Photo: Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker
Chris Marker’s Sans soleil exemplifies the journey to wisdom, without once mentioning that concept.
Unlike The Alchemist and Siddhartha, Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans soleil (Sunless) does not overtly represent a quest for wisdom and self-realization.[1] Rather, it presents itself as a journey into memory, understood “as both private reverie and the shared collective beliefs that compose a sense of history” (Lupton 152). And yet I would argue that this film, in which the word “wisdom” never appears, is the culminating moment of its maker’s lifelong wisdom quest, exemplifying—to a greater degree than either The Alchemist or Siddhartha—the five essential markers of wisdom I have sketched out here: attention to cultural and historical contexts, an appreciation of complexities, the practice of empathy, a commitment to social justice and communitarian values, and intellectual humility.
Commonly grouped with his friends Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda among the Left Bank filmmakers of the 1950s and beyond, Chris Marker is best known for highly personal, meditative film essays that are often the fruit of his travels—to Finland, Africa, China, Siberia, Israel, Cuba, Japan, Vietnam, Chile, Iceland, the U.S., and more. Released at the height of Marker’s career, after the more political work of the late 60s and early 70s and before his explorations in digital technology, Sans soleil represents a return to his earlier travel films, with special attention to Japan (the focus of Le mystère Koumiko, 1965) and Africa (as in the 1953 Les Statues meurent aussi, with Alain Resnais). At the same time, it looks forward to Marker’s later work in digital multimedia (Level Five, 1997; Immemory, 1998). Like his celebrated 1962 photonovel La jetée and its story of a man “marked by a childhood image,” Sans soleil is testimony to the process of being marked by the images one carries in memory or on tape. Hence the pertinence of Marker’s nom de plume (he was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve).
Photo: La jetée, dir. Chris Marker
In many respects, Sans soleil is a highly intimate film, capturing the ebb and flow of personal memories “in the fashion of a musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints, and mirror-like fugues” (from the film’s press dossier, qtd. in Lupton 153). Among its particular leitmotifs are images of cats and owls, which Marker repeatedly includes in his personal catalogue of “things that quicken the heart” (9:00). But the film effectively distances itself from autobiography in two important ways.
First, Sans soleil is not narrated by the filmmaker or his proxy, but rather by a woman—Florence Delay in the original French, Alexandra Stewart in English—who recounts what she has read in letters from a Sandor Krasna, a pseudonym for Marker himself.[2] When the film enters what it calls “the Zone” and its images are rerouted through a video synthesizer, Krasna reports on the work of Hayao Yamaneko (another Marker pseudonym), placing the autobiographical at yet another level of remove. Even the film’s electronic soundscape is credited to a Marker pseudonym, Michel Krasna. Indeed, Marker’s name only appears in the film in the final credits, seemingly as an afterthought, under the rubric “Conception and Editing.” A fundamental humility, in other words, lies at the heart of this intensely personal filmic essay.
Photo: jonathanrosenbaum.net
Sans soleil’s second, and arguably more powerful, way of distancing the autobiographical lies in the way it uses the drift of memory to turn outward, to juxtapose spatially and temporally distant customs, practices, and events so as to foreground what is distinct (and what not) about the cultural and historical contexts that shape them. The quest for wisdom here is thus a far cry from Hesse’s “way within.” Toward the end of the film, Krasna speaks of walking a beach on the Cape Verde island of Sal and at the same time recalling young girls praying on a Tokyo street, suggesting that the film camera and magnetic tape give us
a little more power over a memory that runs from camp to camp, like Joan of Arc. That a short-wave announcement from Hong Kong radio picked up on a Cape Verde island projects to Tokyo, and that the memory of a precise color in the street bounces back on another country, another distance, another music, endlessly. (1:26:00)
Photo: Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker
Sans soleil’s opening sequence exemplifies this practice of echoing juxtaposition. It begins with a short clip of three girls walking down a windswept road in Iceland, which Marker shot in 1965 for Haroun Tazieff’s Volcan interdit and which Krasna calls “the image of happiness” (00:15). There follows a piece of black leader, intercut with the image of a fighter plane taken from Marker’s Loin du Vietnam, which “he had tried several times to link… with other images, but it never worked” (00:30). “One day,” the voice-over continues, “I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film, with a piece of black leader. If they don’t see the happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black” (00:45). In this, the first of several instances in which Krasna speaks of wanting to succeed in a task this very film accomplishes, the line between happiness (the three girls) and death (the fighter plane) is exceedingly fine, as indeed it had been in La jetée. “[A]t least they’ll see the black” is a bit of an enigma, only clarified 90 minutes later when the film returns to the clip of the three girls, juxtaposing it with images of their Icelandic town almost fully submerged in black volcanic ash eight years later, “as if the entire year 65 had just been covered in ashes” (1:32:15).
Photo: Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker
Following a short title sequence, Marker presents us with a longer sequence of sleeping passengers on a ferry from Hokkaido to Tokyo. “I’ve been around the world several times,” Krasna notes, “and now only banality still interests me. On this trip, I’ve tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter” (2:15). In aspiring to be a poet of everyday experience in culture, Marker creates an extended meditation on what Lévi-Strauss called “the poignancy of things,” which “implied the faculty of communing with things, of entering into them, of being them for a moment” (28:30).
In his time among the samanas, Siddhartha practices a radical form of “unselfing” that allows him to become an animal or element of the natural world: “Siddhartha took the heron into his soul… was a heron, ate fish, hungered heron hunger, spoke heron croaking, died heron death” (14). In the end, however, “he always found himself again upon awaking” (15). Marker’s communion with things—with the movements of a ticket attendant in a Tokyo subway, with a line of young Africans moving rocks, with the sight of Pac-Man gobbling up his digital prey, and so much more—is far less mystical but more stable and repeatable.
The image of an Icelandic town that will come to be submerged in volcanic ash models a conception of poetry that is “born of insecurity” and “the impermanence of things” (23:40). Over images of dead animals in the Sahel, Krasna speaks of his “constant comings and goings” between Guinea-Bissau and Japan as a “journey to two extreme poles of survival”—a journey that nearly always takes as its foil the practices of life in France and the U.S. (7:40). From these comings and goings, he concludes that “in the nineteenth century, mankind had come to terms with space and that the great question of the twentieth was the coexistence of different concepts of time,” before ending on the film’s favorite light-hearted example of spatial coexistence: “By the way, did you know there are emus in the Île-de-France?” (2:45). In structuring his film around echoing juxtapositions that track the worldwide comings and goings of a fictional double, Marker exemplifies what Catherine Lupton has called an emerging “global consciousness” (149).
Photo: Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker
Crucial to Sans soleil’s foregrounding of collective memory in cultural contexts is its fascination with social behaviors and rituals, especially those dedicated to all that is lost, broken, or used up. Over an image track that includes shots of a Polaris missile and various military aircraft, Krasna evokes the “passion for lists” of 10th-century Japanese author Sei Shōnagun, especially the list of “things that quicken the heart” (9:00). He then writes of Japan: “I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations” (10:00). The film is replete with images of dancing celebrants, both in Japan and Guinea-Bissau, and of culturally important milestones, like the Japanese Coming of Age Day (1:29:00). But it also focuses on more private, melancholic rituals, like that of a couple praying for their lost cat, “to repair the web of time where it had been broken” (4:15), or of participants in a prayer ceremony for the “repose of broken dolls,” which leads Krasna to wonder whether kamikaze pilots “had the same look on their faces” (30:00, 1:17:30). Following footage from a Coming of Age Day celebration comes a Dondoyaki, a celebratory burning of the celebration’s remains, predicated on the Shinto belief that “the debris… have a right to immortality… the last state before their disappearance [into] the poignancy of things” (1:30:00).
After a long quest, Hesse’s Siddhartha discovers a coincidence of opposites in the fundamental oneness of life and death. In Marker’s Japan, however, this coincidence appears as a fact of everyday life and practice. Over images of Japanese adults and children laying chrysanthemums in honor of a dead panda, Krasna reports being told that “the partition between life and death does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner” (58:45). Then, into a sequence of Japanese children trying to “stare through the partition,” Marker intercuts a clip of an unidentified gunman killing a giraffe in Africa. In Guinea-Bissau unlike Japan, Krasna notes, death is “not a partition to cross through but a road to follow” (1:00:30). At the “extreme poles of survival,” that shadow of death that can appear so remote in the cultures of the West has a fundamental immediacy—as the obverse or lining of life (Japan) or as its essential path (Africa). In these cultures, all things are touched by an ineluctable melancholy, whose poignancy can be seen in the remark that time “heals everything except wounds” (28:00).
Marker’s choice of Guinea-Bissau among the many post-colonial countries of Africa stemmed no doubt from the example and prestige of Amilcar Cabral, the leader of a guerrilla struggle against Portuguese rule, who was assassinated in 1973 shortly before the securing of independence. Immediately after the Japanese ceremony for the souls of broken dolls, Marker explores the roots and vicissitudes of Cabral’s anticolonial struggle. While celebrating the movement’s success—“they did what they could; they freed themselves; they chased out the Portuguese”—Krasna segues to “the rumor that every third-world leader coined the same phrase the morning after independence: ‘Now the real problems start’” (31:30).
Photo: Wikiwand
From the time of his 1961 pro-Castro film ¡Cuba Si! through his work with the SLON and ISKRA collectives in the late 60s and early 70s, Marker’s films consistently embraced a series of specifically left-wing, activist political messages. By contrast, 1977’s Le fond de l’air est rouge (in English, A Grin Without a Cat) reflects on both the revolutionary fervor leading up to the May ’68 events in France and elsewhere and the disillusionment that followed. Much of the melancholy that haunts Sans soleil’s treatment of Amilcar Cabral and his successors stems from disillusionment with the “revolutionary romanticism” of Western revolutionaries in the 1960s, who saw in the struggles of Cabral, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro harbingers of a “new revolution in Europe” but ultimately found the post-revolutionary problems of governance “rather unexciting” (31:00, 31:45). “Ah well,” Krasna reflects, “history only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar-coated” (32:00).
Several minutes later, Marker gives us images from mid-60s activism against the construction of Tokyo’s Narita airport, bringing back, “like a shattered hologram… an intact vision of the generation of the 60s.” “If to love without illusions is still to love,” Krasna writes, “I can say that I loved it” (41:15). Although “concretely” the struggle had failed, all that the activists had gained “in their understanding of the world”—their “indignation in the fact of injustice,” their “generosity”—”could have been won only through the struggle” (41:45).
Later still, the film returns to Amilcar Cabral, noting that his success in leading the PAICG guerrilla movement was owing to his profound study of his people and to weapons provided by the socialist countries, but also to food and other goods from the social democracies. In Cabral, Krasna finds (without naming it as such) the wisdom of one who understood the historical and cultural context in which he worked, who “was not afraid of [the] ambiguities” and complexities that attend any successful action in the world, and who “knew the traps” inherent in revolutionary romanticism’s quest for ideological purity (1:02:30). In the activists of the Narita struggle, he finds a generous indignation consistent with wisdom’s concern for social justice. At the same time, like Cabral, Krasna is attuned to the pitfalls that all such struggles must face. Following a sequence outlining the fight to carry on Cabral’s legacy among leaders riven with “post-revolutionary bitterness,” he observes that, in place of “what we were told had been a collective memory,” there are only “a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration in the great wound of history” (1:03:45).
Photo: Vertigo, dir. Alfred Hitchcock
After a brilliant extended meditation on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, seen as exemplifying a specifically Western view of death as the quintessence of indecipherability, Krasna speaks of laying “the first stone of an imaginary film” during the summer when he “had met three children on a road and a volcano had come out of the sea” (1:10:15). Central to this “science fiction” film will be the landscape of our planet, seen in the eyes of “a man who comes from elsewhere, from very far away.” Whereas Sans soleil is the product of a filmmaker who travels in space, this man will have voyaged in time, specifically from the year 4001, an era when the human brain has reached “the era of full employment… total recall as memory anaesthetized” (1:11:00). Rather than scorn past humanity, he who has lost the capacity to forget will turn to past humanity “first with curiosity and then with compassion” (1:11:30). For this “third-worlder of time,” the idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet’s past, as documented throughout Sans soleil, is said to be as unbearable as the existence of poverty was to Che and the youth of the 60s (1:12:00).
Naturally he’ll fail. The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible to him as the poverty of a poor country is unimaginable to the children of a rich one. He has chosen to give up his privileges, but he can do nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose. (1:12:30)
The time traveler’s only recourse is that which has thrust him into this “absurd quest”—Mussorgsky’s song cycle, Sunless—which allows him to perceive what he initially was unable to understand, “something to do with unhappiness and memory” (1:12:45). Speaking of the very film we are watching, Krasna says, “Of course I’ll never make that film” (1:13:00). But he speaks of collecting scenes for it, as well as images of his “favorite creatures,” such as the owl we see on the image track.
Photo: Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker
As Sans soleil concludes, Marker returns to the three Icelandic girls, shows their town of Heimaey now submerged in volcanic ash and remarks that “nature performs its own Dondoyakis,” noting that “it sufficed to wait and the planet itself staged the working of time” (1:32:15, 1:32:45). A more conventional film would have ended here, but Marker uses this reprise and a short segment on the owner of a lost cat praying to time to set up a final excursion into what Krasna calls “the Zone,” in homage to Tarkovsky’s Stalker. By passing images of the 60s and more recent past through a video synthesizer, Hayao Yamaneko (yet another Marker pseudonym) gives us images “already affected by the moss of time” that “proclaim themselves to be what they are—images—not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality” (1:33:45, 40:00). This sequence, which anticipates Marker’s turn to digital technologies, speaks by contrast to “the unbearable vanity of the West that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being, what is spoken to what is left unsaid” (1:34:30). Marker thus ends a film in which his filmmaker surrogate travels to the poles of survival to enter into, and commune with, the rituals and celebrations that allow individuals and communities to repair the web of time–a film whose melancholy derives largely from the recognition that progressive political action is both absolutely necessary and subject to the complexities of history and individual motivation—by evoking the ultimate thin partition, that between being and non-being.
Photo: Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker
Unlike The Alchemist and Siddhartha, where the voyage to wisdom remains squarely embodied in a third party, Sans soleil ends on an implicit challenge to the viewer. For, like Hayao’s “electronic graffiti,” the film as a whole speaks
to that part of us which insists on drawing profiles on prison walls: a piece of chalk to follow the contours of what is not or is no longer or is not yet; the handwriting that each one of us will use to compose his own list of things that quicken the heart…. In that moment, poetry will be made by everyone, and there will be emus in the Zone. (1:35:00)
[1] Sans soleil/Sunless exists in two versions—the original French, narrated by Florence Delay, and an English version, narrated by Alexandra Stewart. Marker encouraged viewers to watch the film in the language with which they were most comfortable, most likely to avoid the distraction of subtitles. The quotations and time references in what follows refer to the English version—in part because that is the version most readers of this book will turn to, in part due to what I feel is the greater poetic power of Alexandra Stewart’s narration. All time references to the film are to the nearest 15 seconds.
[2] In what follows, I will refer to the supposed author of the meditations shared in the narration as Krasna and to he who composed the film and its images as Marker.
