This film keeps coming back to me. It utterly confused me at first but something about it made me go back and watch again. It is a film that can fit into many definitions, none of them however, definitively.
The problem of capturing reality is a problem central to film theory, most do it by creating the 'reality effect' via the familiar codes of continuity editing etc, but it is just that, an illusion. Marker, like Godard, purposely confounds these codes and explores the limits of film/the image/art in order to examine what Benjamin called 'erfahrung' - a formulation for experience aligned to memory as apposed to immediacy. True experience is the recollection of events, a retracing of the path of memory. Only when experience is assimilated in this way can meaning be derived from it.
Sans Soleil plays with the idea of grand historicising themes, focusing on the narratives left untold in the history books, the story of the defeated, strange cultural idiosyncrasies, the easy, lazy way emotions are manipulated by the camera, so a man's tears of gratitude are revealed by context to be tears of rage. Marker takes canonical historical signposts and challenges their ability to tell us anything of worth about the world and humanity within it. He jolts (and it is a jolt) our attention away from the official processes of historification, that goes on beneath our noses in cinema, towards the banal and the everyday detail that comes the stuff of life itself.
On first viewing, especially if you are unfamiliar with the codes of progressive, experimental or 'counter' cinema, you may well be confused. But you will also be intrigued and on second viewing its secrets begin to reveal themselves. This is released with Marker's short la Jetee, another treat.
This is a truly remarkable film, the only piece of cinema that has, for me, chimed on a similar level of complexity and profundity with the works of Shakespeare and one that similarly continues to resonate.
The problem of capturing reality is a problem central to film theory, most do it by creating the 'reality effect' via the familiar codes of continuity editing etc, but it is just that, an illusion. Marker, like Godard, purposely confounds these codes and explores the limits of film/the image/art in order to examine what Benjamin called 'erfahrung' - a formulation for experience aligned to memory as apposed to immediacy. True experience is the recollection of events, a retracing of the path of memory. Only when experience is assimilated in this way can meaning be derived from it.
Sans Soleil plays with the idea of grand historicising themes, focusing on the narratives left untold in the history books, the story of the defeated, strange cultural idiosyncrasies, the easy, lazy way emotions are manipulated by the camera, so a man's tears of gratitude are revealed by context to be tears of rage. Marker takes canonical historical signposts and challenges their ability to tell us anything of worth about the world and humanity within it. He jolts (and it is a jolt) our attention away from the official processes of historification, that goes on beneath our noses in cinema, towards the banal and the everyday detail that comes the stuff of life itself.
On first viewing, especially if you are unfamiliar with the codes of progressive, experimental or 'counter' cinema, you may well be confused. But you will also be intrigued and on second viewing its secrets begin to reveal themselves. This is released with Marker's short la Jetee, another treat.
This is a truly remarkable film, the only piece of cinema that has, for me, chimed on a similar level of complexity and profundity with the works of Shakespeare and one that similarly continues to resonate.