The first image, in grainy black and white, is a top-angle shot of an airport terminal. At first, you think it might be a drone shot of one of the many modern, small, provincial airports that have come up around the world; but then you identify the big airliners and their early jet vintage — Boeing 707s, DC-8s, Ilyushins and such — and the logos of now-extinct airlines like Pan Am on the tails. You notice the long row of spotlight towers on the roof terrace and around the big network of runways beyond. “This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood.” The gravelly French voice takes over from the choral music and starts to lead you through the narrative. “The violent scene that upset him and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later, happened at the main jetty at Orly, the Paris airport, sometime before the outbreak of World War III.”

As the film called La Jetée proceeds, you see more monochrome shots of the airport flick across the screen and you realise you are looking at still images and not moving ones. You realise that the ‘drone’ of the first shot was actually a rostrum-camera movement across a photograph of the eponymous terminal — the ‘jetty’ — of the film. Pulled into this masterfully constructed dystopia from sixty-two years ago, you enter an intense journey of double and even triple recognitions. As the voice-over describes the planetary devastation caused by the nuclear conflict, you find yourself looking at ruined cities, the images of bombed out houses and razed boulevards familiar from the Second World War (at the time only seventeen years before the film was released), still visuals which are then tied up to startlingly ‘real’ images of the destruction of Paris — rubble inside a roofless Notre-Dame, a decapitated Arc de Triomphe. If Venice is “the only city” for Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Chris Marker, the director of La Jetée, brings every bombed city of the 20th century home to his beloved Paris. Looking at the film now, you can’t help thinking of the various urban destructions that have come after the film was made: Beirut, Manhattan, Baghdad, Kharkiv, Gaza.

The conceit of the 27-minute film is this: the world has gone through a nuclear war and the surface of the planet is uninhabitable because of radioactivity. “Many died,” the voice tells us. “Some believed themselves to be victors. Others were taken prisoner.” These survivors shelter in a network of galleries below the city where “The victors stood guard over an empire of rats.” The people in charge carry out deadly experiments upon their prisoners; the only way humanity can survive is if they find a loophole in time which will allow desperately-needed food, medicines and sources of energy to be brought in; the aim of the experiments is to send someone into another time “to summon the Past and the Future to come to the aid of the present.” One by one, the victims of the experiment either die or are driven crazy. The controllers are able to spy on people’s dreams and they are looking for someone who is able to enter the past deeply in his/her dreams. The nameless protagonist (whose story this is) is then selected because he keeps dreaming of the past with an intensity that is promising.

A work of art can shift shape over time and La Jetée is a great example of this. While the experiments are a direct reference to those carried out by Nazi doctors on prisoners in the death camps, today the whole scenario immediately reminds us of not only CIA-run black sites and torture cells the world over but also the subterranean war going on in the tunnel network under Gaza. While the spying on dreams connects directly to the surveillance currently being carried out upon us by our devices, the desperation for survival resources is anticipated years before we actually began to recognise the ecological Armageddon that we now face.

As we plunge deeper into the vortex of this imagination, we realise that the relentless succession of still images in changing rhythms actually generates far more anxiety than a ‘normal’ cinematic film would have. Everything is still and, yet, everything is moving; the stillness is a deeply unstable one, not something you can trust. As with the soundtrack, the images too are multilingual, speaking in visual tongues — doctored photographs from long before Photoshop, ‘straight’ street photography, set up shots within a documentary situation and totally theatricalised narrative images. The soundtrack too, using a matching economy of means, doesn’t ever let you rest — Western classical music of different sorts, sound effects both quotidian and highly distorted, and the haunting voice-over all play with your mind and your perception. With no gimmicks, such as 3D or vibrating cinema seats, the experience becomes almost haptic.

The protagonist “doesn’t go mad. He doesn’t die. He suffers.” He manages to travel to the past and with him we are transported back to a world where we see “a peacetime morning... Real Children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves.” A woman, the woman in his dreams, “smiles at him from an automobile... other images appear, merge, in that museum, which is perhaps of his memory.” Even as we experience the defamiliarisation of quotidian things, the theme of the museum, of the remnants and the traces of the past, coalesces as another strand of the film. The underground tunnels are actually galleries and store-rooms for various objects from the past — statues, masks, pottery; the man and the woman entwine arms and wander through a jungle of stuffed animals in a museum of natural history, with the viewer now fully aware that in this future hell all animals are extinct, that there are no real birds anymore.

Sitting at the edge of a dying 2024, the older ones among us may recognise so many quaint things in this densely-packed film as belonging to a distant past but one during which we were alive. Some of the ideas (especially of love and desire) in La Jetée may also seem to be quaint but it’s also startling how things loop back in the film, for instance, the fear of a Third World War that might have once felt dated but now no longer does. In our constantly fracturing world, one can long to inhabit a slice of time like the protagonist and his lover where “their only landmarks are the flavour of the moment in which they are living and the markings on the walls.” And, yet, here we are, hiding as best we can in our respective underground warrens, desperate for some trick of time that enables the past and the future to come to our aid.