Sans Soleil

Chris Marker, again with others’, meditation on memory, travel, and other deals, from 1983
This is a difficult film; at once simple, with your footage and the meandering voiceover, but it builds up to create an effect that is not quite the sum of its parts
Marker’s footage is again far from continual, snatches of often objects, handhelds. Rarely holds the camera on anyone for any period of time, so we never really enter someone else’s narrative journey. Constant series of looks, glances, small moments, at angles picture of them moving.
The willingness on occasions to jump locations adds to the sense of dislocation. This is a journey we are very much being taken on. The letters build up for times into quite a coherent study of life in Tokyo, but always a personal element. The film manages to convey in a fine manner the non-understandable totality of the vast city, the small gestures. A mood, not a place.
The voiceover gives us whispers and glimpses, occasionally a little bathetic, always thoughtful on occasion nearly profound. The film is at its best when it manages to create its own stream of memory in the viewer; we remember images we saw earlier, replay them, glances from out of context. Put together in this playful style (the sequence where commuter’s dreams are imagined) creates quite a tableau.
The coming together with the images from the computer, the ‘zone’, creates a liquid universe that is perhaps more common now, though less so in ’83. Again, nicely stops us getting too comfortable.
Altogether, we a have a piece that is frankly rather difficult, but its richness and willingness to always consider the image in new ways leads to some arresting sequences.