Anyone catch this little short film on the Sundance Channel recently? This fascinating little movie is credited with inspiring my favorite Terry Gilliam movie, TWELVE MONKEYS.
Synopsis:
Earth lies ruined in the aftermath of a nuclear war. The few surviving humans begin researching time travel, in hopes of sending someone back to the pre-war world in search of food, supplies, and hopefully some sort of solution to mankind’s imminent demise. The protagonist is a man whose retention of a single, vague childhood memory (that of witnessing a murder on the jetty at Orly airport) is the basis for his being chosen to travel back in time. His journey leads him towards an enigmatic and paradoxical destiny.
There are many similarities with MONKEYS. The underground portion, the catastrophe, the experiments with time travel, the kid watching himself as an adult returning to the past and being haunted by the vision.
The object of his memory fixation (a memory of a woman he sees at the Orly terminal a day before the nuclear war starts) is so powerful it allows him to go into the past without going crazy.
The other persistent memory image is of a man getting shot:
The apocolypse (nuclear, this time) happens, and like in TWELVE MONKEYS, society moves underground.
The boy grows up underground, like the Bruce Willis character in Monkeys. He gets in trouble, and is offered a pardon if he will participate in the time travel experiment, using the memory of the woman to anchor him to a time period.
Well, he’s fixated with the woman, so naturally they fall in love.
Like the Willis character he wants to stay in the past… but he doesn’t get to. Instead, he is sent to the future, to petition for help from the people of the future.
Once more he is sent to the past by the Mad Doctor.
He follows the lady to the tarmac at Orly airport. There is a crowd watching airplanes. He runs towards her, but is shot by one of the Mad Doctor’s henchmen… Just like in 12 Monkeys, the guy the boy watches getting killed is himself.
Not bad for a 30 minute film from 1962, in fact, it’s pretty amazing. Very beautiful and poetic story, this. It would be fun to do a side by side comparison at some point. The similarities with TWELVE MONKEYS are there, but where that was a cross between psychological thriller and low key science fiction, La Jetée is a film about a love story that transcends time itself.
Third Point of Singularity 