About

La Jetée will screen from an archival 16mm print.

Chris Marker's monumental La Jetée is a shining example of nuclear-inflected science fiction. The film is a dystopian puzzlebox - it tells the story of a man drafted to take part in time travel experiments in an attempt to avert the nuclear devastation wrought by a Third World War. His almost monomaniacal obsession with a childhood memory of a woman on a jetty and a subsequent fatal incident has granted him a unique level of mental resilience against the pressures inherent to the experiments.

Marker utilises the unusual technique of (almost) only using still photographs with narration to play this narrative out on screen. His arresting monochrome photography establishes a world shrouded in shadows and decay, set against the comparative resplendence of the pre-war scenes in Paris. Despite only playing a minor role in the drive of the plot, the film's nuclear connection reveals itself in this fascination with the titanic destruction of a society and the desperate isolation of those left behind. It, like the two films with which it shares its screening date, also engages with conceptions of memory, guilt, and trauma. A monumental work despite being less than half an hour in length, La Jetée is an unmissable cinematic achievement.