In the opening of La Jetée it’s named a photographic novel, a term which immediately raises questions. When you actually start watching it quickly becomes clear why it has been given that title. The movie consists of, if you forget one “freeing” exception, completely out of pictures, combined with a voiceover telling a story. It is like being read to as a child with a book in front of you. The story is very mature though and it is a movie experience unlike any other.
In a world in which the third world war has made the surface of the earth uninhabitable because of radiation, everybody lives underground (in poor conditions). In order to change this situation experiments are done on humans. The goal of it is to travel in time to find an actual solution. No matter what they try, there doesn’t seem to be any human who can handle it and is overcome by the overload of imagery they have to process. There is one man however who has such a strong memory of an event at an airport that it somehow makes him able to go much further than the others have ever gone.
With a running time of only 28 minutes it is an intense experience, in which raw black and white pictures almost feel being melted into your brain, following you as stark memories after the film. By doing so director Chris Marker shows that pictures can be more powerful than moving imagery. It is a movie which actually isn’t one, so there’s no point talking about the acting, as there is none. It is all about the story and the accompanying pictures and worth a watch. For those who have watched it and think this should have been made in a proper movie then there is a possibility to do so: 12 Monkeys was inspired by La Jetée.
