Also playing… The films of Chris Marker

“He
wrote me…”

            This is the mantra of Chris Marker’s
Sans
Soleil(Sunless).
A woman reads in voiceover what a friend has written her, as footage he has
shot plays out underneath in rapid, random succession. The film is a sort of
travelogue, mostly of Japan and Africa, and the words are a
travelogue of his mind. His thoughts, always related somehow to the clip at
hand, are a dizzying torrent of intellectual musings, switching gears at
breakneck pace.

            As you struggle to keep pace, the
challenge is twofold: to absorb what is being said, and to assess the value of
what is being said. Whether you cotton to this film will depend on whether you
nodded in agreement or rolled your eyes through most of Richard Linkletter’sWaking
Life, a film with a similar ambition.

            Is this film pretentious or
profound? To be sure, that is a Rorschach test for the viewer, but the film
often wobbles back and forth between these two points so quickly as to make the
point moot. The stream of images and thoughts is gulped in heedlessly as it
flows past. A stopped clock is right (or, in this case, interesting) twice a
day, and this clock spins around like mad.

            Sans
Soleilhopscotches
through locales as quickly as it does ideas, and the sense of tourism that pervades
the film is a strength and a weakness. It becomes a
bit patronizing as the travails of the masses are used as an occasion to wax
intellectual, the letter-writer pulling in all manner of philosophers and such
to limn his thoughts about these little lives.

            The film works best when it serves
up straightforward, wry reportage on the cultures. A
Japanese man plays whack-a-mole in an arcade, but the moles have been replaced
with little human heads, all labeled with the titles of office workers. The head
for the immediate supervisor has been so viciously pounded over time that it
has been replaced again with the original mole. A black-haired,
Japanese-looking JFK animatronic robot sells suits in
a department store as the PA system swells with a syrupy female chorus singing
“Ask not what your country can do for you…”

            Marker wisely does not pontificate
what a 13th-century painter once said as these moments are shown, as he is wont
to do elsewhere. Some of this sort of thing comes off and some of it doesn’t
when you are given a chance to reflect on what is being said. We are shown
Japanese children prodded into the ritual of tossing flowers onto the memorial
for a dead panda, and they look about like what you would expect them to:
vaguely confused, amused, distracted. But we are told that they are staring
intently through the thin membrane separating life and death, curious to
understand.

            Perhaps.

            And it almost seems like a Saturday Night Live skit when a
discourse on Vertigo leads the
narrator to not once but twice mention something about the film, pause
significantly, and then ask (picture Jon Lovitz
widening his eyes as he says this) “…or is it the other way
around…?” (So true.Shivers.)

            All this
aside, the most interesting part of Sans Soleil came for me at a moment when the narration
blissfully fell away, and the images could just be absorbed. I was relieved,
and then I realized that I was seeing them through Marker’s eyes.

All
of Marker’s work is a web of connections, and Vertigo also appears as a reference in La Jetée,
Marker’s best-known work, and perhaps his best as well. A series of beautiful,
grainy black-and-white photographs tell the story of a man from an apocalyptic
future being trained to travel through time.

            Marker’s preoccupation with memory
finds an artful foothold in narrative, and the film has endured as a classic
for over 40 years, even becoming the basis of Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. It is, especially for
Marker, a model of restrained simplicity and elegant perfection, and remains
entrancing no matter how many times I see it. Most reviews spoil one aspect of
it, however, so I’ll just say this — don’t take your eyes off the screen.

Sans Solieland La Jetée screen on Tuesday, April 20, in the Dryden Theatre at George Eastman House, 900 East Avenue, at 8
p.m.
$6. 271-3361, www.eastman.org.

This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2004.