la jetée (13. 187)

Courtesy of our faithful chronicler, we are informed the influential sci-fiction featurette by Left-Bank writer-director Chris Marker (previously) premiered on this day in 1962. Set in a post-apocalyptic Paris, with survivors of a nuclear war living in the catacombs and galleries beneath the Palais de Chaillot (the neoclassical showcase built for the Exposition Internationale of 1937 on the grounds of the partially demolished Palais du Trocadéro—the temporary headquarters of both the UN and NATO and backdrop of Hitler’s short tour of the city with Albert Speer in 1940 and Victory in Europe celebrations five years later) with the remaining scientific community conducting research into time travel, sending test subjects to various dates in the past and future and change the course of history and avert the conflict that has all but wiped out civilisation. Challenged to find suitable test subjects mentally stable enough to withstand the rigours of temporal displacement, they pin their hopes on a man with a vague but ingrained memory from before the war, a startling encounter he witnessed from the observation platform (“the jetty”) from the Orly airport. His intervention seems promising but is caught in a paradox and can affect no change. The narrative is told almost exclusively with a photomontage, cycling through still images with no dialogue other than an expository voice-over. The short was adapted and expanded by filmmaker Terry Gilliam with his 1995 12 Monkeys, a debt very much openly acknowledged in the movie’s opening credits..