| La jetée | |
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Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Chris Marker |
| Produced by | Anatole Dauman |
| Written by | Chris Marker |
| Narrated by | Jean Négroni |
| Starring | Hélène Chatelain Davos Hanich Jacques Ledoux |
| Music by | Trevor Duncan |
| Cinematography | Chris Marker |
| Editing by | Jean Ravel |
| Release date(s) | 1962 |
| Running time | 28 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French German |
La jetée is a 1962 French science fiction film by Chris Marker. It is also known in English as The Jetty or The Pier. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. The film runs for 28 minutes and is in black and white. It won the Prix Jean Vigo for short film.
The 1995 science fiction film 12 Monkeys was inspired by, and takes several concepts directly from, La jetée.
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A man (Davos Hanich) is a prisoner in the aftermath of the Third World War, in a destroyed, post-apocalyptic Paris where survivors live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. Scientists 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 the prisoner, whose key to the past is a vague but obsessive childhood memory of a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during an incident where a man was killed on the boarding platform ('the jetty') at Orly Airport.
After several attempts, he reaches the pre-war period. He meets the woman from his memory, and they develop a romantic relationship. 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 permanently, but he asks instead to be returned to the pre-war time of his childhood, hoping to find the woman again. He is returned and does find her, on the jetty at the airport - however, an agent of his jailers has followed, and assassinates him. In his final moments, he realises that the death which he witnessed as a child, which has haunted him for his entire life, was none other than his own.
La jetée 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 Spotmatic[1] and the motion-picture segment was shot with a 35mm Arriflex.[2] The film has no dialogue aside from small sections of muttering in German. The story is told by a voice-over narrator. 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.[3]
Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995) was inspired by, and takes several concepts directly from, La jetée. In 1996, Zone Books released a book which reproduced the film's original images along with the script in both English and French.[4] It was re-released in 2008, but is now out of print[5] The 2003 short film, La puppé, is both an homage to and a parody of La jetée.[6] The video for Sigue Sigue Sputnik's 1989 single "Dancerama" is also an homage to La jetée.[7] The film is one of the influences in the video for David Bowie's "Jump They Say" (1993).[8] The music video for Isis's "In Fiction", from 2004's Panopticon, drew comparisons with La jetée.[9] The song "Last Night at the Jetty" by Panda Bear has lyrics inspired by the themes of the film. In 2010, Time ranked La Jetée first in its list of "Top 10 time-travel movies".[10]
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.
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