La Jetée

La Jetée (1962) is a French short film by Chris Marker you can watch online on iFILM — 29 minutes that changed science fiction cinema. Shot almost entirely in still photographs with narration, it stands completely alone in the medium; film schools worldwide still use it as a benchmark for what cinema can do without a single moving image.

Nuclear war has left Paris in rubble. Scientists send prisoners into the past and future searching for something that might save what's left. One man qualifies because his memory holds a single obsessive image: a woman on an airport observation deck, and a moment from his childhood he cannot explain. Time travel here is not adventure. It's a loop with no exit.

Terry Gilliam expanded the idea into Twelve Monkeys thirty years later, but the source remains more unsettling — spare, cold, and precise as a blade. Watch La Jetée (1962) online on iFILM.