Sans Soleil (1983)
Directed by: Chris
Marker.
Written by: Chris
Marker.
Chris
Marker’s Sans Soleil has for a longtime been one of my biggest cinematic blind
spots. The film always ranks high on surveys of the best documentaries of all
time, and is the highest ranked film (at least of those readily available) on
the They Shoot Pictures Don’t They annual list of the 1,000 greatest films –
based on a lot of surveys combined together – that I had not seen. Marker, in
general, is a blind spot for me – I have seen his masterpiece La Jetee from
1962, but nothing else of his. This film has been on to watch list for years –
and I’ve always put it off. Now that I have seen it, I think it was right of me
to put it off until now. In my younger days, a film like Sans Soleil would have
driven me nuts and probably bored me to tears.
That is
because Sans Soleil is a strange film. It’s a documentary, but with fictional
elements. It’s a montage film and a travelogue and a home movie. There are
parts that are a strange tribute to Hitchcock’s Vertigo – which La Jetee was
too, really. It is a film in which a fictional female narrator reads the
letters of a fictional cameraman describing what they seen and encountered in
their travels – a lot in Japan and Africa but also other places – like the stop
in San Francisco for the Vertigo tour, or rural Iceland in which children walk
together hand-in-hand representing innocence and happiness. It uses stock
footage, and footage Marker shot himself. The sound in the movie is never
synced with the images. The film is very personal for Marker – he is doing
everything here, from the writing, to the music to the editing, etc. – and yet
it is also deliberately distancing himself from it. He doesn’t even take a
traditional director credit for the film.
A film
like Sans Soleil is challenging – but in a way that I can find more frustrating
than rewarding. It does, kind of, remind me of the what Godard has been doing
for a while now as well – making these indecipherable film montages in which
Godard goes off on political tangents and rants, that you either understand or
don’t – care about, or don’t care about. Godard can be cranky – and he most
often is – but he can also be playful in these films, most notably Goodbye to
Language 3-D. Most of the time though, he seems disappointed in us – those in the
audience, and people around the world.
Marker’s
film is different though. It is a view of a Western thinker, a Marxist, looking
outwards at the world he sees. You can say that at times Marker does seem to eroticize
the people he seems – “othering” them in ways that only a white Westerner
would, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But Marker isn’t looking down on
anyone in the film, and he finds fascinating connections between the different
cultures he surveys – and relates it all to the broader human experience.
More than
anything, the film is about memory - how flawed memory can be. We don’t really
remember what happened, only what we think happened. It is a film about history
– and the flaws there as well. It is a film about modernity – seen through the
innovations at the time, including Pac-Man. It is Marker reaching out and
trying to find connections – finding some, losing others. And that’s primarily
what makes it different than Godard’s films – which are very insular to his own
worldview. Godard is confident he is right, in a way I don’t think Marker is.
Or
perhaps I’m completely wrong about Sans Soleil and I totally misunderstood it.
So be it. As the narrator says in the film “Not understanding obviously adds to
the pleasure”.
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