Why so much hype?

Fantastic!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

SPOILERS impliedIn La Jetée, post-apocalypse charlatans fixate on their delusional hope of escaping certain annhilation in the atomically irradiated catacombs of an obliterated Paris. Their 'experiments' consist in interrogating victims for their most personal memories - an 'À la Recherche du Temps perdu' for these perdurantists, who seek to identify and retrieve the separate exploded temporal parts of a life deliberately shattered, atomised and alienated from its context, in a surgical manner operating on consciousness to analyse it for clues to the nature of human existence in time. This primitive procedure, which is more superstition than science because it is the expression of a fanatical, desperate hope in the face of Death, employs torture in order to tear out of the sacrificial victim their very soul, in an agonising unnatural birth. This is science as cult, seeking to conjure the ghosts of the past, and to convert the living - marooned in the present - into deathly ghosts that can in turn haunt their own future: In this way the mad scientists believe they are stitching together the temporal parts of various interrupted lives into one monstrous, eternal life - a temporal Frankenstein's monster, yoking together heterogenous experiences into the appearance of human life. The fitful, flickering, frozen, stiff, rigor mortis of the light projected from the magical cave of the survivors, entombed in the Paris Catacombs along with the dead, attracts time-visitants from the actual future who police and cleanse the deranged, diseased gestalt of the immediate post-holocaust period: The one surviving experimental subject/victim of that benighted time who manages to emerge fitfully, blinking into another period - the pre-war past just before the bomb fell - , and who is symbolically poised to take flight at La Jetée (Orly Airport) to any destination, allowing the deranged phantoms of the doomed survivors of World War III to spread throughout the rest of time, like the immense and dangerous glowing persistence of radioactivity, must be contained within the hermetic capsule of human history's quarantined, off-limits era of Death. This unwilling wanderer through time, this lost soul and harbinger of others that would spill out of the maw of Hell after him, must be destroyed. He is. Shot? Or just reaching the limit of his own abruptly inconclusive memory? In love with a dream-girl, but more in love with his own death, which releases him from the circles of a false and futile gyre of tormenting rebirth into the same horror he was recoiling from. Damaged souls, driven mad by existential horror, must die so that time is not trapped forever in the brief flash of their immolation. Frozen photographic memories must be expunged from the screen of the future, so that new shadows can be made to play across it. 'The Man' cannot be free of the chain (he lies about it to the dream-girl) that binds him to his own sensory Cave of Perception, and therefore cannot join those Travellers he meets who are truly free of Time. From disappointment, disillusion, despair, horror and tragedy, there is no release, except in Death. We are the Prisoners of the Cave in Plato's Allegory. But in Death, we are individually free - it is for those muttering Nazi doctors that the phrase 'Escape is futile' should be addressed, not their suffering victim!Persistence of vision is deterministic: The image moves, yet only moves back to the point where it began (the unnamed Man dies). Time loops round like a noose, trapping us before a finite narrative. Of course our failing mind takes excursions into the surrounding darkness, but there the shadows crowd together too thickly to be discriminated from the huddled mass, and we are thrown back into our own small circle of light. Defined. Sanctioned by the inky mark on the illuminated page. Our Pass - our passing into an unknown region. Flight. Arrest.

La jetée (1961) aka The Pier is one of the best, poignant, and most unusual films ever made. The 28 minutes long collection of unbelievably rich, mesmerizing, still black and white images accompanied with the mourning score and sparse narration look inside your very soul while you look at them and they talk to you and reach to all your senses. This is correct - the film used a photo-montage technique but once stated watching, I was so enthralled that I did not think about technical part. The film is simple, poetic, philosophical, and profound. It is an anti war/post-apocalyptic science fiction documentary style and at the same time the ode to love, longing, and to power of memory.Here is the paradox - how can documentary, made of the still black and white images tell the story that would influence every following film about time travel and be the true feast for mind and soul? Well, it has happened in La jetée, and while watching you forget what genre the movie belongs to because it defies the definitions of genres, and you just don't want it to end even though you know from the beginning that this movie will never have a happy ending. Like millions of fascinated viewers I ask myself how that much was achieved with so little. Like an unnamed protagonist of La jetée is marked for life with an unforgettable image from his childhood, the viewer is marked with the still images of the film, especially by only one animated image of awakening in the film that comes like a miracle.I finished earlier this evening re-watching Terry Gilliam's excellent film Twelve Monkeys (1995) for which La jetée was the inspiration. Now when I saw both, I am sure that if it were not for the unspeakably sad, beautiful and moving short film of Chris Marker that suggests that "calling past and future may save the present" and provides the extraordinary emotional impact with the story of return to the most vivid childhood memories again and again, there would be no brilliant and dark visions of Twelve Monkeys. Both films are glorious in their unique way and should be viewed together to be appreciated fully.

This is one of these movies you wind up watching in film classes, and it's considered a great classic. Unfortunately, it's pretty tedious. It is essentially an illustrated sci-fi short story made up (almost) entirely of still images. This is an admittedly original approach to movie making, but not an especially engaging process.While leisurely told, the real issue for me with the film is it's not a very good sci-fi story. I was immersed from childhood in science-fiction (my dad taught a college literature course devoted to it) and the story struck me as trite and predictable. Admittedly, I saw it 20 years after it came out (in the 1970s), so the story might have seemed more original at the time, but all-in-all this is sub-par Twilight Zone fare given artistic appeal through it's presentation.There is one stunning moment in the movie, and it's such an interesting moment (you'll know it when you see it), and one that is only possible if the film is made just as it is, then arguably it's a good thing for a film student to see. But it's very dull.

Straight out of the twilight zone era of the early-'60s when the world came it closest (many times, as it turns out) to apocalyptic destruction, and so many Hollywood thrillers -- both highbrow and down-market -- enjoyed a mournful creepiness that just worked, came this French short, only 28 minutes long, about a post-WW3 earth in which scientific experiments underneath the catacombs of Paris are being conducted into human memory in order to access it in some way to achieve contact of a kind with the future.Comprised only of frozen freeze frames -- except for one brief, subtle yet heart-stopping moment -- LA JETEE offers up some of the most haunting cinema ever captured. With the museum sequence its timeless centerpiece.The music score, the imagery, the face of eternity that was the '60s.It must be said, however, that the original version of LA JETEE with french narration (and English subtitles) is the way to go. In recent years, however, a new version with English narration has circulated -- the problem being that the new narration is done very poorly, taking the picture out of the correct place and time somehow... This new version was probably done to make the film "more accessible" but does so to obtain a mainstream audience LA JETEE is never going to get anyway.LA JETEE is a classic must-see....But, as is the case with anything -- or anyone -- who is truly special, the regiment out their who hate it are deeply committed to their hatred of it. And such is the case with LA JETEE.