Sans Soleil

Sans Soleil
Directed by	Chris Marker
Written by	Chris Marker (as Sandor Krasna)
Narrated by	Florence Delay (French version) Riyoko Ikeda (Japanese version) Charlotte Kerr (German version) Alexandra Stewart (English version)
Music by	Chris Marker (as Michel Krasna)
Cinematography	Chris Marker (as Sandor Krasna)
Editing by	Chris Marker
Distributed by	Argos Films
Release date(s)	1983
Running time	100 minutes
Country	France
Language	French

Sans Soleil (French pronunciation: ​[sɑ̃ sɔ.lɛj], "Sunless") is a 1983 French film directed by Chris Marker. The title is from the song cycle Sunless by Modest Mussorgsky. Sans Soleil is a meditation on the nature of human memory, showing the inability to recall the context and nuances of memory and how, as a result, the perception of personal and global histories are affected.

Description

Stretching the genre of documentary, this experimental essay-film is a composition of thoughts, images and scenes, mainly from Japan and Guinea-Bissau, "two extreme poles of survival". Some other scenes were filmed in Iceland, Paris, and San Francisco. A female narrator reads from letters supposedly sent to her by the (fictitious) cameraman Sandor Krasna.

Sans Soleil is often labeled as a documentary, travelogue, or essay-film. Despite the film's modest use of fictional content, it should not be confused as a mock-documentary; the fictitious content works as a device to assist meaning in the film which, along with its occasionally nondescript movement among locations and lack of character-based narrative, is derived from the juxtaposition of narrative and image.

Introductory quotations

The original French version of Sans Soleil opens with the following quotation by Jean Racine from his tragedy Bajazet (1672):

"L'Éloignement des pays répare en quelque sorte la trop grande proximité des temps."
(The distance between countries compensates somewhat for the excessive closeness of time.)

Marker replaced this quote with the following one by T. S. Eliot from Ash Wednesday (1930) for the English version of the film:

"Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place".

Production

Sans Soleil contains some stock footage, clips from Japanese films and television, and a few excerpts from other films. The original documentary footage was filmed by Marker with a 16mm Beaulieu silent film camera in conjunction with a non-sync portable tape recorder; the film contains no synchronous sound. Some of the stock footage shots were colourized with a Spectron video synthesizer. A number of sequences in Sans Soleil are borrowed from other filmmakers who are not mentioned until the film's credits, except the footage of the Icelandic volcano which is accredited in narration to Haroun Tazieff.

The film was assembled largely in the 1970s, a period when Marker was part of a political commune and preferred to downplay his authorial signature (the title "Conception and editing: Chris Marker," buried in a long list of credits,is the only indication it's his film), which may partly explain why he is represented in the film by Sandor Krasna's letters.

Influences

The sequence in San Francisco references Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Marker's own earlier film La jetée. Marker's use of the name "The Zone" to describe the space in which Hayao Yamaneko's images are transformed, is a homage to Stalker, a film by Andrei Tarkovsky, as noted in one of the letters read in the film. English rock band Kasabian used a sound clip from the documentary in their West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum album at the beginning of the song "West Ryder Silver Bullet".

External links

• Sans Soleil at the Internet Movie Database
• Sans Soleil at Rotten Tomatoes
• Sans Soleil at AllRovi
• Full text of the film
• Full text of the film in Russian