Chris Marker’s remarkable short science fiction film, La Jetée, cinematically explores the way that we inhabit time and how memories structures us as individuals. Marked by the memory of a woman he saw in his childhood, the unnamed protagonist’s vivid memory images facilitate his journey back through time from a post-apocalyptic future and are key to the film’s startling, elliptical ending. La Jetée’s bare bones narrative and construction out of (almost entirely) still frames highlights the complexity and paradoxes of cinematic perception, reminding us that like memory, cinema frames our relationship to time, marking the moments that structure our lives.
—Anders Bergstrom