Origami instructions based on a film by Chris Marker
1962 French science fiction featurette directed by Chris Marker and associated with the Left Bank artistic movement, created entirely of black and white photographs.
1. S ometime before the outbreak of WWIII, there is a child on the jetty at an airport in Orly.
2. T he child sees a man shot and killed. That scene, along with the image of the woman, leaves a lasting impression on the child.
3. Y ears later, World War 3, a nuclear war, breaks out. Paris is destroyed. Survivors settled at Chaillot, underneath a network of galleries.
Some are winners, some are prisoners. The winners ran experimentors onto prisoners.
4. T he man, formerly the child, is a prisoner. He continues to have flashbacks to the moment when he saw a man die for the first time.
He also continues to see clear visions of the woman. The man is selected as a test subject.
5. Dr. Frankenstein, who is running the experiment, says that the experiment is about finding a loophole in time, and travel to different times to access food, medicine, and sources of energy, to summon the past, and the future to help the present.
6. T hen, it is revealed that the man is selected for this experiment because he is able to dream another time. Perhaps he will be able to live in a different time because of his strong mental image of the past.
7. The experimenters inject the man with a serum.
After multiple attempts, he succeeds on the tenth day.
He runs into the woman who reoccurs in a dream and pursues a romantic relationship with her.
As the test progresses, he continues to travel to the past to meet with the woman.
8. T he man was spending time with the woman at a museum when he gets summoned back to the present.
The experimenters were planning to send him to the future. He succeeds.
9. T he man has a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future. He is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society.
10. T he man returns to the present because he has accomplished his mission. When he returns, he learns that his captors are planning to rid of his existence, since there is no use for him anymore.
11. T hose from the future intercept and invites him to join them in their time and escape death.
12. T he man instead makes the decision to go back to the past, to reconnect with the woman he loved, the same woman from his dreams.
13. T he man manages to make it to the past, but he is at Orly, at the same jetty where he saw a man killed for the first time.
He locates the woman and runs towards her. As he is running, he sees the childhood version of himself standing near the woman.
A spy who had trailed him from the camp then pulls out a gun and shoots the man.
Then, the man realizes that the man that was shot and killed from his childhood was himself.
Typeset in Triptych by The Pyte Foundry Photography and design by Yeji Kim