Review - La Jetée (1962)

La Jetée is a French science fiction oddity. It is also a masterpiece. The short philosophical treatise (disguised as an immensely effective fictional tale) is told in still images and voice-over narration. The still image approach allows each frame to be a brilliant composition of beauty and power, and (along with the narration) eliminates the need for dialogue and expository scenes. This results is a full-length cinematic story (indeed, it was done this way in Gilliam's '12 Monkeys') told in a brisk 29 minutes.

La Jetée is the story of a man whose vivid memories of the past makes him a prime candidate for time travel experiments in the near future after the surface of the earth has been destroyed in World War III. The only way to save mankind is to reach through time (as the narrator puts it, "to summon the Past and Future to the aid of the Present").

So, the unnamed protagonist is sent into the past, where he falls in love with a woman from his memories. He is confronted by humans from the future, who offer to take him into the future, but he chooses to remain in the past with the woman of his dreams.

La Jetée's only moment of moving film is used for shocking effect: the woman from the man's memory awakens and looks into the camera (into the man's eyes).

It's paradoxical and ironic ending is one of the most effective endings I've ever seen - it actually surprised me and yet it was foreshadowed from the start, and had profound implied effects on the entire story and the fictional human history.

With its brevity, stylistic approach, and subtle commentary on memory, destiny, warfare, humanity, childhood, loss, and more, La Jetée is cinema's closest cousin to poetry.