The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965.

On my imaginary shelf of favorites Sans Soleil had always sat slightly out of view, clandestinely lingering in the shadows behind the other cinematic behemoths that had crafted the loftiest statures in my mind. It sat in an indeterminable repose as I time and time again avoided re-watching it, every time hesitating, wondering if this was truly the film I once had thought it to be. Being intimidated by my own inner-circle is just the kind of business I'm in, and baby, business is a-boomin'. Now, after a multitude of revisits, looking back on my imaginary shelf there are still those that…

"I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten."

Memories are the means of which the mind stores and remembers information, recollections of the past that are then remembered, images and impressions as can be sheathed in our minds.

Memories consist of many things, senses such as sight and sound combined with a particular placement in time; although as each memory is an encapsulation, they are all ultimately atemporal abstractions of specific moments in our past.

Memories degrade over time or due to lack of attention. Information must be stored before it can…

When it comes to movies these days I really am spoiled by so little want. I mean, it's just so easy to get hold of most things, even if one has to resort to torrent sites like karagarga or other more obscure avenues. Rewatching Sans Soleil reminded me of when I would make almost daily trips to the library in downtown San Francisco and bring home anything on DVD or VHS that looked interesting or that I'd heard about from friends on livejournal or whatever, often browsing a selection of the same old titles, yet anxious to see if perhaps anything new had been returned and not already picked out by another in the constantly ravenous swarm of movie fiends.…

Like any decently-educated cinephile, I was saddened at the passing of filmmaker Chris Marker in 2012. Having only seen La jetee by that time, I grieved based on how insanely original I found that film to be, and it further inspired me to seek out his other work to pay tribute. Well, as all of us cinephiles who vow to watch a canonical filmmaker's filmography can most likely sympathize, things in my life got in the way and that idea was derailed, replaced by other distractions or duties.

It wasn't until I purchased the discounted Criterion Blu-ray containing Marker's two greatest works that my goal was reinstated. I watched La jetee again, loving it even more, and then I moved…

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." - James Joyce, Ulysses

"I look at his machines. I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend."

Godard's fixation on new technologies of documentation speaks to his desire to upend the hierarchies of professional art, to liberate individual perspective from the tyranny of production while simultaneously making possible the expression of a true, complex history unencumbered by the manipulative edits of victorious capitalism and imperialism. Chris Marker's own approach as a filmmaker, most purely expressed in the technological experiments of Sans Soleil, are to embrace the fundamental impossibility of any one Truth. Synthesizers and emergent image manipulation technology abound in this film, and in…