Ensofter Overrated and overhyped

Glimmerubro It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

framptonhollis Legendary documentary filmmaker Chris Marker's most famous and praised work is not a documentary in the slightest; instead, it is "La Jetee", a powerful philosophical sci-fi drama clocking in at just 28 minutes and composed almost entirely of still photographs. Featuring mind bending concepts, tragic outcomes, iconic visuals, and a thought provoking narration, these photographs come together to create an experience comprised of melancholic beauty. Tears flowing down your cheeks, a chill creeping up your spine; get used to these feeling while watching "La Jetee" because you may start to feel them a lot!While engaged in this brilliant avant garde experience, the audience is cast away into a post apocalypse made up of depression, confusion, curiosity, and advanced experimental technology. This film presents a quest made up of romance, drama, and futuristic tech, but it contains NONE of the cliché traits one could expect from said genres. Instead, it is an atmospheric mood piece that lights up the screen with its originality and original style. It is all the better for its radical experimentation of the cinematic platform, twisting of audience expectation, and subversion of genre tropes. I hesitate to even label this as merely a science fiction film or a drama or a love story, because it really is not a film that wants to be categorized; instead, it wants to be explored and absorbed. This film is not some cool, futuristic sci-fi flick, instead it is a work of poetry, philosophy, feeling, sensuality, tragedy, and mystery. It is a cold, dense, and jaw dropping work of unstoppable genius.

Hitchcoc This is a haunting 28 minutes. The world has just been through World War III and nuclear weapons have doomed everyone. This takes place in Paris and the city is rubble. Winners and losers (actually all losers) are living underground. The scientists are using the others as Guinea pigs to try to figure out a way to travel back in time and correct the mistakes. One young man is a prime choice to do the job. As his memory is probed he goes back to a moment on a pier (La Jetee) where he tried to see a woman with whom he had fallen in love. He creates a narrative in his mind. What it does is create a kind of loop that will probably prove unproductive. It's probably like the people that will be left after it is too late at some future time, especially if they were complicit in the destruction, desperately trying to come up with a last straw to grasp. What we have, however, is one more shot of cruelty toward the people already victimized. I hope I'm wrong, but I kind of see the whole climate thing and the ozone layer being our World War III. That aside, this picture shows us some of the beauty that was there before the arrogance of some would eventuate our demise and with it the love and kindness that is really what the human condition should be about. I haven't even mentioned how incredibly creative this film is, using black and white still photographs to tell the story. Images of joy and pain and resilience.

Anthony Iessi "La Jette" is a strange short film, that many are familiar to the fact that it inspired the Terry Gilliam film "12 Monkeys". It centers on the hypothetical aftermath of World War III. It is assumed that the world had been scorched by nuclear weaponry, as we see a young man strapped down and blindfolded by a group of ominous scientists in an underground refuge. What the man is being subjected to is a time machine that sends him back to the time, and his mission is to collect goods, and send them back to the present day in order to feed the survivors of the war. He is sent back to the near moment when his life ended, and all he remembers seeing is a strikingly beautiful young woman, standing over a pier while an unknown man falls to his death. Instead of following orders, the man stalks the female throughout the city of Paris, in order to figure out why he remembers her, and what significance she has to him before the bomb hit. What happens is quite lovely actually. You see, the man begins to talk to the young woman, and they begin a pleasant Parisian love affair. Needless to say, this makes the underground scientists none too pleased. For several times over, the scientists keep sending the man back to the beginning of the time warp in order to complete the mission, only for the man to keep pursuing the young lady every time. The two inter-dimensional lovebirds even manage to squeeze in a museum visit, where they gaze at the wonders of the animal kingdom. Hey, even in a time warp, you have to stop and smell the roses. After many attempts, the scientists play a trick and send the young man to a strange, scary future that warns him of the consequences of a malnourished society. The people where black clothing, and stare deeply into his eyes. Do you think that would scare him into doing the right thing? Of course not! He's got to get the girl. Angry about his failure, the scientists bring him back to the past, to meet the girl, only to have him assassinated by another time traveler. In the end, he suffered the exact same fate as the man he saw before the war. He was the fallen man from his own past. All this is shown in glorious frames per second… no not 24, just frames. Like a slideshow gone horribly wrong, the story progresses through images, which coincide with the fact that Marker himself is an acclaimed photographer. Does it even matter in the end? Not for me. I was deeply invested in every moment of this great short film. As a matter of fact, in the genre of Science Fiction, I don't think I've ever seen a finer film. Marker masterfully places fear in the hearts of his viewers. Whatever future we have to look forward to, it looks awfully bleak for Marker. There is nothing to look forward to, but the imminent arrival of a nuclear holocaust. As with many films in tune with "Nouvelle Vague", the politics are visibly liberal. "La Jette" is an early anti-war picture. In the wake of WWII, and the arms race happening in Europe, Marker constructed a film that allowed us to think about the social and physical implications of nuclear war. In the process, he allows an intimate look at the past, and how our main character, keeps trying to hang onto it as long as he can, for tomorrow is hopeless. The woman he seeks is in itself, a metaphor for peace and good memories. Good memories are precious, and beautiful, and visceral. When you think about good memories, you want to plant yourself back in time and relive them. We sympathize with our main character, and we feel for him when he dies in the end. I believe the moral of it all is to remember what thrived before, and try to prevent what this film tried to envision for our future, which consists of nothing.

Phobon Nika What is it, where is it, how will it affect me? In a devastated Paris in the aftermath of WWIII, the few surviving humans begin researching time travel, hoping to send someone back to the pre-war world for food, supplies and maybe a solution to their dire position. One man is haunted by a vague childhood memory that will prove fateful. La Jetée, only running for twenty eight minutes, is a fascinating tale told through a narration and a selection of still images taken and arranged by Marker. The content, all-bar-none of which is of utmost beauty of both the light and dark sides of one's heart, is truly remarkable. If a novice to the staggeringly pure and sublimely clever world that La Jetée can conjure second-nature, it's almost best to take it in twice consecutively, once without subtitles to listen to the soothing yet (for most average viewers) unintelligible and ambiguous French poem whilst absorbing the pulchritude of the images that Marker arranges for us. Starting at the pier of Orly Airport in Paris, the crisp sound of jet propulsion graces our ears before gallery-worthy stills of a crumbling, hysterical city roam across the screen. The silent and sans-audio watch will then adorn the audience's eyes with the jewel-like pictures of the menacing, imperious looking doctors who present the equally intriguing and chilling apparatus for the planned psychological time-travel. Upon embarking through past and future, much warmer images to the post-rapture subterranean Paris appear: a museum of taxidermy specimens and a bustling, a beautiful and blissfully ignorant girl with long hair and a pretty smile, and a sunny day back at the airport pier. A perplexing figure then appears, in all his aesthetic glory yet again, but our minds, void of aural explanation, can't piece together what has happened. Upon a second viewing with the disposable narration, La Jetée's deeper, sophisticated philosophical magic is unlocked. We learn of the situation of post-apocalypse and the reason why we've been drawn to this sadist affair in the tunnels below Paris. It continues, just as beautifully and perfectly balanced. The museum is revisited, and we hear: "In fact, it is the only thing he is sure of, in the middle of this dateless world that at first stuns him with its affluence. Around him, only fabulous materials: glass, plastic, terry cloth. When he recovers from his trance, the woman has gone." We learn of the relationship between the prisoner and the woman in his mind, how she succumbs to him so readily, and why she is weeping in despair as the figure reappears on the pier as the twenty eight minutes of unfolded faultless direction, narrative, sculpture and innovative poetry. La Jetée's size and its one-of-a-kind take on stop motion cannot let it fool a perspective audience into missing such a display of technical brilliance and interpretative richness.