La Jetee / Sans Soleil

Our DVD Price: £15.99 RRP: £19.99 Save £4.00 (20%)   Availability This product should be despatched within 7 days.  This product will be dispatched from Guernsey. Delivery times   Earn 75 Bonus Points when you buy this product. More info

Film Description

Two films that have the workings of memory as their starting point. La Jetee 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. This is the version prepared by Chris Marker with voice over in English. Sans Soleil is a rich and layered meditation on 'the dreams of the human race', weaving footage from throughout the world into an astonishing imagined dialogue between a cameraman and an unknown woman. NB. Both versions are original English-narrated versions overseen by Marker.

Film Information

DVD Extras

'Chris on Chris' documentary (10mins); booklet.

Technical Details

Film Media

3 Stills

View Stills

Reviews & Articles

Share your thoughts and opinions - write a review

Review by Graeme Hobbs on 25th June 2003

‘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.

View more reviews by Graeme Hobbs

Browse all Film Reviews

See Also...

Hand-picked recommendations of related films

Twelve Monkeys Dir: Terry Gilliam Based on Chris Marker's La Jetee, this is a visually stunning, intellectually stimulating, and deeply compassion... More >

Vertigo Dir: Alfred Hitchcock Hitchcock's most richly complex, profound, and critically admired masterpiece: a wonderfully mysterious and drea... More >

Immemory Dir: Chris Marker Marker believes that memory is more structured than it seems and that he can, at least in principle, build a map... More >

Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Film Collections

Best Science-Fiction Titles

Including: 2001: A Space Odyssey, A History Of Science Fiction Movies, A.I., Alien Quadrilogy (Box Set), Babylon 5 Series 1, Back to the Future Trilogy, Barbarella, Brazil, Capricorn One, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

View all collections

This film is part of the following Customer Film Lists

Alex's Favourite French Films by Alex Davidson

I've always been a particular admirer of French film, having studied it and loved the films throughout my life and career. Many of my all-time favourite movies were made in France, and here is a selection of my very favourite French films.

Hari by Haridas.B

These are some of the films I have seen and loved - Hari

MovieMail Top 100 Best-Sellers of All-Time by MovieMail

This is your list: the 100 films you've bought the most of in the 10 years of MovieMail's existence. There are some surprise entries and some glaring omissions – but it’s all true, and, frankly, you’ve got very good taste! It’s such a good list that we're going to make it a permanent fixture on our website and to celebrate the launch we’ve slashed many of the prices on these wonderful films. Enjoy!

Create your own Film List!

Customers who bought this also bought...

Recommendations from fellow customers

Fellinis 8 1/2

by Federico Fellini

La Regle du Jeu

by Jean Renoir

Breathless (Godard, 1959)

by Jean-Luc Godard

Seven Samurai

by Akira Kurosawa

L'Age dOr / Un Chien Andalou

by Salvador Dali / Luis Buñuel

Other films by...

More films directed by Chris Marker

Sans Soleil

Last Bolshevik,The

View more >

More films starring Ligia Branice

Behind Convent Walls

by Walerian Borowczyk

View more >

For questions or assistance, call us on (+44) 0844 776 0900 or email on enquiries@moviemail-online.co.uk

© 2004-2007 MovieMail, Ltd., All Rights Reserved. Find out more about MovieMail