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.
Vertigo lends a few touches to the two films, certainly, but mostly Joycean misdirections that too many critics overplay, and use to flub their assessments of the far superior works of Marker. In short, Marker played upon the hubris and gullibility of the critics likely to keep them talking about the films until superior critics could actually come along and unlock the realities. Again, this is the mark of a great artist.
So, on to Sans Soleil (Sunless), whose title is adapted from a song cycle by Russian classical composer Modest Mussorgsky. This much longer film follows the filmed globe-trottings of a fictive man named Sandor Krasna (the stand-in for Marker). It is a fictive documentary (but not quite a mockumentary) that flirts with some of the ideas expressed in Godfrey Reggio’s unnarrated Quatsi films.
Like the earlier film, Sans Soleil has a narrator, but it is not a fictive film, rather a quasi-documentary. The female narrator (Alexandra Stewart) reads letters from Krasna about his voyages from Iceland to Africa to Japan (where the bulk of the film is shot), with short trips to Paris and San Francisco (due to the Vertigo homage). The observations made by Krasna are beautifully reflected in the footage we see (unlike La Jetee, this film has moving color images, not just still black and white photographs). The film opens with an epigraph from T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets, from "Ash Wednesday":
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place….
Aside from the homage to Vertigo, there is an even more penetrating one to Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science fiction film, Stalker, wherein Krasna mentions a place where images are transformed, called The Zone. Through all its circumlocutions, the film does find its way back to its start, the images of a trio of Icelandic children, although the length of the film does not enable the viewer to get the same thrilling rush of recognition one does in La Jetee, wherein the panic of the lead character is felt by the viewer in a recapitulation.
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."