Curator Watchlist
A landmark short that turns still images, voiceover, and memory into a devastating time-travel romance. It’s essential if you like formally inventive cinema, post-apocalyptic melancholy, or films that linger like a dream after they end.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 29m
Director: Chris Marker
Starring: Jean Négroni, Hélène Chatelain, Davos Hanich
A man confronts his past during an experiment that attempts to find a solution to the problems of a post-apocalyptic world caused by a world war.
Chris Marker
Jean Négroni, Hélène Chatelain, Davos Hanich
A landmark short that turns still images, voiceover, and memory into a devastating time-travel romance. It’s essential if you like formally inventive cinema, post-apocalyptic melancholy, or films that linger like a dream after they end.
La Jetée is one of cinema’s great paradoxes: a film built almost entirely from stillness that feels intensely alive. Chris Marker uses photographs, narration, and sound to create a time-travel story that is less about mechanics than about memory, grief, and the impossible wish to return to a moment before loss.
What makes it endure is how precise and humane it is. The post-apocalyptic setting is spare but haunting, and the romance at the center gives the film its ache. Every image feels selected with the force of a remembered dream, which is why the ending lands with such quiet devastation.
It’s short, but it’s not slight. The film’s influence on later sci-fi is enormous, yet it still feels singular: intimate, philosophical, and formally fearless. If you want a movie that can change how you think about what cinema can do, this is one of the first places to go.
amaya (5★) · 9379 likes
the best powerpoint in the world
SilentDawn (4.5★) · 2497 likes
90/100 La Jetée is 28 minutes long and it says more about love, existence, time, and memories than any film that I've seen in awhile. Never has a film so calmly devastated the viewer with such intimate portrayals of human emotion and its influence on survival and connection. Chris Marker's film is a brooding masterwork of a short-film, and I can't wait to delve back into its quietly hypnotic rhythms in the near future.
DirkH (4.5★) · 2081 likes
Stunning. Beautiful. Mesmerizing. Important. A slide show with an I.Q. of 180 and the heart of a blue whale. Required viewing for anyone interested in film and storytelling.
PTAbro (4★) · 1772 likes
Two things stuck when I finally sat down to the exceptional La jetée: First, the method of telling this story is ingenious (besides being admirably efficient). The use of still frames juxtaposed with fluid audio accentuates the jerkiness of the visuals. I found it delightfully clever that a film about time-travel is essentially forcing us to internalize the passage of time with the virtual jump-cuts separating each still and the freezing of time while we soak in the information presented… more
Josh Lewis (5★) · 1641 likes
Images as a means of storing memory, cheating time, and rewriting history; bafflingly simple & poignant.
A major time-travel film that shares the same obsession with memory, catastrophe, and fatalistic repetition.
For viewers drawn to meditative sci-fi, existential dread, and a haunting sense of spiritual searching.
Another contemplative science-fiction work where grief and memory reshape reality.
A key influence-adjacent film about love, trauma, and the persistence of memory after historical catastrophe.
For its dream logic, repetition, and uncertainty about what is remembered versus imagined.
A surreal, memory-soaked film that treats time as something elastic and haunted.
A melancholy, alienated sci-fi drama with a strong emotional and conceptual pull.
A post-apocalyptic science-fiction film that leans into isolation, mystery, and existential unease.
Shares the poetic, reflective approach to time, memory, and human longing.
For a more intricate but similarly serious take on time travel and consequence.
A modern sci-fi drama that connects language, memory, and loss in a moving way.
A lyrical meditation on identity, intuition, and the feeling of living beside your own memory.
memory, time travel, post-apocalyptic survival, love and loss, trauma, fate, identity, war aftermath
experimental sci-fi, short film, post-apocalyptic, time loop, memory, romance, voiceover narration, photographic imagery, philosophical, art-house