La Jetée was conceived, photographed and directed by Chris Marker, a French documentary filmmaker who had worked with Alain Resnais, and whose work is distinguished by a personal essay style in remarkable films such as Letter From Siberia and Sans Soleil. La Jetée is unique in Marker’s filmography in that it his only fiction film, and even though it could be viewed as straight science fiction, it also owes a debt of gratitude to Resnais’s films.

Told almost entirely in still photographs – the credits list it as a "photo-roman" (photo-novel) – the film opens at the jetty of the Orly airport where a young boy sees a beautiful woman watching as a man falls and dies. This image remains the dominant memory of the boy throughout his life. When he is a man, there is a World War that lays the world waste, and his city of Paris has become an uninhabitable radioactive pile of rubble. Beneath the city are a group of scientists who take men prisoner in order to conduct dangerous experiments in time travel. The prisoners, however, are often driven mad by the experiments; after all, the mind does not readily accept such notions.