On a first pass, I found Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil—a documentary essay film, in which a narrator (Florence Delay) reads fictional letters she’s received from a filmmaker over footage from his travels in Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and elsewhere—to be more daunting than definitive, despite its reputation as one of the great documentary experiments. I’ll likely get there, and certainly the movie has its immediately impressive qualities. There is literary poetry in the stream-of-consciousness observations (“History throws its empty bottles out the window”), while even during an initial viewing there are cinematic moments that stop you in your tracks. Foremost among them is when the narrator quotes Japanese poet Basho saying that “The willow sees the heron’s image upside down.” This is accompanied by a ghostly dissolve from a shot of a heron in a tree to a matching painting of the same tableau, which is flipped. What does that “mean”? It’s a visual riff, I suppose, on a few of the many, many things Sans Soleil is interested in: culture, art, memory, history, and the ways all four interact (there is a density to this movie that’s intimidating). Despite that example, however, most of Sans Soleil’s substance lies in spoken word rather than arresting image. Composition, movement, color, and the like aren’t at the forefront as they are in, say, Chantal Akerman’s News From Home—another experimental doc employing a letter-writing construct and free-association imagery. (Something like Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson also mines similar territory while being more aesthetically engaging.) News From Home struck me as a major work right out of the gate. Sans Soleil likely will someday.
(5/13/2023)
