Dave I just opened a new thread on Sans Soleil and then saw this by you. Before I rattle out a reply, maybe we should choose which playground.
better to write on the one associated with the film, I think, but I leave it to you.
OK, I agree with you, so it shall be here…
Here’s my thing with this film. Whilst La Jetee spills seminal creative fluid, is heralded as a poignant classic and continues to inspire both new and established filmmakers to this day, what is born in the womb of Sans Soleil is Chris Marker as a true auteur, advancing on a world he largely seems to experience as filled with tristesse and empty ritual, casting dark mnemonic shadows on the wall with little more than a handheld camera and an attitude.
What I get most from this is not so much a dwelling upon the retrieval of memory, but the original encoding itself. Any single moment of experience is intensely subjective —each heartbeat a car crash of references to other moments, a fragmented mirror of reflections both real and imagined, so that as we live and breathe the very lens (the eye, the ‘I’) through which we record our walking about this earth is warped by (self) consciousness. And then post-encoding, all retrieval is cursed by entropy: gradually we drift further and further from the center of our experience, and this ultimately leads to a world of argued histories and a global failure to connect with our own humanity.
We’re basically all slaves to memory. Marker fits in with the finest tradition of artists that have become obsessed with this cognitive concept; i.e. Woolf, Proust, Joyce, Resnais, etc. Sorry, a vague sentiment, I know, but I’m just warming up here.
This is an interesting thread.
Best films to watch for this concept?
I forget.
Wild Strawberries?
Dave McDougall
memory: creates reality. distorts reality. invents subjectivity. obliterates subjectivity. invents the present. evades the present.
and then some.
is memory in this film subjective? meta-subjective? both?
does it ground you in what is or in what was?
this film is part of a web of works about memory’s creative/destructive path (along with Godard, Lynch, Hitchcock, Resnais, Duras, Robbe-Grillet, etc, etc), and I’d like to hear from others on the impressions you get of memory’s complexities from Sans Soleil.