La Jetee

La Jetee's Script pt.1

This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood. The
violent scene that upsets him, and whose meaning he was to grasp only years
later, happened on the main jetty at Orly, the Paris airport, sometime
before the outbreak of World War III.

Orly, Sunday. Parents used to take their children there to watch the
departing planes.

On this particular Sunday, the child whose story we are telling was bound
to remember the frozen sun, the setting at the end of the jetty, and a
woman's face.

Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. Later on they do claim
remembrance when they show their scars. That face he had seen was to be the
only peacetime image to survive the war. Had he really seen it? Or had he
invented that tender moment to prop up the madness to come?

The sudden roar, the woman's gesture, the crumpling body, and the cries of
the crowd on the jetty blurred by fear.

Later, he knew he had seen a man die.

And sometime after came the destruction of Paris.

Many died. Some believed themselves to be victors. Others were taken
prisoner. The survivors settled beneath Chaillot, in an underground network
of galleries.

Above ground, Paris, as most of the world, was uninhabitable, riddled with
radioactivity.

The victors stood guard over an empire of rats.

The prisoners were subjected to experiments, apparently of great concern to
those who conducted them.

The outcome was a disappointment for some - death for others - and for
others yet, madness.

One day they came to select a new guinea pig from among the prisoners.

He was the man whose story we are telling.

He was frightened. He had heard about the Head Experimenter. He was
prepared to meet Dr. Frankenstein, or the Mad Scientist. Instead, he met a
reasonable man who explained calmly that the human race was doomed. Space
was off-limits. The only hope for survival lay in Time. A loophole in Time,
and then maybe it would be possible to reach food, medicine, sources of
energy.

This was the aim of the experiments: to send emissaries into Time, to
summon the Past and Future to the aid of the Present.

But the human mind balked at the idea. To wake up in another age meant to
be born again as an adult. The shock would be too great.

Having only sent lifeless or insentient bodies through different zones of
Time, the inventors where now concentrating on men given to very strong
mental images. If they were able to conceive or dream another time, perhaps
they would be able to live in it.

The camp police spied even on dreams.

This man was selected from among a thousand for his obsession with an image
from the past.

Nothing else, at first, put stripping out the present, and its racks.

They begin again.

The man doesn't die, nor does he go mad. He suffers.