La Jetée

Chris Marker's La Jetée opened in 1962 as a 28-minute short and won the Prix Jean Vigo the following year. It entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound critics' poll in 2022, sixty years after its release, and it is one of the founding works of the photo-essay in cinema. Marker (born Christian-François Bouche-Villeneuve, a wandering essayist, photographer and filmmaker who would carry the same broad register through Sans Soleil and decades of later work) made it between his earlier Letter from Siberia and the projects he is better known for.

It is built almost entirely from still black-and-white photographs, with a single brief moving-image sequence. Hélène Chatelain plays the woman, Davos Hanich the man and Jacques Ledoux the experimenter. In a Paris laid waste by a Third World War, experimenters underground are sending one of their captive subjects backward and forward through time in search of a way to survive, and his journeys are anchored by a memory from his pre-war childhood: the face of a woman seen at Orly Airport.

Science-fiction cinema has kept returning to it ever since, and Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995) is a feature-length adaptation. Marker's commitment to the still image, a voice-over that does most of the storytelling, and an elliptical, philosophical tone all fed into the European tradition of the essay film that Histoire(s) du cinéma would later extend.