He Wrote Me...

Film: Sans Soleil (Sunless)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various media.




















If you look up Sans Soleil (Sunless) on the Internet and start reading through the criticism or the reviews on IMDB.com, you’ll see the phrase “Sans Soleil is a unique meditation on [insert subject(s)]” over and over. Evidently, this is an art film geek’s way of telling people that this is an art geek film, one that can be appreciated only by those who wear berets, sip Chateau d’Something, and smoke clove cigarettes.

So let’s get this out of the way right away: Chris Marker’s film is absolutely a meditation on life, culture, art, time, and more. As for unique, I’m not entirely sure. There were large chunks of this film that reminded me pretty strongly of films like Mondo Cane, even down to the actual filmed deaths of wild creatures and some of the more disturbing parts of the circle of life—vultures pecking at the eyes of a dead giraffe, for instance.

The film is essentially a 100+ minute montage of images, primarily from Guinea-Bissau and Japan. There is no chronology or story; instead, the film is a series of short monologues delivered by a narrator, who is herself describing letters she has received from the filmmaker, Marker’s alter ego. Parts of the film act as history lesson on Guinea-Bissau and its rise to nation status from Portuguese colony and its bloody birth and early years. Other parts are commentary on Japanese television and culture, as well as the emerging culture of video games—still brand new in the film’s year of 1982.

Marker draws metaphors everywhere, linking Pac-Man to life, for instance, although not in the way that I would have. He comments through his narrator that the game symbolizes the relationship of individual and environment. To my mind the metaphor works better seeing the eponymous hero of the game as an endless consumer, pursued through an unending maze by little personalized demons that eventually trap and kill him…but then I’m not the filmmaker here, am I?

Regardless, Marker does not shy away from terrible images, seeking a sort of beauty in horror that he attributes is also a part of Japanese culture. Even pain must be exquisite, he says, and he gives us a taste of the horrific. It is a terrible moment to see a giraffe shot through the neck, blood fountaining in twin geysers from each side of the neck, terrible to see a man walk up and put a rifle bullet through the creatures head, terrible to see the giraffe’s fate as vultures plunge neck-deep into the eye socket. Terrible also are the images of death of the people of Guinea-Bissau plagued by war and revolution after revolution.

It is entirely possible that I am not the right person to truly comment on Marker’s work here. What I can say is that this film is special. It comes across not so much as a film with a cohesive or connected story, but as a meandering expression of ideals and philosophy. It comes almost as stream of consciousness as the narrator skips from topic to topic and back again, going where the images take her, or perhaps the images instead follow her train of thought through the letters received from Marker’s persona. It feels almost like reading someone’s private journal entries, provided the author majored in philosophy.

Is it unique? In some ways certainly, although Mondo Cane is its natural parent and Koyaanisqatsi is a direct sibling. I can say that while I probably didn’t understand all of it, I found it visually fascinating, even when it was also visually disturbing and terrible. I was never bored by it.

I feel like I need to watch it again, or perhaps again and again, to truly understand what Marker was trying to accomplish here. It’s a film that doesn’t seem to do well on a single viewing, only acquiring meaning and relevance through repeated exposure. It demands and deserves to be taken seriously and studied, and that may be its most defining character trait. It is important, almost certainly in ways that I only partially fathom.

This is not truly a documentary, because it documents nothing beyond our unseen and unheard author’s musings, but it does play and feel like a documentary. Also, I watched this film on several different media, so it’s difficult for me to pinpoint exactly where I watched it. I think, ultimately, Marker would approve of that.

A few last notes. I was tempted to watch Vertigo, since a lot of parallels are drawn to that film, but I simply didn't have time. Second, I can see where many would find the soundtrack here annoying or disturbing, but I really liked it, particularly at the end. Third, films like this don't bore me, but they do have a tendency to make me sleepy.

Why to watch Sans Soleil: Interesting and meditative.
Why not to watch: Disjointed and sometimes gruesome.

Time After Time After Time After Time

Films: La Jetee
Format: Online video on laptop.

While it’s only been a week since I started this blog for real, I thought it was time to get myself out of my comfort zone and do something new. Up until now, everything I’ve watched has been in English with only one exception (M), and I’d already seen everything at least once before. So, it was time to move into uncharted territory. Thus, I decided to not only look at something in a different language—French in this case—but that was also completely new to me.

Of course, that’s not entirely true in the case of La Jetee. While I haven’t seen this film before, I have seen the film that came from it, and it’s a movie I love very much. Terry Gilliam used this film as an inspiration for 12 Monkeys to the point where a special notice on his film was included to give Chris Marker at least some credit for inspiring Gilliam.

La Jetee cannot be considered as anything other than an art film. In fact, the only real thing it has in common with a traditional film is a narrator. It is not a moving picture as most of us are used to in that it doesn’t actually move. Instead, it is a series of black and white stills linked into a cohesive story by a narrator.

With its short running time, there isn’t a lot of room for exposition in the film; instead, things just kind of happen without much explanation given to us. We start at Orly in Paris as a young boy and his family watch the planes take off and land. The young boy is struck by a particular image, a combination of the sun, the jetty, and a woman’s face. Later, the boy realizes that he has just witnessed a man being killed on the jetty, and this may well be why the image stays with him.

Later (and yes, this is essentially the plot device used here), World War III starts. Paris, and presumably the rest of the world is completely destroyed and people are forced to live underground. With the world uninhabitable, the scientists who live underground are forced to try a variety of experiments. The only way to find what they need to survive—food, medicine—is to travel through time, back to the past. But surviving in the past is impossible for most men. Waking up in an old time as an adult would drive most men mad. The only way for this experiment to work is to find a man who can truly imagine the past.

The most successful at this is the boy from the jetty years before, mostly because of the strength of the vision he has of the jetty at Orly and the woman’s face. Subjected to experiment after experiment, he calls up images from a past time, essentially travelling back through time, where he meets the girl he remembers from the jetty years before. But this time, he is an adult and not a boy.

***HERE THERE BE SPOILERS***

The point of the film is that the boy at the beginning, the man killed on the jetty, and the man traveling back into time are all the same person. The boy, essentially, witnesses his own death. It is an existential moment that will, in one way, continue to repeat itself ad infinitum. The boy grows up to become the man who is killed in front of the boy who grows up to be the man who is killed in front of the boy, ad nauseum. There is a beauty here, though, of a life so perfectly created and contained that its beginning contains the seeds of its own end, and that its end creates its beginning.

***THUS ENDETH THE SPOILERS***

Because of the path this film takes, I don’t think it could possibly be anything but French. It is a truly existential experiment, one that could not come from a different culture or time. While Gilliam used this film to inspire 12 Monkeys, I don’t think that film would have happened without this one first. It is without question a French invention, and a set piece of French sensibilities.

La Jetee is tragic and sad, and yet filled with its own beauty and wonder. It is a film that I believe will stay with me for a long time, if only because of the way that it works and the way that the story unfolds. It is not a fantastic example of storytelling, nor narration at its best, but it is a wonder of imagination and inventiveness.

Incidentally, if you have already seen 12 Monkeys, the ending of this film is quite similar, and you should go up and read the spoilers. If you’ve seen the one, there are no surprises here in the other.

Why to watch La Jetee: A quiet, tragic beauty and an inventive story.
Why not to watch: 26 minutes of still photography and existential angst.