la jetee is composed almost entirely of black and white still shots that tells a conventional tale of time travelling with narrative themes of time and memory, and what it does is so hauntingly brilliant and cemented itself as one of the most influential short i have ever seen. the protagonist of the story, the man, held captive after the apocalyptic world war iii in the underground tunnels of paris. he was a subject to the time travel experiment, where he was sent back and forth in time to find a solution for present situation. the key to this experiment is his strong childhood memory linked to this woman at the jetty and witnessing the death of a strange men. the movie starts out with the noise of aircraft engine and then a zoom out from the sky to show us a busy airport. this scene is deceptively clever that at first it seems like things are moving with the aid of unsteady camera shakes, but only after a while you will come to realise it is a photo still, and lays the general expectation throughout the whole 28 minutes short. the editing in this movie is remarkable and important to its thematic element, in the earlier half of the movie every image is moved to the subsequent image with quick cut and as the experiment moment starts slow dissolve technique is employed when the man travels back to the past or return to the future. each scenes (images) varies in length, sometimes with a repetitive rhythm. how does the images imply the actions? movie in its first advent is showing a series of still picture in rapid succession that creates the illusion of motion. la jetee is constantly static, every movement is froze and the time passage can only be conveyed through editing. we can only interpret the movement of characters through this series of images and sometimes with the ever-present narrator it only makes things more uncertain, such as the nature of memory. the entire scenario of protagonist with the woman inside this taxidermy museum, the humans stuck in the passage of time in the photographs but the animals are already immobile and dead. if you recall earlier of a single shot with the flocks of birds paused mid-flight in the photograph, their eerie nature is similar. la jetee is very thought-provoking, leaves a strong searing marks when it doesnt move, and with that famous 5 seconds sequence (the bird chirping crescendos!) that feels so incongruent from the whole that it stood out strongly. the nature of the memory, a comfort for the needful or frustratingly out of reach at times so tenderly portrayed with these series of masterful images, la jetee is indeed a masterful short.