La Jetée, the experimental New Wave short by the French director Chris Marker, is probably best known today for having served as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. But Marker’s 26-minute masterpiece is by far the more important and original work, and not just because 12 Monkeys was almost ruined by Brad Pitt’s awful—but Oscar-nominated!—performance as a deranged animal-rights activist.

Except for one brief clip of a blinking eye, La Jetée (1962) is comprised entirely of black-and-white still images, voiceover narration, and unobtrusive minor-key music. The action, such as it is, takes place in the aftermath of World War III. Paris has been destroyed, along with much of the rest of the civilized world, and all survivors were long ago forced underground. A group of scientists is attempting to find food and energy by subjecting prisoners to rudimentary time-travel experiments. The film’s time-traveling protagonist, identified simply as “the man whose story we are telling,” is haunted by a childhood memory of an incident he witnessed on a pier (a jetée) at Orly Airport. He is sent again and again to prewar Paris, where he spends time with a beautiful young woman whose significance to him he can’t quite grasp.

La Jetée is about time, memory, and longing, among other things, and it’s incredibly complex and powerful. This seven-and-a-half-minute clip is from the first half of the film. (I taped it off of the Sundance Channel a few months ago.) The voiceover has been rerecorded in (French-accented) English.

The film seems to be hard to find on DVD, but Amazon can hook you up with used copies of a DVD compilation that includes it. And ooh, I just discovered that someone has uploaded the entire original French version to Google Video.

I think I was about 15 when a family friend turned me on to Luis d’Antin Van Rooten’s extremely clever and hilarious 1967 book Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames—The d’Antin Manuscript. The conceit of the book is that it’s an annotated version of an obscure collection of medieval French verse. But it’s actually a homophonic translation of Mother Goose rhymes from English to French. What that means is that Van Rooten translated the sounds of the words, not the words themselves. The resulting “French” versions only make sense as French-accented English. So “Mother Goose Rhymes” becomes “Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames”; “Jack and Jill” becomes “Chacun Gille”; and “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater” becomes “Pis-terre, Pis-terre / Pomme qui n’y terre.” D’Antin’s “translations” use real French words but are utterly nonsensical in French. You don’t have to understand actual French to read d’Antin’s rhymes; you just need a fairly good grasp of French pronunciation rules and an ability to recall Mother Goose. D’Antin’s elaborate, deadpan annotations, in which he purports to extract meaning from the incoherent French, are great parodies of academic pretentiousness. The annotations are amusing even if you don’t know French (I don’t, not really), and I’m sure they’re even funnier if you do.

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