The cine-conversation continues with this month’s pairing: the experimental classic La Jetée (1962) and a program of early films by video artist Sadie Benning (1989-1998).

A sci-fi epic told in still images, La Jetée travels back and forth through time as a man deals with love and violence in the wake of World War III. Told with a keen awareness of genre, what follows is filmmaker Chris Marker’s spiral of narrative memory and a visual essay on image-construction as it pertains to recollection and death. (Be on the lookout for the one moving image tucked into this masterpiece.)

Sadie Benning’s video art from the 1990s uses a barrage of images and popular culture tropes to layer intimate stories of a teenager recalling her first girlfriends, loves, and anxieties. Made with a Pixelvision camera, which records footage onto cassette tapes, the video diaries are jagged art-objects themselves that blast with energy (and sometimes the music of Bikini Kill) while compounding nostalgia in the newfound.

The fictions and frictions of memory are at the forefront of these riotous films.