"Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window."
On Sunday night we watched Sans Soleil from the New Yorker VHS release, which probably looked close to how it should given that it was filmed on 16mm. Any summary will fail to capture the depth of a Marker film, but briefly, a woman reads letters, ostensibly from whoever captured the images we see from a number of locations. This narrative gloss is quickly betrayed through the philosophical and historical musings that mark this to be an essay film, populated not by characters but by ideas loose in the world. Contemporary Japan occupies the film's center, but Marker's movement is not bounded by time or space, but by association, contrast, and the occasional non sequiter ("did you know there are emus in the Ile de France?") Japan had featured in his oeuvre before- the 1965 biographical short Le Mystère Koumiko- and there's a familiarity with the place that colors the content. Although he does dip into defining national moments, World War II and the Heian period, for instance, his exploration is far more personal, seemingly following interest and chance rather than reaching for a composite. Light is thrown into the sunless corners of Japanese culture: ceremonies, streets, tv, sex museums, outcast bums, video games, department stores, leftist demonstrations. Although the narrator sometimes reads from the letters sweeping generalizations, what we come to learn about this place and the others chronicled comes fragmented, at times contradictory. Sans Soleil, then, evokes early post-modernity in its fractured style and impressionistic portrait of post-industrial capitalism and underdevelopment in close, uncertain proximity on the screen. Post-colonial Africa serves as Marker's foil to technocratic Japan. Here the letters dwell far more on the past, the disappointing aftermath of socialist national liberation movements in the developing world, as mediated by extensive documentary footage. There are other travels, to San Francisco in search of Vertigo landmarks, to France with it's idiosyncratic emus, and the poignant bookends shot in Iceland. Leading the letter writer is the unrelenting theme of memory and image- Do images constitute history, or is it the other way around? How does memory use the image, and what are the implications of the image being used to dance across time and the surface of the world as Marker does?
How can I comment much more on Sans Soleil? On the internet alone there are pages upon pages of interpretation by people who've spent a lot more time with it then I have, or have a richer theoretical background. Instead, I'll just encourage everyone to make it a priority to see it soon, and give some brief thoughts as to why. To begin with, if my description sounds daunting, be comforted that Marker approaches his work with a sense of humor and compassion. Cats, dogs, children, even emus are his muses, and are treated as an essential part of the world, not to be trampled by history. Indeed, they are essential to our lives and memory. From an early scene:
"He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats. I wish I could convey to you the simplicity—the lack of affectation—of this couple who had come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery so their cat Tora would be protected. No she wasn't dead, only run away. But on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right name. So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken."
Later, however, the cat's name Tora is linked to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor- "Tora! Tora! Tora!" Even when the world is shown at its most ugly, and in the narrator's words "history only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar coated," it is in the context of an always guardedly hopeful compassion. Gut-wrenching footage of a giraffe being slaughtered, guerrilla warfare, kamikaze missions; everything has it's place, so it seems, but Marker makes no room for exploitative imagery. There may be room for faulting Sans Soleil when it reverts to anthropological language for commentary. For example: "He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time."
Then again, according to the thin fictional veneer, this is not Marker himself speaking, but the fictional filmmaker speaking through his letters to the narrator. Who is this voice who is speaking to us, explaining or problematizing the stream of images? I'll leave it to the grad students to work on this one.
Another fascinating element of the film is the use of video manipulation, associated both with experimental art and mass-produced video games, to abstract and change images. A Japanese friend demonstrates their techniques, which they call "the Zone," a reference to Tarkovsky's Stalker, reducing film to moving shapes of color: "images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality." As the film progresses, it seems to inhabit more and more this Zone, or at least becomes obsessed with the technical means and the results it produces. The now archaic manual pins and switches used to create these pure images take on an architectural significance, almost like the ad-covered buildings of Japan channeling the human subjects in the street. Aside from its obvious thematic significance, the aesthetic impact is awesome, especially in our digitally saturated culture where computerized illusion is the norm. The radical potential of manipulated video work such as this doesn't seem to get its due much any more; but, like Godard and Mieville's video techniques in features like Numero Deux and Here and Elsewhere, Sans Soleil's intellectual interaction with "the Zone" signals a trajectory of experimentation that has unfortunately been eclipsed by CGI sleight of hand.
I view everything in a new light since starting to work on my own movie. In Sans Soleil, the autonomy of sound and image, cut loose from each other and stitched back together (with an edging of ambiguity) by the narrator-medium, struck me. Marker's collection of images and non-corresponding sounds could potentially have been constructed into a complete film, or any number of shorter or longer projects. His technique, of course, is genius here, but what is to prevent anyone to go out with any primitive equipment (Marker here used 16 mm and frequently degraded the image electronically), record their world, and make something out of it to share? In developing the film, I've planned several scenes reminiscent of Marker's, with documentary footage and found images overlaid by found sounds and disparate narration. Sans Soleil showed the plausibility of this approach, and its pitfalls. Namely, the ideas need to be there to upgrade the images (by contextualizing, reframing, problematizing), or the images and sounds need to be remarkable, without the need of commentary.
Sans Soleil was not my first encounter with Marker; I'd previously seen his far longer and more ponderous work on the fate of the revolutionary wave of the late 60's, Grin Without a Cat, as well as earlier shorts Sunday in Peking and The Koumiko Mystery. Interestingly enough, those latter two I received on a DVD-R from a friend. We went to watch them, but found them recorded without sound. Koumiko had subtitles, but our Sunday outing in revolutionary China was dead silent. As a solution, we put on Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, and the collaboration worked quite well. Marker's latest, The Case of the Grinning Cat got a short theatrical run in New York, but as far as I know hasn't made it to DVD- it's apparently an attempt to pick up the threads of Grin Without a Cat for the Iraq War generation, with a humorous exploration of Marker's favorite animal- the cat- in Parisian street art.
