This is a shot from Chris Marker's classic time travel short film of 1962, La Jetée.
It's not a screenshot, mind you.
It's a full shot, a still image, a photograph, one of 422 photos that make up the entirety of this 28-minute movie, or photo novel as Marker called it.
La Jetée tells the story of a man being held captive underneath a Paris destroyed by World War III, where he becomes a guinea pig in time travel experiments.
It turns out, the protagonist can time travel successfully because of a really strong memory from his childhood where he saw a mysterious woman on the pier at the Orly Airport and a man being shot dead.
This is the memory that opens the film.
The scientist's goal is to send the protagonist to the future, but they practice by sending him to the past, where he develops a relationship with that woman from the pier.
After multiple trips and trials, the scientists learn what they need to to send him to the far future, where he meets advanced humans who give him the tools to restore the Earth of his own time.
Unfortunately, now that he's no longer useful, the scientists plot to kill the man upon his return.
The advanced humans very nicely offer to bring him back to the future, but he wants to be sent to the past instead, to that moment on the pier.
The scientists chase him in time, and well, it turns out that the man who he remembers being shot dead on La Jetée was himself.
If this story sounds familiar, it's because it was an inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, and its DNA can be felt in several famous time travel and science fiction stories that came after.
Of course, what separates La Jetée from the others is Marker's choice to use still images.
Actually, that's wrong, because when you think about it, Terry Gilliam is using still images too.
It's just that he's using 24 still images every second, while Marker uses, on average, one image every four seconds.
The rapid rate of images in 12 Monkeys and pretty much every other film creates the illusion of movement in our minds.
The connection we make between frames is involuntary.
Our brains automatically stitch them together.
The marker slows down that rate, really slows it down, so that the connection ceases to be automatic.
The voiceover guides us, but we have to do the stitching consciously.
We're also forced to sit with every frame, and what do we notice about those frames?
We notice that they are dead.
All movement is gone and we're left with these lifeless fragments of time.
An appropriate thing in a world obliterated by war.
Marker shows us that the movement of moving pictures, even though it resembles life, is illusory.
It's really just another form of memory, and memory is always fragmentary and lifeless, reanimated only by the meaning we impose on it from the present, like the narrator of La Jetée, who organizes these photos into a coherent story.
But it goes deeper than that, because this is a stable time loop story, suggesting that what happens was always going to happen.
The protagonist sees his own death as a child and by virtue of him seeing it, this future is inescapable.
These kinds of stories suggest that all time is fixed, that every moment exists simultaneously, like all the moments of a movie exist on a film reel.
The future, in some greater, higher sense, is already the past, already a memory.
The main character of La Jetée is trapped in time.
In this deterministic universe, choice is as illusory as the movement of film.
The cruel irony is that time travel is usually imagined as a form of power, the power to escape linear time, to change history.
But time travelers in stable time loop stories discover again and again the exact opposite.
They are more powerless than they ever imagined.
Looking for possibility, they instead find fate.
For this reason, Marker's film is a humbling one.
It suggests that our lives are, in some profound sense, static.
Frozen, like the long dead animals, in the museum that the protagonist and the woman visit on their final date.
They might not know it, but they're looking at themselves in that museum.
And we might not know it, but we're looking at ourselves in this film.
Now if that seems depressing, well, that's because it is.
But Marker does offer us a consolation.
It doesn't come at the end of the film, but in the middle.
You see, I lied earlier when I said that this film is made up entirely of still images.
There is one shot, just one, that moves.
Proceeded by a series of fades that get closer and closer to movement.
The woman's face, for just a second, comes to life.
It is in the running for the most poignant bit of motion in all of cinema, and it's the slightest bit of motion you can possibly imagine.
What I think Marker is saying is that love, human connection, somehow transcends, somehow escapes the trap of time.
It may be cliche to say that, but there is nothing cliche about the way Marker shows it here.
It's shocking to see, so shocking that it's only later you realize that this second of motion wasn't really motion at all, just 24 photos in sequence.
Hey, everybody.
Thank you so much for watching.
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