Still Life
1001 Movies
La Jetée
Does a movie need to have moving pictures to be a movie? La Jetée is a 28 minutes montage of still photographs. A narrator speaks throughout the duration of the film and presents that story that is being depicted. Paris has been destroyed by after a world war. Prisoners of the war are now being experimented on in the hope that time travel can be used “to call past and future to the rescue of the present”.
You would think that not showing actual movement would make it feel like there is no action. However, the pictures shift within the scene just as the camera would if it were a motion picture. The transitions between shots are now even more important than a cut in a normal movie because it is one of the biggest tools available to the director. The story being told is great piece of science fiction fits perfectly into the short story format. La Jetée was the inspiration for another good science fiction movie from the 1990s that I will not mention by name to prevent spoiling this movie for others.
