015 - Sans Soleil, 1983, France; Dir. Chris Marker

Sunday, January 15, 2017

015 - Sans Soleil, 1983, France. Dir. Chris Marker.

Do you take videos when you go on vacation?

Did your dad do it when you were a kid?  On Super 8mm film or VHS-C or Video8 or DVC or some other medium?

Now you use your phone.  Or a DSLR or a mirrorless camera.

Sans Soleil is a travel documentary, or more properly, a travel essay film, focused on Africa and Japan, tied together with philosophical ideas told in voice-over.

It is a meditation on memory.  It is bright and colorful.  It is cultural and political.  It is thoughtful and rambling.  It is detached and non-judgmental.  It is stream-of-conscious.  It is engaging.

Chris Marker travelled everywhere.  And he filmed everything he saw.  On 16mm color film, using a Beaulieu R16.

He thought about it, edited it, and recorded his thoughts about it--here in a fictional format, in the guise of a woman's reading of the letters sent back to her by a travelling cinematographer.

The travelling cinematographer is named Sandor Krasna, but it is really Chris Marker himself.

The letters the woman is reading are really the script Chris Marker wrote.

The film comes in four versions: French, Japanese, German, and English.  We get the English version, and our narrator is Alexandra Stewart, a French actress who appears in at least one other movie we will see this year.

She also appeared in a movie called Under the Cherry Moon, directed by the musical sensation Prince.  Purple Rain was directed by Albert Magnoli, but Prince directed 3 Chains o' Gold, "Rasberry Beret," Diamonds and Pearls, Get Off, and Sign 'o' the Times, in addition to Under the Cherry Moon.

Chris Marker begins with an image of three girls in Iceland, and the man in the letter tells the woman that he begins with an image of three girls in Iceland.  Then he cuts to black, and the man in the letter tells the woman that he cuts to black.

This meta, self-referential opening resembles Orson Welles's meditation F for Fake released in 1973, ten years before Sans Soleil.  And the 2002 Spike Jonze feature film Adaptation.

Then the images take off.

We go to different places, mainly Tokyo and Okinawa in Japan, and Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in Africa.  We also go to San Francisco, to Paris, and to that beginning and the ending in Iceland.

We see parades, rituals, dances, markets, commuters, warfare, shrines, cats, owls, emus, giraffes, video games, kamikaze pilots, cities, islands, deserts.

There is a parade with people wearing wild, horned masks on their heads, like a Brazilian Carnival in Africa.

There is a commuter train with the commuters asleep, each lying awkwardly across the seats.

There is an animatronic of JFK in a Tokyo shopping mall, with a recording saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country."  Meanwhile, a song plays, in the style of the Andrews Sisters with the lyrics "Ask not what your country can do for you . . ."

The purpose of the JFK animatronic is to sell men's fashion.

Treasures from the Vatican are on tour and on display.  On the top floor of a shopping building.

There is a shrine to cats, the maneki nekos, and a shrine to copulation, with giant organs and with taxidermied animals in positions.  Including monkeys.

There is an imagined sequence of nightmares, with shots of sleeping commuters interspersed with clips from Japanese horror movies.

There are comparisons between Japan and Africa.  Animism priests dropping paper scraps in Japan, and animism priests dropping paper scraps in Africa.  A man with a clothed monkey in Africa, and a man with a clothed monkey in Japan.

He shows a ritual performed by a people group he says will die out.  They are in Japan but not Japanese.  He believes they are the last generation and that the ritual will disappear forever.  He implies that he has rescued it for posterity in the nick of time.

We see an African leader placing a medal around the neck of one of his generals.  We are told that the leader was killed the next year and that the medal recipient took over power--because he resented not being given a greater promotion.

We see a giraffe hunted and shot, spewing blood and falling.

Some of the images are graphic, some are beautiful, and many, as Marker calls them, mundane.

They juxtapose Japan's ancient traditions with modern technology.

At one point we move to San Francisco, and Krasna, as the woman reads, has been touring the locations that had appeared in the Alfred Hitchcock movie Vertigo.

We see footage of James Stewart and Kim Novak.  We see the same locations from the movie and from Krasna's footage: the streets, the hotel, the mission, the tower, and the sequoia.

Remember yesterday when we discussed La Jetee.  We mentioned that the man who time-travelled went with his girlfriend to a sequoia.  Yes, it is this one, and Marker refers to La Jetee in this movie, at this moment.

This film is fascinating and worth watching.  It is stream-of-consciousness.  The narration can be academic, thoughtful, insightful, propagandistic, or pretentious, but it does not necessarily matter.  You may watch the film listening intently to the narration and trying to understand it, or you may watch the film with yourself in stream-of-consciousness, like reading poetry or looking at a painting or listening to classical music, and allow your thoughts to go where they may.  Or you may ignore the narration altogether and watch the images.  Or you may play it as background.

Marker had a political agenda.  But he downplays it in such a way that it does not matter.

In the end the images are beautiful, or mesmerizing when they are not beautiful, or odd when they are not mesmerizing, but always interesting.

Do you take videos when you go on vacation?

What if you put them together.

What if you make a film like this film from your own travels.  What if you travel to make your film.

Look for real people doing real things.  Look for the mundane, the routine, and also the unusual.

Tell the story.  In a thousand words.  Or one picture.  Or a thousand pictures.

Worth a million words.