day ten: la jetée. [another day, another movie – post-apocalypse.]

La Jetée is by far the most critically and academically celebrated film on the list so far. It’s a 1963 French film, made up almost entirely of still images (there is only one brief moment of motion in the film).

While many details were changed, the general premise is the basis for 12 Monkeys, another classic post-apocalypse film which is only left off this list because I’ve seen it several times and, with a few exceptions, I wanted to focus more on movies I hadn’t seen before.

La Jetée is about a boy who has the image of a woman’s face burned into his memory as a child without understanding why. His memory of this woman comes just before WWIII ends life as we know it. Much later, he is kept in an underground prison beneath the ruins of Paris as an adult. It is there that he is used in time travel experiments, because they need guinea pigs with strong images connecting them to moments in the past.The experiment successfully projects his consciousness into the past in physical form, allowing him to meet the woman whose face he carried with him through the horros of the apocalypse.

The short film is only 28 minutes long, so I can’t really go into more detail than that without giving away the whole thing, but if you’ve seen 12 Monkeys, **spoilers ahead, skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t seen either of the films mentioned in this post.** the two stories, along with the shared theme of post-apocalyptic time-travel, are both rooted in the idea of a young boy witnessing his own death, unbeknownst to him that this is what he has seen.

This film was so delightfully unique. Perhaps the series of still images with narration would have grown tiresome over a feature length film, but for half an hour it never bogged down or lost emotional depth. It was almost like a graphic novel, with photographs instead of hand-drawn art, and no dialogue. It was also a slightly different motivation for time travel than I’ve seen in a story before. The film was ambitious enough that, while it was well-received and influential, it hasn’t been truly imitated stylistically on a large scale.

Most of all, I appreciated the subtly with which it grappled with huge ideas, some philosophical, and some fantastical in nature.

This is going to sound pretentious, but I mean it as an honest to goodness word of advice: if you need things more traditional and “mainstream” (for lack of a better word), it might be out of your strike zone. Otherwise, I recommend firing up the old Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ feature to check it out.