La Jetee / Sans Soleil on DVD

Star Review

‘Nothing tells memory from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of the scars’ (La Jetee)

No filmmaker has investigated the workings and function of memory more thoroughly than Chris Marker, and the two films here testify to the intelligence and distinctiveness of his approach. La Jetee (1962) is simply one of the most influential films ever made. And yes, it is less than half an hour long and told almost entirely in stills. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, the film documents the attempts of an underground community of scientists to contact other ages through a loophole in time in order to revitalize their dying society. They use people with particularly strong images from the past for their experiments, forcing them to try and re-enter that moment. The film is admirable for many reasons - its brilliantly evocative use of sound, its editing, the beauty and power of its photography, the concept itself even. And as for communicating the painful, hollowing loneliness of the moment of waking when you realize that the person you have been with was only in a dream and that they are entirely lost to you, it has never been better filmed. Never. Sans Soleil (1982) is a rich and layered meditation on vision and the representation of memory. Taking the form of a travelogue, a cameraman sends letters from destinations around the world to accompany his pictures. He travels to Iceland, Japan, and more ‘forgotten’ places - Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde islands in search of images of happiness, moments suspended in time, the banal, and ‘things to make the heart beat faster’. His letters, in which he tries to make connections between the images he films, are read and commented on by an unknown woman. Questions of the distortions of recollection and our re-writings of memory are raised and remembering is seen as the ‘lining’ of forgetting. Sometimes the photographer thinks that the least distortion of actuality is to be found in the most mediated pictures of all - those manipulated by an image synthesizer known as the ‘Zone’. They are nothing more than images and make no claims for themselves regarding reportage, objectivity or truth. It is a film filled with striking images that catch in the mind. Near the end there is a shot of three girls in Iceland, the sun in their hair turning their heads to pure light. It comes from a place of wonder, as if fugitive spirits had been briefly captured on film. Suddenly they are gone and we are left with our loss and our memory.

Graeme Hobbs on 25th June 2003

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