone Books released a book version of La jetée. It reproduced the film's original images along with the script in both English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 and French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 and is now out of print, though it was re-released in 2008 by Zone Books. The 2003 short film, La puppé, is both an homage to and a parody of La jetée. The video for Sigue Sigue Sputnik
Sigue Sigue Sputnik
Sigue Sigue Sputnik were a British new wave band created in 1982 by the former Generation X bassist Tony James. The band had three UK Top 40 hit singles, including the song "Love Missile F1-11".-Early years:...

's 1989 single "Dancerama" is also an homage to La jetée. One of the explicit influences in the video for David Bowie's
David Bowie
David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s...

 "Jump They Say
Jump They Say
"Jump They Say" is a song by David Bowie from his album Black Tie White Noise. It was released as a first single from the album in March 1993....

" (1993) is La jetée. The music video
Music video
A music video or song video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings...

 for Isis
Isis (band)
Isis was a Los Angeles, California-based post-metal band, founded in Boston, Massachusetts, with a career spanning from 1997 to 2010...

's "In Fiction", from 2004's Panopticon
Panopticon (album)
Panopticon is the third full-length album by Los Angeles, California based post-metal band Isis, released by Ipecac Recordings in 2004. The album's title is derived from philosopher Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison ideal and philosopher/historian Michel Foucault's later allegorical appropriation...

, drew comparisons with La jetée. The song "Last Night at the Jetty
Last Night at the Jetty
"Last Night at the Jetty" is the third single to be released by Panda Bear from Tomboy. It was released December 13, 2010 by FatCat Records. The sleeve was designed by Scott Mou, Panda Bear's collaborator from the group Jane...

" by Panda Bear
Panda Bear (musician)
Noah Benjamin Lennox also known as Panda Bear, is an experimental musician and a founding member of Animal Collective.-Early life:...

 has lyrics inspired by the themes of the film. In 2010, Time magazine
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

 ranked La Jetée first in its list of "Top 10 time-travel movies".

Home media release

In Region 2, the film is available with English subtitles in the La jetée/Sans soleil digipack released by Arte Video
Arte
Arte is a Franco-German TV network. It is a European culture channel and aims to promote quality programming especially in areas of culture and the arts...

. In Region 1, the Criterion Collection has released a La jetée/Sans soleil combination DVD, which features the option of hearing the English or French narration.

External links

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