“This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood.” That is the opening (the first voice) of Chris Marker’s film. The phrase broaches a story (the hero will travel in time toward that childhood image); the destruction of cities and the devastation of the earth’s surface have threatened the very reality of the present and have thus let loose temporal virtualities normally locked up or held captive in the past (the past consisting only of a series of images that have become autonomous, tied to the living only by some affect or trauma). The fiction of La Jetée is thus a certain kind of work—whose object is the film’s hero—concerning the paradoxes of memory, concerning the inclusion of the past that lives on within the hero as an image, as a secret that the laboratory experiments in the underground camp will try to make him confess. The realization of the confession comes with the death of the hero himself as he relives a moment of his past, as he meets once again the girl whose image has haunted him.

The extreme emotion of images fading to white, fading to black, constitutes a subvention of the film’s material or its narrative mode. Through jump cuts and flashbacks, memory’s events are drawn by the sweetness, the violence, and in any case the capture of recollection (from a time that resists elision because a part of the subject began to be born then). It’s from this exploratory terrain—this terrain which consists of a man navigating blindly, struggling along in a body alienated from its own images, in the film version of his unrecognizable life. It’s from here that the flower of pure love arises, the object of all of humanity’s nostalgia, the memory of a love becoming innocent in the image.”

Words by Jean-Louis Schefer (translated by Paul Smith) / Passages de l’image, Exhibition catalogue, Centres Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1990