Memories of travels and places – especially Japan and Guinea-Bissau after the failed revolution – in the letters of Sandor Krasna, a freelance cameraman, filtered by the evocation and voice (Alexandra Stewart) of an unknown woman. Her words and the images that Sandor (C. Marker himself) has taken from reality are intercepted and deformed (solarized) by the interventions of the Japanese video artist Hayao Yamaneko and become ghostly. In the long-distance dialogue between two invisible characters (with the intrusion of a third party) there is “a veil of temporal and spatial distance that accentuates the poetic force of the (beautiful) text” (Roberto Chiesi). More than stories, they are small anecdotes, metamorphoses of objects and many figures of cats, much loved by Marker for whom they are bearers of a proudly solitary freedom. Along the path of this singular poetic and hypnotic film are the hints – pessimistic rather than pitiful – on poverty and social exploitation in the Third World. Music: Michel Krasna, Isao Tomita. Produced by Anatole Dauman. RHV - Ripley's Home Video 2007.
(il Morandini)
Images of Iceland, guerrillas from Guinea-Bissau, letters from a Hungarian cameraman, the agony of a giraffe, video-deliriums of a Japanese, fragments of Arielle Dombasle's voice: Chris Marker secretes his honey from everything he encounters. An uninterrupted reflection on memory and its traces. I wonder, he himself says, "how they remember things, those who do not photograph, who do not film, who do not record on video, how did humanity before these devices cultivate memory... Now I know, they wrote the Bible, magnetic strip of eternity, of a time that will have to be reread without stopping, to know that it existed". Happy are we, then, men of the twentieth century, who have both the Bible and Chris Marker, a photographer who writes with images.
(Georges Sadoul, Dizionario dei film)
source
www.mymovies.it
Criticism
“What is poignance des choses, this pungent intensity of things? What is this implacability in striking the senses that prevents us from looking away? It is not (only) the seduction of forms, it is not (only) their willingness to welcome and guide the gaze, but more precisely that faculty of being in communion with things, of entering into them, of being them for a few moments. An emotional intensity that is born from contact and that lives exclusively in the dimension of contiguity, of adjacency, of friction. Sans soleil speaks of this and does so with heartbreaking precision, infallibly. The “dreamy vassalage” of Okinawa, the “equality of the gaze” found in the markets of Bissau and Cape Verde, the “image of happiness” of three Icelandic children and the “pilgrimage to San Francisco” in all the locations of Vertigo: the places, times, circumstances change, but the emotional tone of the film does not. Neither documentary nor travelogue: more simply a breathtaking list of “things that make the heart beat”. The structural principle of Sans Soleil is the cluster: an informal grouping of elements united by virtue of momentary attractions and temporary aggregations. The image and the verbal commentary (commentaire) touch and caress each other, maintaining an almost erotic relationship, driven by a piercing desire to interpenetrate, to merge: the velvety voice of Florence Delay rests softly on the images piled up by the cameraman Sandor Krasna (Marker's pseudonym, of course), enveloping them and, so to speak, swaddling them in a melancholic splendor. If the images need to fall, to precipitate on the words, overwhelming them with "visual evidence," Marker makes them overflow, letting them entirely occupy the space of the discourse, "obstructing" it. And conversely, if the images call for a verbal investigation, the commentaire pushes into them, dislodging poetic sparks, lighting them with a dazzling, incendiary lyricism. Without ever forgetting to measure the unbearable vanity of the West, which has never stopped privileging being over non-being, the said over the unsaid. Desire, melancholy, revelation.”
(Alessandro Baratti)
