I take back what I said about The Hire: Powder Keg. At 28 minutes, La Jetée is my favorite short film of all time. The images are indelible, the experience unforgettable. Like Sans Soleil, it is a meditation on time and memory, but a much more poignant and effective one. The plot follows a prisoner in the aftermath of WWIII who is used for time travel experiments. Edited together using still images from the footage, Marker uses motion itself as a representation of time. There is one break from the exclusive use of stills, and the instant we see time start to flow, it is ripped away from us. We are left with the question, is it only a dream?
The black and white cinematography is simultaneously beautiful and tragic thanks to masterful compositions. The story is made more powerful through an expert choice of music. There was very little acting to speak of in the traditional sense, but the timing in the editing and the shot choices managed to be just as evocative as any acting could be. There was only one real problem I had with the movie, and that was the people of the future. They looked preposterous; why not just make them look like us? They are, thankfully, in the movie for a very brief period of time and do not distract too heavily from the beauty in the rest of the film. This is a movie you will remember for many years to come.IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0056119/