But first of all he looked for the woman's face, at the end of the jetty. He ran toward her. And when he recognized the man who had trailed him since the underground camp, he understood there was no way to escape Time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death.
Now, look back at the opening of the narration. The first six paragraphs are quite direct. They weigh heavily. Were this a novel, the description would weigh far more heavily, for there would be no images to distract. But, then the quick change from a single death to the many, and the bulk of the film drifts the mind away from that opening. Both narration and images work together to make the viewer almost wholly forget the opening claims of the film re: the boy’s early trauma.
Only in the next to last paragraph is there an inkling that hearkens back to the opening. The viewer struggles to make the connection, but the conspiracy of words and images thrust the opening scene back so quickly, and ends so abruptly, that when the narrator utters, "was the moment of his own death," the viewer is stunned, kneecapped in an emotional sense.
And it is this fact which undercuts one of the main filmic claims about this film, and the later film Sans Soleil; that they are films about memory. They are not.
Yes, the internal tale is concerned with the memory of the boy-cum-man, but the external part of the film, that which the viewer witnesses, is concerned with perception. What do we experience when we experience it. We are quite overwhelmed, initially, with the film’s opening premise of childhood trauma, until it is wholly subsumed in the nuclear nightmare. That dominates so much of the proceeding that, if honest, likely only a handful of people in a thousand, would recall the ending and make the connection to the, in retrospect, blindingly inevitable, ending. Thus, Marker recapitulates the consumed tunnel vision of the main male character within his viewers. He makes us not only witness the perceptual lack of the man, but embody it totally. That is a remarkable thing for any art to do, and surely the admission of unstinting greatness.
The other great critical misperception about this film, and even more so Sans Soleil, is its connection to Alfred Hitchcock’s vastly overrated 1958 film Vertigo. Yes, this film features male obsession with a woman from the past, and there is a scene where the man has a similar scene to the one on Vertigo, where the characters look at the rings of a sequoia tree, and the man points to outside its rings, to indicate where he comes from. And Sans Soleil has a whole digressive passage set in San Francisco, which is an homage to Vertigo, but both of Marker’s films are so much deeper, and so much more masterful in every aspect of the filmic medium, than Hitchcock’s film that what others see as influence I can only see as pastiche.
Article comments
1 - Dave
Of course it is inconceivable to Mr. Schneider that the film may be about BOTH memory and perception.
But of course, then he wouldn't have anything to act smug and superior about whilst talking about other critics.
2 - io
couldnt agree more with the previous comment. the films are about both memory and perception.
from the moment i read him stating that vertigo is an overrated movie i knew i couldnt take him seriously.
3 - Outofyourmind
Quoting: "one can understand why I was never particularly moved to engage the films of this man; especially considering that he was French, from that nation that launched the careers of such notable filmic failures as Jean Cocteau and Jean-Luc Godard."
So you would never have watched French cinema because of a whole 2 French directors being failures? Surely that's not very constructive discrimination? That would mean that you wouldn't watch any American cinema on the grounds of how much junk they put out every week? I think American cinema is great, don't you agree?
Cocteau a failure? Please develop... compared to what? Compared to "Terminator" in terms of box office numbers (since you mentioned Terminator in your critic)? What makes you say such a gratuitous, ignorant thing? The guy invented more than most can today with more technology and everyone at the time looked at him as the way forward for the new cinema... Get your head out of your brainwashed box, forget what you learned in the all-good-thinking schools and cinema academies (what's that suppose to mean anyway?) and embrace!
4 - El Bicho
Here's one that doesn't understand that reasoning
5 - what?
Film, after all, is a medium founded and nurtured by the written word. Without a good screenplay, a film is just shadows on a wall."
6 - Christina
Anybody who would judge all of a country's cinema based on disliking some particular movie or director from that country lacks credibility as a reviewer. Those "filmic failures" you mention are actually considered renowned classic filmmakers, and its fine if you don't like them (you are obliged to dislike anyone you please) but stop trying to rewrite history with your shallow denunciations.