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Criterion Spine #387 · Episode 1
La Jetée
Chris Marker, 1962 · with Dr. Dennis Weiss
"The past is dead."
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A man haunted by a fragment of memory from his childhood — a woman's face on the observation jetty at Orly airport — is selected by post-apocalyptic captors to travel through time. Shot almost entirely in still photographs, Chris Marker's 28-minute masterpiece is one of cinema's most radical formal experiments and one of its most emotionally devastating stories. La Jetée poses an elemental question: can memory itself become a prison?
A philosopher whose work sits at the intersection of technology, media, and human experience, Dr. Weiss brings a unique analytical lens to Marker's meditation on memory and time.
Spoiler-free context and starting points.