title: La Jetée summary: >- Twenty-eight minutes, told almost entirely in still photographs, and still the most affecting film about memory anyone has made. pubDate: 2026-07-20 kind: film creator: [redacted] Marker year: 1962 rating: 5 tags: - film - photography

It is a science fiction film about time travel, assembled from black and white stills with a voice-over. There is exactly one moving shot in the whole thing, a woman opening her eyes, and because everything around it is frozen, those two seconds land like nothing else in cinema.

Marker understood something that a lot of photographers half-know: a still image is not a weaker version of a moving one. It is a different instrument. Stills are how memory actually stores things: as fragments, out of order, with the sound arriving separately.

Terry Gilliam remade it as Twelve Monkeys, which is a good film and a completely different object. Watch this one first, in one sitting, without your phone.