How the Influential Time-Travel Movie La Jetée Was Made (Almost) Entirely out of Still Photographs

In a future where human­i­ty has been dri­ven under­ground by an apoc­a­lyp­tic event, a pris­on­er is haunt­ed by the child­hood mem­o­ry of see­ing a man gunned down at an air­port. A group of sci­en­tists make him their time-trav­el­ing guinea pig, hop­ing that he’ll be able to find a way to restore the soci­ety they once knew. In one of his forced jour­neys into the past, he falls for a strange­ly famil­iar-look­ing woman who con­vinces him not to return to his own time peri­od. Alas, things go wrong, cul­mi­nat­ing in the final real­iza­tion that the death he had wit­nessed so long ago was, in fact, his own.

You may rec­og­nize this as the plot of Ter­ry Gilliam’s 12 Mon­keys, from 1995, and also as the plot of Chris Mark­er’s La Jeteé, from 1962. 12 Mon­keys, a full-scale Hol­ly­wood pic­ture star­ring the likes of Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, attained crit­i­cal acclaim and box-office suc­cess. But La Jeteé, which inspired it, stands as the more impres­sive cin­e­mat­ic achieve­ment, despite — or per­haps owing to — its being a black-and-white short com­posed almost entire­ly of still pho­tographs. That unusu­al (and unusu­al­ly effec­tive) form is the sub­ject of the new video above from Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer.

“When you think about it, Ter­ry Gilliam is using still images too,” says Puschak. “It’s just that he’s using 24 still images every sec­ond, while Mark­er uses, on aver­age, one image every four sec­onds.” In La Jeteé, we’re “forced to sit with every frame,” and thus to notice that “they’re dead: all move­ment is gone, and we’re left with these life­less frag­ments of time, an appro­pri­ate thing in a world oblit­er­at­ed by war.” Mark­er “shows us that the move­ment of mov­ing pic­tures, even though it resem­bles life, is illu­so­ry; it’s real­ly just anoth­er form of mem­o­ry, and mem­o­ry is always frag­men­tary and life­less, re-ani­mat­ed only by the mean­ing we impose on it from the present.”

Yet this pho­to-roman, as Mark­er calls it, does con­tain one mov­ing image, which depicts the lady with whom the pro­tag­o­nist gets involved wak­ing up on one of their morn­ings togeth­er. Puschak describes it as “in the run­ning for the most poignant bit of motion in all of cin­e­ma” and inter­prets it as say­ing that “love, human con­nec­tion some­how tran­scends, some­how escapes the trap of time. It may be cliché to say that, but there is noth­ing cliché about the way Mark­er shows it.”  Mark­er’s inven­tive nou­velle vague col­league Jean-Luc Godard once called cin­e­ma “truth 24 times per sec­ond” — a def­i­n­i­tion bro­ken wide open, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly, by Mark­er him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Chris Marker’s Rad­i­cal Sci-Fi Film La Jetée Changed the Life of Cyber­punk Prophet William Gib­son

Under­stand­ing Chris Marker’s Rad­i­cal Sci-Fi Film La Jetée: A Study Guide Dis­trib­uted to High Schools in the 1970s

Petite Planète: Dis­cov­er Chris Marker’s Influ­en­tial 1950s Trav­el Pho­to­book Series

David Bowie’s Music Video “Jump They Say” Pays Trib­ute to Marker’s La Jetée, Godard’s Alphav­ille, Welles’ The Tri­al & Kubrick’s 2001

A Con­cise Break­down of How Time Trav­el Works in Pop­u­lar Movies, Books & TV Shows

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.