La jetée

Chris Marker's La jetée (1962) is a 29-minute film told entirely in stills. A personal favourite, the time-travelling short was part micro-documentary of Paris, part clockwork mystery, all told with fatalistic trepidation towards a nameless, unseen calamity that dooms the human race. La jetée went on to inspire Terry Gilliam's serviceable US adaptation, 12 Monkeys (1995), a hearty B+ preoccupied more with the director's visual eccentricities than Marker's subtle politics, even if it was unanimously well-received. 

Originally in French, the English-language cut of La jetée features a laconic, world-weary narrator who galvanized Marker's bruising truths: that humanity existed only as divisions of war and peace.

As part of Not Coming To A Theatre Near You's Time Travel Month, contributor Evan Kindley wrote a detailed analysis of La jetée, striking the thousand beats that make it a mandatory experience.

 "But Marker is also processing his misgivings about the extreme political situations he’s known firsthand. The disorientation of being, by nationality if not by opinion, on the “right” side of one conflict and the “wrong” side of the next informs La jetée’s politics, which are doubly overdetermined by the memory of the French Resistance against fascism and guilt over imperialist aggression in Algeria."

You can find the film, in its entirety, on Google Video.