The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965.

On my imaginary shelf of favorites Sans Soleil had always sat slightly out of view, lingering in the shadows behind the other cinematic behemoths that had crafted the loftiest statures in my mind. It sat in repose as I time and time again avoided re-watching it, every time hesitating, wondering if this was truly the film I once had thought it to be. Being intimidated by my own inner-circle is just the kind of business I'm in, and baby, business is a-boomin'. Now, after a multitude of revisits, looking back on my imaginary shelf there are still those that lurk in the…

"I've been around the world several times, and now only banality still interests me."

Through a fictionalized series of letters narrated by a dispassionate woman (who editorializes a bit now and then), a globetrotting cameraman describes his recent travels—to Japan, the Cape Verde islands, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland and the United States—and ruminates on a great many subjects, chief among them being the interdependence of memory and image. I couldn't fully summarize Chris Marker's Sans Soleil if my life depended on it (even after watching both the French and English versions over the past week), nor do I believe a synopsis could do justice to the film's approach; suffice to say that this densely multifarious essay film revels in the transportive essence…

When it comes to movies these days I really am spoiled by so little want. I mean, it's just so easy to get hold of most things, even if one has to resort to torrent sites like karagarga or other more obscure avenues. Rewatching Sans Soleil reminded me of when I would make almost daily trips to the library in downtown San Francisco and bring home anything on DVD or VHS that looked interesting or that I'd heard about from friends on livejournal or whatever, often browsing a selection of the same old titles, yet anxious to see if perhaps anything new had been returned and not already picked out by another in the constantly ravenous swarm of movie fiends.…

My main source of inspiration from the documentaries of Werner Herzog, Agnès Varda and now Chris Marker is that they all seem to represent the prospect that cinema isn’t such a challenge to create, implying that if you’re fortunate enough to simply own a camera, you too can make a film. This ‘do it yourself’ sentiment gives me much hope for the future, the idea that if every pitch I ever made went hideously wrong I could journey out into the world armed with nothing but a camera, intentions focused solely on showing this global carnival in motion. 

Like Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Sans Soleil quickens the heart with its cerebral dissection of passing human beings, all…

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." - James Joyce, Ulysses

"I look at his machines. I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend."

Godard's fixation on new technologies of documentation speaks to his desire to upend the hierarchies of professional art, to liberate individual perspective from the tyranny of production while simultaneously making possible the expression of a true, complex history unencumbered by the manipulative edits of victorious capitalism and imperialism. Chris Marker's own approach as a filmmaker, most purely expressed in the technological experiments of Sans Soleil, are to embrace the fundamental impossibility of any one Truth. Synthesizers and emergent image manipulation technology abound in this film, and in…

I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.

Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.

I’m sorely tempted to not write an actual review for Sans Soleil, but instead just keep on copying out all the quotes that made my head spin. However, if I were to do that, I’d end up transcribing the entirety of the film’s narration, which is just plagiarism, so. Here goes nothing!

Sans Soleil resists description, and even struggles to fit neatly into the definition of a ‘film’ at all. Rather than…

People have, for as long as I can remember, told me I was “smart.” I have never understood this. I do not believe I have ever talked to anyone in my entire life who I was somehow “smarter” than, whatever that even means. I have never encountered a single person who didn’t have something to teach me, something I would never have known without that particular encounter with that particular person at that particular time. If anything, in most every interaction I have, I am regularly awed by how much more of the world the other party understands, how much I can learn from them. I go through life assuming everyone I speak to is “smarter than me,” and I do…

"I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten."

Memories are the means of which the mind stores and remembers information, recollections of the past that are then remembered, images and impressions as can be sheathed in our minds.

Memories consist of many things, senses such as sight and sound combined with a particular placement in time; although as each memory is an encapsulation, they are all ultimately atemporal abstractions of specific moments in our past.

Memories degrade over time or due to lack of attention. Information must be stored before it can…

Like any decently-educated cinephile, I was saddened at the passing of filmmaker Chris Marker in 2012. Having only seen La jetee by that time, I grieved based on how insanely original I found that film to be, and it further inspired me to seek out his other work to pay tribute. Well, as all of us cinephiles who vow to watch a canonical filmmaker's filmography can most likely sympathize, things in my life got in the way and that idea was derailed, replaced by other distractions or duties.

It wasn't until I purchased the discounted Criterion Blu-ray containing Marker's two greatest works that my goal was reinstated. I watched La jetee again, loving it even more, and then I moved…

I can write about what happens in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, as well as describe to you the many formalist flourishes it wields as it traverses the liminal generic boundaries between documentary, avant-grade, and essay film conventions. I could even enumerate various feelings I experienced while watching this seemingly free-associative movie poem, from rapture to repulsion, from delight to despair. And I still wouldn’t be able to adequately describe my feelings actually watching this generous, ferociously alive masterpiece as it ruminates on the reconstruction of memory and the formation of new ways to process the world we live in. The dreams of the past are transformed into digital simulacra of violent pixelization. While Marker is enchanted by the possibilities media-making…