La Jetée

The runway (La Jetée) is a black-and-white film made in the technique of photoromana (the video sequence is a sequence of alternating photographs). It was shot by French director Chris Marker in 1962.

This work is considered not only one of the most significant and influential examples of film fiction, but also one of the first films about subjectively experienced time travel.

The film lasts 28 minutes. The plot of the film includes several examples of the implementation of the principle of Novikov's self-consistency: an event in the childhood of the protagonist helps him to travel through time, which becomes the cause of that very event. On the other hand, the people of the future share with the protagonist knowledge and materials that will help humanity survive after a nuclear catastrophe and thus ensure the existence of these people of the future.

After the thermonuclear strike of the Third World War, the surviving Parisians live in the underground catacombs of Paris. They attempt time travel in the hope of finding descendants in the future and getting food, medicines and power plants from them "in the name of the past and the future helping the present."

The main character, being a prisoner, is forced to agree to time travel. He is constantly haunted by an episode of his childhood in which he witnesses a murder in the terminal of Orly Airport. This episode is used in time travel. The traveler is thrown further and further into the past. There he meets and communicates with a woman who was with the victim. After a successful journey into the past, the experimenters throw the main character into the future.

In the future, he meets with people of the revived society. Upon returning to the present, the hero is sentenced to death, but the people of the future offer to transfer him to the future and join them. He refuses, asking to be taken back to the past, to the Orly Airport terminal. Once back in the past, he realizes that the murdered man he saw as a child is himself, and that he saw his own death from the outside.

As chronomania in the movie is the mental journey of the protagonist in time, first in the past and then the future. The journey takes place exclusively in his imagination after injection of some drug. The starting point for travel into the past is one of the most vivid memories of his childhood. According to the author of the film, the future is much better protected than the past. and to send in the past is much easier. So travel into the past are considered as training before to send the consciousness of the subject in the future.

For people of the future, apparently, time travel is not something extraordinary. Not only can they transfer to the present energy and materials, but also to move people from the present to the future or the past.

Externally, the people of the future in the present. The only difference is that the strange devices the size of a few centimeters, fixed on their faces.

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»