Sans Soleil - Unsichtbare Sonne

A poetic and rambling essay film, in the form of a letter from a lost and lonely traveller. Chris Marker lets his mind and camera roam through the landscape of early eighties Japan, and his imagination drift across the world. Memory history and emotion blend into a loving study of human existence. The film's form is loose and sprawling and it it almost impossible to try to follow it in any linear fashion. Instead it washes across the surface of you conscious mind, occasionally burrowing deep with images you can never forget. It is a completely unique film and is inspiring in its ability to bring the political, the philosophical and the poetic together on screen. Chris Marker is one of the unsung greats of film history.

'Sans Soleil' opens with a ferry trip to Japan, with the camera peering at sleeping passengers. This is a perfect encapsulation of the film as a whole, a beautiful mixture of journey and dream. The film is ostensibly a documentary, that holier-than-thou genre convinced of its own superior truthfulness. And the film is full of documentary images, snapshots from the faraway places Marker visits, Japan, Africa, South America, San Francisco, Iceland, Paris. The film is full of the observations of the filmmaker about the cultures he observes.

But 'Sans Soleil' couldn't soar further from the prosaic ambitions of the documentary. Like the film it most resembles, Marker's own 'La Jetee', it is in fact a work of science fiction, as much about time travel as literal travel. Each place Marker visits is stripped of its familiarity, and made eerie, alien. Concrete images become springboards for dizzy philosophical speculations. The film moves with ease from the court of 11th century Imperial Japan to the revolutionary struggles in 1960s Africa to emus on the Ile de France to an interpretation of Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' to astrological rumination on a desert beach, and still remains thematically coherent and full of the most startling connections.

It is this structure that creates the feel of science fiction, the linking of seemingly disparate images, symbols, stories, experiences, places to create a strange pattern which emanates something spiritual, that seems to make sense of increasing chaos, dislocation, displacement. But we are constantly reminded that these are secular, man-made, ad-hoc, arbitrary constructions, as phantom as the relationship in 'La Jetee', but, similarly, a necessary construction to cover the abyss.

The distortion of the soundtrack, the mixture of silence and mooged classics; the computer visuals of Marker's friend, known as The Zone, which seep conventional, representational images and turn them into ghosts, traces, stripped of history, recognisability, humanity; the film's fictional framework (the narrative comprises letters to the narrator by the filmmaker, Sandor Krasna) all add to this unsettling science fiction appropriation of the documentary genre.

When the history of cinema comes to be written in centuries to come, there will really only be two films that will survive from its first century, films dense, supple, playful, renewable enough, and full of enough possibilities for future direction, to transcend the local, the generic, the pretentious, the narrative. One is that final gasp of modernist cinema, 'Vertigo'; the other is this epitome of post-modernity. in many ways, 'Sans Soleil' is a stunning exegisis on Hitchcock's masterpiece (which had only just been re-released after two-decades withdrawel), echoing its circular structure, its concern with time, memory, the elusiveness of history.

'Soleil' locates the crisis of post-modernity in Japan, that most modern of modern capitalist societies. With the curiosity of an anthropologist, the good humour of an essayist, and the eye for the unusual of a rare filmmaker, Marker gives us a Japan we rarely see, even in the country's own cinema; on the one hand a culture of startling modernity, leading the way in computers, technology, department stores etc., on the other full of residual traditions, rituals, superstitions, ceremonies, going back centuries. The co-existence of these two time-scales has resulted in a kind of blur, a temporal vacuum, whereby all sense of time and perspective is lost, where religious ceremonies for the souls of stray pets co-exist with state-of-the-art video games.

Japan is like a ship that has lost its anchor, where all time is the same, and therefore irrelevant, just as Scottie Ferguson wanders around dazed, in a loop of fantasy and distorted memory. Without history, memory, a culture ceases to be a culture and lays itself open to all sorts of vulnerability. But this lack of foundation ironically leads to a greater freedom, particularly of the mind, and the film, as it reaches its conclusion, becomes visionary and hallucinatory.

'Soleil' is anything but bleak - its stories, myths, cultural tidbits, observations are unfailingly entertaining and full of good humour. Krasna compares the overcultured, saturated Japan to the timeless emptiness of Africa, to the spooky otherworldliness of Iceland, as his 'objective' narrative becomes increasingly a personal odyssey that must be teased out from hints and ellipses. In its focusing on the minutae, the forgotten, the arcane, the ephemeral, the back alleys, the garbage, but suggesting that 'Soleil' is ultimately only one film out of a possible multitude made possible by new technologies, Marker's film is at once profoundly democratic yet exhilaratingly idiosyncratic; an apocalyptic vision teeming with life.

One of the most worthless things I've ever seen put on celluloid. I had previously tried to get through it twice and failed - finding it miserably tedious. The images were barely more than home movie quality, every sentiment was abysmally banal, and there was something me than faintly self-congratulatory about it all. What on earth can Marker's fans get out of this…? He seemed to think he was the first westerner to set foot in Asia - and with a camera too! He tried to invest everything he saw with such utter gravity and meaning, but fell head first into every clichéd image and hackneyed idea of Asia there is. I waited for something to grab me… some remarkable insight or pearl of wisdom… nothing… just a film-maker (a fairly amateurish one) desperate to film every little oddity, and when there are none, every little banality.

I knew this was going to be a hard ride, but I tried to shrug off any preconceptions and prejudices to give this another try. After only three minutes I had to hit the pause button. Later I tried again, a non-believer reading the Bible.

Bland images. This kind of thing needs-pictures like Baraka to at least provide some justification. Five minutes are spent watching a Japanese street carnival. Marker takes a fascination in people that comes across as simply naïve. He waxes philosophical about a man frying food on a hotplate, presumably because it's the first time he has seen it happening. A Japanese cameraman of equal naivety might well point his camera at a little old woman frying chips in a British chippie and call it meaningful. Thankfully, nobody ever did.

His camera craves little oddities, such as the temple of the beckoning cats, but it's no more than touristic innocence.

The observation that people ought to look in the camera is typical of the 'aren't I being meaningful by seeing something that no-one else can?' attitude. But by doing so they are not revealing themselves with curiosity, only hiding themselves with insecurity.

There are two ways of looking at every human emotion. A blithe side and a cynical side. Marker is full of the tourist's childish fascination in things he little understands, and which he photographs for precisely that reason. Every image is the gawping of an idiot - at the beginning we stare at people asleep on a ferry as if there is something unique and profound about this particular ferry this particular day.

Drawing filigree connections is his main past-time: Marker thinks it clever to move from formal stylised movements of a Japanese traditional dance to awkwardness.

He sets himself a challenge at the very beginning - how to follow an idyllic image of three Icelandic girls? Nothing works - certainly not the fighter plane he suggests. He gives us a long black pause instead. So, there's a game of meaning going on, couched in a game of imagery. Absolutely every piece of film here is the same.

The woman's deadpan voice-over constantly riles. She has the tone of Virginia Woolf reading her suicide note. She is narrating the traveller's letters. It's earnest, adulatory - and you never forget it is Marker talking about himself, massaging his own ego through a fantasy girlfriend because it conveniently avoids the too-blatant first person. There's something unpleasantly adolescent, almost JD Salingerish, about this trick, and I instinctively resist.

I felt like I was supposed to be impressed by the fact that Marker had travelled, had had reflections, that he was alive. It was not just self-congratulatory, but self-ratifying, self-aggrandizing; the immodesty of the adolescent that hasn't yet learned sophistication.

At the end of it he had shown me nothing about the world or about people. He had made mountains out of philosophical molehills and was dining off the tale.

I must be brief. This documentary, which splices in cuts from Vertigo and from some guerrilla films, is definitely worth seeing. Though a student of French literature, and therefore habitually and terminally bored by pretentious studies of memory, this movie is remarkable in the way it makes connections across continents through the filmmaker's memory, extended as it is by the visual images he has stored on film. To put it disrespectfully, there is a lot of eye candy in this film, some of which is extremely beautiful ... the computer graphics towards the end might even remind Cocteau fans of some of scenes from Blood of a Poet (these, though, were what I found to be a bit over the top). So far I have only seen this film once, and so many of the memories that it prodded just three weeks ago have faded, like for example the name of the composer whose Bez Solntse inspired the title, and the documentary on volcanic activity I saw somewhere sometime which was echoed in the section filmed in Finland. In any case, this film will give you insight into the fascinating co-existence of traditional and modern culture in Japan. This struck home with me because I lived in Asia during the 80s when the technology of video-games, computers, and stereophonic luxe were exploding in the very same culture in which colorful Hindu and golden Buddhist temples w/ smoking incense, bird-singing contests and kite races were popular Sunday diversions from production. Bref, a fabulous film. As others have suggested, be prepared to suspend the Hollywood mindset for this treat.

When is a documentary not a documentary? SANS SOLEIL is a film comprising 'real' images, narrated with 'real' observations. The subject-matter is Japan, post-modernism, the erasion of memory, the flattening-out of history, decentring, surface, pastiche. It records life-styles, trends, habits, rites, artistic movements with the rigour of an anthropologist. It is a film about travel: throughout the world, throughout time. It is science fiction (Terry Gilliam's TWELVE MONKEYS fleshes out an anecdote here). It is a Borgesian fantasy, (the filmmaker is actually a fictional creation , Sandor Krasna). To call it a documentary, or even a film, would be like calling the Sistine Chapel a ceiling.