La Jetée

A study of Chris Marker's haunting time travel short, La Jetee (1964),in the BFI Film Classics series

Chris Marker’s La Jetée is 28 minutes long and almost entirely made up of black-and-white still images. Since its release in 1964, the film – which Marker described as a ‘photo-novel’ – has haunted generations of viewers, and its spiralling narrative of post-war time travel has inspired writers, artists and filmmakers.
But as Marker rarely gave interviews, little is known about the origins of La Jetée or the ideas behind it. In this groundbreaking study, Chris Darke draws on rare archival material, including previously unpublished correspondence and production documents, to shed new light on the making of the film. He explores how Marker’s only fiction film grew out of his early work as a writer and his fascination with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and traces how La Jetée’s imagery can be seen to echo throughout Marker’s extraordinarily diverse oeuvre.

In his afterword to this new edition, Darke considers La Jetée’s continuing impact on contemporary cinema and culture: inspiring Asif Kapadia’s time-travel docudrama 2073 (2024) and Dominique Cabrera’s documentary Le Cinquième plan de La Jetée (2025), as well as appearing in the cinema section of the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony.