Chris Marker - Sans Soleil

[Bobby Beksinski]

Chris Marker's true free form documentary "Sans Soleil" covers a wide
variety of topics while mainly just being effective as a filmed
photography album. It is a video essay that contrasts differences in
world cultures from Japan to Africa and a little bit of San Francisco
and Iceland. It's narration plays out like a meditation on memory and
time and feels like Marker's own wandering thoughts rising to
formation.

"Sans Soleil" spends a great deal of its time examining the Japanese
culture and their ceremonious society. While in other moments display
its material mostly as scattered moments in time. The images form a
decadent collage of different parts of the world and the people whom
inhabit it. "Sans Soleil" also spends a small segment of its run time
discussing Alfred Hitchcock's movie "Vertigo" and how Marker retraced
the film's footsteps by visiting the separate shooting locations it
used.

There is only one afterthought at the end of watching this and that is
the impact the film had on me personally or more exactly lack thereof.
I wonder if the film is too scattered in thought and image to truly
retain and appreciate. Sort of the same way memory is discussed here
and how not remembering is different from forgetting.

[Thorkell A. Ottarsson]

I loved this film. Felt like watching a sci fi documentary. Every day
life was other worldly, like something from the future. I think it is
very important to just go with the flow when watching this film (and
others like it). Not try to understand too much. Just take a deep
breath and watch it the same way you listen to music. Just let it sink
in. :)

Thorkell