Sans Soleil is a documentary that may not seem like such—spoiler alert: no talking heads, no interviews at all. In other words, this is not a participatory one.
Sans Soleil is a poetic one, in that the narrative is based on a letter being read by a female narrator, sent by a particular Sandor Krasna, said to be an alter ego for the director Chris Marker (Berardinelli). The narrative does not even follow a storyline.
Rather, it is a travelogue of the places where Marker has been to. Tons of footage are seen, shot from different places, but among those that stand out the most are from an African country Guinea-Bissau, and Japan.
And to go further deeper, the film shows much more of Japan, especially in the capital Tokyo, where the narrator feels some sort of fascination towards the country and its people, their culture, the advancement in technology as portrayed by arcade video games and a life-sized android of the late US President John Kennedy.
Where the film stands out is on its use of images. They may have been randomly thought of, but one can see the creativity that has been put onto them. One can point out the “abstractness” and the “bizarreness” of the film thanks to some weird electronic music paired with moving images that, while based on stock footage, are highly edited to make it look as if it was an animated painting.
Viewers can also see Japan’s fascination with cats, wherein they have those white cat figurines with their right paws raised, although unlike the Chinese ones in which they are colored gold and the right paw moves back and forth, it is seen that the ones in Japan are of one piece, that they are made of porcelain; a big cat figurine even had its raised paw gone. There is even a cemetery dedicated to cats, even a cat “God” where bereaved owners of the deceased cats buried there can pray and offer flowers to.
Another instance of Japanese looking up to an animal is that of a dog named Hachiko, who waited years and years for its owner to return, who never did, as he already died. Hachiko’s immense loyalty to its owner has awed the Japanese to the point that a statue dedicated to the dog had been built.
In the subject of Japanese technology, the narrator tells of the “inseparable philosophy of our time” which is in the wildly popular game Pac-Man. She further describes the titular character being the “most perfect graphic metaphor of man’s fate”, and that “he puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment”. As everyone is aware of, Pac-Man is a classic chase-in-a-maze game where players are to control Pac-Man, the playable yellow character, within the maze, eating all the dots to gain points to get to the next level, and avoid hitting or being chased by ghosts. The narrator relates the video game to human life in a way that while we are pursuing our goals (the “individual”, the Pac-Man), external factors are trying to stop us as well (the “environment”, the ghosts).
Near the end of the film, the narrator wonders how people “remember things who don’t film, photograph, and tape”, further pondering how mankind has “managed to remember” despite not having any visual or written record; here it essentially highlights the essence of documentation and documentary in general—to keep material that will be remembered in the future when one wants to look back at a particular event or experience.
Sans Soleil is documentary at its finest: a sense of personality evoked by images. A first-person form of documentary, should we say.
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REFERENCE
Berardinelli, James. “Sans Soleil.” Reelviews Movie Reviews, 23 Oct. 1983, http://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/sans-soleil.
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