Chris Marker
La Jetée

Can an unforgettable story of love, death, disillusionment, and time travel that raises important philosophical questions still be incredibly engaging without ever falling into intellectualism or incomprehensibility? Can it be told in a thirty-minute short film? And can it be done not through footage, but through still photographs, which involve the cancellation of all movement?

Chris Marker did it, and with a skill that is nothing short of impressive.
A French author of extreme importance, passionate about science fiction and comics (the two sources of inspiration for this film), he did it with "La Jetée", a truly groundbreaking film. A revolutionary work that, when released in 1962, confounded film critics, unable to categorize such a unique and innovative work, still widely imitated today with poor results (there's even a remake by Terry Gilliam: "Twelve Monkeys"). The definitions that emerged were "scientific photo-novel" (?), "science love" and other such absurdities.

The title can refer both to a launching pad for airplanes and to the leap the protagonist, used as a guinea pig for experiments aimed at saving humanity, undertakes through past and future. Paris is destroyed by a Third World War of biblical proportions. The possible hope lies in memory. The memory of an image so strong and evocative that it is wished to be cherished forever.

Because "La Jetée" is not a love story for a human being, but for the image, the basic foundation of cinema, which here is amplified through an immobility where the only, imperceptible, movement (the blinking of a woman's eyes) suddenly becomes an epiphany: life, the inexorability of time, and the illusion of freedom (time travel) that finds space only in death. The magic here lies in making movement—the inexorable power of cinema that has become a habit—a mystery.

There is an idea of time and memory that refers to Bergson: no longer objective time divided into hours, minutes, and seconds, but subjective time where moments differ from one another, whose length is determined by our experience. If time is subjective, however, it is also a prison: returning to an idyllic childhood can only lead to death. 
Time materializes through two symbols: eyes and children. Children, in fact, have a conception of time detached from a mathematical conception of it: through the image that obsesses him, the protagonist vainly tries to return to that dimension of innocence that is not allowed to him. The eye, on the other hand, is always wide open, unable to grasp the true essence of the passing seconds and to rationalize the difference between past, present, and future. 

Man, unable to distinguish between past and future, is doomed to death. 

These are themes that Marker will revisit in "Level Five" (1996) and which here find full maturation: the woman, once again, is the embodied symbol of a balance between life (mother) and death (past). 

Extraordinary example of complex cinema (one could talk about it for hours, but that would risk beating around the bush) both in terms of content and style, essential for anyone with even a minimal passion for cinematic art, and, in absolute terms, one of the masterpieces of the past century.