The_Sisko_2970750 (Copied from my review on Amazon)A hauntingly beautiful love story told (almost) entirely in black and white stills. Are we set on a predestined path, despite our best hopes and dreams, and the love we share with another, to merely traverse from point A to point B, and then be done forever? The two magical seconds in this movie where love momentarily lives and breathes in live action happen all too quick for me -- possibly a metaphor for love, and life, in general. La Jetee is fittingly all too brief, and therein lies its power. In a brief span, you will feel elation, and sudden loss, and you may just ponder your own life and loves more than you have in long time.Milton Boyd

Miles-10 This modest little film, made up almost entirely of still photography (there is one brief sequence of motion which you will miss if you blink), also happens to be the inspiration for the film and television series "Twelve Monkeys". This I did not realize when I started watching it recently for the first time. Only at the end did I realize that it is the same concept as "Twelve Monkeys" and suddenly remembered hearing that "Monkeys" is based on a 1960s French film.This "movie" (its "movement" is truly illusory even if it is an effective illusion) is affecting and the denouement is worth waiting for (and, besides, the whole piece is only 28 minutes long).The title, "La Jetee", has interesting connotations. The literal meaning of this title is "The Pier", but the average English speaker might not know that airport architecture uses this term, which is taken over from seaports. You usually see signs for "terminals" and not "piers" in airports, but "pier" is more or less what is meant by "terminal" even though there is supposed to be a difference between the two terms. What is interesting historically is that because the film was made in the early 1960s, the pier at Orly Airport, which is near Paris, is an open-air pier where both passengers and their well-wishers can watch the planes load and unload both baggage and passengers. This is no longer possible because terminals now tend to be entirely enclosed and only passengers are allowed to reach the departure point. In more ways than one, watching this movie is a kind of time travel. In it, the pivotal scene takes place outdoors whereas, by the time "Twelve Monkeys" was made in the 1990s, the scene had to be done inside an airport terminal. Also, in the first scene, if you look at the airport tarmac as viewed from the pier, you will see planes with the tail-markings of two airlines that no longer exist, TWA (ceased doing business in 2001) and PanAm (ceased in 1991).

leader-ashley Many movies today are designed for lazy viewers, with the director showing us everything he wants us to see and trying to communicate his own vision. La Jetée isn't like that. In fact, it can hardly be called a "movie" since Marker composed it almost entirely of still images rather than moving footage. Marker uses vivid imagery and innovative presentation to etch a story definitively in each viewer's mind. The viewer is forced to fill in the gaps between the photos on his own, to build a story in his own mind, working off the many associations the images call up in his memory. As a result, the film feels interactive and personal. Furthermore, the film is resonant. Whereas many movies leave only vague memories of a plot in their wake, this one lingers in the mind with so many distinctive images: the woman's face, the man in the glasses, the eerie moment when the woman blinks as she lies back in bed. The moment when the protagonist regards his sleepy lover as she blinks, the only moving footage shown in the whole film, is one of Marker's most clever moments in the film, feeling more vivid than any other. Every other plot point — the time travel, the experiments, the scene on the dock — seems hazy and half-forgotten, like a dream. But this moment, with this woman, seems real. The film involves time-travel, but there are no blinky spaceships to be found, and it doesn't feel like dated sci-fi at all. (Well, aside from the eyeliner.) Time-travel plays a marginal role and is used only to illustrate the film's true concerns: memory, loss, and humans' need to dream. The protagonist is sent back in time by his cruel post-apocalyptic government to recreate the past, to weaponize it. Our pilgrim's mind is able to withstand all this without snapping because it has an anchor, in the form of a woman's face, glimpsed years ago from afar and never forgotten. Nothing ever came of this glimpse, but he cherished that one hope in his heart and built his whole being around her image. People's minds are irrational that way, and Marker knows it. His gap-riddled narrative and ambiguous ending play with the audience's irrational minds and force them to feel, well, something.

PrometheusTree64 Straight out of the twilight zone era of the early-'60s when the world came it closest (many times, as it turns out) to apocalyptic destruction, and so many Hollywood thrillers -- both highbrow and down-market -- enjoyed a mournful creepiness that just worked, came this French short, only 28 minutes long, about a post-WW3 earth in which scientific experiments underneath the catacombs of Paris are being conducted into human memory in order to access it in some way to achieve contact of a kind with the future.Comprised only of frozen freeze frames -- except for one brief, subtle yet heart-stopping moment -- LA JETEE offers up some of the most haunting cinema ever captured. With the museum sequence its timeless centerpiece.The music score, the imagery, the face of eternity that was the '60s.It must be said, however, that the original version of LA JETEE with french narration (and English subtitles) is the way to go. In recent years, however, a new version with English narration has circulated -- the problem being that the new narration is done very poorly, taking the picture out of the correct place and time somehow... This new version was probably done to make the film "more accessible" but does so to obtain a mainstream audience LA JETEE is never going to get anyway.LA JETEE is a classic must-see....But, as is the case with anything -- or anyone -- who is truly special, the regiment out their who hate it are deeply committed to their hatred of it. And such is the case with LA JETEE.