#67 (tie): ‘La Jetée’: The Reveal discusses all 100 of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time

Chris Marker's experimental science fiction film is the list's second-shortest entry and its most unusual.

On December 1st, 2022, Sight & Sound magazine published “The Greatest Films of All Time,” a poll that’s been updated every 10 years since Bicycle Thieves topped the list in 1952. It is the closest thing movies have to a canon, with each edition reflecting the evolving taste of critics and changes in the culture at large. It’s also a nice checklist of essential cinema. Over the course of many weeks, months, and (likely) years, we’re running through the ranked list in reverse order and digging into the films as deep as we can. We hope you will take this journey with us.

La Jetée (1962)
Dir. Chris Marker
Ranking: #67 (tie)
Previous rankings: #50 (2012)

Premise: Paris, Sunday, “sometime before the outbreak of World War III”: a boy travels with his family to watch planes depart from Orly Airport. Standing on the jetty, he observes both a beautiful woman (Hélène Châtelain) and a sudden, violent death. As an adult after a war that’s devastated Paris, the now-grown boy, referred to only as “The Man” (Davos Hanich), lives in a bunker beneath the Palais de Chaillot. Because of his strong memory of this pre-war event, The Man is considered the ideal subject for experiments in time travel that will allow those who’ve survived to seek help from the past and the future. In the past, The Man spies The Woman and they fall in love. In the future, he meets a group of people who can provide the help those in charge of the experiments are seeking.

Keith: Scott, I think we were both looking forward to discussing La Jetée but also wondering if it would offer us enough to talk about. After all, it’s short, a mere 28 minutes. That makes it one of only two short films on Sight & Sound’s top 100. And if its time-travel narrative might have seemed unusual in the 1960s, it’s pretty familiar now. Not only was La Jetée loosely remade by Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys, you can see its thumbprint on everything from The Terminator to Back to the Future to Primer to Looper. But, having watched it again (and then again after that), I’m not so worried anymore. It’s as strange as it is moving, one of the few movies you can point to and honestly say there’s nothing else like it.

There wasn’t anyone else like La Jetée’s director, either. “Chris Marker” is the pseudonym used by the filmmaker / author / photographer / writer / CD-Rom creator / Second Life world-shaper sometimes known as “Chris Mayor,” “Boris Villeneuve,” “Hayao Yamanchko,” and other names. You can find his real name without much effort, but I’m not going to include it out of respect for Marker and other self-styled enigmas. Born in France or Mongolia (accounts vary) in 1921 (probably), Marker became part of the French Resistance during World War II before fighting with the U.S. Air Force. He then turned to journalism and became a champion of leftist politics, both in his work and as an activist. As a filmmaker he is best known for essay films that incorporate elements of travelogues, personal reflections, and politics (and we’ll hit one of those further up the list).

La Jetée is the exception within that filmography and, in many ways, within film, period. The credits refer to it as a “photo-roman,” which should probably be taken a little, but not entirely, tongue in cheek. All but non-existent now and always more popular elsewhere than in the United States, photo-romans (or “photonovels”) are pieces of sequential storytelling using photographs. Think of a comic b0ok, but with photos instead of drawings. (They were also once used to adapt movies in the pre-VCR era.) La Jetée is not that but it’s not a conventional film, either. With one remarkable mid-film exception, it’s a series of still photos set to narration and music. Yet La Jetée is every bit as cinematic as any proper movie I’ve ever seen. Its black-and-white images are alternately striking and poignant and Marker’s use of music and editing never makes it feel “still” no matter how still the images.

Scott, assuming you also feel like the film works, why do you think it works? We’ve also barely talked about the substance of the film. There’s a lot to unpack here, so let me just offer this as a starting point: Marker loved Vertigo. We’ll talk about that again when we hit Sans Soleil, but there are several references to Vertigo in La Jetée, too. The most conspicuous is the moment by the sequoia tree where The Man echoes Kim Novak’s Madeleine in pointing out when he was born (but points in the opposite direction beyond the cross-section’s final rim). But there are others, too. Let’s start there: What is Vertigo doing in this movie and what is Marker doing with it?

Scott: I think it has to do with the nature of The Man’s obsession in La Jetée and how closely it aligns with Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie in Vertigo. Scottie has been asked to follow Madeleine by her husband, who believes she’s been acting strangely, and the two develop a relationship after he saves her from a jump into San Francisco Bay. That leads to the famous sequence at Muir Woods that Marker explicitly references, but it’s Madeleine’s impulsive plunge from a bell tower, followed by his subsequent entanglement with the strikingly similar Judy that is echoed in La Jatée. Like Scottie, The Man clings to the memory of the beautiful woman at the airport—and has his Muir Woods moment with her, of course—but it’s strange and illusory and ultimately tragic. Scottie loves the image of Madeleine before the two ever actually speak and it’s that image he seeks to recreate with Judy after Madeleine is gone. Similarly, The Man does not know the woman he remembers so vividly from the past, but the impression is so strong this entire film is built around it. Humans are prone to this type of fantasy: We become thunderstruck by the idea of a person that may not square with the real thing, and we’re heartbroken when that illusion is shattered.

Movies are uniquely suited to this type of story, I think, which is why Vertigo, despite dropping a notch below Jeanne Dielman in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll after snatching #1 from Citizen Kane in 2012, is as influential as any film ever made. (Brian De Palma and David Lynch have made a religion out of it, but countless other directors are similarly smitten.) Movies are built on the illusion created by still frames running through a projector at 24 frames per second—and, what’s more, they are fundamentally elusive, shuttled off into the dark forever after they’re passed in front of the light. The Man knows nothing about the woman at the airport, but the fate of civilization rests on the power he has to be literally transported by it. Filmmakers (and film critics) love Vertigo (and La Jetée) because they echo the feeling we so often get at a cinema when we’re head over heels for a trick of the light—one that perhaps later we try to recreate in our minds with limited success.

Now, La Jetée is unique among movies in the Sight & Sound poll in that the vast, vast majority of its images are still photographs, but it sure as hell is “cinematic” regardless. Marker’s fellow Frenchman Alain Resnais had directed his masterpiece Hiroshima, Mon Amour a few years before La Jetée and the film seems to extend Resnais’ work in its use of voiceover as a bridge to the sorts of images (in that case, newsreels both real and staged) we don’t often see in movies as well as the freedom to integrate big philosophical and historical themes, all tied to a single intimate relationship. The neat trick of Marker’s films is that we get all the benefits of still photography—that single, composed moment out of time—along with the benefits of conventional movies, since the montage often works to tie together scenes, even if they’re by nature more elliptical here.

Watching it again for this series, I was struck by how beautifully Marker deploys different editing techniques for effect: dissolves, fades, montage sequences, etc. La Jetée deconstructs movies, but it’s so skillfully constructed, too, in the way Marker associates or melds individual images or establishes the rhythms of a full sequence. That whole sequence documenting The Man’s 50th day, when he and the woman wander through “the museum of ageless animals”—which is how I will refer to the Field and other natural history museums henceforth—is so beautiful and oddly romantic. In a movie about time travel, here we have a couple looking at creatures frozen in time while their own relationship is so elusive and impermanent. She calls him her “ghost,” a visitor who vanishes just as suddenly as he arrives. Marker gives the whole encounter an eerie romanticism.

Any stand-out sequences for you, Keith? What else is movie-ish about La Jetée? And as the premier chronicler of the “Laser Age” of science fiction, how important do you feel it is to the genre?

Keith: To answer your question the long way, I learned a bit about the history of La Jetée from Chris Darke’s monograph for BFI Film Classics, and about how it was (unsuccessfully) pitched to France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to attract funding and later brought to the public. Trying to drum up money from the government, Philippe Lifchitz—co-founder, with Marker, of Argos Films—likened it to Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad, which had recently enjoyed great success. He also said it “will no doubt be the first French science-fiction film.” That’s a dubious claim given France’s Georges Méliès’ made the first science fiction films but it does suggest that French cinema wasn’t exactly swimming in sci-fi in the early 1960s. After its completion, La Jetée found its first audiences at festivals, both straight-up film festivals but also science fiction and animation festivals. Kingsley Amis, for instance, caught it at the Trieste International Science Fiction Film Festival where he dismissed it as “avant garde kitsch.” But others in the English-speaking world, like J.G. Ballard, were more receptive when it started to play as a double feature with Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (another sign that France wasn’t incompatible with science fiction).

I think La Jetée’s is a little Velvet Underground-like, where everybody who saw it at the time made their own science fiction film. Or, more accurately, it’s one of those films whose influence seeped into the groundwater. On the most basic plot level, you can see its influence on the films I referenced above (for starters). But its willingness to push boundaries and go avant garde with the genre aligns it both with the literary science fiction new wave of the 1960s and films like Alphaville, Agnès Varda’s Le Créatures and Resnais’ own Je t'aime, Je t'aime. Though harder to quantify, the influence of its emotional elements, in a genre not famous for high emotions at the time, feels considerable, too. Is Solaris the same film without La Jetée? Is Close Encounters of the Third Kind? By coincidence, I went to see Interstellar this past weekend. That’s a film that owes a lot to La Jetée both narratively and dramatically, but both its time travelling back to an important moment in the protagonist’s past and the feelings that journey stirs have become such commonplace genre elements that the connection might not have occurred to if I didn’t watch La Jetée the day before. Then, last night, I watched Bertrand Bonello’s recent film The Beast, which is another science film that plays with the notion of scarring memories. It’s almost like I never stopped watching La Jetée over the past few days

A side note: one piece I would have sworn was lifted wholesale almost certainly wasn’t. The English photographer Robert Freeman shot the cover of With the Beatles in August 1963. La Jetée is referred to as a 1962 film, but it didn’t start playing festivals until 1963. The February 16, 1962 date you’ll find on the internet seems to be purely fanciful. The film was still in production at that point. In fact, Marker shot many of the photos used in La Jetée while working on the documentary Le Joli Mai, a film about Paris at the end of the Algerian War. Maybe Freeman could have seen it and borrowed its images of four faces in half-shadow against a black backdrop, but it seems unlikely.

I answered your last question first, didn’t I? It’s tough to pin down stand-out sequences in a film that’s so short yet filled with memorable moments. There are some obvious moments, like the end and the moment the film comes alive and the Woman looks directly at the viewer. I’m always struck by the stretch early on when the narrator dryly describes the coming of a third World War against images of buildings in rubble almost certainly taken from World War II. As when the Woman gazes at us, it’s another scene that erases the distance between the fictional movie we’re watching and the reality of the world we know. This war we’ve seen, if only in photos, could be revisited on us a thousandfold. (That Marker was completing work on the film during the Cuban Missile Crisis feels apt.) As for what’s movie-ish about it, that almost feels like the wrong question. If it’s so effective, why aren’t there more movies like La Jetée?

Circling back to the Third World War, here’s a rare quote from Marker found in Darke’s book, an email in reply to a request to screen La Jetée as part of a program protesting the soon-to-commence Iraq War in 2003. Marker agreed even though, in his words, “I’ve always thought it a misunderstanding to construe La Jetée as a film about war, its subject is something else altogether and the Third World War is only a backdrop… but no use troubling young brain cells with such quibbles.” So, Scott, if its subject is something else altogether, what is its subject?

Scott: I guess I’m going to contradict myself with my answer to that question, Keith. Because I also have a great appreciation for how much Marker’s vision of a Paris decimated by World War III reflects the devastation that city (and others) experienced in World War II and yet… war would not necessarily rank that high for me in terms of themes I’d associate with La Jetée. It is more the grim context for what Marker really intends to explore: Time, memory, fantasy, illusion. As a genre, science fiction opens up so many possibilities for Marker here because nothing is off the table. Even the conditions under which The Man can time travel where others cannot are a little wonky, because they’re so much more grounded in theme than speculative technology: Scientists choose him over other subjects because of the strength of this one pre-war childhood memory, which allows him to withstand the shock of time travel. We’ve seen plenty of sci-fi (and real-life) scenarios where, say, space travel requires special physical strength and perhaps mental discipline, but the intensity of a memory is rarely a factor. (Solaris may be an exception, but that’s more a case of astronauts encountering a situation that triggers something within their consciences.)

We’ve talked about the many films inspired by La Jetée—your Velvet Underground analogy is apt—but I do wonder why no feature (that I’m aware of, anyway) in the past 60-plus years hasn’t attempted to replicate its still-image conceit. Perhaps Marker set too high a bar. Or perhaps just under 30 minutes is the proper running time for a movie that only gives you the briefest of moving images. (I’m reminded of what my friend’s film-school teacher told him: “It’s a movie, so movie the camera.”) There are so many interesting possibilities that still-image storytelling opens up: There’s more focus on how the individual images are composed because we spend more time with them, and they burn into your memory in much the same way as the woman at the airport burns into the memory of our protagonist. At the same time, the contributions of the actors are erased, so emotions are modeled rather than performed, which may limit the drama, but does not limit the intensity. You end up gaining an appreciation for how other tools of the medium—the use of voiceover and the versatility of the editing techniques especially—can fill in the gaps when you lose a part of cinema that you assume is essential. (I tend to have the same reaction when I watch a silent movie. The absence of dialogue and diegetic sound often heightens my attention.)

That said, La Jetée is kind of a beautiful piece of writing, too, isn’t it? The narration does feed us the necessary pieces of narrative information, but Marker’s script has some real poetry in it. Like this thesis statement: “Moments to remember are just like other moments. They are only made more memorable by the scars they leave.” Granted, Marker appears to have not considered the many commercial jingles that have lodged themselves in my brain since childhood, but the point stands. That particular line comes before a description of the woman’s face as the only “peacetime image” to survive the war in The Man’s head, and even then, we’re left to wonder if he actually saw it and what it means. Or how about the description of a future, rebuilt Paris as having “a thousand unknown avenues”? What a beautiful way to describe a once-familiar place that had become unfamiliar.

What do you make of the ending, Keith? I think it’s an incredible standalone sequence just from a filmmaking standpoint, with Marker cutting it with the urgency and suspense of an action climax. (The succession of stills are speeded up as The Man rushes toward the woman at the airport, but the conceit makes the whole thing still feel like it’s happening in slow motion.) I guess we have a Terminator scenario here where a malevolent time-traveler arrives to murder our protagonist, but I’m not sure that’s the point of emphasis for Marker. I suppose you have to chalk this up as a victory for predetermination over free will, because The Man’s consequential adventures through time have put him on a loop back to a fate that was sealed from the beginning. He is a prisoner of the moment, and can do nothing to affect the outcome. That’s a pretty bleak conclusion.

We haven’t talked about Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys, which I think we both admire, but I don’t think either of us re-watched for this discussion. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about how Gilliam was able to make this scenario work as a more conventional (albeit still unconventional) science-fiction thriller. It was certainly audacious of him to try.

Keith: I don’t really see the ending as bleak so much as romantic and fatalistic. I find the older I get the more power memories of the past have over me. I’ll recall childhood memories of my family and realize I’m the only one still alive or that all the places tied to them have been torn down or made unrecognizable. Sometimes it doesn’t take a war to wipe away the world we know. The idea of memories being like scars feels apt. Remembering can be sweet but also painful and it’s the accumulation of such scarring moments that make us who we are. The Man dies, but in such a way that brings him full circle to what matters to him most, what’s made him him. He’s destroyed pursuing what he loves. It’s bleak but I don’t know that it’s just bleak.

I’ve been wanting to revisit 12 Monkeys for a while now. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen it. (At a suburban theater outside Columbus, Ohio with my college buddy Dave. It was the first Christmas after graduation. Why did that one leave a scar?) If I recall, it doesn’t just pay homage to La Jetée, it pays homage to La Jetée paying homage to Vertigo when Bruce Willis and Madeleine Stowe hide out in a theater playing a Hitchcock marathon and watch the Muir Woods scene shortly before Stowe transforms herself a la Novak. It’s been a while, but I think characters in the grips of a yearning that reaches across time and space unite all three films. (Vertigo’s not a science fiction or fantasy film—unless it is—but Scottie is in love with a woman he believes to be dead who was pretending to be a woman possessed by a long-dead woman’s spirit.) Which might be another reason I can’t see La Jetée as only bleak. That kind of yearning for what can never be reached can be noble or foolish or perverse. But it always moves me.

Scott! You’re not going to believe this: Our next film is tied with nothing. In three weeks, we’ll discuss the 1973 film Touki Bouki by Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty. See you then.

Previously:

#95 (tie): Get Out
#95 (tie): The General
#95 (tie): Black Girl
#95 (tie): Tropical Malady
#95 (tie): Once Upon a Time in the West
#95 (tie): A Man Escaped
#90 (tie): Yi Yi
#90 (tie): Ugetsu
#90 (tie): The Earrings of Madame De…
#90 (tie): Parasite
#90 (tie): The Leopard
#88 (tie): The Shining
#88 (tie): Chungking Express
#85 (tie): Pierrot le Fou
#85 (tie): Blue Velvet
#85 (tie): The Spirit of the Beehive
#78 (tie): Histoire(s) du Cinéma
#78 (tie): A Matter of Life and Death
#78 (tie): Celine and Julie Go Boating
#78 (tie): Modern Times
#78 (tie): A Brighter Summer Day
#78 (tie): Sunset Boulevard
#78 (tie): Sátántangó
#75 (tie): Imitation of Life
#75 (tie): Spirited Away
#75 (tie): Sansho the Bailiff
#72 (tie): L’Avventura
#72 (tie): My Neighbor Totoro
#72 (tie): Journey to Italy
#67 (tie): Andrei Rublev
#67 (tie): The Gleaners and I
#67 (tie): The Red Shoes
#67 (tie): Metropolis