Director: Chris Marker | Release: 1962 | Genre: Sci-Fi
This brings us to the French short film that inspired Twelve Monkeys: La Jeteé. Made in 1962 and directed by Chris Marker it tells the story of another man, this time without a name, living below the surface of a hopelessly hostile world, destroyed by World War Three (a familiar fear of annihilation from that time, also shown, for pitch black laughs, in Dr Strangelove). He is selected, by an unnamed superior, and told that there is hope for the future, but it lies not in space but in time. He is sent back in time to bring back resources,
While 12 Monkeys wasn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows this film takes the nightmarish bleakness and abstract surrealism even further: there are no moving images, only still pictures, nor even a dash of colour, everything is shown in black and white, at one point a man’s face under a light bore an uncanny resemblance to a skull. Even the voices are grim and melancholy. There is no music, just a voice.
All these films have in common a darkness, sometimes literal and sometimes metaphorical, and all deal with the mind, including the outer reaches of sanity. All use music and unusual photography, of different sorts, to create a sense of confusion.
Tomás 