La Jetée

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

The film is constructed almost entirely from still black-and-white photographs, with a single brief moving-image sequence. Hélène Chatelain plays the woman; Davos Hanich plays the man; Jacques Ledoux plays the experimenter. The setting is post-apocalyptic Paris after a Third World War; underground experimenters are sending one of their captive subjects backward and forward through time in pursuit of a strategy for survival, and his journey is anchored by a memory from his pre-war childhood — the face of a woman seen at Orly Airport.

The film became a continuing reference point in subsequent science-fiction cinema. Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995) is a feature-length adaptation. Marker's structural commitment to the still-image photo-essay form, the use of voice-over narration as the film's primary narrative engine, and the elliptical philosophical register all became foundational to the European art-essay-cinema tradition that Histoire(s) du cinéma would later extend.