Film is a form of art expression of politics, history, literature and philosophy.
——Preface
Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, the centerpiece of his triptych, the other two is La Jetee (The Pier, 1962) and Level 5 (1996), is regarded as a loosely-bound trilogy: the jetty projects forwards in time to its own displacement. The premise of Sans Soleil is that an unseen woman reads and comments upon letters she receives from a globetrotting freelance cameraman, Sandor Krasna, whose name we discover only in the closing credits. She reads the letters out by way of a commentary, which reflects both obliquely and directly on the images we see “the two extreme poles of survival”, Japan and Africa, the latter represented by the former Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde; but his dispatches also take in Iceland, San Francisco (for a tour of the locations of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo) and the Ile-de-France (the land of France). As the timeline goes by, Krasna wonders (Marker puts it in his own presentation of the film) about the meaning of this representation of the world of which he is the instrument, and about the role of the memory he helps create. Extracts of other along with Krasna’s images altered synthetically by a Japanese friend of his, Hayao Yamaneko, who deisgns video games and as a sideline obsessively feeds film images into a synthesizer, whose de-naturalized visual world he calls the Zone, in homage to Andrey Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Finally, the references provided by these various characters have been assembled by a filmmaker, not in the form of a conventional narrative, but “in the fashion of a musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints and mirror-like fugues.”
There is a lot of way to interpret Sans Soleil, such as references from literature, history, politics and films. To begin with, from the literary point, San Soleil refers to two authors: Tomas Stearns Eliot, whose poet is quoted at the beginning of the film, and Sei Shonagon, the Japanese writer who is cited repeatedly.
Second, San Soleil makes references to several historical events, for instance, the citation of the kidnapping of Kim Dae Jung and Che Guevara reflect the fact that Japanese started to have reaction to foreign policy and indicate the Japanese affiliation of changing. This is because Japanese was influenced by the rise of a new postwar generation to leadership and policy-making position. The differences in outlook between the older leaders still in positions of power and influence and the younger generation that was replacing them complicated formulation of foreign policy. In addition, the legacy of Amilcar Cabral untied the independence movement of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, and Luiz, the president of guinea-Bissau decorated Major Nino in a military award ceremony. We learned ‘what looked like a moving affirmation of revolutionary solidarity was in fact a viper’s nest of bitterness and resentment.’
Moreover, The sequences in San Francisco references Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Marker's own earlier film La Jetée (The Pier). In addition, Marker's use of the name "The Zone" to describe the space in which Hayao Yamaneko's images are transformed, diegetic and non-diegetic sound contribute to companied voices and music altered synthetically, is a homage to Stalker, a film by Andrei Tarkovsky.
Literature reference
Tomas Stearns Eliot
The film begins with a piece of T.S Eliot’s poem, Ash Wednesday. It’s easy to find the connection between Chris Marker and T.S Eliot. T.S Eliot is good at writing free verse and full of random thoughts. “Eliot is, I think, a relatively indifferent, or uninterested, observer of the phenomenal world… His direct affirmation are always summings-up of this style, concentrations for which the rest of his verse appears as so many hints.” Writes A. Alvarez. To some degree, Chris Marker imitates Eliot’s free verse style. Furthermore, Paul Levy notes in The Wall Street Journal: “these formerly lost early works are meaning-laden exceptions to … Eliot’s magpie poetic method, the making of patchwork patterns of phrases and strings of words, very often borrowed from other poets’ verses, without the use of quotation marks. ” Same performance practice also applied in Sans Soleil, Chris Marker edits movies randomly and does not build bridges between the leaps of clips, like the style of stream of consciousness.
In East Coker from The Four Quartets, Eliot writes:
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about
In the same way, “he told me about the January light on the station stairways” in San Soleil: the faces on the train, eyes closed. Meditation, self-critique, aspiration, anxiety, weariness, defeat, exhaustion, compliance, satisfaction, release, delay and perseverance—the scene of different sleepy faces blend with the clips from horror movies, like the dreams of these sleeping people. We cannot know what we will find when these reposeful masks are peeled away from these faces and we may gaze at the true interior.
Sei Shonagon
Chris marker want to illustrate “Japanese style” and cultural by cueing Sei Shonagon’s poem. “ They are a journey to the two extreme poles of survival…this is a state of survival that the rich countries have forgotten, with one exception¬¬¬----you win----Japan.” The some of survival can create a list of “elegant things”, and enjoy the “limpid spring,’ meanwhile the others, “he hilled himself…he could not stand hearing the word ‘Spring’”
Sei Shonagon is a Japanese auther in eleventh century, who is the auther of The Pillow Book. With his professed interest in banality, Krasna shares Shonagon’s melancholy delight in ‘the contemplation of the tiniest things’, and her list of ‘things that quicken the heart’ in particular strikes the cameraman as an apt criterion for filming. The intense poignancy derived from heart-quickening thinks is in direct proportion to their triviality- the motley accumulation of sights and signs gathered by Krasna on his return to Tokyo includes, in random order, a woman chalking characters on the road, a cat peering over a parapet, a shop window display of a clarinet that plays itself, a poster with an owl on it, and a street fortune-teller, and the sense that, on another occasion, the contents of the list would have been completely different.
Sei Shonagon’s elegant and evocative list, The Pillow Book, 1002 (italics ours): ‘Sparrow feeding their young. To pass a place where babies are playing. To sleep in a room where some fine incense has been burnt. To notice that one’s elegant Chinese mirror has become a little cloudy. To see a gentleman stop his carriage before one’s gage and instruct his attendants to announce his arrival. To wash one’s hair, make one’s toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure. It is not and one is expecting a visitor. Suddenly one is startled by the sound of rain-drops, which the wind blows against the shutters.’
Political and historical references
Kim Dae Jung
Krasna using the long shot focusing the young militants who are trying to gather signatures for supporting Kim Dae Jung. “On the other sidewalk the Left has the floor. The Korean Catholic opposition leader Kim Dae Jung—kidnapped in Tokyo in '73 by the South Korean Gestapo—is threatened with the death sentence. A group has begun a hunger strike. Some very young militants are trying to gather signatures in his support. ”
In the South Korean presidential election, 1971, Kim represented the Democratic Party, challenging incumbent President Park Chung-hee of the Democratic Republican Party (South Korea). Following the election, Kim fled to Japan where he eventually began an exile movement for democracy in South Korea. With widespread allegations of corruption and manipulation of the results, Park turned his regime into a military dictatorship. Around noon of August 8, 1973, Kim was abducted by a group of unidentified agents. Later Kim was moved to Osaka and later to Seoul, South Korea. Subsequently Kim was released in Busan. He was found alive at his house in Seoul five days after the kidnapping.
Through this reference, we can see the Japanese starts to have reaction to foreign policy and indicate the Japanese affiliation of changing. This is because Japanese was influenced by the rise of a new postwar generation to leadership and policy-making position. The differences in outlook between the older leaders still in positions of power and influence and the younger generation that was replacing them complicated formulation of foreign policy.
Che Guevara
Che Guevara is a hero; his sprit influenced young people deeply. Meanwhile Japan is an open country, which is good at absorbing different culture. So when Japanese feel the society is unfair and poverty in their present, they begin to react like Che Guevara, just as what Che said, “Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.” It follows that people all around the world will always feel the oppression, the unfair lopsided world led by the United States and the imperishable worship to Guevara if the hegemony of the United States still exists. It is a lopsided world so the cosmopolitanism of Guevara has been able to spread. The world’s rebel hero——Guevara was born from American Power. The spirit power of this rebel hero will die together with American hegemony.
Left: “revolutionary purity” from Sans Soleil
Right: 1960 file photo Cuban leaders, including Che Guevara, in the middle of picture
“As for the students, some massacred each other in the mountains in the name of revolutionary purity, while others had studied capitalism so thoroughly to fight it that they now provide it with its best executives. Like everywhere else the movement had its postures and its careerists, including, and there are some, those who made a career of martyrdom. But it carried with it all those who said, like Ché Guevara, that they ‘trembled with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world.’ They wanted to give a political meaning to their generosity, and their generosity has outlasted their politics. That's why I will never allow it to be said that youth is wasted on the young. ”
Amilcar Carbral and Luis Carbral in Bijagos of Guinea Bissau
The film offer the idea that what evaluable for collective history might be nothing more than a cumulating of individuals’ memories and wounds. Relating to the progressive defection of Amilcar Cabral, the revolutionary legacy, who had united the independence movements of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau and won a guerrilla war against the Portuguese, the film shows the footage of a military award ceremony in which Amilcar’s half-brother Luiz is decorating Major Nino. “We are told that in order to interpret this film, we must move forward a year, when Nino will have deposed Luiz in a military coup, and we will understand that what looked like a moving affirmation of revolutionary solidarity was in fact a viper’s nest of bitterness and resentment. ’And so men parade their personal lacerations in the great wound of History.’
Film references
Stalker by Tarkovsky
“He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' homage to Tarkovsky. ”
In Tarkovsky’s film, the Zone is a derelict landscape created by an alien landing and navigated illegally by the Stalker, who takes a scientist and a writer there in search of a room where whatever they desire can be granted. Both Zones are ‘non-places’ outside the normal laws of space and time, which map human desires, imagination or spirituality rather than the physical world.
What is documented here is a reworking of documentary’s relation to the real, and to experience through the profound calling into question of the viewing self. This different relation to the real is founded in an altered connection to indexicality and time, which passes through a dream space before it enters the “Zone”, this latter space marking a return to Tarkovsky, Stalker.
Left: Stalker Right: Sans Soleil
The video is well balanced with the audio: When there are abundant visual elements that audience need think about, music and sound effects will fade out consciously. Ordinary pipes, ruins, wastelands and buildings all turns poetically weird and terrified as crossing the entry to the next space at the real hand of Tarkovsky several simple montages can make excellent expression of the metaphor, which are more powerful and richer than other kinds of presentation. We see stalker and bedrooms that is ramshackle and black-and-white bedroom throughout the movie. As the symbol of family, wife and children are always obstructing stalker’s danger exploring, and become the only ones who comfort him after he finishes stalking and comes back. Behind the whole movie with abstract lines, this may be the biggest tension. Sans Soleil also follows the same pace of Stalker: a shot of three Icelandic children is showed as the beginning of movie, and it becomes end of movie eventually.
Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock
The idea at which Sans Soleil begins to disclose its own veil is its excursion into Vertigo. Krasna is obsessed with Vertigo as the only film ever to portray ‘impossible memory, insane memory’, and writes that he has seen it nineteen times. Making his pilgrimage to the sites where the film was made, and recalling Hitchcock’s original via a series of stills that are momentarily held and dissolved between his own footage, Krasna reworks Hitchcock’s narrative into a new story, and the character of Scottie (James Stewart) is recast as ‘Time’s fool of love’. This unveiling of appearances to reveal time at work in the representation of space may be logically extended to cover the perpetual geographical displacement enacted across Sans Soleil, which then emerges as one vast metaphor for the passage of time.
Left: still from Vertigo Right: Sans Soleil
La Jetee (The Pier)
In straightforward terms he is on the island of Sal, listening to radio Hong Kong, thinking back to when he was in Tokyo in winter, subject to these and other images that return unbidden via association with his present. We are beyond distanced contemplation of images that may or may not have been filmed by him, but we are also beyond flashback, neither seeing through his mind’s eye nor seeing images as testimony to his memory but, rather, we are told that the images are his memory. Time is more important than path, with concentric memories growing face on face, like a series of tree rings. Later on, indeed, San Soleil features a still from Vertigo, which shows the sequoia cut in Muir Woods, and then films the similar cut in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, which figures in La Jetee.
Left: La Jetee Right: Sans Soleil
As in La Jetee we see here an impossible memory, the only difference being the introduction of motion to the pictures we see and the fact that Krasna does not feature within these images to be looked at as the protagonist of La Jetee does. These memory images ay well function to point back to Krasna’s location at the time of writing but this position is constructed in the film as a visual and aural absence. Krasna’s memory, fashioned by film in every sense, opens out beyond himself in the absence of his physical presence.
In conclusion, in such a simple form, Sans Soleil covers and implies such a wide range of prospective, from the literature reference from poems by Tomas Stearns Eliot to the list by Sei Shanagon in the Heian period. Chris Marker bends the poems into the movie in order to reach the stream of consciousness. Using Eliot’s magpie poetic method, Chris Marker edits video clips consciousness. Like Sei Shanagon concentration to the details around her life, Marker also fixes camera to the little single details around him. In the point of view of the historical and political references from the kidnapping of Kim Dae Jung (who later become Korean president) to the quotes of Che Guevara, even to the Amilcar Cabral (who leads the independent movement of Cape Verde and guinea-Bissau). On one hand, these citations of history reflect the fact that Japanese started to have reaction to foreign policy and indicate the Japanese affiliation of changing, on the other hand, Chris Marker records the third world’s history that may be ignored by most of people. We also learned revolution is a long and hard way to realize the solidarity and independence. Moreover, The sequences in San Francisco references Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Marker's own earlier film La Jetee. In addition, Hayao Yamaneko's transformed images “the Zone” are homage to Stalker, a film by Andrei Tarkovsky. Krasna thinks his memory by reviewing films, exhibits himself in the absence of his physical presence.
Chris Marker is influenced by new form of art cotemporary. In the same era among late 19th and early 20th, artists such as Pierre Schaeffer, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Gyorgy Ligeti no long just go for the appreciation and enjoyable, instead, they pursue the possibility of arts. For instance, etude aux chemins de fer by Pierre Schaeffer, it is the assemblage of various natural sounds recorded (originally on tape) to produce a montage of sound; Marcel Duchamp, the Dadaist and surrealist who start the point of performance art; and 4’33 by experimental composer John Cage in 1952, the song that have 4’33 long silence, which echoed in Sans Soleli with a 5 seconds black out in the beginning of movie. In addition, silence was an important structural element in some of the Sonatas and Interludes, Music of Changes and Two Pastorals. To some degree, the application of silence aims to let people to think.
In the process of producing Sans Soleli, Chris Marker tries to explore more and more possibilities of form of expression. The sense of illusion is created by unique edit, weird composition, surreal rhythm and philosophical thought. Through Chris Marker almost put no emphasis on any individual, he portrays Japan with his unique vision with an aesthetic perspective. Meanwhile, his closely observing Japanese culture and society and analysis the culture and society with personal and historical view, has a profound impact on film history. This invaluable film opens the door to impossible and extends imagination to an infinite extent. Sans Soleli is more than just a movie or documentary, it is an art expression of politics, history, literature and philosophy.
Bibliography:
Chris Marker: Memories of The Future by Catherine Lupton
Cities In Transition –the moving images and the modern metropolis by Andrew webber and Emma Wilson
Time And The City: Chris Marker by Sarah Cooper
Reflections on Ash Wednesday and T.S. Eliot Poem by Jeff Goins
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/t-s-eliot
http://jeffgoins.myadventures.org/?filename=reflections-on-ash-wednesday-and-a-ts-eliot-poem
http://oedipa.tripod.com/eliot-2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%ADlcar_Cabral
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Kim_Dae-jung
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu%C3%ADs_Cabral
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/26/cuban_dissident_eloy_gutierrez_menoyo_dies_at_77/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3
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