A film that stirs the imagination on many levels--visually, intellectually and emotionally. Chris Marker, that remarkable French filmmaker, has been called “the cinema's first essayist” for his committed and witty documentaries including Far from Siberia (1957) and Cuba Si! (1961). In Sans Soleil, Marker uses modern day Japan, with its electronic games, its age-old obsessions and its 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 San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock. Like Marker's La Jeteé (1962), 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 small movements and captured moments, of rituals and inadvertent theatrics; it is a disassembled whole which the filmmaker reassembles. Eventually a metamorphosis is achieved: what was memory becomes fiction.