La Jetée (1962)
10/10
Chillingly controlled to stick in the mind.
6 September 2005
One way movies tend to be memorable is when a certain image they create is so powerful it sticks right into the mind and refuses to leave. This is a film created to do just that, and one method is to remove a level of the motion to create haunting images that stay static on the screen until they're burned on the cornea. Memory, however, is not just visual, and as if the film needed any help, the disturbingly saturated music and sound helps implant everything in this movie until it's not to be forgotten.

A man is haunted throughout his life by the image of a beautiful woman, and the death he witnessed after seeing her. Soon afterward, a bomb hits Paris and sends the survivors scurrying underground to survive nuclear fall-out. A scientist then uses the man's clinging focus on the past memory of the beauty and death to send him through time to try to prevent the bomb.

This is not a movie that needs to be remarked upon by saying, "Every frame is like a photograph!" because every frame is a photograph. However, it keeps away from being considered merely a slide-show by the emotive use of sound and narration and the surreal look into time and memory, a look that's quite adequate for truly representing the sort of imbalance and dizziness that would be created by time-travel. It recreates the sort of objective detail of memories wherein the movement through space and time is certainly recognized as your own, but your inability to control it since it's already been done makes you sort of an outside spectator to your own actions. That, I believe, is the focus that drives this narrative along and it's done so well, it's difficult to imagine anyone not being sucked into it.

--PolarisDiB
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