A response to the reviewer who called the film pretentious claptrap: This movie is not for everyone and I can easily understand the sentiments of one who finds it pretentious. But when one says "Assumptions include that the east is superior to the west, television is bad, capitalism evil,etc." you are so thoroughly missing the point of the film that I have to wonder if you watched it out of the corner of your eye while doing a crossword puzzle. Perhaps one doesn't hear "Capitalism is good" and understands "capitalism is evil," but that all occurs within the viewer. I for one never saw any of these "assumptions" being made here.
44 Reviews
Documentaries record the real; this is beyond 'real'.
alice liddell12 April 2000
When is a documentary not a documentary? SANS SOLEIL is a film comprising 'real' images, narrated with 'real' observations. The subject-matter is Japan, post-modernism, the erasion of memory, the flattening-out of history, decentring, surface, pastiche. It records life-styles, trends, habits, rites, artistic movements with the rigour of an anthropologist. It is a film about travel: throughout the world, throughout time. It is science fiction (Terry Gilliam's TWELVE MONKEYS fleshes out an anecdote here). It is a Borgesian fantasy, (the filmmaker is actually a fictional creation , Sandor Krasna). To call it a documentary, or even a film, would be like calling the Sistine Chapel a ceiling.
The Two Poles of Survival = Tokyo / Africa
chris-25123 November 2009
Visionary filmmaker Chris Marker creates a portrait of ever encroaching globalization in this 100 minute odyssey between the 'two poles of survival'.
Probably one of the greatest 'avant-garde' films of all time, don't let its classification dissuade you. This is a very simple film with a very simple message: though time changes, what nourishes humanity remains constant, namely love, memory, hope, understanding, recognition and belonging.
The only frustrating thing about this film is that one viewing is not enough. This is a work you will cherish re-watching for years to come.
Direct cinema science-fiction set on Planet Earth.
Probably one of the greatest 'avant-garde' films of all time, don't let its classification dissuade you. This is a very simple film with a very simple message: though time changes, what nourishes humanity remains constant, namely love, memory, hope, understanding, recognition and belonging.
The only frustrating thing about this film is that one viewing is not enough. This is a work you will cherish re-watching for years to come.
Direct cinema science-fiction set on Planet Earth.
In the entire history of cinema, there have been only two truly important, indispensible, founding films - this is one of them.
the red duchess31 October 2000
'Sans Soleil' opens with a ferry trip to Japan, with the camera peering at sleeping passengers. This is a perfect encapsulation of the film as a whole, a beautiful mixture of journey and dream. The film is ostensibly a documentary, that holier-than-thou genre convinced of its own superior truthfulness. And the film is full of documentary images, snapshots from the faraway places Marker visits, Japan, Africa, South America, San Francisco, Iceland, Paris. The film is full of the observations of the filmmaker about the cultures he observes.
But 'Sans Soleil' couldn't soar further from the prosaic ambitions of the documentary. Like the film it most resembles, Marker's own 'La Jetee', it is in fact a work of science fiction, as much about time travel as literal travel. Each place Marker visits is stripped of its familiarity, and made eerie, alien. Concrete images become springboards for dizzy philosophical speculations. The film moves with ease from the court of 11th century Imperial Japan to the revolutionary struggles in 1960s Africa to emus on the Ile de France to an interpretation of Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' to astrological rumination on a desert beach, and still remains thematically coherent and full of the most startling connections.
It is this structure that creates the feel of science fiction, the linking of seemingly disparate images, symbols, stories, experiences, places to create a strange pattern which emanates something spiritual, that seems to make sense of increasing chaos, dislocation, displacement. But we are constantly reminded that these are secular, man-made, ad-hoc, arbitrary constructions, as phantom as the relationship in 'La Jetee', but, similarly, a necessary construction to cover the abyss.
The distortion of the soundtrack, the mixture of silence and mooged classics; the computer visuals of Marker's friend, known as The Zone, which seep conventional, representational images and turn them into ghosts, traces, stripped of history, recognisability, humanity; the film's fictional framework (the narrative comprises letters to the narrator by the filmmaker, Sandor Krasna) all add to this unsettling science fiction appropriation of the documentary genre.
When the history of cinema comes to be written in centuries to come, there will really only be two films that will survive from its first century, films dense, supple, playful, renewable enough, and full of enough possibilities for future direction, to transcend the local, the generic, the pretentious, the narrative. One is that final gasp of modernist cinema, 'Vertigo'; the other is this epitome of post-modernity. in many ways, 'Sans Soleil' is a stunning exegisis on Hitchcock's masterpiece (which had only just been re-released after two-decades withdrawel), echoing its circular structure, its concern with time, memory, the elusiveness of history.
'Soleil' locates the crisis of post-modernity in Japan, that most modern of modern capitalist societies. With the curiosity of an anthropologist, the good humour of an essayist, and the eye for the unusual of a rare filmmaker, Marker gives us a Japan we rarely see, even in the country's own cinema; on the one hand a culture of startling modernity, leading the way in computers, technology, department stores etc., on the other full of residual traditions, rituals, superstitions, ceremonies, going back centuries. The co-existence of these two time-scales has resulted in a kind of blur, a temporal vacuum, whereby all sense of time and perspective is lost, where religious ceremonies for the souls of stray pets co-exist with state-of-the-art video games.
Japan is like a ship that has lost its anchor, where all time is the same, and therefore irrelevant, just as Scottie Ferguson wanders around dazed, in a loop of fantasy and distorted memory. Without history, memory, a culture ceases to be a culture and lays itself open to all sorts of vulnerability. But this lack of foundation ironically leads to a greater freedom, particularly of the mind, and the film, as it reaches its conclusion, becomes visionary and hallucinatory.
'Soleil' is anything but bleak - its stories, myths, cultural tidbits, observations are unfailingly entertaining and full of good humour. Krasna compares the overcultured, saturated Japan to the timeless emptiness of Africa, to the spooky otherworldliness of Iceland, as his 'objective' narrative becomes increasingly a personal odyssey that must be teased out from hints and ellipses. In its focusing on the minutae, the forgotten, the arcane, the ephemeral, the back alleys, the garbage, but suggesting that 'Soleil' is ultimately only one film out of a possible multitude made possible by new technologies, Marker's film is at once profoundly democratic yet exhilaratingly idiosyncratic; an apocalyptic vision teeming with life.
But 'Sans Soleil' couldn't soar further from the prosaic ambitions of the documentary. Like the film it most resembles, Marker's own 'La Jetee', it is in fact a work of science fiction, as much about time travel as literal travel. Each place Marker visits is stripped of its familiarity, and made eerie, alien. Concrete images become springboards for dizzy philosophical speculations. The film moves with ease from the court of 11th century Imperial Japan to the revolutionary struggles in 1960s Africa to emus on the Ile de France to an interpretation of Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' to astrological rumination on a desert beach, and still remains thematically coherent and full of the most startling connections.
It is this structure that creates the feel of science fiction, the linking of seemingly disparate images, symbols, stories, experiences, places to create a strange pattern which emanates something spiritual, that seems to make sense of increasing chaos, dislocation, displacement. But we are constantly reminded that these are secular, man-made, ad-hoc, arbitrary constructions, as phantom as the relationship in 'La Jetee', but, similarly, a necessary construction to cover the abyss.
The distortion of the soundtrack, the mixture of silence and mooged classics; the computer visuals of Marker's friend, known as The Zone, which seep conventional, representational images and turn them into ghosts, traces, stripped of history, recognisability, humanity; the film's fictional framework (the narrative comprises letters to the narrator by the filmmaker, Sandor Krasna) all add to this unsettling science fiction appropriation of the documentary genre.
When the history of cinema comes to be written in centuries to come, there will really only be two films that will survive from its first century, films dense, supple, playful, renewable enough, and full of enough possibilities for future direction, to transcend the local, the generic, the pretentious, the narrative. One is that final gasp of modernist cinema, 'Vertigo'; the other is this epitome of post-modernity. in many ways, 'Sans Soleil' is a stunning exegisis on Hitchcock's masterpiece (which had only just been re-released after two-decades withdrawel), echoing its circular structure, its concern with time, memory, the elusiveness of history.
'Soleil' locates the crisis of post-modernity in Japan, that most modern of modern capitalist societies. With the curiosity of an anthropologist, the good humour of an essayist, and the eye for the unusual of a rare filmmaker, Marker gives us a Japan we rarely see, even in the country's own cinema; on the one hand a culture of startling modernity, leading the way in computers, technology, department stores etc., on the other full of residual traditions, rituals, superstitions, ceremonies, going back centuries. The co-existence of these two time-scales has resulted in a kind of blur, a temporal vacuum, whereby all sense of time and perspective is lost, where religious ceremonies for the souls of stray pets co-exist with state-of-the-art video games.
Japan is like a ship that has lost its anchor, where all time is the same, and therefore irrelevant, just as Scottie Ferguson wanders around dazed, in a loop of fantasy and distorted memory. Without history, memory, a culture ceases to be a culture and lays itself open to all sorts of vulnerability. But this lack of foundation ironically leads to a greater freedom, particularly of the mind, and the film, as it reaches its conclusion, becomes visionary and hallucinatory.
'Soleil' is anything but bleak - its stories, myths, cultural tidbits, observations are unfailingly entertaining and full of good humour. Krasna compares the overcultured, saturated Japan to the timeless emptiness of Africa, to the spooky otherworldliness of Iceland, as his 'objective' narrative becomes increasingly a personal odyssey that must be teased out from hints and ellipses. In its focusing on the minutae, the forgotten, the arcane, the ephemeral, the back alleys, the garbage, but suggesting that 'Soleil' is ultimately only one film out of a possible multitude made possible by new technologies, Marker's film is at once profoundly democratic yet exhilaratingly idiosyncratic; an apocalyptic vision teeming with life.
An amazement
cromwell-326 January 2000
I've only seen this film twice, both on the same day, nearly fifteen years ago; and yet its poetic-philosophical themes, its melancholy, its images still remain with me. Viewing it was an intensely personal experience; I find myself a little startled to find that other people have seen it. I find myself plagiarising it constantly; I think of it at odd times (when I accidentally catch someone's eyes and immediately look away; whenever I visit San Francisco); it is a work of lingering and subtle beauty that percolates through my bloodstream, informing the hours and days, changing the things and ways I see...
A film that can make earth seem like a strange and foreign planet
joeloh30 June 2005
A poetic and rambling essay film, in the form of a letter from a lost and lonely traveller. Chris Marker lets his mind and camera roam through the landscape of early eighties Japan, and his imagination drift across the world. Memory history and emotion blend into a loving study of human existence. The film's form is loose and sprawling and it it almost impossible to try to follow it in any linear fashion. Instead it washes across the surface of you conscious mind, occasionally burrowing deep with images you can never forget. It is a completely unique film and is inspiring in its ability to bring the political, the philosophical and the poetic together on screen. Chris Marker is one of the unsung greats of film history.
This is not a documentary
carrienations8 February 2004
To call this film a documentary is to cheapen it. It's life on screen, not a mere document. It's poetry... and I'm not sure that word is adequate. How about your view of how you live and the world around you? Have you ever seen a film that gave you the questions to ask yourself? This film is startling... I can't praise it enough. My mind was exhausted by considering the layered imagery, both audio and visual, and the contextual shifts between them. How does anyone pick up a camera after seeing this? You might as well toss it in the trash because Marker has made Earth's last film.
It's a crime that this film is not available on VHS or DVD in the U.S. Fans of this film should also seek out "The Koumiko Mystery", another transcendant film by Chris Marker.
It's a crime that this film is not available on VHS or DVD in the U.S. Fans of this film should also seek out "The Koumiko Mystery", another transcendant film by Chris Marker.
unwatchable twaddle
federovsky1 August 2014
One of the most worthless things I've ever seen put on celluloid. I had previously tried to get through it twice and failed - finding it miserably tedious. The images were barely more than home movie quality, every sentiment was abysmally banal, and there was something me than faintly self-congratulatory about it all. What on earth can Marker's fans get out of this
? He seemed to think he was the first westerner to set foot in Asia - and with a camera too! He tried to invest everything he saw with such utter gravity and meaning, but fell head first into every clichéd image and hackneyed idea of Asia there is. I waited for something to grab me
some remarkable insight or pearl of wisdom
nothing
just a film-maker (a fairly amateurish one) desperate to film every little oddity, and when there are none, every little banality.
I knew this was going to be a hard ride, but I tried to shrug off any preconceptions and prejudices to give this another try. After only three minutes I had to hit the pause button. Later I tried again, a non-believer reading the Bible.
Bland images. This kind of thing needs-pictures like Baraka to at least provide some justification. Five minutes are spent watching a Japanese street carnival. Marker takes a fascination in people that comes across as simply naïve. He waxes philosophical about a man frying food on a hotplate, presumably because it's the first time he has seen it happening. A Japanese cameraman of equal naivety might well point his camera at a little old woman frying chips in a British chippie and call it meaningful. Thankfully, nobody ever did.
His camera craves little oddities, such as the temple of the beckoning cats, but it's no more than touristic innocence.
The observation that people ought to look in the camera is typical of the 'aren't I being meaningful by seeing something that no-one else can?' attitude. But by doing so they are not revealing themselves with curiosity, only hiding themselves with insecurity.
There are two ways of looking at every human emotion. A blithe side and a cynical side. Marker is full of the tourist's childish fascination in things he little understands, and which he photographs for precisely that reason. Every image is the gawping of an idiot - at the beginning we stare at people asleep on a ferry as if there is something unique and profound about this particular ferry this particular day.
Drawing filigree connections is his main past-time: Marker thinks it clever to move from formal stylised movements of a Japanese traditional dance to awkwardness.
He sets himself a challenge at the very beginning - how to follow an idyllic image of three Icelandic girls? Nothing works - certainly not the fighter plane he suggests. He gives us a long black pause instead. So, there's a game of meaning going on, couched in a game of imagery. Absolutely every piece of film here is the same.
The woman's deadpan voice-over constantly riles. She has the tone of Virginia Woolf reading her suicide note. She is narrating the traveller's letters. It's earnest, adulatory - and you never forget it is Marker talking about himself, massaging his own ego through a fantasy girlfriend because it conveniently avoids the too-blatant first person. There's something unpleasantly adolescent, almost JD Salingerish, about this trick, and I instinctively resist.
I felt like I was supposed to be impressed by the fact that Marker had travelled, had had reflections, that he was alive. It was not just self-congratulatory, but self-ratifying, self-aggrandizing; the immodesty of the adolescent that hasn't yet learned sophistication.
At the end of it he had shown me nothing about the world or about people. He had made mountains out of philosophical molehills and was dining off the tale.
I knew this was going to be a hard ride, but I tried to shrug off any preconceptions and prejudices to give this another try. After only three minutes I had to hit the pause button. Later I tried again, a non-believer reading the Bible.
Bland images. This kind of thing needs-pictures like Baraka to at least provide some justification. Five minutes are spent watching a Japanese street carnival. Marker takes a fascination in people that comes across as simply naïve. He waxes philosophical about a man frying food on a hotplate, presumably because it's the first time he has seen it happening. A Japanese cameraman of equal naivety might well point his camera at a little old woman frying chips in a British chippie and call it meaningful. Thankfully, nobody ever did.
His camera craves little oddities, such as the temple of the beckoning cats, but it's no more than touristic innocence.
The observation that people ought to look in the camera is typical of the 'aren't I being meaningful by seeing something that no-one else can?' attitude. But by doing so they are not revealing themselves with curiosity, only hiding themselves with insecurity.
There are two ways of looking at every human emotion. A blithe side and a cynical side. Marker is full of the tourist's childish fascination in things he little understands, and which he photographs for precisely that reason. Every image is the gawping of an idiot - at the beginning we stare at people asleep on a ferry as if there is something unique and profound about this particular ferry this particular day.
Drawing filigree connections is his main past-time: Marker thinks it clever to move from formal stylised movements of a Japanese traditional dance to awkwardness.
He sets himself a challenge at the very beginning - how to follow an idyllic image of three Icelandic girls? Nothing works - certainly not the fighter plane he suggests. He gives us a long black pause instead. So, there's a game of meaning going on, couched in a game of imagery. Absolutely every piece of film here is the same.
The woman's deadpan voice-over constantly riles. She has the tone of Virginia Woolf reading her suicide note. She is narrating the traveller's letters. It's earnest, adulatory - and you never forget it is Marker talking about himself, massaging his own ego through a fantasy girlfriend because it conveniently avoids the too-blatant first person. There's something unpleasantly adolescent, almost JD Salingerish, about this trick, and I instinctively resist.
I felt like I was supposed to be impressed by the fact that Marker had travelled, had had reflections, that he was alive. It was not just self-congratulatory, but self-ratifying, self-aggrandizing; the immodesty of the adolescent that hasn't yet learned sophistication.
At the end of it he had shown me nothing about the world or about people. He had made mountains out of philosophical molehills and was dining off the tale.
travel video plus philosophy
SnoopyStyle1 December 2016
This is a film pondering time and place. The narrator is retelling a travelogue written by a world traveler. He traveled and commented on life in various places from Japan to Cape Verde to Guinea-Bissau. Trying to comprehend the ideas coming from the narration may be a fool's errant but it does flow with a hypnotic rhythm. One does wonder if the stories being told are real or made up but it almost doesn't matter. The commentary on these foreign lands come with a grain of salt. The images themselves are interesting. They are sometimes banal everyday life. Sometimes they are fascinating bits of a different culture. This is more than a simple travel vacation video but I couldn't really explain what it all means. Even as a simple home video, this is still entrancing. One starts to fall into the movie. I'm not sure what to take away from this other than the awesome knowable unknowable foreignness of the world.
A film about memory that you won't forget
Robert-15915 December 1999
With "Sans Soleil," Chris Marker skillfully blends image, sound, and voice in a powerful way that I've never experienced before or since. No mere description can begin to convey this film's stunning effect on my intellect and my senses. Not quite a documentary, not quite fiction, Marker's film emerges as a mesmerizing meditation on the meaning of time, space, and memory. "How," he asks, "does one remember thirst?" A film you won't forget.
Gimme subtitles!
jonathan-5777 June 2007
This is Marker's much-lauded travelogue-essay film about Japan, Guinea-Bissau, and Hitchcock. The imagery is gripping and the intuitive structure is marvelous, although I think he's jaded about resistance and in spite of his best efforts there's some exoticizing going on in the Weird Japan stuff. Also - the version of this Siue's roomie got from the library is dubbed by this BBC type woman, and her civilized recital almost wrecks the movie! I guess in art you can't get away with that heartlessly professional tone of voice without sounding utterly pretentious, even in an avowed 'masterpiece'. Well, let that be a lesson to you. I stuck with it and would advise you to do the same, it goes places.
thinking, memorizing, feeling in images
mingus_x28 July 2002
a memory in pictures. everyone in the world should make such a visual personal statement/essay.
there is no better way in communication. ...and all this films should be released on DVD. let's start with Chris.Marker's "Sans Soleil".
[who ever got the rights on this one, start digitizing and polishing sound and picture and afterwards release it on DVD, everyone should get the chance to see it]
there is no better way in communication. ...and all this films should be released on DVD. let's start with Chris.Marker's "Sans Soleil".
[who ever got the rights on this one, start digitizing and polishing sound and picture and afterwards release it on DVD, everyone should get the chance to see it]
Philosophy and Documentary.
doctorsmoothlove26 March 2008
Warning: Spoilers
Every once in a while I watch a film that leaves me agape in the creativity of the director. I certainly feel this way about Sans soleil. It's as bizarre a movie as one could ever hope to find but it does work as a documentary. The film is in no way concerned with entertaining the audience. It is a philosophical text presented in film format. It also describes the culture of Japan and Guinea-Bissau.
The movie explains a lot about the reverence of the land in Japanese society. We see people praying with their heads bowed to the Earth and the narrator provides commentary about it. We also learn the importance of the dog to the Japanese people. Also, the film discusses the importance of the train to the Japanese. Something intriguing about the film is how the narrator discusses the artistic possibilities of video games. Since the film was released in 1983, video games were in crisis due to the crash that happened earlier that year (in North America and Europe). Now looking at games like Metroid Prime and Shadow of the Colossus, I understand what she meant. For Guinea-Bissau, the narrator discusses the political history of the country and the risks of being a revolutionary. I'd like to write more about it, but I cannot recall anything to say.
Those who choose to watch Sans soleil, would be best served to read the script before and after the viewing. Then, they should talk about what they just watched. I will do that when I watch it again, as I have for many philosophical texts. This film is not intended for a large audience, and those wishing to watch it should be knowledgeable of that. Also, if you enjoy Hitchcock, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the homage Marker plays to him.
The movie explains a lot about the reverence of the land in Japanese society. We see people praying with their heads bowed to the Earth and the narrator provides commentary about it. We also learn the importance of the dog to the Japanese people. Also, the film discusses the importance of the train to the Japanese. Something intriguing about the film is how the narrator discusses the artistic possibilities of video games. Since the film was released in 1983, video games were in crisis due to the crash that happened earlier that year (in North America and Europe). Now looking at games like Metroid Prime and Shadow of the Colossus, I understand what she meant. For Guinea-Bissau, the narrator discusses the political history of the country and the risks of being a revolutionary. I'd like to write more about it, but I cannot recall anything to say.
Those who choose to watch Sans soleil, would be best served to read the script before and after the viewing. Then, they should talk about what they just watched. I will do that when I watch it again, as I have for many philosophical texts. This film is not intended for a large audience, and those wishing to watch it should be knowledgeable of that. Also, if you enjoy Hitchcock, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the homage Marker plays to him.
Banal
gbill-7487729 November 2021
A film I really wanted to like, given the acclaim and the positive opinion of so many people I respect, but one that fell short for me. The concept was unique and I wish I could say it was praiseworthy, but it too often felt voyeuristic and culturally condescending, and that was a real turn-off. The narration didn't add anything, and at times got so banal and pseudo-intellectual that I felt like I might enjoy the film more with the volume off. "Perhaps they read only in the street, or perhaps they just pretend to read-these yellow men," Marker (through his narrator) says. About video games, there's this: "Perhaps because he (Pac-Man) is the most perfect graphic metaphor of man's fate." Good grief. It was like being trapped in a room with someone showing a really long home movie and droning on as the footage veered randomly from place to place. I would have loved to hear the voices of and viewpoints of the people he filmed, or something that gave me real insight into their cultures. Also, I have no idea why Marker felt a need to show the gruesome (and extended) killing of a giraffe, but he did.
save this film for a day when you have energy
flippo16 July 1999
I must be brief. This documentary, which splices in cuts from Vertigo and from some guerrilla films, is definitely worth seeing. Though a student of French literature, and therefore habitually and terminally bored by pretentious studies of memory, this movie is remarkable in the way it makes connections across continents through the filmmaker's memory, extended as it is by the visual images he has stored on film. To put it disrespectfully, there is a lot of eye candy in this film, some of which is extremely beautiful ... the computer graphics towards the end might even remind Cocteau fans of some of scenes from Blood of a Poet (these, though, were what I found to be a bit over the top). So far I have only seen this film once, and so many of the memories that it prodded just three weeks ago have faded, like for example the name of the composer whose Bez Solntse inspired the title, and the documentary on volcanic activity I saw somewhere sometime which was echoed in the section filmed in Finland. In any case, this film will give you insight into the fascinating co-existence of traditional and modern culture in Japan. This struck home with me because I lived in Asia during the 80s when the technology of video-games, computers, and stereophonic luxe were exploding in the very same culture in which colorful Hindu and golden Buddhist temples w/ smoking incense, bird-singing contests and kite races were popular Sunday diversions from production. Bref, a fabulous film. As others have suggested, be prepared to suspend the Hollywood mindset for this treat.
Sunless: the memory of itself.
Polaris_DiB3 July 2007
Warning: Spoilers
I had to struggle over whether or not I could do this movie justice by writing a review of it after only seeing it once; it's definitely one of those films that, though you can understand it as it goes along, and it is not in any way what one would call difficult, is one that has so many different details and points that it seems relatively rude to try to shorten it down to a synopsis. Then again, as it's work in memory, impression, and time precludes, who's to say that the instant of reviewing it does it injustice merely by struggling with it's impression of it? Well okay, now I'm just being pretentious.
"Sans Soleil" can be generalized as an almost two-hour visual essay on memory, poetry, and imagery, based around Chris Marker's travels around the world, focusing mostly on Japan and Africa. It lacks the visceral and unsettling effects of his short "La Jetee", but it isn't like it's meant to be... though both films can be considered "contemplative", this one is much more meditative and philosophical, continually reworking it's ideas even to various points of self-awareness made ironic through the narrator's "He wrote... He said..." misdirection.
For some reason, it may be impossible to describe just how such a film can be considered so striking and yet still sound so simple (read any review that likes it, they will be awed but there'll be doubt in the minds of any that have seen it that it couldn't possibly be all that). What's interesting about it is that it is, in fact, a very simple work, especially structurally. It is even in a way dated since it uses computer effects of the time that, though they still are used experimentally today, still feel older in a this-was-new-back-then-but-we're-past-it-now way. But still... somehow it works, gets under the skin, says things in ways that you think you understand and then snap too and realize that you've been so lost in what's been going on that you've not paid attention--or was it too much attention? It is, indeed, like it's own memory of itself.
--PolarisDiB
"Sans Soleil" can be generalized as an almost two-hour visual essay on memory, poetry, and imagery, based around Chris Marker's travels around the world, focusing mostly on Japan and Africa. It lacks the visceral and unsettling effects of his short "La Jetee", but it isn't like it's meant to be... though both films can be considered "contemplative", this one is much more meditative and philosophical, continually reworking it's ideas even to various points of self-awareness made ironic through the narrator's "He wrote... He said..." misdirection.
For some reason, it may be impossible to describe just how such a film can be considered so striking and yet still sound so simple (read any review that likes it, they will be awed but there'll be doubt in the minds of any that have seen it that it couldn't possibly be all that). What's interesting about it is that it is, in fact, a very simple work, especially structurally. It is even in a way dated since it uses computer effects of the time that, though they still are used experimentally today, still feel older in a this-was-new-back-then-but-we're-past-it-now way. But still... somehow it works, gets under the skin, says things in ways that you think you understand and then snap too and realize that you've been so lost in what's been going on that you've not paid attention--or was it too much attention? It is, indeed, like it's own memory of itself.
--PolarisDiB
a masterpiece without peer
butchcorum19502 February 2007
At the core of "Sans Soleil," it seems, is the way society chooses to remember things -- and what happens when assumptions are replaced by new facts and a new reality. If this sounds (to use a 1960s expression) "far out," that's because "Sans Soleil" does what few other nonfiction films have done before or since: Link disparate cultures (in this case, Japan, Iceland, Guinea- Bissau and the United States) through street scenes that range from the mundane ("banality," in Marker's on screen words) to the extraordinary.
One example: Marker shows sleeping Japanese passengers on a ferry, then a subway framed by Tokyo's skyline, then a bird walking serenely on water, then an African woman smiling, then a cat temple in Japan where families pray for felines. "We do not remember -- we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten," says the film's erudite narrator as she reads a letter supposedly written by Sandor Krasna. In truth, Krasna is actually Marker, who invented the person of Krasna to ... well, it's anyone's guess because Marker doesn't give interviews and prefers to let his work speak for itself. Here's one guess:
Marker, who's never seen in "Sans Soleil," doesn't want to take full credit for a film that draws from so many displays of public rituals.
Like Edward Steichen's "The Family of Man" photography project, "Sans Soleil" captured lives and moments that were ordinarily overlooked -- though instead of a team of photojournalists, it was just Marker who roamed various continents for the material in this unforgettable movie. Few other filmmakers but Marker would travel to the outskirts of Guinea-Bissau, take pictures of working-class people, then juxtapose the footage with a rolling commentary about the country's revolution that toppled Portuguese rule. That revolution inspired revolutionaries in Europe, but as Marker dryly notes, "Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window." In reading Marker's lines, actress Alexandra Stewart ("Exodus," "Day for Night") cites everyone from the Japanese poet Basho to Marlon Brando. (Marker's footage of San Francisco was inspired by Hitchcock's "Vertigo.")
One example: Marker shows sleeping Japanese passengers on a ferry, then a subway framed by Tokyo's skyline, then a bird walking serenely on water, then an African woman smiling, then a cat temple in Japan where families pray for felines. "We do not remember -- we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten," says the film's erudite narrator as she reads a letter supposedly written by Sandor Krasna. In truth, Krasna is actually Marker, who invented the person of Krasna to ... well, it's anyone's guess because Marker doesn't give interviews and prefers to let his work speak for itself. Here's one guess:
Marker, who's never seen in "Sans Soleil," doesn't want to take full credit for a film that draws from so many displays of public rituals.
Like Edward Steichen's "The Family of Man" photography project, "Sans Soleil" captured lives and moments that were ordinarily overlooked -- though instead of a team of photojournalists, it was just Marker who roamed various continents for the material in this unforgettable movie. Few other filmmakers but Marker would travel to the outskirts of Guinea-Bissau, take pictures of working-class people, then juxtapose the footage with a rolling commentary about the country's revolution that toppled Portuguese rule. That revolution inspired revolutionaries in Europe, but as Marker dryly notes, "Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window." In reading Marker's lines, actress Alexandra Stewart ("Exodus," "Day for Night") cites everyone from the Japanese poet Basho to Marlon Brando. (Marker's footage of San Francisco was inspired by Hitchcock's "Vertigo.")
Amazing
dbborroughs5 June 2010
Warning: Spoilers
I am haunted by Chris Marker's Sans Soleil.
I picked it up because it's paired with Le Jetee of a Criterion DVD. And I've been watching it over and over again since it arrived.
Nominally its a travelogue of sorts with a woman reading the letters of a photojournalist while we look at images that relate. Most of the material relates to Japan and Africa. However Marker has arranged it in such away that it relates to a wide variety of subjects. Its a film that is full of endless possibilities since there is not only too much to take in on a single viewing, but also because the more you see it the more the film changes a you make more and more connections between bits of the film. How you feel about the film is constantly being rewritten by the connections you make.
My sole complaint about the film is the constant repetition of "the wrote me" in the narration. Other than that its a trip.
And while its very much attached to the technology of the time the film was made, its still very much relevant some 30 years later.
If you want a head trip see this film.
I picked it up because it's paired with Le Jetee of a Criterion DVD. And I've been watching it over and over again since it arrived.
Nominally its a travelogue of sorts with a woman reading the letters of a photojournalist while we look at images that relate. Most of the material relates to Japan and Africa. However Marker has arranged it in such away that it relates to a wide variety of subjects. Its a film that is full of endless possibilities since there is not only too much to take in on a single viewing, but also because the more you see it the more the film changes a you make more and more connections between bits of the film. How you feel about the film is constantly being rewritten by the connections you make.
My sole complaint about the film is the constant repetition of "the wrote me" in the narration. Other than that its a trip.
And while its very much attached to the technology of the time the film was made, its still very much relevant some 30 years later.
If you want a head trip see this film.
A fascinating exploration of humanity via counter cinema
porlawright4 July 2006
This film keeps coming back to me. It utterly confused me at first but something about it made me go back and watch again. It is a film that can fit into many definitions, none of them however, definitively.
The problem of capturing reality is a problem central to film theory, most do it by creating the 'reality effect' via the familiar codes of continuity editing etc, but it is just that, an illusion. Marker, like Godard, purposely confounds these codes and explores the limits of film/the image/art in order to examine what Benjamin called 'erfahrung' - a formulation for experience aligned to memory as apposed to immediacy. True experience is the recollection of events, a retracing of the path of memory. Only when experience is assimilated in this way can meaning be derived from it.
Sans Soleil plays with the idea of grand historicising themes, focusing on the narratives left untold in the history books, the story of the defeated, strange cultural idiosyncrasies, the easy, lazy way emotions are manipulated by the camera, so a man's tears of gratitude are revealed by context to be tears of rage. Marker takes canonical historical signposts and challenges their ability to tell us anything of worth about the world and humanity within it. He jolts (and it is a jolt) our attention away from the official processes of historification, that goes on beneath our noses in cinema, towards the banal and the everyday detail that comes the stuff of life itself.
On first viewing, especially if you are unfamiliar with the codes of progressive, experimental or 'counter' cinema, you may well be confused. But you will also be intrigued and on second viewing its secrets begin to reveal themselves. This is released with Marker's short la Jetee, another treat.
This is a truly remarkable film, the only piece of cinema that has, for me, chimed on a similar level of complexity and profundity with the works of Shakespeare and one that similarly continues to resonate.
The problem of capturing reality is a problem central to film theory, most do it by creating the 'reality effect' via the familiar codes of continuity editing etc, but it is just that, an illusion. Marker, like Godard, purposely confounds these codes and explores the limits of film/the image/art in order to examine what Benjamin called 'erfahrung' - a formulation for experience aligned to memory as apposed to immediacy. True experience is the recollection of events, a retracing of the path of memory. Only when experience is assimilated in this way can meaning be derived from it.
Sans Soleil plays with the idea of grand historicising themes, focusing on the narratives left untold in the history books, the story of the defeated, strange cultural idiosyncrasies, the easy, lazy way emotions are manipulated by the camera, so a man's tears of gratitude are revealed by context to be tears of rage. Marker takes canonical historical signposts and challenges their ability to tell us anything of worth about the world and humanity within it. He jolts (and it is a jolt) our attention away from the official processes of historification, that goes on beneath our noses in cinema, towards the banal and the everyday detail that comes the stuff of life itself.
On first viewing, especially if you are unfamiliar with the codes of progressive, experimental or 'counter' cinema, you may well be confused. But you will also be intrigued and on second viewing its secrets begin to reveal themselves. This is released with Marker's short la Jetee, another treat.
This is a truly remarkable film, the only piece of cinema that has, for me, chimed on a similar level of complexity and profundity with the works of Shakespeare and one that similarly continues to resonate.
Sans Soleil
jboothmillard8 May 2012
Warning: Spoilers
Featuring in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die was this film, I did not understand what the title meant, alternatively called Sunless, and I certainly did not know anything about prior to reading the book, but that's what made it more worth trying. Basically this is an experimental documentary from the thoughts of a woman travelling, meditating and expressing herself in beautiful and distinct parts of the world. We see her thoughts, images and scenes mainly in parts of Japan and Guinea-Bissau, but also with parts of Iceland, Paris and San Francisco, and apparently it is her readings with the cameraman following her routes. The English version is narrated by Alexandra Stewart. There is no story as it is more thought of as a documentary, but with the element of thoughts and ideas throughout the narration it can be seen as some kind of travel guide, or rather a travelogue from the narrator's point of view. You may get a little lost with what the narrator is saying about whatever you are seeing, but what makes the film work is all the fascinating scenery and brightly coloured imagery throughout wherever the camera takes us, so for that it is a worthwhile documentary. Very good!
Strange Little Film
gavin694227 February 2014
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.
What to make of this? While longer and with more action than "Jetee", this is Chris Marker again showing us strange images with some science fiction music over the top. Now we have odd sex statues, and stuffed animals (taxidermy, not kid toys) in positions of mating... what? Then we have a whack-a-mole game, which consists not only of bureaucrats (fair) but also a single baby seal... what? And to top this off, we have a robot that looks vaguely like John F. Kennedy, with a musical rendition of his most famous speech playing in the background...
What to make of this? While longer and with more action than "Jetee", this is Chris Marker again showing us strange images with some science fiction music over the top. Now we have odd sex statues, and stuffed animals (taxidermy, not kid toys) in positions of mating... what? Then we have a whack-a-mole game, which consists not only of bureaucrats (fair) but also a single baby seal... what? And to top this off, we have a robot that looks vaguely like John F. Kennedy, with a musical rendition of his most famous speech playing in the background...
"Now the real problems start"
dmgrundy9 November 2020
The key question, beyond revolutionary romanticism, is what happens after independence, Chris Marker wrote of Cape Verde when assembling for Sans Soleil footage shot during the Angolan and Guinea-Bissaun independence struggle of the 1970s. For Marker, Cape Verde served as a potent figure for points of access, of entry or exit. Located in the central Atlantic ocean, and inhabited only upon discovery by Portugese explorers in the 15th century, it was the first European settlement in the tropics, and a key stopping point during the Atlantic slave trade, and its independence struggles during the era of decolonisation-along with its innovative linkage with the struggle in Guinea-Bissau, spearheaded by Amilcar Cabral-suggested new ways in which internationalism might be incorporated into a praxis of liberation. Likewise, the efforts of the Guinean filmmakers suggests what Cesar calls "the promise of a militant cinema of emancipation, born from the struggle as a praxis of liberation". Yet in 'Sans Soleil', the Guinean archival footage, along with Marker's images of Cape Verde, serve as indices of failed hopes, of the failure of both political struggle and the aesthetics of what he calls 'revolutionary romanticism' which invests in that struggle a hope for the future of the world. Over footage of Cape Verdean ports, queues at stores and labour on building sites or market places, Marker's narrator comments: 'Rumor has it that every third world leader coined the same phrase the morning after independence: "Now the real problems start." Cabral never got a chance to say it: he was assassinated first. But the problems started, and went on, and are still going on. Rather unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism: to work, to produce, to distribute, to overcome postwar exhaustion, temptations of power and privilege.'
Originally planning to make a film along the lines of the agitational, collective work developed with the SLON and ISKRA groups, Marker subsequently reshaped footage shot through the 1960s and 1970s into a video-essay meditation as much on his own role as on the broader narratives of which his footage provides a slice: a meditation on memory and on ways of narrating history, rather than that narrative itself. Including the footage shot by the Guinean filmmakers-Cabral embracing fighters, shaky black and white images that appear to be shot from within guerrilla conflict-Marker presents a doubly-lost moment of possibility, in which the documentation of African independence struggles by African filmmakers both fail. "Who remembers all that?" asks Marker's narrator at one point, referring to the Cape Verdean-Guinean liberation struggle. "History throws its empty bottles out of the window". Much of this filmmaking activity was lost when cannisters of film were thrown into the street during the civil war at some point in the 1990s.
As Marker notes, hearing the stories of the sheer hell of such guerrilla warfare makes a mockery of those who described theirs as 'guerrilla filmmaking'. If, at one stage Marker travelled the globe, documenting the revolution, documenting new modes of living--in footage that was, as in his early film on Cuba, often banned within Euro-American contexts--and emphasizing film-making as a collective process, later films like 'Sans Soleil' take the very same footage as the basis for the melancholic reflections which have as their overarching theme the failure of global transformation promised by radical movements in Europe and Third World struggles in Europe's colonial 'possessions'. The out-of-time nature of that footage, material to be re-inscribed, alternately written over or uncovered in a kind of politicised Proustianism, a palimpsestic reflection on defeat, needs as its corollary Marker's science-fiction image of the future traveller, the traveller from the year AD 4000 in which earth has become a world of total recall, viewing with compassion the sadness mixed with aesthetic pleasure--the forms of art, of cinema, the failures of memory and desire. Noting the problematics of the gaze he projects onto the Cape Verdean women he films until they cast their gaze back at the camera, Marker ends his film on the image of the Cape Verdean woman who locks eyes with the camera for a fraction of a second--the exact length of a frame of film--Marker appears to hold this out as a possibility, if not of mutual contact, of the resistance to objecthood, and the possibility of a self-creation that would not need the mediation of the white, male filmmaker, world-traveller, revolutionary romanticist. Yet, as with much of the footage in the film, Marker feeds these images into the image-synthesizer of the (fictional) Japanese artist Hayao Yamanoko, producing solarised, distorted images that distort and transpose their sources into blotches of irreal colour and indistinct, amorphous forms. Feeding the footage into the machine serves as a surreal analogy for the mediations that exist between filmmaker and object, the problems of colonial framing, and the vagaries of historical memory, that are Marker's subject. The returned gaze, the flicker of tacit acknowledgment of performance, suggests the possibility of an artistic response--to frame oneself, rather than to be the always-framed-a fragile, yet vital force against the power imbalances of a 'world cinema' whose legacies are still firmly rooted in colonial power relations.
Originally planning to make a film along the lines of the agitational, collective work developed with the SLON and ISKRA groups, Marker subsequently reshaped footage shot through the 1960s and 1970s into a video-essay meditation as much on his own role as on the broader narratives of which his footage provides a slice: a meditation on memory and on ways of narrating history, rather than that narrative itself. Including the footage shot by the Guinean filmmakers-Cabral embracing fighters, shaky black and white images that appear to be shot from within guerrilla conflict-Marker presents a doubly-lost moment of possibility, in which the documentation of African independence struggles by African filmmakers both fail. "Who remembers all that?" asks Marker's narrator at one point, referring to the Cape Verdean-Guinean liberation struggle. "History throws its empty bottles out of the window". Much of this filmmaking activity was lost when cannisters of film were thrown into the street during the civil war at some point in the 1990s.
As Marker notes, hearing the stories of the sheer hell of such guerrilla warfare makes a mockery of those who described theirs as 'guerrilla filmmaking'. If, at one stage Marker travelled the globe, documenting the revolution, documenting new modes of living--in footage that was, as in his early film on Cuba, often banned within Euro-American contexts--and emphasizing film-making as a collective process, later films like 'Sans Soleil' take the very same footage as the basis for the melancholic reflections which have as their overarching theme the failure of global transformation promised by radical movements in Europe and Third World struggles in Europe's colonial 'possessions'. The out-of-time nature of that footage, material to be re-inscribed, alternately written over or uncovered in a kind of politicised Proustianism, a palimpsestic reflection on defeat, needs as its corollary Marker's science-fiction image of the future traveller, the traveller from the year AD 4000 in which earth has become a world of total recall, viewing with compassion the sadness mixed with aesthetic pleasure--the forms of art, of cinema, the failures of memory and desire. Noting the problematics of the gaze he projects onto the Cape Verdean women he films until they cast their gaze back at the camera, Marker ends his film on the image of the Cape Verdean woman who locks eyes with the camera for a fraction of a second--the exact length of a frame of film--Marker appears to hold this out as a possibility, if not of mutual contact, of the resistance to objecthood, and the possibility of a self-creation that would not need the mediation of the white, male filmmaker, world-traveller, revolutionary romanticist. Yet, as with much of the footage in the film, Marker feeds these images into the image-synthesizer of the (fictional) Japanese artist Hayao Yamanoko, producing solarised, distorted images that distort and transpose their sources into blotches of irreal colour and indistinct, amorphous forms. Feeding the footage into the machine serves as a surreal analogy for the mediations that exist between filmmaker and object, the problems of colonial framing, and the vagaries of historical memory, that are Marker's subject. The returned gaze, the flicker of tacit acknowledgment of performance, suggests the possibility of an artistic response--to frame oneself, rather than to be the always-framed-a fragile, yet vital force against the power imbalances of a 'world cinema' whose legacies are still firmly rooted in colonial power relations.
eye popping and enigmatic philosophical film essay
framptonhollis8 July 2017
Bizarre in its extreme unconventionality, "Sans Soleil" remains the second best known film in Chris Marker's prolific and legendary filmography. During his lifetime (one not at all wasted due to his massive and consistently brilliant production of art in almost all of its forms, most famously the cinematic form), Marker remained a mysterious figure, and his films only add to the mystery. "Sans Soleil" is perhaps among the most enigmatic works in all of cinema's history; it is something of a collage of images, a travelogue primarily taking place in Japan (Africa is also often visited, among a few other areas from around the world) scored by atmospheric electronic music and a narration injected with profound philosophy, occasional wit, provocative melancholy, and a knack for unique and sometimes absurdist detail.
Dealing with everything from the primary theme of memory and the existential nightmare of time's passage (or, as the narration at one point puts in (more poetically): "the moss of time") to oddly humorous (yet still often thought provoking) encounters with phallic statues and an animatronic designed to bear the appearance of former U.S. president John F. Kennedy, "Sans Soleil" reaches a point of pure unpredictability. While mildly slow in bits, the overall product is uniquely entertaining in its ability to portray and provoke a wide and diverse palate of human emotion. With its grainy yet pleasantly colorful cinematography and semi surrealist atmosphere, "Sans Soleil" successfully entertains the eyes and the mind of any viewer that can appreciates its wildly experimentalist and almost structureless style. This is a film likely to divide viewers, but big enough fans of art house and avant garde cinema can all agree that it is among the finest documentary/experimental/drama/essay films ever made; a truly fresh and original project that is playful and profound like no other masterpiece before or after] it.
Dealing with everything from the primary theme of memory and the existential nightmare of time's passage (or, as the narration at one point puts in (more poetically): "the moss of time") to oddly humorous (yet still often thought provoking) encounters with phallic statues and an animatronic designed to bear the appearance of former U.S. president John F. Kennedy, "Sans Soleil" reaches a point of pure unpredictability. While mildly slow in bits, the overall product is uniquely entertaining in its ability to portray and provoke a wide and diverse palate of human emotion. With its grainy yet pleasantly colorful cinematography and semi surrealist atmosphere, "Sans Soleil" successfully entertains the eyes and the mind of any viewer that can appreciates its wildly experimentalist and almost structureless style. This is a film likely to divide viewers, but big enough fans of art house and avant garde cinema can all agree that it is among the finest documentary/experimental/drama/essay films ever made; a truly fresh and original project that is playful and profound like no other masterpiece before or after] it.
Huhh?
tilenpetek-7892030 June 2021
Eastern cultures through a Western lens. Also, boring.
trippycheez18 May 2005
I'm surprised to see that so many other reviewers tolerated and even loved SANS SOLEIL. In my opinion, SANS SOLEIL is an inferior version of KAYAANISQATSI (which was released the same year): while KAYAANISQATSI lets its images of different societies, machines, and crowds speak for themselves, Chris Marker layers a monologue of pseudo-intellectual babble over his. The footage itself is pretty interesting: we see Japanese people performing ancient purification rites, some nice shots of Iceland's lunar landscape, and other scenes from societies around the world, but the voice-over pretty much ruins it. It's like a failed poet hijacked National Geographic and forced them to make SANS SOLEIL instead of something interesting. Honestly, you could probably find more meaningful prose in a teenage goth's LiveJournal.
I had a few ideological problems with the movie as well. Chris Marker (a Frenchman, I assume?) darted about in non-Western societies, viewing foreign people through a camera lens. He then mashed all the footage together, drawing inferences from the images which he then communicated to us, the (primarily Western) viewers through a voice-over. He never interviews anyone he films. His voice is the only one we hear, he is the sole authority who controls the information we receive, and as a result he can construct other cultures to fit a message of his choosing.
What to the people living in the jungle have to say about life? That's what I'd like to know. But instead we hear through Marker that they are noble savages, free in their own way despite being so primitive, practicing mystical rituals the narrator doesn't actually comprehend, etc. Even Japanese TV somehow serves to illuminate Japanese culture for Marker, despite the fact that he admits he doesn't speak Japanese and can't understand a word of what's going on! Edmund Said explores this form of representation in his book "Orientalism," but basically I see Chris Marker as the Rudyard Kipling or Marco Polo of our day. He travels abroad, reports back to us with a romanticized description of other cultures (which the cultures themselves do not contribute to directly), we accept it, and the discourse ends. We never learn anything tangible, besides the fact that Marker found this experience to be personally significant in some vague way.
Also, I had to close my ears while the narrator discusses Hitchcock's VERTIGO... I haven't seen that one yet and had a feeling Marker wouldn't include any spoiler warnings.
I had a few ideological problems with the movie as well. Chris Marker (a Frenchman, I assume?) darted about in non-Western societies, viewing foreign people through a camera lens. He then mashed all the footage together, drawing inferences from the images which he then communicated to us, the (primarily Western) viewers through a voice-over. He never interviews anyone he films. His voice is the only one we hear, he is the sole authority who controls the information we receive, and as a result he can construct other cultures to fit a message of his choosing.
What to the people living in the jungle have to say about life? That's what I'd like to know. But instead we hear through Marker that they are noble savages, free in their own way despite being so primitive, practicing mystical rituals the narrator doesn't actually comprehend, etc. Even Japanese TV somehow serves to illuminate Japanese culture for Marker, despite the fact that he admits he doesn't speak Japanese and can't understand a word of what's going on! Edmund Said explores this form of representation in his book "Orientalism," but basically I see Chris Marker as the Rudyard Kipling or Marco Polo of our day. He travels abroad, reports back to us with a romanticized description of other cultures (which the cultures themselves do not contribute to directly), we accept it, and the discourse ends. We never learn anything tangible, besides the fact that Marker found this experience to be personally significant in some vague way.
Also, I had to close my ears while the narrator discusses Hitchcock's VERTIGO... I haven't seen that one yet and had a feeling Marker wouldn't include any spoiler warnings.
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