Movies - La Jetée

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	Movies - La Jetée

La Jetée (1962) (literally "The Jetty" or "The Pier", but in this case idiomatically meaning "The Terminal," as in an airport terminal) is a black and white 28-minute science fiction film by Chris Marker.

It tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace with limited narration with only a single brief moving image.

Due to its brevity it often accompanies another film; Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) was the film it was first released with.

Terry Gilliam's 1995 film Twelve Monkeys
was inspired by and loosely based on La Jetée.

Plot

In the movie, the survivors of a destroyed Paris in the aftermath of World War III live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send someone back to before the devastating war to recover food, medicine, or energy for the present, "to summon the past and future to the aid of the present". The traveller is a male prisoner, his vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the main terminal at Orly Airport is used as the key to his journey back in time. He is thrown back to the past again and again. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman who was present at the terminal. After his successful passage to the past, the experimenters attempt to bring him back into the future. In a brief meeting he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate society. On returning to the future, he is set aside to die but he asks to be returned to his childhood. He is returned and finds the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult.

An identical plot device, using the notion of circular time, is central to the 1995 film 12 Monkeys.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for La Jetée ]

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