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.
95% ★★★★★ (40,577)
La Jetée
Where to watch: Buy
Movie · Drama · Romance · NR
1962 · 29m · ★ 95% (40.6K)
A man's obsession with an image of his past
Director: Chris Marker
Starring: Jean Négroni, Hélène Chatelain, Davos Hanich
Overview
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.
Director
Chris Marker
Production
Argos films, Radio-Télévision Française
Cast
Jean Négroni, Hélène Chatelain, Davos Hanich, Jacques Ledoux, André Heinrich, Jacques Branchu, Pierre Joffroy, Étienne Becker, Philbert von Lifchitz, Ligia Branice, Janine Klein, William Klein, Germano Facetti
Curator Review
Verdict
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.
Best for
fans of experimental or essayistic cinema
viewers who love time-travel stories with emotional weight
people interested in memory, trauma, and postwar anxiety
cinephiles looking for a foundational short film
Skip if
you need fast-paced plotting or constant visual movement
you dislike narration-heavy or highly conceptual films
you prefer conventional character-driven sci-fi over poetic abstraction
Overview
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.
Worth noting
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.
Bottom line
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.
Top Letterboxd reviews
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.