I first saw Chris Marker’s La Jetée in 1988.

First year at UVa. A class called “Cinema as an Art Form.” Twenty-eight minutes of still black-and-white photographs and a voice. Almost no motion except one blink. I walked out knowing I’d seen something complete. I did not know Hollywood would spend $30 million turning it into a Bruce Willis movie.

Seven years later I sat in a multiplex and watched Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. Virus, underground future, a convict sent backward through time, a woman, an airport, a death that would not stay in the past.

I didn’t make the connection at first.

Then I did. Same memory. Same woman. Same pier. Same man watching himself die.

La Jetée (1962) is not a conventional film. Marker called it a photo-roman. Survivors of World War III live under Paris. Scientists send a prisoner through time because he is marked by one childhood image: a woman on the observation deck at Orly, and a man being shot. He finds her in the past. He falls in love. He understands too late that the death he saw as a child was his own.

Universal bought the remake rights. Robert Kosberg pitched it. David and Janet Peoples wrote the feature. Charles Roven hired Gilliam. Gilliam said he avoided watching the original until his own film was finished. He’d only seen the stills.

What they kept is the skeleton:

A prisoner chosen because of a single memory. An uninhabitable future. The woman. The airport. The loop that closes when he becomes the image that made him.
The climax of 12 Monkeys is La Jetée’s jetty.
What they changed is the nervous system:
Nuclear war becomes a virus. The Palais de Chaillot tunnels become Philadelphia’s underworld. Silence and stills become Gilliam noise — Brad Pitt’s mania, the Army of the 12 Monkeys, conspiracy, junk-tech, madness that might be prophecy.
Same story. Different temperature.

I saw the original in a classroom in 1988. I saw the remake in a theater in 1995. It took years to put them together, which is the joke the films are telling. You don’t recognize the image until you’re already inside it.

Watch La Jetée first. Then 12 Monkeys.

The short is colder and, in some ways, more perfect. The feature is louder, messier, and more Gilliam. Both are about a man who cannot escape the picture that invented him.
@TerryGilliam @Criterion #LaJetee #12Monkeys