Amid the hundreds of sequential black & white photographs that comprise Chris Marker’s landmark 1963 “film”––the 28-minute La Jetée––some seven of them are given to a sequence where a man and woman stand in front of a slice of an ancient sequoia, the brief timeline of mankind represented within its rings. He is from a post-apocalyptic future, made to partake in torturous time-traveling experiment by his captors; she is a woman he recalls from one of his earliest memories, a face he once glimpsed out on the jetty at Orly when he was just a young boy. “As in a dream,” the voiceover describes, “he shows her a point beyond the tree, hears himself say ‘This is where I come from.’”

For those who don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of film, this reference gets explained twenty years on, in Marker’s 1983 Sans Soleil, a dreamlike travelogue/personal essay that easily peregrinates between Tokyo, Africa, and Iceland. There’s a digression about San Francisco late in the film, as Marker seeks out the shooting locations for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 Vertigo. One location has particular resonance: Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart are strolling through a park, when she stops in front of a sequoia slab, her gloved hand tracing out the points on her previous life. The narrator realizes that “this vertigo of space in reality stands for the vertigo of time.”