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Reviews
Sans soleil (1983)
A film which has to be seen to be believed
Sans Soleil is a 1982 nonlinear essay film by French documentary filmmaker Chris Marker (La Jetee) named after a song cycle by Mussorgsky. The film is a collage of images gathered from Africa, Iceland, San Francisco, France and Japan all set to non- direct sound. Throughout the film, an unseen woman's voice (Alexandra Stewart) narrates letters written by a possibly fictional traveler in poetic verse accompanied by sections of electronic music. Each segment begins with the phrase "He wrote me" and explores matters such as consciousness, Japanese television, modern culture, technology and even the act of filming. Images in the film include children in Iceland, a carnival in Guinea-Bissau, a ferry in Hokkido, girls in Cape Verde, and a shrine to cats in Tokyo. Sans Soleil has been hailed in some quarters as a masterpiece, however a more accurate description is "a horrendous waste of space which gives avant garde film-making a bad name." Hitchcock may well have said drama is "life with the dull bits cut out", but Sans Soleil is life with the interesting bits cut out. The narration is an affront to the English language, the images flat and tedious and the less said about the sound the better. Lines such as "How can one remember thirst?" merely confirm the film as a Monty Python sketch masquerading as an art-house film. An atrocious waste of two hours which makes Russian Ark look like Face/Off.