| Sans Soleil | |
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Criterion Collection DVD packaged with La jetée |
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| Directed by | Chris Marker |
| Written by | Chris Marker (as Sandor Krasna) |
| Narrated by | Florence Delay (French version) Riyoko Ikeda (Japanese version) Charlotte Kerr (German version) Alexandra Stewart (English version) |
| Music by | Chris Marker (as Michel Krasna) |
| Cinematography | Chris Marker (as Sandor Krasna) |
| Editing by | Chris Marker |
| Distributed by | Argos Films |
| Release date(s) | 1983 |
| Running time | 100 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
Sans Soleil (Sunless in English) is a 1983 French film directed by Chris Marker. The title is from the song cycle Sunless by Modest Mussorgsky. Sans Soleil is a meditation on the nature of human memory, showing the inability to recall the context and nuances of memory and how, as a result, the perception of personal and global histories are affected.
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Stretching the genre of documentary, this experimental essay-film is a composition of thoughts, images and scenes, mainly from Japan and Guinea-Bissau, "two extreme poles of survival".[1] Some other scenes were filmed in Iceland, Paris, and San Francisco. A female narrator reads from letters supposedly sent to her by the (fictitious) cameraman Sandor Krasna.
Sans Soleil is often labeled as a documentary, travelogue, or essay-film. Despite the film's modest use of fictional content, it should not be confused as a mock-documentary; the fictitious content works as a device to assist meaning in the film which, along with its occasionally nondescript movement among locations and lack of character-based narrative, is derived from the juxtaposition of narrative and image.
The original French version of Sans Soleil opens with the following quotation by Jean Racine from his tragedy Bajazet (1672):
"L'Éloignement des pays répare en quelque sorte la trop grande proximité des temps."
(The distance between countries compensates somewhat for the excessive closeness of time.)
Marker replaced this quote with the following one by T. S. Eliot from Ash 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".[2]
Sans Soleil contains some stock footage, clips from Japanese films and television, and a few excerpts from other films. The original documentary footage was filmed by Marker with a 16mm Beaulieu silent film camera in conjunction with a non-sync portable tape recorder; the film contains no synchronous sound.[3] Some of the stock footage shots were colourized with a Spectron video synthesizer.
The sequence in San Francisco references Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Marker's own earlier film La jetée. Marker's use of the name "The Zone" to describe the space in which Hayao Yamaneko's (who is, in fact, Marker himself) images are transformed, is a homage to Stalker, a film by Andrei Tarkovsky, as noted in one of the letters read in the film. English rock band Kasabian used a sound clip from the documentary in their West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum album at the beginning of the song of the same name.
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