Sans soleil (1962)

On the surface, this remarkable 1982 filmed essay by the legendary Chris Marker--the French filmmaking pioneer whose extraordinary works about the properties of memory (including the 1962 La Jetée, remade by Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys) comprise a chapter of French New Wave history--appears to be a kind of travelogue. Using narration, documentary footage, photographs, and various sorts of mental meanderings, Marker constructs a cinematic parallel to the inherent adventures in journeying through different parts of the world. With great, self-effacing wit, Marker invokes that sense of broadened wisdom and vision that accompanies travel, as well as the delicate problem of trying to communicate the scale of that wisdom and vision to others. The delightful movie takes us to many fascinating sights in Tokyo, but what really develops is a dialogue with the audience about the nature of a filmmaker's pact with them, as well as the insecurity of trying to live up to that promise. A wonderful, clear-eyed experience, one that makes you wonder why Marker continues to be tagged with the obfuscating tag of "experimentalist." --Tom Keogh Amazon.com

A Gem of Inventive Filmmaking

I saw Sans Soleil in an art film class I took a year or so ago. I had no idea what to expect, and I was totally enthralled. I scoured the internet for a copy of the film on DVD, and finally did find a bootleg copy somewhere. It remains my favorite film experience ever, and each time I watch it I make new connections and realize another idea the film is suggesting. Before I proceed, let me note that the film is neither fiction nor traditional documentary, but is an "essay film," meaning a voiceover provides the only dialogue throughout the 2+ hours of the film, which may try the patience of a great many viewers.

This film has an incredible tone to it, a somber elegance with a hint of melancholy which is nested in the voice over, which is, again, the single element giving structure to what would otherwise look like a jumbled stretch of filmic field recordings. The voiceover, which is credited as letters from the filmmaker's friend, but which is actually a script the filmmaker wrote as if his friend had written him said letters, is itself a beautiful and haunting reflection on time and memory, of the failure of creation to overcome the march of time. So in a way, it castigates itself to failure. (This is one reading, it also contains Marker's signature postcolonial criticism, etc., etc.) The voice also seems to operate at a kind of remove, since Marker wrote the dialogue years after he shot all the disparate footage, which almost makes it feel as though we're listening to the notes some deity has transcribed while watching the feeble human race go about its business.

This said, I believe the film does have to be experienced in a certain setting, or with a certain mindset. It's best in exhibition, or when watched alone. I tried showing it to a friend in my apartment, and I could feel that something wasn't right, that he wasn't going to get as much out of it as I would. And perhaps you have to be some specific type of person to really love this film, though I have no idea what this type of person would be. December 3, 2005

A cine-voyager's encyclopaedia, one to quicken the heart.

The following comment is merely the equivalent of those travel brochures that encourge you to visit foreign places. To tell you what I thought and felt about 'Sans Soleil' would be as meaningless as somebody returning from a holiday to Majorca and eulogising their suntan. 'Sans Soleil' is a journey everyone must undertake for themselves. One (mental) health warning, though: the journey is endless - once taken, you can never go 'home' again.

Because 'Sans Soleil' IS a journey. It is a journey around the world, through the letters of Sandor Krasna accompanying the footage shot in the places he visited: a town in Iceland soon to be swallowed up by a volcano; a beach on the North African coast where stray dogs congregate; the Ile de France, unexpected home to emus; the jungles of Guinea-Bissau; but mostly Japan, whose every facet and contradiction Krasna obsessively chronicles - its devouring modernity, in the shape of skyscrapers, department stores and pioneering electronics, co-existing with the residues of ancient rites, be they propitiatory ceremonies on the site of a new building, the many shrines devoted to animals, or the New Year festivities for girls entering womanhood. He considers Japanese popular culture, TV, comics, computer games, music, dancing, horror movies; or the bizarre absorption of Western iconography, from JFK to the Pope.

'Sans Soleil' is also, therefore, a journey in time, from the barely marked prehistory of an African desert to the 11th century journal of a Japanese maid-of-honour, to the violent political struggles in the Third World in the 1960s, to a proposed synopsis for a sci-fi film set in 4001, in which a man visits our time, from a culture that has lost the art of forgetting, to our post-modern world that has lost memory.

It is a journey through the mind of a man, Sandor Krasna, whose observations and speculations over a diverse range of material reaches dizzying speculative and metaphysical heights. Taking his cue from something purely local, he conjures dazzling philosophical constructs, that never become pompous or inaccessible, but magically galvanise what is hidden behind or ignored in the everyday. What is more liberating is that the journey into his mind is a journey into our own. Everything he observes on film is recorded verbally in his letters - this might seem redundant, but it encourages us to extract our own speculations and naratives from the same material, filling in gaps, or taking ideas from a different angle.

Above all, 'Sans Soleil' is a journey through the possibilities of film. It is ostensibly a documentary, a series of recorded images of poeple, places and events as they actually happened. But they are part of a fictional construct, the letters of a fictional filmmaker. Their integrity as documentary images are qualified by experiments on the soundtrack, by distotions of their texture, and by computerised manipulation. In any case, 'Sans Soleil', like most Marker films, is what Pasolini called a 'polluted' text; already distanced by the persona of Krasna, Marker's own footage is supplemented by a bewildering mass of found film, documents taken from their original contexts reimagined in a new collage. Even the 'staight' documentary soon becomes a springboard for vertiginous speculation, attesting to Krasna's desire to privilege non-being as much as being, such as the sequence where the presumed thoughts and dreams of weary rail commuters synchronise with Krasna's own oneiric ruminations. Marker's thoughts on life, death, memory, time(s), history, dreams, resurrections, reincarnation, delusion, men, women, desire, city, war, politics, water, ritual, space, travel, creation etc., culminate in the best-ever exegesis of the world's greatest film, and Marker's holy grail, Hitchcock's 'Vertigo'. April 25, 2002

An interesting video

This is a very interesting video. I live in Japan and the traveller notices and is fascinated with everything I take for granted, for example, the January light. February 6, 2000

Sharing Experience

"Sans Soleil" is more than a movie. it is a shared experience. The ideas and images staid with me and were in my mind for several days. Remembering it is like thinking of a beautiful moment of strange and deep intimacy. December 14, 1999

one of the greatest films ever made

A fabulous, rangy ficto-documentary by Chris Marker. It doesn't, as stated above, have subtitles: this is the english version. The sound track consists of music and a voiceover read in this version by Alexandra Stewart. Iceland, Japan, Guinea-Bissau, the Ile de Paris, Hitchcock's Vertigo and as always, cats by the galore. Cinema by somebody who continually invents the cinematic everytime out. December 26, 1998

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