Sans soleil

“The past is like a foreign country,” wrote Chris Marker in Les dépays, a book of photographs and short essays that can be seen as a companion to his film Sans soleil. In the film, he combines documentary footage—partly drawn from archives, partly shot by himself—filmed in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and above all Japan, a lifelong fascination for Marker. Accompanying the images, a female voice reads aloud letters by the fictional cinematographer Sandor Krasna, perhaps an alter ego of Marker himself. Letters about what he saw, about who we were when we experienced something, and who we are when we remember it.

Sans soleil is the primal form of the essay film, with its associative dialectic between word and image, and blend of fiction and documentary. It is a political film, an ethnographic film, a declaration of love to cats and owls. A film that is indefinable and seems to take on new forms each time you see it, because you watch with different eyes from those of yesterday, or of ten years ago.