How Not to be Seen preceded by La Jetée

Director: Chris Marker, Hito Steyerl

1962 / 44min / DCP

In a radioactive post-World War III Paris, survivors forced underground by the widespread destruction hatch a plan to send one of their number into the pre-cataclysmic past with hope of opening a way to a less toxified future in Marker’s massively influential 1963 Prix Jean Vigo winner for best short film, comprised almost entirely of still images. Preceded by How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, Steyerl’s acidic lampoon of instructional films—its title nods to a classic Monty Python skit—largely shot at a desert site housing military photo calibration targets.

“Chris Marker’s La Jetée is introduced by artist Hito Steyerl and paired with her short film How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File. La Jetée, a photo-roman composed almost entirely of still images, portrays a man in a dystopian future who is forced to time-travel through his memories to unlock the key to humanity’s survival. How Not to Be Seen, a satirical instructional video shot against the backdrop of US Air Force aerial-photography calibration targets, teaches its viewers techniques for becoming invisible within a culture of hypervisibility. The two films reveal how the images and technologies of surveillance cut both ways: in La Jetée, the recollected images that hold the key to humanity’s survival also conceal the protagonist’s death; in How Not to Be Seen, technology designed to surveil entire populations simultaneously renders certain bodies invisible.” —Thalia Stefaniuk, series co-curator and New Museum Curatorial Assistant

Hito Steyerl’s “Mechanical Kurds” (2025) is on view now at the New Museum.

La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962, 28 mins)

How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (Hito Steyerl, 2013, 16 mins)

Q&A with artist Hito Steyerl on Friday, May 29th