Synopsis
"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.
Sans Soleil
1983 Directed by Chris Marker
Genre
Themes
Humanity and the world around us Politics and human rights Epic history and literature War and historical adventure journey, scientific, humanity, documentary or breathtaking political, documentary, president, democracy or propaganda death, profound, symbolism, philosophical or vision graphics, storytelling, emotion, magic or animation earth, sci-fi, space, spaceship or mankind Show All…
Popular reviews
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Isn't it stupid to tell people not to look at the camera?
I think it would be a good film to show to alien life, to say Here... this is what we Were and this is who we Are, our extended attempts to reconcile with ourselves, we simply cannot remember what we cannot remember, maybe you folk will have a better time of it than we do. The film itself feels alien, the places he visits, the things he observes, even the people he meets. . I don't know how Marker managed to film everything presented here so beautifully, but at times it feels like the air has changed colour, like the universe has accidentally been knocked by something passing… -
My main source of inspiration from the documentaries of Werner Herzog, Agnès Varda and now Chris Marker is that they all seem to represent the prospect that cinema isn’t such a challenge to create, implying that if you’re fortunate enough to simply own a camera, you too can make a film. This ‘do it yourself’ sentiment gives me much hope for the future, the idea that if every pitch I ever made went hideously wrong I could journey out into the world armed with nothing but a camera, intentions focused solely on showing this global carnival in motion.
Like Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Sans Soleil quickens the heart with its cerebral dissection of passing human beings, all…
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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.…
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"I've been around the world several times, and now only banality still interests me."
Through a fictionalized series of letters narrated by a dispassionate woman (who editorializes a bit now and then), a globetrotting cameraman describes his recent travels—to Japan, the Cape Verde islands, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland and the United States—and ruminates on a great many subjects, chief among them being the interdependence of memory and image. I couldn't fully summarize Chris Marker's Sans Soleil if my life depended on it (even after watching both the French and English versions over the past week), nor do I believe a synopsis could do justice to the film's approach; suffice to say that this densely multifarious essay film revels in the transportive essence…
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"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…
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People have, for as long as I can remember, told me I was “smart.” I have never understood this. I do not believe I have ever talked to anyone in my entire life who I was somehow “smarter” than, whatever that even means. I have never encountered a single person who didn’t have something to teach me, something I would never have known without that particular encounter with that particular person at that particular time. If anything, in most every interaction I have, I am regularly awed by how much more of the world the other party understands, how much I can learn from them. I go through life assuming everyone I speak to is “smarter than me,” and I do…
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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.
Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.
I’m sorely tempted to not write an actual review for Sans Soleil, but instead just keep on copying out all the quotes that made my head spin. However, if I were to do that, I’d end up transcribing the entirety of the film’s narration, which is just plagiarism, so. Here goes nothing!
Sans Soleil resists description, and even struggles to fit neatly into the definition of a ‘film’ at all. Rather than…
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It brings me no joy to declare that I loathed a film generally considered to be a masterpiece. But boy did I loathe this.
Marker seems to be the celebrated cinematic incarnation of my freshman year roommate. You know the type, the prematurely cynical philosophy major who says things like "History only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar coated." Or who says of censorship "it points to the absolute by hiding it - that's what religion has always done," or calls Pac-Man "the perfect graphic metaphor of man's fate."
Sheesh.
I'll give the film credit for having having an unintentionally appropriate title though, since nothing here was particularly enlightening.
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Chris Marker, the director of 1962’s influential science fiction short La Jetée, delivers a distinctive piece of work with Sans Soleil. The documentary substantiates the pathos of daily existence with reflections on the behaviour of memory and expressions of sorrow, and through its narration, manages to convey components of being a travelogue with contemplations written entirely by the filmmaker but which are purportedly delivered aloud from letters penned by an imagined cameraman named Sandor Krasna.
Marker exemplifies with astonishing ease how all the seemingly different ingredients blend and assemble into a grand collage which inquisitively peels away classifications and boundaries. It's a hugely thought-provoking philosophical documentary that's sprawlingly beautiful and often surprisingly cuttingly sarcastic. It mischievously defies tradition as well as the description of what a documentary can be, and more accurately could be described as a portrait of consciousness. Sans Soleil is a fascinating film.
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I could honestly watch this film a several hundred more times in my lifetime. In other news, probably the only time I've ever audibly "aww"-ed at a penis at the movies.
Metrograph. 35mm.
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I think every French person is born with the extraordinary gift of being capable of and keen on saying very obvious things that mean very little but using the most wordy and flowery diction possible. Let me yarn on about my dog’s bowel movement this morning as I illustrate a tenderly breaking dawn in the summer heat and relate this back to some contemporary art bullshit I’ve viewed. Don’t you ever just see a dog shitting and think about the soft violence of nature as it fades away and is reborn through the earth? Sometimes I read ___ magazines at the ___ and think back to my youth when I ____ that ___. For the love of God. End me.
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56/100
[Originally written on my blog.]
Succeeded in getting more out of this the second time, though I'm down with Vincent Canby to some extent when he suggests that Marker has merely fashioned a flimsy clothesline upon which to string the edited highlights of years of vacation footage. (Simile mine.) Knowing that the voiceover text is in fact Marker filtered through fictional intermediaries made me note its similarity to Varda's eclectic essays, though I still prefer a bit more focus than we get here; if there's a path connecting "How to film the ladies of Bissau?" (with its haunting single-frame acknowledgment of the camera) to, say, the Vertigo tour, I'm afraid it escaped me. No, the fact that he's a tourist shooting film in both instances does not suffice.
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