Sans soleil

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.

This is one of these self-indulgent movies where the main objective is for the artist to draw the audience into his world under the assumption that there's a mutual agreement that what we observe may appear too distant and unreachable to us. It's kind of like if your mother-in-law came back from visiting Europe and she starts showing you all of her pictures for 2 hours. Chris Marker isn't so crude, however, I always felt that when one is experiencing the culture of a distant land the medium of film was never the choice way to experience it. Rather, the exploration of different cultures when traveling must be experienced within the moment, rather than taking the moment with a camera and experiencing it at home. This is where Sans Soleil becomes a success or a failure in the eyes of the audience: do we live in the moment close to the same way the filmmaker does? This is something only you can answer when watching it. Personally, It was all over the map for me (no pun intended), I think the traveler has the gift of reading people and of showing how their culture has become a mirror for their lives.

I've only seen this film twice, both on the same day, nearly fifteen years ago; and yet its poetic-philosophical themes, its melancholy, its images still remain with me. Viewing it was an intensely personal experience; I find myself a little startled to find that other people have seen it. I find myself plagiarising it constantly; I think of it at odd times (when I accidentally catch someone's eyes and immediately look away; whenever I visit San Francisco); it is a work of lingering and subtle beauty that percolates through my bloodstream, informing the hours and days, changing the things and ways I see...

Some interesting shots strung together with a pretentious, artsy narration that mimics profundity in a familiar jejeune style. Assumptions include that the east is superior to the west, television is bad, capitalism evil, etc. Sample insight: "Pac-man puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment." With a different narration it could be a much better film. One key to its superficiality: the people are only seen, never heard. The narrator's voice covers all, like ketchup. Marker has a good eye, a good feel for faces and gestures, but a mushy brain. If you're a young aspiring artist in an MFA program who's attracted to "theory" the humorless self-importance of this film may appeal to you.

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.