A great deal has been written about Sans Soleil’s meditation on, and mediation of, the link between memory, imagery, and time, much of which frames Chris Marker’s cinema as an attempt to navigate the impasse between self and society, as well as past and present, and to ponder the relationship between the external world and the internal, culturally contingent meanings divined by the viewer from external imagery. To this extent, an obvious reading of the film would be that it vandalizes cinema’s hope to accurately represent the world and corrodes memory’s potential to interrogate the past without bias. Yet, while a highly subjective film – one entirely unsure of its subjectivity – that dissolves linear continuity and causal image relationships to mourn the loss of stable, coherent mental structures, Sans Soleil also enlivens itself with the possibility of imagery unshackled from cause-effect confines, gifted flight to connect with and comment on other images that nominally – diegetically – boast origins in warring time periods and differing geographic locations. Sans Soleil reflects the mortality of the classical conception of cinema as a thread on which a singular “reality” is mounted from beginning to end, a cinema comparatively assured of its own truism. Yet Marker’s film also discovers in this demise a sense of renewed possibility, even refreshed reality, in a more subjective world caught up in the ephemerality of its own meanings, alive to a multiplicity of readings because each meaning, by itself, is ultimately far from completely sustainable. Marker’s cinema embodies Thoreau’s sense of the “I” as a personal and vibrant resonance with the world, one that is closer and more in touch with the world because it knows that it cannot access it completely or without the entanglements of the social.

Largely, Sans Soleil achieves this dialectic through editing with an eye for connection rather than causality, allowing images to echo and remake or inflect each other associatively rather than to “accumulate” over time toward one definitive “answer.” The film also routinely meditates on its own fallible representation by incorporating images of various artistic representations that both fail to encapsulate humanity and somehow exceed or re-interpret human life. Much as death in the film often animates creativity or life, even contact with the unknown or the intangibles of existence, the death/deconstruction of cinema’s classical structure is ultimately a conduit for imaginative revitalization and connection between images, cultures, and ideas. Decrementing artistic manipulation or modernism as an escape from reality and into the castle of the mind may risk implying that external reality is an objective state that can be grasped non-subjectively in the first place. Thinking about how one sees the world is interacting with the world. Sans Soleil thus refuses recourse either to an impenetrably singular will or an ungraspable material multiplicity, offering instead a plurality of sensate connections weaving a constellation of possibility out of the modern maelstrom of images, senses, and feelings confronting us at every turn. Moving across time and space like a ghostly wanderer through the cosmos, it is a cinema of interstellar communion.

Despite the illusory nature of a memory in Sans Soleil, Marker’s film does not exclusively adopt a mood of melancholic hopelessness about the possibilities of memory and art to reconsider the world. Marker’s is an ephemeral world, but the fingerprints of reality’s hauntedness are available for those who search. Despite its highly modernistic refracting of perspective and lack of a singular mythopoetic narrative structure, the film’s project also seems somewhat Romantic, emphasizing the individual mind’s capacity – or at least the possibility – to transcend social circumstance, to bridge subjective realities, to privilege the beauty in everyday experience and divine meaning from new contexts. Watching a chef, the film frames cooking as an art and proposes that rumination on this act can provoke philosophical meditation. The narration, that this induced trance or combination of physical torpor and mental stimulation is “common to philosophy, painting, the martial arts,” obliterates imposed cultural and artistic boundaries. It establishes a togetherness of being in the world, a sense of inexhaustible possibility where art, as it were, can exist in anything. Partially, this shifts the film – which could be read as a commentary on humanity’s reduction to image-status in an overly-technological modernity – to a less pejorative, more inquisitive register wherein a human is always an artist, or a wielder of mental energy, and always an art, or always prey to the gaze of other people, always slippery and potentially repurposeable as a visual image for meditation and imagination. As the narrator notes, even “commercials become a kind of haiku” under a certain light, if confronted empathetically. In this light, that images can be unmoored from context and shredded of permanence by the incessant march of time – that they don’t exist contextually bound in the past – can be a liberatory reality as much as a fragile one.

Consider the sequence immediately preceding the chef. While the figure is not an unlocking image – if anything, Sans Soleil has no such center or secret to “give over” to the audience – the comment on the cook at least provides a grounding rod for the film’s electric tendrils. The density of trains/buses throughout the film suggest certain overarching themes, namely the search for meaning, the movement across space and, in this case, time. But the film’s “transportation” – both transporting the audience to the world of Japan and fictional filmmaker Sandor Krasna’s transportation to his own past through reminiscence’s ghostly echo – are shot through with absence. A wide-framed image of land – several images, in fact – suggests access to the possibility of the external world. But the images are already displaced from immediate contact by the mediating device of a bus window, a facsimile of a film screen and a reminder that knowledge and/or sight can be artistically constructed and often mediated, foggy, or distant as well as a revealing, contingent, and sometimes intangible perspective on reality rather than an objective, foundational, unchanging rendering of it.

Of course, while the film is shot through with absence and instability, its non-linear, non-causal editing also establishes new constellations of meaning that exceed any a priori narrative structure. The film plays with the interrelationship between humans – in flesh – and representations of humans throughout. Early, for instance, we cut to a shot of a motorcyclist glimpsed through his rear-view mirror – again an echo of the vista through the train window, a reality glimpsed through a frame. Right after this shot, we cut directly to a swinging pendulum modeled as an owl in blue and yellow, a representation or image of an owl. The editing suggests that man on the motorcycle is mediated, partially unknown, “represented” artistically much like the owl and the hundreds of other images of art in the film. Yet the film is not entirely given to negative analysis of such images as failures to evoke reality. The shot of the owl pendulum is mimicked soon after when a man himself swings back and forth on the side of a building, framed around the windows of the building as if an image or representation himself (which, of course, he is as glimpsed through the film camera), as if being reduced to a mere ornament of the city. Conversely, however, one could suggest the alternate, that the city’s life bestows movement and energy to not only the man but the ostensible owl object, dissolving the iron-clad capitalist distinction between human and material so prevalent in the Western world. Yet, the aforementioned point about the man swinging between window-frames echoing the owl advertisement in the window only attains argumentative status through the formal manipulation of the film to place these images in direct conversation with one another. The spatial and temporal cuts here, not contextualizing the two images within causal or diegetic space but with ideological or associative similitude, is foundational for art, creation, and filmic representation. Rather than locking images in stable interpretations as if “choosing” one – the man or the owl pendulum – as more “alive,” the editing unmoors images from such distinctions.

Similarly, right before the shot of the motorcyclist, the film cuts to a man standing in the street, the camera tilting up to reframe him by revealing a loudspeaker tied to his back, again an alien image – we do not know who this man is or why he stands here – that is not contextualized by the film’s narration or edited causally. The man becomes a kind of instrument, sound emanating from him, an odd symphony backed by a score of music that confounds the membrane between diegesis and non-diegesis since it seems to come from this man as well as the score. We then see the motorcyclist, then the pendulum owl, itself emanating a robotic bell noise that mirrors the non-diegetic electronic score, as though the film’s non-diegetic music is in some harmony with the sounds of the diegetic world temporarily. This speaks to the desire to use cinematic music – non-diegetic music manipulation – to not only perceive but connect to new cultures, Japan in this case. After a shot of what appears to be a self-inflating clarinet trapped in a store-window, neither assuredly a genuine instrument nor definitely a fake one, we then cut to a sign, as the camera pans down to reveal a woman crunching numbers on a calculator. Yet, again, the musical score reframes her as an everyday musician: her hand motions match the electronic warbles of the music, as though she is playing an electronic keyboard of the universe. This sequence jeopardizes a hermetic seal between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, as well as a clear boundary between the observer to the observed.

All this speaks to the Krasna character’s penchant for discovering beauty in the world, for uncovering new perspectives, for locating a “symphony” in everyday objects and people in other contexts, massaging vitality out of them. The film, in meditating everyday sites, boasts a fascination with the quotidian that elevates the banal to the otherworldly or alien – rereads the woman as a musician of a sort – gifting her the agency of creation, of art. If the film simply observed that the chef was an artist, it actually warps the diegesis through music and editing (positioning the woman after the clarinet) to imbue the woman with this creative art power. The mind’s creative agency, much like a city’s architectural creation, becomes a symphony of a sort. Although there is a distance underscoring this – the film does not know this woman nor her existence per-se – the film is also animated by the sight of her, connecting images in a collage of sound and motion that defy a definitive, closed-circuit “argument.” Distance between the observer and the observed is not mortally wounding here, and it can even breathe fresh life into the world.

Largely, the film’s animating principle is one of resonance, then, and although death for the film often catalyzes creation, Sans Soleil – if infecting art with death – also feverishly intersects art and representation with life as well. At one point, we cut to a bookstore, images of people reading comics en masse, only to cut to a wide image of a comic woman graphed out on the side of a building, looking down on the road as a small man passes by through her eye-line, as though she is reading him. The film repeats this gesture a number of times, eventually characterizing the city as a comic strip – a work of art – where representations “voyeurize the voyeurs.” Poetically, the film also engages in personification, noting that “Tokyo is tied together with electric wire, she shows her veins,” blurring the boundaries between machine, construct, and human life further. The city becomes a collage of panels and frames, much like a film, yet these frames (again, much like film) are afforded life itself, a power over people. We cut to a series of statues staring down at the camera, asserting themselves over the viewer/audience while resisting in part the spectator’s agency to view them. At one point during this montage, the film juxtaposes a living cat, a stuffed panda, and a sign of an owl as if to play around in the discursive space of representation and explore wandering signifiers without a singular goal, except perhaps to acknowledge the multiplicity of an animal’s form and to question whether the live cat is itself a representation, after all an image within a film camera. Central to the film’s thesis seems to be that art and mediated representation cannot fail at representing life because art – the capacity to create, to work with materials to create perspectives of life – is of life, a part of life, a collective goal practiced in some capacity by everyone.

Again, in this sense, it must be stressed that Sans Soleil is not simply a meditation on life and death. Instead, it is an embodiment of that dialectic, a film that animates the very flow of its images with the understanding that images both kill or replace previous images and bring them again to life through reconsideration. When we move to a discussion of Apocalypse Now, an American film thought to bring life to the horror of the Vietnam War, we almost immediately return to Japan with images of what we are told are Japanese horror films in still. They are trapped in their various frames, yet they also pulse, the images throbbing and then receding as if threatening to assault the viewer while emanating the lifeblood of art and memory. Death and life here are not simply abstract concepts but visually enacted in the frame at a formal level: each image replaces or kills the last one but also reimagines it, comments on it, as though each image is always being destroyed and recreated in simultaneity. The images seem to throb, animated as a kind of inflection point between life and death, animation and in-animation. The narration continues to intimate an unstable connection between image and life: “Japanese horror movies have the sly beauty of certain corpses,” the narrator notes. The film seems to remind that the mind – much like cinema – is perhaps intrinsically aesthetic and confronts even dead people as images, making images immanent to – rather than escapes from – reality. Death, or destruction, and ensuing creation is central to the film’s diegetic world and focus: a great deal of the film speculates on and/or depicts violence that is colonial, systemic, and personal, as well as public rituals and art objects that are beckoned forth by death. One early track across bull skeletons cuts almost immediately to a lively canvas of people in Africa celebrating and wearing bull costumes. Here, the specter of death is corporealized in life, permeating out in the spirit of collective effervescence. Yet, at a deeper level, the film imbues its very formal flow with this dialectic, as the death of a linear narrative and individual memories becomes a conduit for refashioned notions of life dispersed across generations, continents, and even conceptions of existence. The film itself becomes its own exquisite corpse, a polyvocal gathering of impressions that don’t finish one another but extend their energy and share their confusion over time.

Throughout, Marker almost entirely resists essentializing understandings of experience that boil down to ideologically pure truths or complete perspectives. For instance, while depicting a late-night television sex show, the sequence begins with shots of women covered up by blurred pink circles over their genital region, yet the film’s narration resists the urge to bemoan the partial nature of the image: “censorship is not the mutilation of the show. Censorship is the show.” Manipulation of images – developing them, adding to them, molding them, even covering them up or subtracting from them – is not only a slippage from a hypothetically complete version of the images; manipulation is a component of reality, is how reality is constructed, since reality is always in interrogation by the mind. The possibility of escaping the corrosion of memory, the trap of being unable to remember the past “as it happened,” can be lensed with liberation if one realizes that how they initially perceived or experienced the moment was itself subjective to begin with. Although sometimes fashionable to decrement modernistic “art films” as endlessly self-centered, pretentious, and disconnected from worldly experience, Sans Soleil is ultimately quite humble. It refuses to accept its own perceptions and assumptions as guaranteed realities. Subjectivity – and the alienation of cultural and temporal distance – pollute and purify, disfigure and refresh, experience in simultaneity.

Finally, the film preserves the perhaps delusional hope of cosmopolitan connection. Animated by the charge of escape from its mental confines, drawn to the amorphous sense of possibility found in not knowing, the film moves away from an objective consciousness not to descend into a vexing whirlpool of nihilism but to relocate and recollect experiences in a new aspect. As if both Romantic and modernist at once, Sans Soleil seems at once to endorse, or at least desire, imaginative transcendence and defy it. Shattering the pristine illusion of unearned objectivity, the film does not escape from the world but treats mind and world as constant conversational partners. In its attempt to thwart and transcend time and space by recreating a world in its own head, transcendence for the film is not a placid and peaceful exemption from the world but an at times violent and amorphous dialogue, even argument, with it. Perhaps paradoxically for a film that is interested in images of the past, Soleil’s lack of a linear, tendentious argument stretched causally across the entire film affords it a mostly present-tense caliber as a film alive to the motile and mutable nature of meaning and reality in each image as we observe it rather than as it accumulates toward an eventual narrative conclusion. One might say that the death of a coherent lexicon for seeing and perceiving is constituent to seeing and perceiving something anew at all. When the narrator notes, when viewing a rock concert on an outdoor television, that “rock is an international language for spreading” feeling, it is telling that the concert is warped or filtered through a screen tinted a malarial, sickly yellow and further obstructed by shrubbery in the foreground. The possibility of connection – of technology to spread meaning where it otherwise might not reach – is always irremediably, unresolvedly at play with its limits. Possibility and limitation are of each other.

Essayistic and perambulatory, Marker’s Sans Soleil still feels humanistic, even if its overriding texture is melancholic. It has a formal consciousness that roves and wanders, overflows and folds images together from multiple sources, threatening to implode into a grand dispersal even as it reminds us that our own ethical capacity to engage across and with difference is the only thing keeping the world from atomizing. It is thus that the film finally works on us and works with us like a friend who provokes and queries, provides texture and canvas for us to explore both ourselves and the sensations less drawn out of the text than generated in the experience of encountering it. It epitomizes cinema as an art that asks us to get better at the act and art of feeling.

Score: 10/10