is being held as a guinea pig for scientists who send him, via his imagi-
nation, first into the past and then into the future to seek a way to avoid
mankind’s extinction. The film combines frames extracted from filmed
footage, documentary photos, archival images and staged narrative shots.
It squeezes every variant of time from its images of motionless ruins,
birds in flight, stuffed animals in museums, statues, fleeting smiles and
pensive frowns. Marker articulates them with an equally broad array of
devices – dissolves, rostrum pans and zooms, narrative sequences, sharp
juxtapositions, flowing music and a strong narrative voice-over. Played
out in a timeless, placeless limbo, the story ofLa Jetéecould have been
evoked only through stills. It is the form best suited to express the
tension between stasis and momentum, between the weight of memory
and the possibility of a future.^9 As we have seen, it is the inevitable
100 gaps that are characteristic of photo-stories, and rather than trying to
89 La Jetée(Chris Marker, 1963), frames.