Just casually appearing from the clock across the hall

My father and I watched La Jetée (1962) this afternoon. I had been cautioned that it might not be as impressive as its reputation, but I found it incredibly haunting, one of the most beautiful things I have seen on a screen: it has the same kind of imperative starkness as The Seventh Seal, things that are so tightly concentrated in themselves that they become both self and symbol; the story is very simple, but it's the simplicity of something essential.

The year is unspecified; the calendar stopped with World War III and there is now only peacetime, which means before the war, and the present, which is subterranean, radioactive, blasted and dissociated; like photographs of Berlin in 1945. There is not even enough of society for a dystopia. There is a man who has been selected for certain mysterious experiments because of a childhood memory that has imprinted on him like a silver fixative: the pier at Orly, a woman's face, a man falling, himself as a small boy staring at these disparate fragments and only realizing years later that he had watched a man die. The experiments are time travel. The planet is dying; space is unreachable; humanity's only salvation lies in the future or the past. Projecting him back toward that lodestone memory, his experimenters are attempting to unstick him from time; the common results are death or madness, but with him they succeed. He opens his eyes in that year of his childhood. He speaks with the woman. She calls him her ghost. They begin an affair in the nonlinear scraps of days and moments before the war that he is constantly shuttled back and forth between. But the goal of the experiments is not the past, it is the future, and he has no place in the present.

All of which is told—with the exception of a few precious, unexpected seconds—in still black-and-white photographs, like a scrapbook of this future history, striking, slightly grainy, sometimes flawlessly and sometimes haphazardly shot; like discrete pieces of memory, strung like the protagonist from one moment to the next. The world is full of frozen ghosts. We are never allowed to live in the movement. It's an amazing effect. And it completely disjoints the basic language of film: all of a sudden those twenty-four frames a second do not equate to seamless vision, but to a progression of discontinuities which the spoken narrative guides, but which the viewer must still fill in for themselves in order for the story to make sense. Even for the French New Wave, seeing La Jetée for the first time must have been like having someone unscrew the top of your head and drop in a handful of slides. It was a good thing to see.

Memory is important. My great-aunt, although she was never referred to as anything other than "Aunt Joy," died this morning. I had met her once that I remember. A photograph from her ninety-second birthday is magnet-tacked up on the refrigerator. She and her inventor husband more or less raised my father for a brief, but memorable period in his childhood; stories from that time include lots of electronics, lots of books, and my father rolling a car. (Never let the eleven-year-old drive.) In photographs from the 1930's, they look like a couple of movie stars; my mother and my father both agree that she really, really couldn't cook. She got up to take a walk around her room and stopped. Her memory for a blessing.