La Jetée (1962)

James Kirk: Narrator

Quotes 

• [last lines] 

  Narrator : [English version]  He looked for a woman's face at the end of the pier. He ran towards her. And when he recognized the man who had trailed him since the camp, he knew there was no way out of time. And he knew that this haunting moment he had been granted to see as a child, was the moment of his own death.

• [first lines] 

  Narrator : [English version]  This is the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood. The violent scene which upset him, and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later, happened on the main pier at Orly, Paris Airport, sometime before the outbreak of World War Three.

• Narrator : [English version]  Above ground, in Paris, as in most of the world, everything was rotten with radioactivity. The victors stood guard over a kingdom of rats.

• Narrator : [English version]  Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars.

• Narrator : A peacetime morning. A peacetime bedroom. A real bedroom. Real children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves.

• Narrator : [English version]  At first, nothing else but stripping out of the present. They start again. The man doesn't die, nor does he get mad. He suffers. They continue.

• Narrator : [English version]  The directors of the experiment tighten their control. They send him back. Time rolls back again. The moment happens once more. This time she is near him. He says something. She doesn't mind, she answers. They have no memories, no plans. Time builds itself painlessly around them. As landmarks they have the very taste of this moment they live and a scribbling on the walls.

• Narrator : This was the purpose of the experiment. To throw emissaries into time, to call past and future to the rescue of the present.

• Narrator : One day, she leans over him. As for him, he never knows whether he moves towards her, whether he is driven, whether he has made it up, or whether he is only dreaming.

• Narrator : The future was better protected than the past.

• Narrator : The prisoners were submitted to some experiments - of great concern, apparently, to those who conducted them. The outcome was disappointment for some, death for others, and for others - madness.

• Narrator : The camp police spied even on dreams.

• Narrator : On the tenth day, images begin to ooze like confessions.

• Narrator : No memories. No plans.

• Narrator : He knew that his jailers would not spare him. He had been a tool in their hands. His childhood image had been used as a bait to condition him. He had lived up to their expectations. He had played his part. Now he only waited to be executed; with, somewhere inside him, a memory of a twice-lived fragment of time.

• Narrator : Soon afterwards, Paris was blown up.

• Narrator : The human race was doomed. Space was off limits. The only link with survival, passed through time, a loophole in time and then, maybe, it would be possible to reach food, medicine, energy,