“Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything – except wounds.”
French filmmaker Chris Marker experimented widely across his 60+ year career, most often as an essayist. The reason this term of art fits is that his body of work, including shorts, features, books, and installations, centers on his singular point-of-view that thrums with self-conscious technique. His work is ever sensitive to complex themes and irresolvable arguments, rather than clear plot points, and his ideal spectator respects ambiguity.
In his famous short film, La Jetée (1962), we listen to a narrator explaining how time travel works among survivors of World War III. The narration dramatizes a series of photographs about the unnamed man’s life, and we eventually realize that his effort to prevent World War III returns him to the moment he watches his own death, as a boy, because he’s moving through time. It’s a strange little movie about the trouble of sequencing life and it involves almost no conventional plot mechanics.
Another of Marker’s famous works is the documentary Sans Soleil (1983), which means “sunless.” It runs 100 minutes, takes place mostly in then-present-day Japan, with frequent asides to Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Iceland, France, and the United States, and it is a meditation on the eroding nature of memory.
Sans Soleil uses a narrator, Alexandra Stewart in the English language version, reading aloud from her epistolary relationship with camera operator Sandor Krasna, who is actually Chris Marker and the creator of the travelogues we watch. She speaks in bags of words that border on nonsense, and we are often numbed as we watch Krasna’s imagery combine with found footage from newsreels, public sources, and, in one thrilling sequence, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). No matter the visual spectacle, the narrator always returns to the importance of how we memorialize experience since all of us forget things so easily. The real “nut” of the movie, then, is recognizing how hard it is to translate imagery into text that must be re-imagined by moviegoers. Krasna’s imagery may be rich, even disturbing (we watch a giraffe being shot to death, as one example), and the narrator’s wit may be sharp, even hypnotic (she says “arch-ee-pell-ah-go” when pronouncing “archipelago”), but the combined effort nonetheless fails to bring us any closer to the “real” nature of Tokyo or San Francisco.
This introduces a second impulse: death. Any movie image, from any filmmaker, is always already an image of something over with and done. Sans Soleil enters into this gap between filmed subjects and how we watch movies, now, and forces us to think about storytelling as just another way to turn the decay of experience into memory. Incidentally, the movie is highly attuned to rituals of people observing the dead or events from the past, particularly because the people on-screen are long dead, or at least a lot older, and the landscapes we visit are definitely re-made by the hand of time. In one eerie sequence, we even watch Japanese shoppers being entertained by an animatronic JFK.
Finally, Sans Soleil glimpses the consumer electronics engine of the future, anticipating how robots, computers, and surveillance technologies have enhanced material comfort while pushing each of us outside the risks of lived personal experience. Fabrication and mimicry are the norm, and we see proof on the face of a gamer playing Pac-Man and in the joy of an animator transforming photographs into stylized animation.
Among other subjects, Sans Soleil considers post-colonial nation building, the consequences of war, and the quarrel many of us have with competing versions of what we think our personal history is inside a national, even a global, experience that influences everyone. In short, the movie has no main character or lesson we’re meant to “keep,” aside from working hard to trace clues in Marker’s argument about experience and memory. There is a jumbled quality to these associations that resolve, as in a mosaic, only after some time in reflection. While watching guerillas running through brush in a fire fight, or worshippers at a shrine for lost cats, or while visiting a museum for phallic sculpture and art, we also contend with images of dead cattle and African women unafraid of looking into the lens of a camera, letting us know they know we’re watching them, and that being a witness is what sets apart forgettable things from permanence.
Perhaps the ultimate expression of a purpose in Sans Soleil is an Icelandic village. In one sequence, we see a vibrant coastal community beneath a volcano. This recorded first-hand experience is something real, a village, that is also a memory, the video footage, shared through a documentary feature. Later on, we get a second glimpse of the village after the volcano’s eruption. The village is now covered in ash, which is something real and a recorded first-hand experience turned into memory because a volcano really did bury a village that no longer exists.
Which village matters? Is it important that we remember the lived place or the buried cinder? Or, is it more important that we understand how the volcano supported both villages until it belched fire, much like how memories are tied to the stories we tell unless we forget them?
–October 31, 2019
