Sans Soleil, Chris Marker, France, 1983, 100’
What more can we say about Sans Soleil at this stage of proceedings?
That it is one of the all-time pinnacle works of cinema?
That when it came out, it changed, forever, the way of thinking through images?
Everything has already been written and said about this chef d’oeuvre, so it probably suffices to add that cinema was never the same after this film. And that precisely for that reason it behoves us to see it again, every so often, on the big screen.
This is a monumental film-essay: from Japan to Guinea-Bissau, from the faces of the three kids on a road in Iceland, to the streets of San Francisco. Before the advent of the Internet, when ideas, texts and images could be connected through links, Chris Marker was already making visionary films in which ideas, memory, history, politics, cinema, images and sound were linked together for the first time on screen in such a free way.
All the secrets of cinema and life are hidden in this work. One of the films one always wants to revisit.
All the secrets of cinema and life are hidden in this work. One of the films one always wants to revisit.