La Jetee
Twelve Monkeys is one of Terry Gilliams most iconic and famous movies. Solidifying him as cult and surreal director, Twelve Monekys depicted a dystopian future in which Bruce Willis, a convict, must jump through time in order to save the world from being ravaged by disease. With an iconic performance by batshit insane Brad Pitt (his character that is) and some truly vivid imagery, Twelve Monkeys is a soly original movie with a wonderful ending that is shocking and sad.
Or it’s not, because it was actually based on this 1962 French Short Film La Jetee. In the future, Paris has crumbed and fallen due to the Third World War. People are kept like prisoners underneath the Palais de Chailliot galleries. The scientists who are the authority in this underground lair, take men and experiment on them, either killing them or sending them crazy. When one subject is selected, he is told that the experiments are to send people back in time, in order to gain aid from the past as there is none around. When he is successfully, he falls in love with a women and she does with “her ghost.” But can he save the future and his love at the same time?
If you were presented with a choice to watch half an hours worth of still images, then you’d be turned off instantly. I really urge you to reconsider because director Chris Marker has created a truly breath-taking piece of cinema. It may be feel simplistic in its approach, but the story has much of an intellectual and haunting premise. Compelling and striking, while Marker sculpted an incredible and influential piece of cinema that inspired generations of science fiction. The end result is an astonishing film that fills us with the anarchic sense of remembrance. The photos serve their purpose and your mind will dabble in those images for a long time after first watch.
With the aid of a narrator whose narration is near poetic and painful, and added with some whispering that is melancholy and petrifying, La Jetee is a powerful piece about conflict. There are different themes that throw against each other. The ideas of memory and dreaming, past and present, childhood and adulthood, science and humanity; they all ball up here and push a story along that echoes of hurt. It is a twining and complex story that meshes one man’s many stories so his timeline becomes one.
If you’ve watch Twelve Monkeys then you will already be aware of the iconic end. It is not detrimental to the movie but it does take away the shock ending much more than if you watched La Jetee the first time. But all in all, this French short film has spurred a lot of science fiction movies and impacted the genre as we know it. A fantastic fantasy told in the movie in a unique and un comparable way.