A man from a post-apocalyptic future is chosen to return to the past in order help save humanity because he's haunted by a vivid memory from his childhood of a murder at an airport. If that sounds familiar, you've either already seen Chris Marker's exquisite "photo-roman" or Terry Gilliam's loose remake of it, (Twelve Monkeys.) Good as Gilliam's film is, it's no substitute for La Jetée, which is the sort of cinematic experimental oddity that wraps around the imagination like a vine and, once seen, can never be forgotten. A mere 25 minutes long, the "film"--really a series of still photographs run together apart from one startling moment of movement--begins in Paris before a vaguely described war drives humanity underground "to rule over a kingdom of rats". Sent back in time to the present (or rather to the film's 1962 present) by nothing more high-tech than an injection, the hero (Davos Hanich) finds the woman (Hél&eagrave;ne Chatelain) whose face he's remembered all his life since a murder at Paris' Orly airport. They grab a modest measure of happiness in their romance, conducted around Paris' museums and public gardens. A sly allusion to Hitchcock's Vertigo underlines the film's key theme: the near-mystical power of memory and the way an image can form the basis of an obsession, hence the film's use of ominous black-and-white stills, like scraps from disorganised family album. Muted and melancholy, La Jetée also sports one of the all-time great cinematic twists. --Leslie Felperin
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