This is inherently interesting as a viewer, because it is so different from what you see in traditional documentary filmmaking. A revolution sparking in Guinea-Bissau is treated the same as subway riders in Tokyo. Marker creates a film collage, where every element is treated with the same weight as every other element. The sequence of the town covered in ash in Iceland, the video synthesizer segments, and the cuts between media like anime to documentary footage, all stand out as incredibly visually compelling. With that in mind, what is Sans Soleil really about? Why is the audience invested in this frenetic montage of images? Firstly, Marker has filmed, and also sourced from other filmmakers, really excellent footage. The film stretches the genre to its absolute limit. Instead of making the observations in the film his own, he uses a pseudonym, and has someone else read them as fictional letters this pseudonym wrote her from his extensive travels as a filmmaker. Sans Soleil disregards all of those rules.Ĭhris Marker openly flaunts the constructed nature of the medium, writing in the narration of the film "Frankly, have you ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people, as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera?" Sans Soleil covers 1980s consumer culture, revolutions across the world, cats, Japanese rituals, volcanoes erupting in Iceland, poverty, longshoremen in Guinea-Bissau, and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, all in under two hours. One would assume a documentary would be objective, educational in a journalistic, fact checked manner, and focus on roughly one subject. What makes the film so great, and still worth talking about 40 years on, is how it shatters what a documentary is perceived to be. To say that Marker was a seasoned documentary filmmaker by the time he got to making Sans Soleil is an understatement. Following that, he worked on Resnais' film Toute la mémoire du monde, covering the national library of France, and Statues Also Die, a collaborative effort with Resnais and Ghislain Cloquet, which was banned in France due its critique of French colonialism. Chris Marker was a true documentary veteran, starting his career as a filmmaker working alongside Left Bank comrade Alain Resnais, most notably helping to write the script for Night and Fog, Resnais' film on the Holocaust, arguably the greatest piece of documentary filmmaking ever made. The greatest rule breakers in cinema are people who know the rules better than the filmmaking purists of the world. In order to break something apart, you need to understand how something works.
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