La Jetée

Dir. Chris Marker

TIFF Cinematheque - Retrospective

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Chris Marker's immensely influential science-fiction classic is one of the cinema's most profound meditations on time and memory.

Archival print!

Called "very possibly the greatest science fiction movie yet made" by Pauline Kael (and later "remade" by Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys), La Jetée takes place in a bombed-out Paris after the Third World War. In the catacombs below the city, scientists subject a man to time-travel experiments which return him to the remembered Paris of his youth, and to his hauntingly cryptic childhood memory of witnessing a man's death on a deserted pier at Orly Airport. Deeply influenced by Alain Resnais and his themes of time, memory and death, La Jetée is a masterful contemplation of the (still and, in the film's key moment, moving) image.