Chris Marker's SANS SOLEIL (1983)

(This was part of a Criterion Challenge Im doing on Letterboxd- this is part of "Films to Fall Asleep To" ... quite the category!)

Or: The Tao of Pac-Man

"It would be better to say time heals everything except wounds... with time, the desired body will disappear."

.... well, definitely more statues of penises than I expected considering its Sight & Sound bonafides. And these images - via the nearly non-stop narrations of letters from someone to another (we get a name at the end but it could have been Marker or anyone or sections from a novel) - manage to extend to a cultural critique that is quite sophisticated! Damn, Chris Marker. On the one hand, I may need to watch Vertigo again (I havent seen it 19 times but I could get there I bet), and on the other hand don't watch this if you have any strong affinity for Giraffes (like seriously, CW brutal animal murder here).

Sans Soleil was a film that I watched in two sittings; that may make it appear I was displeased with what Marker shot and edits and shows us, but that's far from it. This is startling, not tethered or even concerned about making a narrative for its audience, rather it's a Stream that sometimes becomes a raging river like the rapids in Deliverance and other times it is totally serene and where you can think about what nature and technology is around you on your Stream Trip. I almost nodded off watching the first half, just before the narrator expounds on Pac-Man like it's your above average Philosophy professor expounding on Kierkegard, which I chalk up more to watching at the end of a long day than anything.

Coming back to it days later to finish the rest, I was still taken in by the way the film, more like a flipping through a friend's journal after he or she has returned from traveling, with the control loose and yet with a mystical grandeur, though it may have been a mistake to not see this all in one go (and/or with the aid of certain controlled substances, or at least in that sometimes necessary medium of the theatrical experience).

Even as this is in many segments and Marker and the Narration, not to mrntion it's only Narration and no one we see on screen is interviewed, which also makes this like a cross between documentary and Science Fiction speculation I won't say stanzas and do that poetic note again but it could be read as that too, some parts do echo to other moments and seeming asides earlier, especially involving how Japanese citizens have their rituals for their dead, their monuments that appear to be mysterious for Westerners until you just peer a little deeper.

I can't pretend I understood all of this and wouldn't want to try to do a deep analysis here. Suffice it to say though Marker had me hooked and I wanted to see where he would take this Stream to next; I expected it to be an immersion into other cultures, primarily Japan and somewhat in African nations, but what surprised me was the political rigor and how Marker's tangents seem tantamount to building up this vision of what Civilization can be or accomplish. It can destroy in war, create in new technologies, control through games and movies and TV (or even at one point on the many TVs Marker shows us, Judo), and through the places he goes to we see how civilization can be at its worst (killing animals senselessly) and at its most hopeful or thoughtful.

What do you do with power and how can someone who thinks they have control is flipped? How does Creation work when Machines rule our lives? What's Iceland doing there? Can a "Guerilla" campaign be successful? (Maybe. Once). Why do certain images and scenes start and stop here? You cant conventionally explain this except that it works like your own mind (or memory) may work, jumping to this or that, and being... playful. And it is not exclusionary to what is seen as "high" or "low" culture. Gorgeous Temples deserve the same intellectual rigor as Pac-Man - or Hitchcock. 

So what else... I, for one, look forward to our Cat Overlords taking over.