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Such a frustrating disappointment

So much average

Nice effects though.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

I am haunted by Chris Marker's Sans Soleil.I picked it up because it's paired with Le Jetee of a Criterion DVD. And I've been watching it over and over again since it arrived.Nominally its a travelogue of sorts with a woman reading the letters of a photojournalist while we look at images that relate. Most of the material relates to Japan and Africa. However Marker has arranged it in such away that it relates to a wide variety of subjects. Its a film that is full of endless possibilities since there is not only too much to take in on a single viewing, but also because the more you see it the more the film changes a you make more and more connections between bits of the film. How you feel about the film is constantly being rewritten by the connections you make.My sole complaint about the film is the constant repetition of "the wrote me" in the narration. Other than that its a trip.And while its very much attached to the technology of the time the film was made, its still very much relevant some 30 years later.If you want a head trip see this film.

A response to the reviewer who called the film pretentious claptrap: This movie is not for everyone and I can easily understand the sentiments of one who finds it pretentious. But when one says "Assumptions include that the east is superior to the west, television is bad, capitalism evil,etc." you are so thoroughly missing the point of the film that I have to wonder if you watched it out of the corner of your eye while doing a crossword puzzle. Perhaps one doesn't hear "Capitalism is good" and understands "capitalism is evil," but that all occurs within the viewer. I for one never saw any of these "assumptions" being made here.

Every once in a while I watch a film that leaves me agape in the creativity of the director. I certainly feel this way about Sans soleil. It's as bizarre a movie as one could ever hope to find but it does work as a documentary. The film is in no way concerned with entertaining the audience. It is a philosophical text presented in film format. It also describes the culture of Japan and Guinea-Bissau.The movie explains a lot about the reverence of the land in Japanese society. We see people praying with their heads bowed to the Earth and the narrator provides commentary about it. We also learn the importance of the dog to the Japanese people. Also, the film discusses the importance of the train to the Japanese. Something intriguing about the film is how the narrator discusses the artistic possibilities of video games. Since the film was released in 1983, video games were in crisis due to the crash that happened earlier that year (in North America and Europe). Now looking at games like Metroid Prime and Shadow of the Colossus, I understand what she meant. For Guinea-Bissau, the narrator discusses the political history of the country and the risks of being a revolutionary. I'd like to write more about it, but I cannot recall anything to say.Those who choose to watch Sans soleil, would be best served to read the script before and after the viewing. Then, they should talk about what they just watched. I will do that when I watch it again, as I have for many philosophical texts. This film is not intended for a large audience, and those wishing to watch it should be knowledgeable of that. Also, if you enjoy Hitchcock, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the homage Marker plays to him.

This film keeps coming back to me. It utterly confused me at first but something about it made me go back and watch again. It is a film that can fit into many definitions, none of them however, definitively.The problem of capturing reality is a problem central to film theory, most do it by creating the 'reality effect' via the familiar codes of continuity editing etc, but it is just that, an illusion. Marker, like Godard, purposely confounds these codes and explores the limits of film/the image/art in order to examine what Benjamin called 'erfahrung' - a formulation for experience aligned to memory as apposed to immediacy. True experience is the recollection of events, a retracing of the path of memory. Only when experience is assimilated in this way can meaning be derived from it.Sans Soleil plays with the idea of grand historicising themes, focusing on the narratives left untold in the history books, the story of the defeated, strange cultural idiosyncrasies, the easy, lazy way emotions are manipulated by the camera, so a man's tears of gratitude are revealed by context to be tears of rage. Marker takes canonical historical signposts and challenges their ability to tell us anything of worth about the world and humanity within it. He jolts (and it is a jolt) our attention away from the official processes of historification, that goes on beneath our noses in cinema, towards the banal and the everyday detail that comes the stuff of life itself.On first viewing, especially if you are unfamiliar with the codes of progressive, experimental or 'counter' cinema, you may well be confused. But you will also be intrigued and on second viewing its secrets begin to reveal themselves. This is released with Marker's short la Jetee, another treat.This is a truly remarkable film, the only piece of cinema that has, for me, chimed on a similar level of complexity and profundity with the works of Shakespeare and one that similarly continues to resonate.