Pleas for Help from Another Time

Tag Area: Time Travel Trope
Short Film

La jetée

  • The pier
  • La Jetée
  • written and directed by Chris Marker
  • (at movie theaters, France, 16 February 1962) [Accessed at Youtube on 28 February 2022.]
In a world made uninhabitable by the Third World War, a prisoner is chosen as being the only person with vivid enough memories of the past to travel through time and return with salvation.

This 28-minute photo montage with about 1,200 words of narration has a nice seed of an idea, but I find it insulting to other talented filmmakers that Time magazine ranked this sketch of a film as #1 in their 2010 list of best time travel movies. —Michael Main
Tel était le but des expériences : projeter dans le Temps des émissaires, appeler le passé et l’avenit au secours du présent.
translate Such was the purpose of the experiments: to project emissaries into Time, to summon the Past and the Future to the aid of the Present.
A grid of 16 photos from Chris Marker
  • Science Fiction
  • Experimental
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel Series

Series

A Rip through Time

  • by Kelley Armstrong
  • 4 books plus 2 bonus stories (Minotaur et al., May 2022 to May 2025)
Mallory, a Canadian police detective, is in Scotland, keeping vigil at her grandmother’s side in hospice. While she is out on a break, running at night, she is attacked. When she wakes up, she finds herself in strange clothes, in a strange room—and no longer in the 21st century. —Tandy Ringoringo
I’m trying to pass back through time by returning to the place where I crossed over. My brain says that makes logical sense, but I am well aware that it only makes sense because I’ve seen it in movies and read it in books. To return to your own time, you go back to that spot—that magical bridge between worlds. Or you go there and do something you did the last time and that makes you cross over. Maybe it’s a word or a phrase or an action or an emotion. Do that thing, and it will unlock the door through time.

Which is like saying that if I tap my ruby slippers three times I can go home again. I am basing my entire theory on the imagination of fiction writers. Not scientists, because there is no science. People can’t travel through time. Therefore, writers don’t need to worry about “getting it right.” They make up whatever they want.
A modern woman in side profile with a Victorian scene on her torso.
  • Mystery and Crime
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Indiana Jones and his goddaughter set out to find the missing half of Archimedes’s “clock” (or Antikythera Mechanism). With all the usual hair-raising chases, stunts, Nazis (or former Nazis), and the added twist of some actual time travel near the end. —Tandy Ringoringo
Helena: Well, for starters, you’d have changed the course of history.
Indy: That supposed to be a bad thing?
No image currently available.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Mainstream
  • Debatable Time Travel