Dr Mark Bould, reader in film and literature at the University of the West of England and science fiction specialist, takes us through the legacy of Chris Marker's short film masterpiece La Jetée on the sci-fi genre and examines its influence on some of our best loved contemporary filmmakers.

Cinema is a kind of time machine: it displays the past in the present, and crafts the present in response to hypothetical futures. Time travel stories are experiments in narrative: they play with cause and effect, and obsess over beginnings and endings. Chris Marker's La Jetée crystallises these tendencies into a self-reflexive device for thinking about film, about birth and death, about determinism and free-will. This talk will explore how subsequent time-travel filmmakers - including James Cameron's Terminator, Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys, Shane Carruth's Primer and Rian Johnson's Looper - have developed the conceptual and cinematic terrain opened up by this short masterpiece.

Tickets: £6.00 full / £4.00 concessions. There is also a chance to see La Jetée at a visionary evening of sci-fi short films and sound experiments at At-Bristol's Planetarium on Thu 13 Nov at 19:00.

Curated and produced by Encounters Short Film & Animation Festival.

Part of Sci Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder, part of the BFI's huge celebration of science fiction, the world's most popular film genre, in Bristol and Beyond. Check watershed.co.uk/scifi for all the latest out of this world events.

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