"He ran toward her. And when he recognized the man who'd trailed him from the camp, he realized there was no escape out of time, and that that moment he'd been granted to see as a child, and that had obsessed him forever after... was the moment of his own death."
Plot In-Depth
The survivors of a destroyed Paris in the aftermath of World War III live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, 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 a male prisoner who is up to the task; his vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the boarding platform ("The Jetty") at Orly Airport is the key to his journey back in time.
He is thrown back to the past again and again to a time prior to the war, when he had been a child. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman from his memory, who was present at the terminal. 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, but he asks to be instead returned to the pre-war time of his childhood, hoping to again find the woman. He is returned and does find her, but an agent of his jailers has followed. The man finds that the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult at the hands of the agent.
Comprised entirely of still shot photography, except for a shot of the woman opening and blinking her eyes.
La jetée has no dialogue aside from small sections of muttering in German. The story is told by a voice-over narrator. It is constructed almost entirely from optically printed photographs playing out as a photomontage of varying pace. It contains only one brief shot originating on a motion-picture camera. The stills were taken with a Pentax 24x36 and the motion-picture segment was shot with a 35mm Arriflex.[2] The film score was composed by Trevor Duncan. Due to its brevity, La jetée is often screened in theatres alongside other films; Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) was the film with which it was first released. In Region 2, the film is available with English subtitles in the La jetée/Sans soleil digipack released by Arte Video. 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.
This movie was inspired by a scene from
Vertigo (1958). The scene in which the hero and the woman look at a cut-away trunk of a tree is a reference to Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which Marker also references in
Sans soleil.
Chris Marker's only fiction movie.
Twelve Monkeys (1995)
- The opening credits state that it was inspired by the film "La Jetée" written by Chris Marker
It also inspired "City of Lost Children"... [
La cité des enfants perdus]
La Puppe (2003)
- La Puppe tells a similar tale but from the point of view of a toy puppy
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 and French and is now out of print, though it was re-released in 2008 by Zone Books.