This modest little film, made up almost entirely of still photography (there is one brief sequence of motion which you will miss if you blink), also happens to be the inspiration for the film and television series "Twelve Monkeys". This I did not realize when I started watching it recently for the first time. Only at the end did I realize that it is the same concept as "Twelve Monkeys" and suddenly remembered hearing that "Monkeys" is based on a 1960s French film.This "movie" (its "movement" is truly illusory even if it is an effective illusion) is affecting and the denouement is worth waiting for (and, besides, the whole piece is only 28 minutes long).The title, "La Jetee", has interesting connotations. The literal meaning of this title is "The Pier", but the average English speaker might not know that airport architecture uses this term, which is taken over from seaports. You usually see signs for "terminals" and not "piers" in airports, but "pier" is more or less what is meant by "terminal" even though there is supposed to be a difference between the two terms. What is interesting historically is that because the film was made in the early 1960s, the pier at Orly Airport, which is near Paris, is an open-air pier where both passengers and their well-wishers can watch the planes load and unload both baggage and passengers. This is no longer possible because terminals now tend to be entirely enclosed and only passengers are allowed to reach the departure point. In more ways than one, watching this movie is a kind of time travel. In it, the pivotal scene takes place outdoors whereas, by the time "Twelve Monkeys" was made in the 1990s, the scene had to be done inside an airport terminal. Also, in the first scene, if you look at the airport tarmac as viewed from the pier, you will see planes with the tail-markings of two airlines that no longer exist, TWA (ceased doing business in 2001) and PanAm (ceased in 1991).

A man in Paris survives the nuclear holocaust of WWIII. The survivors are driven to live in the underground galleries. The man is held as a prisoner and forced in a dangerous experiment in time travel. His obsessive vision of a woman is needed. He saw her as a child on the observation platform at Orly Airport before the war and there was a shocking incident which he is uncertain about. He goes back into the past and has a relationship with the woman. He is then sent into the future where the future people agree to save his world. He returns to his world where his jailers are looking to execute him. With the future people's help, he returns to his childhood moment at the airport where the incident finally becomes clear.This is a rather poetic sci-fi short. The black & white and still images deliver something unique. With the narration, it feels like watching an immersive picture book. It's definitely not for everyone but I find it entrancing. It doesn't drag and the short running time keeps the movie close to the point.

It's the moments we live through that define us. We may try to run away from our fears and put our pasts behind us to an extent, but we cannot evade the inevitable. La Jetée reveals life shortly before a World War that leaves the world in ruins. We see how society and the ways of life transform over the course of time yet how memories and actions remain constant in people. It's often difficult for us to truly comprehend the impact all our experiences, relationships and thoughts have on our futures. It's even more bewildering how passions like love and happiness can be sustained even after calamitous events. This film is told primarily through still images, and captures particularly distinct memories of a man who vividly remembers the day he once saw another man die at an airport before the war while he was a young boy. It's a moment that sticks with him throughout his life and one that he cannot simply forget. Beautifully, this movie demonstrates that time is but a figment of the mind and that the world depicted in our minds is not as absolute as we may think.

What is it, where is it, how will it affect me? In a devastated Paris in the aftermath of WWIII, the few surviving humans begin researching time travel, hoping to send someone back to the pre-war world for food, supplies and maybe a solution to their dire position. One man is haunted by a vague childhood memory that will prove fateful. La Jetée, only running for twenty eight minutes, is a fascinating tale told through a narration and a selection of still images taken and arranged by Marker. The content, all-bar-none of which is of utmost beauty of both the light and dark sides of one's heart, is truly remarkable. If a novice to the staggeringly pure and sublimely clever world that La Jetée can conjure second-nature, it's almost best to take it in twice consecutively, once without subtitles to listen to the soothing yet (for most average viewers) unintelligible and ambiguous French poem whilst absorbing the pulchritude of the images that Marker arranges for us. Starting at the pier of Orly Airport in Paris, the crisp sound of jet propulsion graces our ears before gallery-worthy stills of a crumbling, hysterical city roam across the screen. The silent and sans-audio watch will then adorn the audience's eyes with the jewel-like pictures of the menacing, imperious looking doctors who present the equally intriguing and chilling apparatus for the planned psychological time-travel. Upon embarking through past and future, much warmer images to the post-rapture subterranean Paris appear: a museum of taxidermy specimens and a bustling, a beautiful and blissfully ignorant girl with long hair and a pretty smile, and a sunny day back at the airport pier. A perplexing figure then appears, in all his aesthetic glory yet again, but our minds, void of aural explanation, can't piece together what has happened. Upon a second viewing with the disposable narration, La Jetée's deeper, sophisticated philosophical magic is unlocked. We learn of the situation of post-apocalypse and the reason why we've been drawn to this sadist affair in the tunnels below Paris. It continues, just as beautifully and perfectly balanced. The museum is revisited, and we hear: "In fact, it is the only thing he is sure of, in the middle of this dateless world that at first stuns him with its affluence. Around him, only fabulous materials: glass, plastic, terry cloth. When he recovers from his trance, the woman has gone." We learn of the relationship between the prisoner and the woman in his mind, how she succumbs to him so readily, and why she is weeping in despair as the figure reappears on the pier as the twenty eight minutes of unfolded faultless direction, narrative, sculpture and innovative poetry. La Jetée's size and its one-of-a-kind take on stop motion cannot let it fool a perspective audience into missing such a display of technical brilliance and interpretative richness.