La Jetée
Having recently watched Mad Max: Fury Road and interested in looking back at other post-apocalyptic films, I decided to watch this French short film about time travel in the ruins of a post-World War III France. A prisoner of German occupiers, the protagonist with a fixation of a beautiful woman during a terrible moment in his past is forced to undergo and experiment in time travel to see if he can travel first backwards and then forwards to the future to see if he can find a way to save the Earth from its ruination. He succeeds but realizes he will be killed by the German occupiers anyway and finds a way to travel back through time to the woman, whom he has fallen in love with. But this being French cinema from the early 1960s...it's not a happy ending.
There are several notable aspects to La Jetée. First, it is a short film, clocking in at about 28 minutes. Second, it is not a traditional film in which pictures are shown in rapid sequences to convey movement; black and white photographs are used instead, limiting motion but making the viewer focus purely on the haunting power of the images put forth. The apocalypse is rendered in cold lines of ruinous grey and wells of shadows, while the past tends to be lighter in hue. The future is cold, dark, and alien, but not necessarily frightening in the way the present rots away in the world of La Jetée. And all of this is set to the whispers of the German researchers forcing the time traveler forward, regardless of his success or the toll it will take on his body and mind.
I enjoyed La Jetée and found it both depressing, inventive, and evocative. It has spectacular cinematic pedigree for film fans, both as a work from director and film essasyist Chris Marker, and as the major inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys as well as possibly partially inspiring The Time Traveler's Wife and The Jacket, though the latter traces itself closer to Jack London's The Star Rover. Time also labeled La Jetée one of the 10 best time travel films ever created, alongside the likes of Time Bandits, Back to the Future, and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
