Overrated

The movie is wildly uneven but lively and timely - in its own surreal way

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Bizarre in its extreme unconventionality, "Sans Soleil" remains the second best known film in Chris Marker's prolific and legendary filmography. During his lifetime (one not at all wasted due to his massive and consistently brilliant production of art in almost all of its forms, most famously the cinematic form), Marker remained a mysterious figure, and his films only add to the mystery. "Sans Soleil" is perhaps among the most enigmatic works in all of cinema's history; it is something of a collage of images, a travelogue primarily taking place in Japan (Africa is also often visited, among a few other areas from around the world) scored by atmospheric electronic music and a narration injected with profound philosophy, occasional wit, provocative melancholy, and a knack for unique and sometimes absurdist detail.Dealing with everything from the primary theme of memory and the existential nightmare of time's passage (or, as the narration at one point puts in (more poetically): "the moss of time") to oddly humorous (yet still often thought provoking) encounters with phallic statues and an animatronic designed to bear the appearance of former U.S. president John F. Kennedy, "Sans Soleil" reaches a point of pure unpredictability. While mildly slow in bits, the overall product is uniquely entertaining in its ability to portray and provoke a wide and diverse palate of human emotion. With its grainy yet pleasantly colorful cinematography and semi surrealist atmosphere, "Sans Soleil" successfully entertains the eyes and the mind of any viewer that can appreciates its wildly experimentalist and almost structureless style. This is a film likely to divide viewers, but big enough fans of art house and avant garde cinema can all agree that it is among the finest documentary/experimental/drama/essay films ever made; a truly fresh and original project that is playful and profound like no other masterpiece before or after] it.

The problem with this movie is that nothing happens. This is one of those horrible "artistic" films that tries to explore philosophical ideas, but the result is a mind-numbing, long-winded narrative with pretty pictures. No new ideas or information is explored -- just poetic words which boil down to brilliant observations of the obvious. This is the sort of movie that pretentious idiots who wish to appear intelligent will claim to love.I like documentaries -- you learn about interesting new facts and ideas in documentaries -- but this is definitely not a documentary. It's a bad B movie masquerading as art. The only way this movie could be enjoyable would be with a MST3K soundtrack.

I had to struggle over whether or not I could do this movie justice by writing a review of it after only seeing it once; it's definitely one of those films that, though you can understand it as it goes along, and it is not in any way what one would call difficult, is one that has so many different details and points that it seems relatively rude to try to shorten it down to a synopsis. Then again, as it's work in memory, impression, and time precludes, who's to say that the instant of reviewing it does it injustice merely by struggling with it's impression of it? Well okay, now I'm just being pretentious."Sans Soleil" can be generalized as an almost two-hour visual essay on memory, poetry, and imagery, based around Chris Marker's travels around the world, focusing mostly on Japan and Africa. It lacks the visceral and unsettling effects of his short "La Jetee", but it isn't like it's meant to be... though both films can be considered "contemplative", this one is much more meditative and philosophical, continually reworking it's ideas even to various points of self-awareness made ironic through the narrator's "He wrote... He said..." misdirection.For some reason, it may be impossible to describe just how such a film can be considered so striking and yet still sound so simple (read any review that likes it, they will be awed but there'll be doubt in the minds of any that have seen it that it couldn't possibly be all that). What's interesting about it is that it is, in fact, a very simple work, especially structurally. It is even in a way dated since it uses computer effects of the time that, though they still are used experimentally today, still feel older in a this-was-new-back-then-but-we're-past-it-now way. But still... somehow it works, gets under the skin, says things in ways that you think you understand and then snap too and realize that you've been so lost in what's been going on that you've not paid attention--or was it too much attention? It is, indeed, like it's own memory of itself.--PolarisDiB

At the core of "Sans Soleil," it seems, is the way society chooses to remember things -- and what happens when assumptions are replaced by new facts and a new reality. If this sounds (to use a 1960s expression) "far out," that's because "Sans Soleil" does what few other nonfiction films have done before or since: Link disparate cultures (in this case, Japan, Iceland, Guinea- Bissau and the United States) through street scenes that range from the mundane ("banality," in Marker's on screen words) to the extraordinary.One example: Marker shows sleeping Japanese passengers on a ferry, then a subway framed by Tokyo's skyline, then a bird walking serenely on water, then an African woman smiling, then a cat temple in Japan where families pray for felines. "We do not remember -- we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten," says the film's erudite narrator as she reads a letter supposedly written by Sandor Krasna. In truth, Krasna is actually Marker, who invented the person of Krasna to ... well, it's anyone's guess because Marker doesn't give interviews and prefers to let his work speak for itself. Here's one guess:Marker, who's never seen in "Sans Soleil," doesn't want to take full credit for a film that draws from so many displays of public rituals.Like Edward Steichen's "The Family of Man" photography project, "Sans Soleil" captured lives and moments that were ordinarily overlooked -- though instead of a team of photojournalists, it was just Marker who roamed various continents for the material in this unforgettable movie. Few other filmmakers but Marker would travel to the outskirts of Guinea-Bissau, take pictures of working-class people, then juxtapose the footage with a rolling commentary about the country's revolution that toppled Portuguese rule. That revolution inspired revolutionaries in Europe, but as Marker dryly notes, "Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window." In reading Marker's lines, actress Alexandra Stewart ("Exodus," "Day for Night") cites everyone from the Japanese poet Basho to Marlon Brando. (Marker's footage of San Francisco was inspired by Hitchcock's "Vertigo.")