La Jetee / Sans soleil

"Great Britain released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada. LANGUAGES: English (Dolby Digital 2.0), SYNOPSIS: La Jetee:Earth lies in ruin after a nuclear war. The few surviving humans begin researching time travel, hoping to send someone back to the pre-war world for food, supplies and maybe a solution to their dire position. One man is haunted by a vague childhood memory that will prove fateful.Sans Soleil:'He wrote me....' A woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler, meditations on time and memory expressed in words and images from places as far-flung as Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco. SPECIAL FEATURES: Interactive Menu, " Product Description

Masterpiece

This is an entry on a traditional English language dictionary for the word masterpiece:

1: a work done with extraordinary skill; especially : a supreme intellectual or artistic achievement.
2: a piece of work presented to a medieval guild as evidence of qualification for the rank of master.


I have been working and studying video, film and the visual arts in general for over a decade now. my opinion, for what it's worth it, is that this work is nothing short of a masterpiece. an achievement so well crafted that it has the power to penetrate an open mind and produce sensations and feelings that were previously buried, hidden or otherwise out of reach. i am truly thankful for this. may others have the opportunity to be as generous as the makers of this film when receiving it. July 6, 2008

Criterion will release a new restored version in June 2007!

For all of you La Jetee fans out there, good news: Criterion has announced a restored re-issue of the film, in co-operation with director Chris Marker. The DVD will feature both French and English voice-over versions. Worth waiting for! March 30, 2007

Two Masterpieces

These two masterpieces at a single dvd ("La jetee" is, of course, a short film) will make a great purchase - additional material is all but non-existant but the films speak for themselves.
The essay on time, perception, media, memory and human destiny ("Sans soleil") and the poetic modernist SF ("La jetee"-that was, as you probably know, liberally remade by Terry Gilliam in "12 monkeys") are among the masterpieces of modernist cinema, not to be missed by any serious film buff.
"La jetee" is famous for its montage of stills, non-moving photographs, but viewers beware; not every shot is a still and this small deviation you should discover is just one example of Marker's subtlety. June 26, 2006

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