La jetée (english subtitles)

La jetée (French pronunciation: ​[la ʒɛte], "The Runway") is a 1962 French science fiction featurette by Chris Marker. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. The film runs for 28 minutes and is in black and white. It won the Prix Jean Vigo for short film.
The 1995 science fiction film 12 Monkeys was inspired by, and takes several concepts directly from, La jetée.

This is the story of a man,
marked by an image of his childhood.

The violent scene that upsets him,

and whose meaning
he was to grasp only years later,

happened on the main jetty at Orly,
the Paris airport,

sometime before
the outbreak of World War lll.

Orly. Sunday.

Parents used to take their children
there to watch the departing planes.

On this particular Sunday,
the child whose story we are telling

was bound to remember the frozen sun,

the setting at the end of the jetty,

and a woman's face.

Nothing sorts out memories
from ordinary moments.

Later on they do claim remembrance
when they show their scars.

That face he had seen was
to be the only peacetime
image to survive the war.

Had he really seen it?

Or had he invented that tender moment
to prop up the madness to come?

The sudden roar, the woman's gesture,

the crumpling body, and the
cries of the crowd on the
jetty blurred by fear.

Later, he knew he had seen a man die.

And sometime after
came the destruction of Paris.

Many died.

Some believed themselves
to be victors.

Others were taken prisoner.

The survivors settled beneath
Chaillot, in an underground
network of galleries.

Above ground, Paris, as most
of the world, was uninhabitable,

riddled with radioactivity.

The victors stood guard
over an empire of rats.

The prisoners were
subjected to experiments,

apparently of great concern
to those who conducted them.

The outcome
was a disappointment for some -

- death for others -

- and for others yet, madness.

One day they came to select a new
guinea pig from among the prisoners.

He was the man whose
story we are telling.

He was frightened.

He had heard about the
Head Experimenter. He was prepared
to meet Dr. Frankenstein,

or the Mad Scientist.

lnstead, he met a reasonable man

who explained calmly that
the human race was doomed.

Space was off-limits.

The only hope for
survival lay in Time.

A loophole in Time,

and then maybe
it would be possible to reach food,

medicine, sources of energy.

This was the aim of the experiments:
to send emissaries into Time,

to summon the Past and Future
to the aid of the Present.

But the human mind
balked at the idea.

To wake up in another age
meant to be born again as an adult.

The shock would be too great.

Having only sent lifeless or
insentient bodies through
different zones of Time,

the inventors where now
concentrating on men given
to very strong mental images.

lf they were able to conceive
or dream another time,

perhaps they would be
able to live in it.

The camp police spied even on dreams.

This man was selected
from among a thousand

for his obsession
with an image from the past.

Nothing else, at first,
but stripping out the
present, and its racks.

They begin again.

The man doesn't die,
nor does he go mad.

He suffers.

They continue.

On the tenth day,
images begin to ooze,

like confessions.

A peacetime morning.

A peacetime bedroom,
a real bedroom.

Real children.

Real birds.

Real cats.

Real graves.

On the sixteenth day
he is on the jetty at Orly.

Empty.

Sometimes he recaptures a day
of happiness, though different.

A face of happiness,
though different.

Ruins.

A girl who could be the one he seeks.

He passes her on the jetty.

She smiles at him from an automobile.

Other images appear, merge,

in that museum,

which is perhaps that of his memory.

On the thirtieth day,
the meeting takes place.

Now he is sure he recognizes her.

ln fact, it is
the only thing he is sure of,

in the middle
of this dateless world

that at first stuns him
with its affluence.

Around him,
only fabulous materials:

glass, plastic, terry cloth.

When he recovers from his trance,

the woman has gone.

The experimenters
tighten their control.

They send him
back out on the trail.

Time rolls back again,
the moment returns.

This time he is close to her,
he speaks to her.

She welcomes him
without surprise.

They are without memories,
without plans.

Time builds itself
painlessly around them.

Their only landmarks are the flavor
of the moment they are living

and the markings on the walls.

Later on, they are in a garden.

He remembers there were gardens.

She asks him about his necklace,

the combat necklace he wore
at the start of the war
that is yet to come.

He invents an explanation.

They walk. They look at the trunk
of a redwood tree covered
with historical dates.

She pronounces an English name
he doesn't understand.

As in a dream, he shows her
a point beyond the tree,

hears himself say,

''This is where l come from ...'' -

- and falls back, exhausted.

Then another wave of Time
washes over him.

The result of
another injection perhaps.

Now she is asleep in the sun.

He knows that in this world
to which he has just
returned for a while,

only to be sent back to her,

she is dead.

She wakes up.

He speaks again.

Of a truth too fantastic to be
believed he retains the essential:

an unreachable country,
a long way to go.

She listens.

She doesn't laugh.

ls it the same day?

He doesn't know.

They shall go on like this,
on countless walks in which
an unspoken trust,

an unadulterated trust
will grow between them,

without memories or plans.

Up to the moment where he feels
- ahead of them -

- a barrier.

And this was the end
of the first experiment.

lt was the starting point for
a whole series of tests,

in which he would meet her
at different times.

Sometimes he finds her
in front of their markings.

She welcomes him in a simple way.

She calls him her Ghost.

One day she seems frightened.

One day she leans toward him.

As for him, he never knows
whether he moves toward her,

whether he is driven,
whether he has made it up,

or whether he is only dreaming.

Around the fiftieth day,

they meet in a museum
filled with timeless animals.

Now the aim is perfectly adjusted.

Thrown at the right moment, he may
stay there and move without effort.

She too seems tamed.

She accepts as a natural phenomenon

the ways of this visitor
who comes and goes,

who exists, talks, laughs with her,

stops talking, listens to her,

then disappears.

Once back in the experiment room,

he knew something was different.

The camp leader was there.

From the conversation around him,

he gathered that after the brilliant
results of the tests in the Past,

they now meant to ship him
into the Future.

His excitement made him
forget for a moment that
the meeting at the museum

had been the last.

The Future was better protected
than the Past.

After more, painful tries,

he eventually caught some waves
of the world to come.

He went through a brand new planet,

Paris rebuilt,

ten thousand
incomprehensible avenues.

Others where waiting for him.

lt was a brief encounter.

Obviously, they rejected
these scoriae of another time.

He recited his lesson:

because humanity had survived,

it could not refuse to its own
past the means of its survival.

This sophism was taken for Fate
in disguise.

They gave him a power unit
strong enough

to put all human industry
back into motion,

and again the gates of the Future
were closed.

Some time after his return,

he was transferred to
another part of the camp.

He knew that his jailers
would not spare him.

He had been a tool in their hands,

his childhood image had been used
as bait to condition him,

he had lived up to their
expectations, he had
played his part.

Now he only waited
to be liquidated with,

somewhere inside him, the memory
of a twice-lived fragment of time.

And deep in this limbo,

he received a message from
the people of the world to come.

They too travelled through Time,

and more easily.

Now they were there,

ready to accept him
as one of their own.

But he had a different request:

rather than this pacified Future,

he wanted to be returned
to the world of his childhood,

and to this woman who was
perhaps waiting for him.

Once again the main jetty at Orly,

in the middle of this warm
pre-war Sunday afternoon
where he could now stay,

he thought in a confused way
that the child he had been
was due to be there too,

watching the planes.

But first of all he looked
for the woman's face,
at the end of the jetty.

He ran toward her.

And when he recognized the man
who had trailed him since
the underground camp,

he understood there was no way
to escape Time,

and that this moment he had been
granted to watch as a child,

which had never ceased to obsess him,

was the moment of his own death.