I couldn't possibly digest it all in one viewing. For now, what I got out of it was to at least temporarily feel what it might be like to have been everywhere and seen everything. That, and a few moments of beauty, simply beauty without adjectives, of a calibre so rare you'd be lucky to come across one such gem in a hundred great films. Here they're scattered about almost carelessly, in a prayer for a lost cat, dogs playing on a beach, or a woman's split-second glance, her face frozen in time by the camera.

One thing I know is this film isn't about memory, not entirely. That's certainly a hugely important part of what's going on, but it…

Sans Soleil, Chris Marker's abstract travel documentary, had been on my Lovefilm list (on a double disc with La Jetée) for about a year and a half. Thanks to Lovefilm's ongoing determination to send me things I don't feel like watching at the time, I've only seen it now thanks to the free Criterion weekend on Hulu.

I would have preferred a French version with subtitles, but the film is difficult enough to come by anyway, without that sort of pickiness, and the English dub is at least Chris Marker's own production. The narrative has a seriousness which is quite beautiful, but its complete lack of humour makes it a little too precious at times - a completely predictable fault…

Chris Marker's true free form documentary "Sans Soleil" covers a wide variety of topics while mainly just being effective as a filmed photography album. It is a video essay that contrasts differences in world cultures from Japan to Africa and a little bit of San Francisco and Iceland. It's narration plays out like a meditation on memory and time and feels like Marker's own wandering thoughts rising to formation.

"Sans Soleil" spends a great deal of its time examining the Japanese culture and their ceremonious society. While in other moments display its material mostly as scattered moments in time. The images form a decadent collage of different parts of the world and the people whom inhabit it. "Sans Soleil" also…

One of the best films I've seen, and definitely one for the arthouse buffs. Chris Marker, a famously reclusive and curiously inventive French filmmaker, has made several boundary-pushing films that combine images and ideas, treating both with equal importance in a way no filmmaker before or since has managed to do so well.

Sans Soleil is a series of video images, stills and archive footage, showing landmarks, events, processions and people from different parts of the world, including Japan, Guinea-Bissau (in Africa) and the USA. These images are complemented by a female narration, who reads aloud letters she received from her photographer friend (who is the one responsible for capturing the images we're viewing). The film's long and seemingly unending…

Documentary/Visual Essay/Travellogue/Avante-Garde something that takes footage of the world, mostly Japan, and structures it into a montage set to commentary, written by the director Chris Marker but read by a female voice.

The result is something inexplicably brilliant. Firstly, it is the one of those films that show the minutiae of life, the importance of the banal through voyeuristic montage and I am always drawn to these. But it is also a film that really makes you consider how you look at things and how you interpret them; the meaning you derive from images, or from life, and then again how you store them and remember them.

Chris Marker it seems, interprets everything with ridiculous eloquence and astounding insight and…