Jul 21

Jul 21 Chris Marker

Docu-essay and testament of the French movie director Chris Marker, which constitutes a journey of criticism and metatextual conclusion of his ten-year reflections on image, memory and history. A film of which we can remember only fragments that refer to something else: three Icelandic children who smile, men on the Tokyo subway, faces, features, years and seasons: heterogeneous elements connected by a melancholy unity.

Sans Soleil, pastiche of images and intellectual stories from which themes emerge slowly: the investigation of increasingly westernized Eastern cultures, the theorization of the non-existence of a non-visual memory ("Can we remember having thirst?") and finally the conclusion that reality has become too complex and interconnected to be able to be filmed uniquely by the camera without making reality fictitious. C. Marker in perpetual balance between the 'passion of the real' and the construction of a critical discourse on the real starting from the real itself has given movement to the movement thanks to particular passages of framing and to unexpected analogies. An alchemical dialogue between filming and sound that help each other by enhancing the reciprocal expressive possibilities, where the word does not get to be seen and where the image is mute. It is a continuous search for other 'banal' intellectual and sentimental angles to read, see, capture, understand the surrounding.

““The remoteness of the countries somehow repairs the too close proximity of times””

A documentary in which there is no need to show everything, there is no need to say everything, the imaginary prevails over representation and through the invented correspondence of the cameraman we re-experience what he himself saw. A continuous participation and estrangement from the human multitude on which the lucid gaze of the flâneur decides whether to remain in tune with the paradox or to go beyond and report. Sans Soleil is a journey everyone must undertake for themselves. The journey is endless - once taken, you can never go 'home' again.