Sans soleil is a documentary by Chris Marker, and if it is a documentary, then it is a very loose one. Part poem, part travelogue, the film uses documentary-style images under the fictional narrative of a woman following the trail of her letter writer throughout Japan and parts of Africa, with a side trip to San Francisco.
It was a very unique film; I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. It played with perceptions of time and memory, asking and raising more questions than it could possibly answer.
Is it a documentary? Well, it wrapped documentary techniques in a fictional package, which is the reverse of what usually happens in more straightforward documentaries. Those usually wrap fictional techniques in a more realistic package. Think of Michael Moore’s films: he clearly is telling a specific story from a specific angle, usually with a specific beginning, middle and ending. His images cannot simply speak for themselves, and even if they could, he doesn’t let them; there is always some dialogue, some narration or implicit question with an implicit answer hanging over whatever shows up on screen. Moore is not alone in this technique–most documentarians use it. However, it is a fictional depiction of a realist premise.
Sans soleil, on the other hand, begins with a fictional narrative: the traveller is following the trail of someone who has written her letters. She tells us what he writes, and then discusses her own (often similar) experiences. But the images are more like Lumiere’s factory workers than Melies’ moon man. These people are real people, their behaviour and postures are unrehearsed, impromptu, chaotic, spontaneous and natural. It’s as if the filmmaker took these images and then applied a story to what he recorded, that his thoughts came to him after he had shot the footage. With this interpretation, it’s easy to think that this was a very footloose, free way of filmmaking, but there was careful thought put into how to combine the images, what to say about how different cultures live on this planet.
I felt more comfortable with the scenes from Africa, even with their dire poverty and dying carcasses. I’ve seen them before, I know what I am supposed to feel when presented with the images. However, I found the Japan sections to be disturbing, disjointed, unfamiliar. There were parts that made me cringe. It reminded me strongly of how Western I am.
I would be very interested in hearing from anyone else who has seen this film. It was certainly a thought-provoker.
