La Jetée
This celebrated short work by French film-essayist and poet Chris Marker (Sans Soleil) actually has much in common with Tarkovsky's widescreen epic Solaris. Both deal with the depths of nostalgia associated with memory, time, and time-travel, and together they form an exploration of emotions in the scientific (and post-scientific) age that is unique to the cinema. La Jetée, constructed from still photographs and frozen shots, tells of a post-World War III Paris where an underground band of survivors become despots in their attempt to reach the future as a way out of the radioactive present. Marker's hero is the helpless astronaut on these torturous voyages through time. His vivid memory of a childhood image enables him, after much suffering, to journey back in time instead of forward, for a brief, perfectly ordinary but glorious love affair with a woman he had seen before the holocaust. The film's one flicker of movement becomes a sensuous, joyous burst, and then the man is called back by his tormentors, eventually to become witness to his own death as past and future merge.