La Jetée (1962) - full transcript

This is the story of a man

marked by an image from his childhood.

The violent scene that upset him,

and whose meaning

he was to grasp only years later,

happened on the observation deck

at Orly Airport

a few years

before the outbreak of World War III.

Parents take their children to Orly

on Sunday to watch the departing planes.

Of this particular Sunday,

the child whose story

were about to tell

would long remember

the frozen sun,

the setting

at the end of the deck,

and a woman's face.

Nothing distinguishes memories

from ordinary moments.

Only later do they become memorable

by the scars they leave.

That face was to be

the only image from peacetime

to survive the war.

He often wondered

if he'd really seen it

or just invented

that tender moment

to counter the moments

of madness to follow.

The sudden roar,

the woman's gesture,

the crumpling body,

and the cries of the crowd,

blurred by fear.

Later he realized

that he'd seen a man die.

Soon afterwards,

Paris was destroyed.

Many died.

Some considered

themselves victors.

Others were taken prisoner.

The survivors settled in underground

passages beneath Chaillot.

Above ground, Paris,

like most of the world,

was uninhabitable,

riddled with radioactivity.

The victors stood guard

over a kingdom of rats.

Prisoners were subjected

to experiments

apparently of great concern

to those who conducted them.

The outcome was disappointment

for the experimenters,

and for the subjects,

either death

or madness.

One day they came to select a new

guinea pig from among the prisoners.

One day they came to select a new

guinea pig from among the prisoners.

He was the man whose story

we are now telling.

He was frightened.

He had heard

about the head experimenter

and was prepared

to face the mad scientist

or Dr. Frankenstein.

Instead, he found

a reasonable man

who calmly explained

that the human race was doomed.

Space was out of the question.

The only hope for survival

lay in time.

A loophole in time

might make it possible

to reach food, medicine, energy.

This was the aim

of the experiments:

to send emissaries into time

to summon past and future

to the rescue of the present.

But the human mind recoiled.

to wake up in another time

was to be born again,

as an adult.

The shock was too great.

After sending lifeless or unconscious

bodies into different time zones,

the inventors now focused on men

with powerful mental images.

If they could conceive of

or dream of another time,

perhaps they would be able

to enter into it.

The camp police spied

even on dreams.

This man was selected

due to his fixation

on an image from his past.

First, the present and all its supports

must be stripped away.

They start again.

The subject doesn't die

or go mad.

He suffers.

They continue.

On the tenth day,

images begin to well up

like confessions.

A peacetime morning.

A peacetime bedroom.

A real bedroom.

Real children.

Real birds.

Real cats.

Real graves.

On the 16th day,

he's on the observation deck.

It's empty.

Sometimes he finds

a day of happiness,

but it's a different one.

A happy face,

but it's a different one.

Ruins.

A girl who could be

the one he seeks.

He crosses her path

on the observation deck.

She smiles at him from a car.

Other images pour out

and mix

in a museum

that is perhaps his memory.

On the 30th day,

the meeting takes place.

This time he's sure

he recognizes her.

In fact, it's the only thing

he's sure of

in this timeless world

that amazes him with its riches.

All around him

are astonishing materials:

glass, plastic,

terry cloth.

When he shakes off

his fascination,

the woman has disappeared.

The experimenters

tighten their control

and send him back

on the trail.

Time rolls back again.

The moment returns.

This time he's close to her

and speaks to her.

She greets him without surprise.

They have no memories, no plans.

Time takes shape painlessly

around them.

Their sole landmarks

are the taste of the moment

and the markings on the walls.

Later they're in a garden.

He remembers

that there were gardens.

She asks him about his necklace,

the combat necklace he wore at the start

of the war that is to break out someday.

He makes up an explanation.

They stop before a redwood trunk

marked with historical dates.

She mentions a foreign name

he doesn't understand.

As in a dream, he points beyond

the tree trunk and hears himself say,

"That's where I come from"...

and falls back, exhausted.

Then another wave of time

lifts him up.

They probably give him

another shot.

Now she lies sleeping in the sun.

He thinks that,

in the time it took him

to return to her world,

she died.

She wakes up.

He speaks to her again.

The truth being

too fantastic to be believed,

he mentions only the essentials:

a distant land,

a long way to travel.

She listens and doesn't laugh.

Is it the same day?

He no longer knows.

They'll take countless walks

like this one,

and an unspoken trust

will grow between them,

trust in its purest form.

No memories, no plans,

until the moment he senses

a barrier ahead.

Thus the first set of experiments

came to an end.

It was the starting point

for a series of tests

in which he'd meet her

at different times.

He meets her a few times

before their markings on the walls.

She welcomes him simply.

She calls him her ghost.

One day she seems frightened.

One day she leans over him.

He never knows

whether he moves toward her

or is pushed,

whether he's made it all up

or is only dreaming.

Around the 50th day,

they meet in a museum

filled with ageless animals.

Now their aim is perfect.

They can aim him

at a given moment,

and he can stay there

and move around at ease.

She too seems to have adjusted.

She accepts the ways of this visitor

as a natural phenomenon,

how he comes and goes,

exists, talks,

laughs with her, falls silent,

listens to her,

and then vanishes.

Once back in the laboratory,

he sensed that something

had changed.

The camp director was there.

From what was said around him,

he gathered that after the success

of the experiments in the past,

they now meant

to launch him into the future.

His excitement

made him forget for a moment

that the meeting in the museum

was their last.

The future was better armored

than the past.

After several

even more grueling attempts,

he eventually caught

some waves of the world to come.

He crossed

a planet transformed...

with Paris rebuilt...

10,000 incomprehensible streets.

Others were waiting for him.

It was a brief encounter.

They clearly refused

this slag from another time.

He recited his lesson:

Since humanity had survived,

it couldn't refuse to its own past

the means of its own survival.

This sophism was taken

for fate in disguise.

They gave him a power unit

strong enough to set

all human industry in motion again.

Then the gates of the future

closed once again.

Shortly after his return,

he was transferred

to another part of the camp.

He knew his jailers

would not spare him.

He'd been a tool

in their hands.

His childhood image had served

as bait to train him.

He'd lived up to their expectations

and played his part.

Now he only waited

to be executed,

with the memory of a twice-lived

moment in time somewhere inside him.

Deep in this limbo, he received word

from the people of the future.

They too could travel through time,

and more easily.

There they were,

ready to accept him

as one of their own.

But he had a different request.

Rather than that pacified future,

he asked to be returned

to the world of his childhood

and that woman

who might be waiting for him.

Once again

on the observation deck at Orly...

on this warm Sunday before the war

where he could now stay,

he thought confusedly

how the child he'd been

must be there too,

watching the planes.

But first he sought out

a woman's face

at the end of the deck.

He ran toward her.

And when he recognized the man

who'd trailed him from the camp,

he realized there was

no escape from time,

and that that moment

he'd been granted to see as a child,

and that had obsessed him

forever after...

was the moment

of his own death.