A film that stirs the imagination on many levels, in Sans Soleil Marker uses modern-day Japan, with its electronic games, its age-old obsessions and atomic bomb memories, as a gameboard for a complex system of references connecting such diverse subjects as the poverty of African natives, the open spaces of Iceland, and the vertigo of memory as perceived by Hitchcock. Like La Jetée, Sans Soleil deals with memory and time, deconstructing and reconstructing both in a lyrical cine-poem. Marker explores memory as an alternative reality; his Japan is one of captured movements and absurd moments, of rituals and inadvertent theatrics. Japan, Africa, San Francisco: it is a disassembled whole which the filmmaker reassembles in a storyless story of a freelance cameraman, Sandor Krasna, who makes "memory protocols" of "the extreme poles of existence." Eventually a metamorphosis is achieved: what was memory becomes fiction.