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.