(Sunless). Sans soleil is a film that stirs the imagination on many levels-visually, intellectually, emotionally. Marker uses modern-day Japan, with its electronic games, its age-old obsessions, and its atomic-bomb memories, as a game board for a complex system of references. The system connects such diverse subjects as the poverty of African natives, the open spaces of Iceland, and the San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock. Like La jetée, Sans soleil deals with memory and time, deconstructing and reconstructing both in a lyrical ciné-poem. Marker explores memory as an alternative reality: his Japan is one of small movements and captured moments, of rituals and inadvertent theatrics, a disassembled whole which the filmmaker reassembles. Eventually a metamorphosis is achieved: what was memory becomes fiction.

We recommend taking public transportation to this event. Parking will be in short supply due to a Friday night Cal football game at Memorial Stadium.