As the basis for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, Chris Marker’s La Jetée, packaged by Criterion with Marker’s other landmark film Sans Soleil, had instant appeal. Gilliam’s superfluous failure to La Jetée, a lean time travel narrative with a Möbius band twist, is only apparent in retrospect. Clocking in at 28 minutes in length and composed entirely, save for one crucial moment, of still photographs, La Jetée’s stark black & white reality contains none of Gilliam’s idiosyncratic excesses. The inevitable and tragic fate of the nameless, post-apocalyptic protagonist resonates clearer as a result. Realizing Chris Marker’s masterpiece (ranked #50 on Sight & Sound’s decennial Greatest Films of All Time List) can be played back to back ad infinitum is fantastic. Perhaps even more fantastic is the moment of subtle brilliance where the protagonist and his love interest (or “constant” in LOST terminology) are frozen in time along with a museum of taxidermied animals, La Jetée’s “most self-reflexive shot”, according to essayist Jonathan Romney, that prompts the question “whether these still images tend to evoke animation in dead beings or to reduce living creatures to deathly stasis”—as haunting an image as has been seared onto the protagonist’s psyche since childhood, that of a woman wearing a lovelorn expression on the pier of the Orly airport moments before her lover is shot and killed before her eyes.