Chris Marker (1983)
I never read a BFI programme note until I’ve seen the film and jotted down a few of my own thoughts on it. A little way into Chris Marker’s documentary Sans soleil I was regretting being so wedded to this minor discipline. The film is narrated by a female voice, who says repeatedly that an unnamed ‘he’ has written to her, expressing the thoughts that she now relays to us and which accompany footage from the travels of her anonymous correspondent. (Although we’re told this man has been round the world, by far the largest part of the footage is from Japan.) I kept wondering who ‘he’ was – and was puzzled as to why, if he was the film-maker, Chris Marker was putting this kind of distance between himself and his audience. The closing credits of Sans soleil explain that the words, read by Florence Delay, are taken from the letters of Sandor Krasna, who also gets the cinematography credit. Sandor looks to be one member of a talented family: the music for the film is by Michel Krasna. The ‘conception and editing’ of Sans soleil is credited to Marker.
Florence Delay is a real-life actress but, as the piece from Sight and Sound in the BFI programme note explained, the Krasnas are pseudonyms for Chris Marker. It’s interesting that Marker doesn’t mention Sandor (or Michel) until the very end. The alias seems less of a put-on than it might have done in credits at the start; there’s an implication that the man who made Sans soleil wants to submerge his identity beyond the duration of the film. Chris Marker was, for much of his long life, a famously secretive man. The name by which he’s known and remembered is itself an invention. He was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in 1921 in Paris or Ulan Bator, Mongolia (as Marker preferred to claim). He was a film-maker who hated to be photographed. The Wikipedia article on Sans soleil speculates that Marker ‘preferred to downplay his authorial signature’ because he was putting the film together at a time when he belonged to a political commune.
The irony of this self-effacement and of the use of a Hungarian-Balkan flavoured pseudonym is that Sans soleil is a display of film-making and intellectual self-confidence, one that I can’t help thinking of as typically French – especially in the pleasure that its creator takes in his wide-ranging cultural references and epigrammatic verbal style. (The film takes its name from a song cycle by Mussorgsky.) Wikipedia describes the piece as an ‘experimental essay-film … a composition of thoughts, images and scenes, mainly from Japan and Guinea-Bissau … [with] other scenes … filmed in Cape Verde, Iceland, Paris and San Francisco’. It’s also a meditation on, as well as place, time and memory, and their relationship[1]. The incessantly fluent combination and rapid succession of images, words and sounds were, for me, impossible to keep up with, sensorily and intellectually. I think I also lack the appetite for ethnographic film-making that’s needed in order to appreciate the work. A proper note on this extraordinary film is beyond me.
Here are just a couple of rather negative observations … Marker’s fascination with exotic anthropology extends to local religious practice, however primitive the beliefs underlying it are likely to seem to an educated Western sensibility. Sans soleil describes, equally respectfully, religious ritual in a developing country like Guinea-Bissau and in metropolitan Japan. At the same time, it seems to be taken as read in the film that Western European culture is post-religious and, by implication, more developed. This struck me as condescending. At one point, ‘he’ opines that, after watching Japanese television for a while, ‘you feel it’s watching you’. Marker’s montage of Japanese faces on TV screens looking straight at the camera seemed an oddly unimaginative illustration of this feeling.
25 August 2015
[1] |The subtitled French language print screened by BFI opens with a quotation from Racine’s preface to Bajazet:
‘L’éloignement des pays répare en quelque sorte la trop grande proximité des temps.’
According to Wikipedia, Marker replaced this in the English-language version of the film with the following from T S Eliot’s Ash Wednesday:
‘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 …’
