Feb. 15, 2012 - Issue #852: The Coffee Issue
Sans Soleil / La Jetée
» A travelogue film ... maybe
Revisiting Sans Soleil for the first time in years, what the film now reminds me of most is WG Sebald's uncategorizable literary masterpiece The Rings of Saturn. We have the intimate voice that's mostly talking about others, the rigorous wandering, the compulsive thought-detours into subjects such as street parades, video games, holidays, revolutions and military coups, panda death, Vertigo, television, Jean Jacques Rousseau, volcanic ash, public sleeping, Apocalypse Now, wildlife, the absence of adjectives in Japanese poetry and large-scale advertising: "pictures larger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs." It's a film for those who feel at home everywhere but at home, who are fascinated by the sacred-exotic, who want to remember everything even though they know perfectly well that memory's really just the lining of forgetting. Or it's for anyone drawn to the essence of movies, because that's also what Sans Soleil is essentially about. In one of Criterion's superb supplements filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin describes Sans Soleil as "a secret map." Which again calls to mind the travelogue, except that Marker's navigational skills are all tied up in the facilitation of his wanderlust, which has guided him through a long career that embraces many forms, formats and themes. He's still at it, some 60 years after helping to found the Left Bank movement, still embracing new technologies, still merging the very personal with the global, the political, the arcane. And he's still too little known. My wish list for future Criterion releases? More Marker, please!
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