Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962)

Chris Marker's La Jetée isn't frequently named as one of the best ever French films for nothing, in spite of the intial-sounding dullness: this is a black and white twenty-eight-minute 'photo-roman', a film almost entirely consisting of still photos with a voiceover describing events in the past and near future and an unnamed man.

This is an experimental science fiction film initially concerning a childhood experience when the narrator would go with his parents on Sundays to the jetty at Orly airport. One occasion will be indelibly imprinted on his memory: a man dies on the jetty and the woman's reactions are really dramatic.

World War III comes and the world is devastated. In Paris the survivors who have escaped from the radiation have gone underground, although most of them are controlled and imprisoned by the new rulers. The unnamed man is a prisoner in a concentration camp under the Palais de Chaillot and – because of his profound memory and his ability to remain sane – is made a guinea pig. The new society needs food, medecine and energy to survive, and the only way that this future can be envisiged is by creating a time corridor: by sending people into other time dimensions to make it possible for the past and the future to help the present.

It takes some experimenting, injecting the man with drugs and sending him back to the woman he remembers, seeing her at the natural history museum, the Jardins des Plantes, etc, to find the woman he remembers. He strikes up a relationship with her and comes to love her. Then he's sent into the future, where the people entrust him with an electricity generator to save the time he comes from.

He's well aware that he's only an expendable guinea pig, although the people from the future pay him a visit and ask him to join them. But he wants to return to the past to rejoin his woman from before the war. He's sent back to Orly on the day he remembers, rushes to join the woman but is killed by a member of the camp: the day and the man he remembered so well was the day of own death.