| Sans Soleil | |
|---|---|
 Film poster | |
| Directed by | Chris Marker |
| Written by | Chris Marker[a] |
| Narrated by | Florence Delay (French version) Riyoko Ikeda (Japanese version) Charlotte Kerr (German version) Alexandra Stewart (English version) |
| Cinematography | Chris Marker |
| Edited by | Chris Marker |
| Music by | Chris Marker[b] |
| Distributed by | Argos Films |
Release date |
|
Running time | 100 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
Sans Soleil (French pronunciation:[sɑ̃sɔlɛj]; "Sunless") is a 1983 Frenchdocumentary film directed byChris Marker. It is a meditation on the nature of humanmemory, showing the inability to recall the context and nuances of memory, and how, as a result, the perception of personal and global histories is affected. The titleSans Soleil is from the song cycleSunless byModest Mussorgsky, a brief fragment of which features in the film.Sans Soleil is composed of documentary footage shot by Marker interwoven withstock footage, clips from Japanese movies and shows, and excerpts and stills from other films.
In a 2014Sight and Sound poll, film critics votedSans Soleil the third best documentary film of all time.[1]
Expanding thedocumentary genre, this experimental essay-film is a composition of thoughts, images and scenes, mainly fromJapan andGuinea-Bissau, "two extreme poles of survival".[2] Some other scenes were filmed inCape Verde,Iceland,Paris, andSan Francisco. A female narrator reads from letters supposedly sent to her by the (fictitious) cameraman Sandor Krasna.
Sans Soleil is often labeled a documentary, travelogue, or essay-film. Despite the film's modest use of fictional content, it should not be confused with amockumentary. The fictional content derived from the juxtaposition of narrative and image adds meaning to the film, along with occasional nondescript movement between locations and lack of character-based narrative.
Chris Marker has said: "On a more matter-of-fact level, I could tell you that the film intended to be, and is nothing more than, a home movie. I really think that my main talent has been to find people to pay for my home movies. Were I born rich, I guess I would have made more or less the same films, at least the traveling kind, but nobody would have heard of them except my friends and visitors."[3]
The titleSans Soleil is from the song cycleSunless byModest Mussorgsky "although only a brief fragment of Mussorgsky's cycle of songs (a brief passage of 'Sur le fleuve', the last of the songs in the cycle, which concerns itself with death) is heard in the course of the film."[4]
The original French version ofSans Soleil opens with the following quotation byJean Racine from the second preface to his tragedyBajazet (1672):
"L'éloignement des pays répare en quelque sorte la trop grande proximité des temps."
(The distance between the countries compensates somewhat for the excessive closeness of the times.)
Marker replaced this quote with the following one byT. S. Eliot fromAsh Wednesday (1930) for the English version of the film:
"Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place"...
(And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place.)[5]
Sans Soleil contains somestock footage, clips from Japanese films and television, and a few excerpts from other films. The original documentary footage was filmed by Marker with a 16mmBeaulieu silent film camera in conjunction with a non-sync portable tape recorder; the film contains nosynchronous sound.[6] Some of the stock footage shots were colourized with an EMS Spectrevideo synthesizer. A number of sequences inSans Soleil are borrowed from other filmmakers who are not mentioned until the film's credits, except the footage of the Icelandic volcano which is accredited in narration toHaroun Tazieff.[7]
The filmmakers whose footage was used who were not mentioned in the narration areSana Na N'Hada, Jean-Michel Humeau, Mario Marret, Eugenio Bentivoglio and Daniele Tessier. Pierre Camus was an assistant director; Anne-Marie L'Hote and Catherine Adda, assistant editors; Antoine Bonfanti and Paul Bertault, mixing.[8]
The film was assembled largely in the 1970s, a period when Marker was part of a political commune and preferred to downplay his authorial signature, which may partly explain why he is represented in the film by Sandor Krasna's letters. The title "Conception and editing: Chris Marker," at the end of the credits, is the only indication thatSans Soleil is his film.[9]
New Yorker Films released the film in the United States.[10]
 | This sectionneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources in this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Sans Soleil" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(June 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
The sequence in San Francisco referencesAlfred Hitchcock's 1958 filmVertigo and Marker's own 1962 filmLa Jetée. Marker's use of the name "The Zone" to describe the space in which Hayao Yamaneko's images are transformed is a homage toStalker, a 1979 film byAndrei Tarkovsky, as noted in one of the letters read in the film.
English rock bandKasabian used a sound clip from the documentary in their 2009 albumWest Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum at the beginning of the song "West Ryder Silver Bullet".
Sans Soleil has received critical acclaim, and has appeared in many "best films" lists:
However, not all critics have been so positive. InThe Guardian,Peter Bradshaw awarded it 3 stars out of 5, saying it was "sometimes perplexing, often intriguing, occasionally redundant. The modified video images of urban commotion and guerrilla warfare, together withMoog-synth score, look a bit quaint."[14] InThe New York Times,Vincent Canby was negative, saying "Mr. Marker pretends to be examining the quality of contemporary life, though what he actually is doing is examining his own, not always coherent or especially interesting reactions to our world.Sans Soleil is a totally self-absorbed movie that closes out all but the most devoted Marker students."[15]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
