Film Notes: Sans Soleil

The distillation of memory, of the act of remembering, is an act of cataloging images. When we retrieve a memory, it is excavated as a snapshot, a brief moment. Maybe some motion. Maybe some sound. This is the quick synaptic work of the brain, and it’s often all we need. We can work in this shorthand because these images are tagged with associations. We are like an archive. 

Configuring a narrative is something we do later, as a more protracted, intentional act, generally only for the purpose of relaying the memory to someone else. Chris Marker’s 1983 documentary, Sans Soleil, is an exercise in recreating and interrogating that act. Composed of footage shot by Marker throughout his travels in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, as well as some stock footage and clips from movies and television, Sans Soleil takes all this material and assigns it a cohesive structure and meaning through montage and narration. 

The bulk of the material was shot in Japan, with additional footage from Guinea Bissau, the Cape Verde Islands, San Francisco, and Iceland. The glue for all these disparate images is a narration read by Canadian actress Alexandra Stewart, in the form of a letter sent to her by the fictitious cinematographer, Sandor Krasna. Krasna provides ethnographic observations from his travels and muses on the universality of mankind. He remarks on times when the places he’s been smack him with the memory of a film, or of another place, or of something he once heard or thought. The imagery is largely observational, it gives the impression that Krasna is a fly on the wall, that the film displays his memories as he recalls them. Some of them are languorous; some, a flash.

In 1983, the main point of contention was whether or not this film qualified as a documentary at all. But it’s unclear if Marker himself ever intended it to be assigned to that genre. He referred to it as a “home movie”. This is an apt description. This is personal footage; the choice to do something public with it came decades later than some of it was shot. This description also captures the feeling of watching the film. But regardless of intent, Sans Soleil greatly expanded the notion of what a documentary could be. That it could be personal, that it did not have to be a piece of reportage in order to constitute an observational truth. Indeed, part of Marker’s point is that objectivity is a farce and yet what he has provided in the film is full of truths.

The footage itself is an artifact, an archeological object, and while contextualizing it may be folly, imbued with the biases and context of those interpreting it, there is essential, absolute truth in the attributes of the object itself. In Marker’s footage, we get so much information, we get so many slices of Japan and Guinea Bissau in the late 20th century. It is our nature to extrapolate, but the pure volume of images in Marker’s work forces the viewer to take them in and simply regard an image of a woman praying at a shrine, of people hauling in fishing nets on the shore, of young girls holding hands. The visual is the truth. These people were there, in front of the camera. They lived. 

The contrived narration isn’t so much there, then, to provide an official narrative, but rather, to make a statement about the folly of social anthropology and of documenting history at all. And yet, the whole exercise is a type of historiography.

Marker seemed to exist in a space of fungible truths and malleable histories. He claimed to have been born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, though there is no evidence to support this. His birthdate is highly disputed. He was known to be elusive about many of the formative details of his life. 

A member of the Left Bank Movement, Marker befriended many of the intellectual figures of the French New Wave, and worked closely with Alain Resnais. In the ‘70s, when much of Sans Soleil was shot, he was part of a political commune, and the choice to funnel all of the film’s observations through a fictional character may have been just as much a leftist political choice about eschewing authorship as it was an artistic one.

He lived a life that suggests that our stories are what we decide they are, and isn’t that something we all do ourselves? Our memories, our perspectives, even our notions of epistemology, none of these are static. And so Sans Soleil might be the truest truth. It ends by altering the footage with synthesizer generated distortions reminiscent of thermal imaging. A visual realm likened in the film to Tarkovsky’s Zone and an effect of atomic degeneration. In the end, Marker’s images are divorced from context, situated in the cosmos. Absent time, absent place. Star stuff.