Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983).mp4

Dimensions: 720 x 448

Duration: 01:39'26

English Narrative

Quality: ~ pretty excellent



*****



http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/marker.html




An early episode in Sans soleil shows a series of porcelain cats - some intact while others, weather worn or cracked with missing appendages - curiously lining a shrine in a Japanese temple that, as the unseen narrator (Alexandra Stewart) reveals, has been consecrated in memory of these benevolent creatures. In a subsequent, unrelated musing on television images, the subject of assigning a name and face to horror is examined, juxtaposed against representational shots of film villains striking a similarly neutral, animalistic stance - one limb raised - as the figurines of the cat cemetery. In a similar juxtaposition, a traditional festival is captured in the streets of modern-day Japan as young women dressed in traditional garment and formed straw hats perform a rhythmic dance, and is intercut with a fragmentary image of a pulsating, African tribal ceremony. Are the respective episodes related, or does the viewer ascribe an unintended significance to the relation of the images because of their observed pattern - their collective semblance to each other - within the context of the film? It is this innate process of association that is propelled equally by sensorial experience as it is by the assimilation of learned and acquired information that provides the mechanism for memory. And it is this integrally personal and human cognitive function - the act of remembering (which, as the narrator incisively remarks, "is not the opposite of forgetting") - that film essayist Chris Marker explores through a sublime montage of ethnographic vignettes, documentary footage, feature film stills, and post-production special effects by artist Hayao Yamaneko (resulting in an abstract digitization of the recorded image - a technological analogy to the processing of memory - that he calls 'The Zone' in homage to Andrei Tarkovsky). Set against a third person narration of paraphrased letters (that invariably introduces an added level of subjectivity) from a fictional filmmaker, global traveler, and intellectual named Sandor Krasna, the film becomes a compelling exposition on the nature and malleability of memory, history, time, and reality.