Sans Soleil

Saw Sans Soleil, a strange and beautiful film. It is a sort-of documentary in the style of Grin Without a Cat, another haunting film directed by Chris Marker. Here, a woman reads letters from a film-maker travelling in Japan. His discursive, complex letters deal with the best and deepest obsessions of film: images, fascination, memory, experience. He includes a bewildering variety of images and ideas, ranging from Japanese youth culture to Hitchcock's Vertigo in a holistic, inclusive way. As opposed to yesterday's film (Strange Days) where complexity was used aggressively, to bewilder and confuse, here it is used poetically and lyrically. Rather than grating, the contrast is harmonious. The filmmaker is trying to communicate to us in a frank and straightforward way about ideas he is actively struggling with.

This film was amazing. It tips its hand fairly early on that this is a capital-A Art film when it fills the soundtrack with incongruous bleeping computer noises. I found this a bit annoying but it's a necessary signal to bail now if you're gonna bail. The rest of the film is much more straightforward, mostly spent simply marvelling (in a respectful way) at the alien weirdness of Japan. Some of this is by-now familiar (such as the overabundance of manga and anime and the strange youth subcultures) but there's also fresh curiosities, such as a department store which is holding up JFK as a style icon. His speeches are sung by a choir as an animatronic puppet Kennedy mouths along. Weird...

But don't get the wrong impression: the whole marvelling-at-Japan thing is completely set dressing for the dazzling connections and mediations in the narration. The attack on Pearl Harbor is connected with a cat-shrine via the film Apocalypse Now. Hitchcock's Vertigo is said to be about the impossibility of film to capture what's truly there. War and death are coins in a fountain. Heady stuff! Thinking back on it, it's not the most concrete of stuff, but it's beautiful and poetic and lovely. Like Baraka and the Qatsi films, this is not the most gripping film. You're not on the edge of your seat, but neither are you supposed to be. You are meant to be intrigued and delighted and I certainly was.