After World War III, Paris lies in ruins. A scientist researching time travel hopes to send subjects to various time periods. He finds a suitable subject in a prisoner with a vivid pre-war childhood memory. The prisoner travels in time and comes to understand an incident he witnessed as a child.

Chris Marker’s game-changing photo-roman is an inventive distillation of cinema, combining montage and voiceover to create a recursive stream of melancholic memories and striking fragments. Forget about special effects: this ingenious vision of science-fiction embraces the power of the imagination.