This film is so gorgeous. I cannot help but see this more as an art work made of collaged experience and imagery of place and time which I guess is exactly what film as a genre is in itself- but the beauty is that you can come into this from any point and start it again as a continuous loop with no beginning or end say and it would still work to convey its message- simply brilliant!
— The picture of Sandor Krasna, traveller/cameramen, as I figured from the visual and aural fest of letters and images, interspersed by the reader’s reactions and dense motifs for each concept, is someone who is in complete awe and wonderment. He is speculating, contemplating – the people, places, culture, myths, facts, life, death, happenstances, his memories of random incidents and accidents, his perception of those memories, the present which would turn to history in a moment and the history that was present a moment ago.
— It is a profound, up close examination not of the technicalities of memory but the banalities that they are made of. The film weighs in extremes as everything lies in the perception. The perception of the viewer, his attention and concentration on the subject are defacto requirements to sit through so called “not an easy” film. It is a kaleidoscope of thoughts sometimes feels like a train loaded with jumbled digressions heading to wasteville or at other times feels like a perfectly constructed puzzle with pieces that quicken the heart, a puzzle luring us into solving it.
— Each scene is carefully constructed, masterfully captured and related. References to Tarkovsky’s Zone, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and even Brando’s Horror from Apocalypse Now are absolute eye-openers. In fact only later, when I rewatched Vertigo, could not help myself declare it a favorite.
— Sans Soleil to me is film making at its intellectually stimulating heights, an inspiration, a far cry asking me to shoot anything, create something. It shows the unfathomable depth and diversity of content this world has on offer.The genius of Chris Marker offers an experience of a lifetime, as cherishable a mind fuck can ever get.
Those are my superficial thoughts/musings on Sans Soleil.
bump?
Well, and also, I think Sans Soleil is a perfect example of film from “found” sources. Documentaries are often made in the same way (shoot a bunch of stuff and then piece it together), but much of the material in Sans Soleil was basically just “collected” by Marker seemingly at random, who then “made sense” of it via editing and narration. Even the original handheld footage feels as though it was taken randomly, as perhaps a tourist would take it, and then processed through this narrative device.
It is similar, in a lot of ways, to cut-up writing, where language is pulled from all sorts of different sources and then pieced together to make something new.
bump?
Yet another example of an interesting film/filmmaker that no one seems to want to talk about.
Beautifully written / filmed visual essay on the banalities of everyday life that together comprise existence as a whole. It offers a bleak perspective that leaves you in an introspective state, constantly bugging out over being an insignificant human.
I wouldn’t agree with Bolo Tie’s suggestion that it is like cut-up writing. But it is an exploration of some rather broad themes, and as such, doesn’t seem as focused and directed as documentaries usually are.
Does anybody else think that it is more appealing now than it would have been at the time it was made? I found myself thinking a lot about how and what has changed since he made it.
I don’t know much about cut-up writing, but I don’t think this film is the same thing if we’re talking various external sources. All of this footage was shot by Marker himself, I believe. The film is an assemblage for sure. A great example of an essay film maybe.
I don’t know if the film would be any more appealing now. It seems to have a timeless quality. I don’t think of it as bound to any era.
I will bookmark and continue reading your blog in the future! Thanks alot for the informative post!
No problem. Hope you enjoy it!
Bobby:
There’s no rule that you can’t do cut-up writing with your own source material. What I mean is that the footage feels (and pretty much is) kind of a bunch of random stuff assembled and “made sense of” in a sort of crazy way. And there’s also a good deal of media that Marker just filmed off Japanese TV and cut into the movie.
I definitely agree about your point that the movie feels timeless. I mean, one can get a certain sense that the documentary itself is not of the contemporary moment, since much of the footage contains temporal markers, but I don’t think it does much to date itself stylistically. And of course, the musings of the narrator, via this “correspondence,” have a universal quality to them.
“I tried putting it with other pictures, to help make sense of them.”
Each scene of Sans Soleil is a dense layer of input. Chris Marker does the same thing in editing together his footage as the digital “Zone” represented does to it with computers, he warps the instance he captured into a matrix of associated signs and then pulls them apart and reworks them according to his choosing. This is not only in the visual elements, but the sound—at any given time, the VO will be talking (and describing what, apparently, another person is saying), a synthesizer soundtrack will be playing, and some of the actual audio recording synced or barely synced to the imagery will be playing as well, fading through each level in a weave. That is what this movie is: a semiotic weave of threads from different cultures, times, dimensions, and philosophies, into one giant post-modern netting of enriching amusement met with destabilized identities. Even the future is documented in this movie.
—PolarisDiB
I just watched Sans Soleil for the first time over this past weekend. I connected with bits and pieces, but overall I felt it was a ton of metaphysical/philosophical ramble – I wasn’t on the same wavelength as Krasna (he’s the guy who wrote the letters, etc, right?) most of the time.
I think this topic is valuable and I’d like to give it a bump, maybe get some more thoughts and opinions. What do you take away from this film? Is there a main intellectual or emotional thrust that ties anything together or is it simply stream of consciousness (the latter being how I took it)? Is this merely a study of one man’s musings and perceptions on life and the world or is he/the film trying to tell us something specifically? Is it supposed to be impenetrable?
@Polaris – what do you mean when you say the “future is documented in this movie”?
What’s the meaning behind his references to Apocalypse Now and Vertigo?
What’s the meaning of the virtual zone that that man created? And the purpose of the final shot?
I don’t care if I sound dumb, I just want a better grasp of this thing! Although it’s been less than a week since viewing it, my memory of specific narrations/sequences is already somewhat fuzzy. I do plan on rewatching someday but I’d appreciate some feedback.
I’ve seen it twice, and need to see it again. I get some sense of an underlying thread about being the author, if you will, of a documentary and how that sense of self-consciousness informs, or detracts from, the actual “product” that is the creation/documentary. I can’t clarify this feeling any further, but perhaps another viewing will help. Sans Soleil is remarkable.
I mean that if it were possible to make a documentary on subjects that haven’t yet happened, this movie does that. It does that by pointing out the interrelated weave of the effects of human societies so that history is just as intangible and messy in its possibilities as the future is, even if history contains facts. The future contains facts as well, but they are just as manipulated and transient as any recorded history.
Sans Soleil is not, actually, stream of conscious, though I may have to stretch to explain the difference. A significant difference I suppose is that stream of conscious is generative and open, where as this movie is analytic and structured. It may seem like the individual parts scurry off to unrelated ideas via association, but if you pay attention step by step they all build logically from each other. Take it from someone who has seen this movie more than a dozen times and written a something like 12 page essay on it, when you break it down it’s actually rather focused. The issue is that it is dealing with the postmodern world, the liminal areas between meaning and the shifting signifiers between texts. Oftentimes the movie is purposefully contradicting itself with voice-over that doesn’t match the images, images that don’t sync with the audio, and a pretty poetic weave of the three. The essay I wrote was originally meant to be an introduction to a different essay. In merely attempting to explain how the movie was crafted to lead into larger points about what it is saying, I ended up exhausting several pages and about a dozen sources before I realized I was finished as far as the assignment was concerned, but could continue to write a book as far as the topic was.
So what I am saying is that you need to watch it again. And probably again. And so on. Hell, the last time I watched it, it was with someone who lived in Japan for a while, and she pointed out things I never even knew about the movie — oftentimes images and settings that inform an audience in-the-know about some important cultural aspect, that the voice-over or soundtrack either doesn’t explicitly mention or sometimes is arguing against. The movie itself I feel is almost cybertext — recursively informs itself while providing openings to become something completely different that also recursively informs itself.
“What’s the meaning of the virtual zone that that man created? And the purpose of the final shot?”
Several meanings. For one thing, the Zone is an allusion to Marker’s friend Tarkovsky’s movie, Stalker. Read some of the threads on this forum about Stalker and the use of the Zone, and you will see that in that reference itself is several proposed meanings worthy of a text-avalanche of analysis and debate. Secondly, Marker’s overall musings on the meaning of images are deconstructed further by the warping and digitizing of the images. Today, we’re used to digital imagery and also used to knowing the difference between digital and film. Back then, you have all of that we’re used to, as well as a case in point that the very film that we’re watching is designed out of manipulating imagery. Some ideas that this analysis either alludes to or talks about directly:
1) Image as window into another time, place, event, or distant cause.
2) Image as mirror reflecting internal space, selves, identity.
3) Image as document, record, politics.
4) Image as ghost, time-travel, God.
a) Ghost = people who are now dead are still move in motion pictures that we watch. A dictator is recorded for prosperity and killed by the very man who is recorded for prosperity observing him being recorded for prosperity.
b) Time-travel = distances and events are pulled together and jumped between beyond the rational physical laws of space-time as concerns our ability to see them in the flesh. As a result a cine-essay of this nature is post-human. Marker himself travels to many of the places and copies many of the records, but Krasna the character is a time-traveler…
c) God = … or Creator, inventor of the images that though recorded live-action never happened in any strictly “real life” that exists in a tangible, objective form. The cine-essayist himself is inventor of the world he’s analyzing.
5) Image as numinous. Investigation into the consummately unknowable, the investigation itself more significant than the object of its investigation.
And the purpose of the final shot? One really simple answer could be that it pulls the plug on that investigation. It also reveals the hand of the image manipulator creator God. It also sets all of the preceding text into a limbo to be reclaimed or reanalyzed by other time-traveler investigator Krasna’s of all types, or the people who read those investigations. Marker made the footage and other assets of this film available in a CD-ROM, for instance, for other people to reedit as they see fit (it’s sort of his thing). This isn’t really a “film” so much as a multimedia installation. Among other things.
—PolarisDiB
Very interesting – thank you, I really appreciate the feedback. This will give me a lot to chew on before I give this film a second look. I should probably watch more of Tarkovsky’s films (I’ve only seen Solaris). I’ll definitely give a more fleshed-out, intelligent response at that point.
What about the Apocalypse Now and Vertigo references? (I haven’t seen the latter either… I know).
I’ll have to rewatch the movie to look further into the Apocalypse Now references. I simply remember going back over “The horror, the horror”, which of course has its own volumes of literature behind it. However, let us also keep in mind that Conrad’s book and Coppola’s movies are both about abject destruction of third world peoples by the first world, the conflict and survival of both, which goes back to Marker’s “survival at the two extremes” theme, as well as the relationship of nature that lives between them (“Did you know that there are emus in the Ile de France?”). The modern world as it exists is the result of colonialism — globalism is post-modern.
Vertigo is one of Chris Marker’s favorite films and he references it both here and in La Jetee, especially as it refers to the spirals of memory and the ability to get lost within it. Vertigo contains the ghostly sense of numinous investigation that Marker taps into and rewires. Another person who does this well, by the way, is Patrick Keiller in his Robinson trilogy.
—PolarisDiB
@Taka
I don’t care if I sound dumb,…
Well, I don’t think you’re dumb, but then again, I’m just as confused about the film as you are, so maybe saying you’re not dumb doesn’t carry much weight. ;) But I’m glad you asked the questions—I just wished more people did this sort of thing more often.
Are there any precursors to Sans Soleil I could read about? Maybe some kind of archival essay films?
I think the precursor to Marker is Dziga Vertov. But it’s a good question. Who are some of the pre-60s film essayists?
T
NB This is an error post that should have shown up under its own film sub-category or Criterion. I’ve reposted it and expanded on it under MEMORY:SANS SOLEIL. This should probably be deleted
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.