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
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Alternative Titles
Sunless, Vailla aurinkoa, 태양 없이, Güneşsiz
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Themes
Humanity and the world around us Politics and human rights Epic history and literature War and historical adventure journey, scientific, documentary, humanity or earth political, democracy, documentary, president or propaganda death, profound, symbolism, philosophical or vision earth, sci-fi, space, spaceship or mankind storytelling, graphics, emotion, breathtaking or emotional 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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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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As I watched this, I felt that same familiar feeling of guilt, like I was watching something that didn’t belong to me. More specifically, I felt like I was watching something that didn’t really belong to anyone, except for the natural space and form that the camera and its operator coercively decide to invade.
Tourism is inherently oppressive, and it makes observation and exploration difficult, if not impossible, to do blamelessly. It doesn’t really matter if the visitor, in this case the author and the camera operator, elevate themselves earnestly or otherwise into a state of consciousness and awareness of the forms that are entering the lens. It is more important than anything else to emphasize that with those forms,…
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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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One of the most revered essay documentaries in history, Sans Soleil is a cinema achievement, and poetic filmmaking at its finest. It manages to capture the beauty in the banality of life, in the context of global history, politics, and culture. Even though the narration can feel excessive at times, I appreciate this holy experience nonetheless.
Told from the perspective of a philosophical, sentimental globetrotter, Sans Soleil examines different cultures of living under its microscopic yet sometimes experimental lens. From Japan, to Africa, and to Ireland, the focus shifts back and forth spontaneously, with most of the runtime documenting the intricate slices of Toyko living. I wouldn't say it's free of Eurocentric gazing and pretentious overanalysis, but it's definitely a fascinating insight into a complicated microsystem of existence that transcends time and space. Recommended.
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***The ElCochran90 Discord Server's Watch Party Redeem #36***
**Recommended by Seventh_Persona.**
*Find full updated list here*.Memory and remembrance: an illusory psychological construct, inherent in the human mind, but thought to be the revival of any past stimuli, when it's only a limited exercise of reconstruction, a fragmentary reproduction of history, or a personal or collective experience. History is revisionist, not only with new tangible discoveries and ideological adoptions, but also from the modern perspective of the victors as its writers.
One of the founding fathers of essay cinema along with Resnais, a trend that would inspire the narrative structure of several filmmakers starting with Godard, Varda and Jean-Daniel Pollet, Marker puts into celluloid the greatest love letter to memory…
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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."
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…
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