On La Jetée: The Politics of Feeling in a Motionless Cinema

By Dominique Yuen-Cao

Somewhere between a photograph and a dream, La Jetée lives. It doesn’t move like a film, but it feels more alive than most.

Chris Marker’s 1962 sci-fi short, often mistaken for a slideshow or mistaken altogether, is composed almost entirely of black-and-white still photographs and narrated by a voice-over. At just 28 minutes, it collapses the borders between cinema and memory, death and desire, movement and stasis. In doing so, it becomes a science fiction story and a quietly devastating meditation on time, love, and what happens when an image refuses to die. This is a film that remembers you back.

Set in a post–World War III Paris buried underground by nuclear fallout, La Jetée follows a man chosen by scientists as a test subject for time travel. Their decimated and desperate society is searching for a way to rescue the present by raiding the past or the future. The man is selected because of a single image from childhood: a woman’s face at the end of the Orly Airport jetty, frozen in his mind by the simultaneous experience of love and witnessing a man’s sudden death. That memory, emotionally charged and visually apparent, becomes his anchor across time. He travels into the past, finds the woman, and forms a deep, nearly wordless bond with her. He also glimpses a future where society survives in sterile harmony and offers to help the present. Yet when given the chance to stay in that future, he chooses instead to return to the moment that has haunted him all along only to realize he has been running toward the scene of his own death.

If it sounds like a myth, it’s because La Jetée is structured like one: recursive, tragic, sublime. But what sets this film apart is not its plot or even its twist ending. It is the way the story is told, frame by painstaking frame. Marker’s film is made up of 422 still photographs. It calls itself a “photo-roman,” a photo-novel, but that label barely hints at the strangeness of its form. The images don’t move, and yet they pulse with duration. Marker stitches these frozen instants together with dissolves, fades, and a score that moves forward even as the visuals resist motion. The result is unnerving: a cinematic experience that feels simultaneously alive and embalmed.

As such, what appears to be a science fiction tale about time travel and fate is, on closer analysis, a film about the ontology of the image. Marker constructs a world wherein photographs (traditionally seen as static remnants) take on agency. Each still frame is not merely a frozen past but an object in time that aches with a kind of consciousness. The protagonist is not experiencing time; he is caught inside it. He is remembered by the image as much as he remembers it. In one sequence, the man and the woman walk through a natural history museum, past frozen zebras and taxidermied tapirs. The camera lingers. The animals are preserved in eternal stillness, captured in time. However, there is no visible distinction between the frozen animals and those observing them. Here, Marker constructs a visual metaphor for the film’s central question: Do images bring life to the dead or reduce the living to stillness? The photographs do both. They preserve and erase. They remember and forget. The museum becomes a mirror: the protagonist is trapped on display like the taxidermied creatures.

This tension culminates in the film’s most astonishing and revealing moment: the woman blinks. Just once, barely as long as a single breath. Yet, it cracks the film open. This single instant of movement is less a cinematic flourish than a metaphysical event in a work composed entirely of still images. That small gesture—eyelids opening, a look returned—destabilizes the illusion that the viewer is in control. Up to this point, we’ve been the observers. But now the image sees us. It turns its gaze outward. It breathes. We are no longer watching memory unfold; memory is watching us unfold. Marker’s genius is not just to make still images move emotionally but to make them feel alive as if they carried their own pulse across time. I’ve rewatched that scene obsessively, and it tightens its grip each time. Not because it’s formally daring but because it reveals the film’s emotional and philosophical core. The woman lover’s blink reveals the possibility that love—ephemeral, intuitive, dreamlike—might momentarily defy the laws of narrative and medium. The man, trapped in a dystopian system designed to preserve and control time, reaches beyond it, not through revolt or intellect, but through something less rational: desire. Not a desire for freedom in the abstract but for connection. For a world in which feeling is not dissected by scientists or sorted into frames but lived. Could it be that love, however fleeting or irrational, existing in a moment suspended beyond reach, can momentarily undo the systems designed to control us?

This suspended moment finds resonance in Plato’s concept of anamnesis, the idea that knowledge is a form of recollection and a return to something already known. However, in Marker’s world, memory is not a path to truth or a means of liberation. It is also not a tool that enables agency. Instead, it is a sentence—both in the judicial and structural sense. The protagonist is not equipped with memory; he is bound by it. He does not use it to transcend time but is condemned to repeat it. His journey through the past is not a voyage of self-discovery but a predetermined return to the formative image that governs his fate. The memory that enables his time travel is also the memory that seals his death. In this way, the image is less a fragment of the past than a structure that dictates the limits of his future. It controls rather than reveals. The image held him. It holds us, too.

Yet even within this closed loop, there’s something strangely radical about the blink. It gestures briefly and bravely toward the possibility that feeling can rupture form. That intimacy, however fragile, might pierce through systems of control. It doesn’t liberate the character. It doesn’t rewrite fate. But it offers a vision of what it might be like to feel free, even inside a structure designed to prevent that very thing. In a way, this is Marker’s most devastating idea: that love can’t save us, but it can be felt, and in being felt, can shift the meaning of the image entirely. This idea takes on renewed urgency in a contemporary landscape epitomized by infinite scrolling and algorithmic imagery, where digital content passes through us without a trace. In a digital ecosystem where images are endlessly consumed and discarded for attention, La Jetée still feels crushingly permanent. It reminds us that the moving image, for all its flickering ephemerality, can trap us in a feedback loop of recognition, nostalgia, and desire. And yet, perhaps paradoxically, it also reminds us that a single, sincere gesture can fracture that loop, however briefly. The moment someone sets their phone down during a conversation and truly listens; the way a stranger’s glance across a subway car can feel more intimate than any message thread; or the tactile weight of another person’s hand reaching for yours in the middle of a film, both of you silent but suddenly there. Scenes like these pull us out of algorithmic passivity and back into presence.

I believe that Marker’s film isn’t simply a meditation on a character trapped in the rules of a film universe. It’s more than that. La Jetée is an elegy for the limits of human thought, a love letter to the ache of memory, and a warning about the political systems that domesticate even our most private dreams. It is about a soul reaching for wholeness in a world that fragments, archives, and controls. Even the most tender human gesture—an open eye, a returned gaze—is subject to the machinery of power. In the blink of an eye, Marker brilliantly offers us not escape but a glimpse of what it would feel like to escape. This glimpse is unreal, brief, maybe even imagined. Still, it is enough to change the entire meaning of the image. Ultimately, it becomes clear that the real subject of La Jetée is not time or even memory but what it means to feel something entirely under conditions designed to make that impossible. This is cinema as a thought experiment, yes, but also as a prayer. A haunting vision of love reaching past the ruins, if only for a frame.