A leader of the Left Bank Group of French filmmakers in the Fifties and Sixties, Chris Marker has been described as “the cinema's first essayist.” His documentaries are uniquely brilliant, personal expressions of thought and concern. Sans Soleil, Marker's newest film, reveals the disparate loves of a broad intelligence. Japan, revolution, Hitchcock: all are treated in a montage that forms a complex system of references. Like Marker's 1962 La Jetée, Sans Soleil deals with memory and time, deconstructing and reconstructing both in a lyrical cine-poem. Marker muses on Hitchcock in terms of memory: a significant portion of the film is shot in the San Francisco Bay Area sites where Hitchcock shot Vertigo. But for all its lyricism, Sans Soleil is a bitter re-evaluation of 20 years of social development; most of the images are of modern-day Japan. Others are from the African states of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, where the Portuguese revolution germinated. The storyless story is of a free-lance cameraman who makes “memory protocols” of “the extreme poles of existence.” A Japanese video-artist distorts these photographic recollections in a synthesizer. A filmmaker collates the material, creating out of it a musical composition of counterpoints, fugues and recurrent themes. Eventually, a metamorphosis is achieved: what was memory becomes fiction.
The artists in question are, according to Marker: cameraman Sandor Krasna, who studied cinematography in Budapest, began a “non-career” as a free-lance cameraman in America, and became fascinated with Japan after paying a visit to the Philippines during the filming of Apocalypse Now--only leaving Japan, in fact, to tour Africa. Musician Michel Krasna is his brother. Video-artist Hayao Yamaneko worked in television in Tokyo, and acquired the status of Artist in Residence at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, after making the video tape, “Who Decided Our Death?” The filmmaker is Chris Marker, “not a bad traveler, who has written some and photographed some, and from time to time made films.... Now working on a project based on the video game, ‘Mosquito bytes cause malaria,' to star Amanda Plummer, who does not know this yet....”
Sans Soleil has been selected for Filmex '83 and the 1983 San Francisco International Film Festival.