Category — Sans Soleil

We received this thoughtful reprise of the “moment of happiness” in Sans Soleil via email today:

Cet été en Islande j’ai vu sur les îles vestmann une image qui m’a fait penser au premier plan de Sans Soleil. C’était un groupe de jeunes filles blondes + un petit garçon. J’ai pensé “c’est la même image”. Je viens de revisionner votre film et découvre que vous aviez tourné ce plan sur la même île, je ne me rappelais pas de ce détail. En visionnant ce plan de nouveau j’ai pensé : “on dirait que c’est au même endroit”. Peut-être est-ce les petits-enfants de vos enfants ?

Avec respect,
Bien à vous,
B.D.

Remember the borgesian-style story ‘Ate onde le sabe’ from Brazil (featuring Sandor Krasna, the dreamer)? Well, here comes another lusophonic snippet. Lead, garden path, dead end? Who cares. Alas, the smooth, sensual quality … of the Portuguese ‘nos gusta’ is lost in the translation that follows.

q-significa-krasna

1st message (request):

> necesito saber e significado del nombre krasna lo q si se es
> q es de origen checo.

“I need to know the meaning of the name ‘Krasna’ in its original Czech form.”

2nd message (answer):

> krasna es de origen Croata, pero tambien esta presente en otros
> paises como rusia etc. significa algo lindo. algo bonito o algo
> hermoso. es para referirse a alguna cosa o alguna persona que
> nos gusta. ;-D

“Krasna is of Croatian provenience, but also crops up in other countries such as Russia etc. It denotes something nice, pleasant, handsome. It is used to refer to something or someone we like / approve of / suiting our taste.”

Which invites us to read ‘Krasna’ as yet another name for something or someone that / who makes our heart beat faster.

I re-read what I just wrote, and it looks suspiciously familiar. Is it possible that it’s just a paraphrase of something I posted before?

- DK

We thought Chris Marker fans would like to know. Many of us learned the text of Sans Soleil forwards, backwards and sideways – down to identifying the lone still self-portrait frame in a Tokyo television monitor – by playing the New Yorker Video release of Sans Soleil on VHS over and over (and over) again, until it was as worn out as, say, Katy Lied.

New Yorker Films, the distributor that helped introduce American moviegoers to the works of Bernardo Bertolucci, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ousmane Sembène, announced on Monday that it was going out of business after 44 years.

NY Times

Other reflections on this event:

• spout.com
• indiewire.com
• takeapart.com

It’s an off week in the waning era of imperfect memory. So in weak association to the spiral trope in Chris Marker’s vision of time, we offer you a link to spiral images on a site dedicated exclusively to . . . stairs: Justin Anthony’s www.stairporn.org/spiral_stairs/

Hotel Josef in Prague

Sans Soleil Spirals

He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory—insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains motionless the eye.

He had driven up and down the hills of San Francisco where Jimmy Stewart, Scotty, follows Kim Novak, Madeline. It seems to be a question of trailing, of enigma, of murder, but in truth it’s a question of power and freedom, of melancholy and dazzlement, so carefully coded within the spiral that you could miss it, and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space in reality stands for the vertigo of time.

He had followed all the trails. Even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores where Madeline came to pray at the grave of a woman long since dead, whom she should not have known. He followed Madeline—as Scotty had done—to the Museum at the Legion of Honor, before the portrait of a dead woman she should not have known. And on the portrait, as in Madeline’s hair, the spiral of time.

And then in its turn the journey entered the ‘zone,’ and Hayao showed me my images already affected by the moss of time, freed of the lie that had prolonged the existence of those moments swallowed by the spiral.

PS: Here’s another tidbit on the 50th anniversary celebration of Vertigo held recently last month in San Francisco: sfcitizen.com.

Texts courtesy of markertext.com. Photo of Hotel Josef in Prague courtesy of stairporn.org. Thanks to our photographer and feline-loving friend mica for the spiral staircase link. For more on sacred geometry, here’s a jump start.

We received a thoughtful note from Don Livoni @ fogblog regarding his recent discovery of Chris Marker. Crafting a haunting film from stills is a discovery that evidently can be made without prior knowledge of La Jetée. It’s a bit like Leibniz and Newton, albeit with a time “differential,” if you like ;). While Mr. Livoni’s films (for example, “Rosie’s Girls” and “DNYK Dreamer”) evoke La Jetée by the skillful sequencing of stills, they also display a stunning sense of chromatic hypersensitivity and palimpsest layering. Meanwhile, the site’s motto – it is without sun, it is memory – aptly summons the spirit of Sans Soleil. Here’s a bit of the note we received, a brief homage to Chris Marker’s sensibilities by a new-found fan:

i love his sense of wonder at what the camera sees and what we remember. i so admire the enigmatic intellect of the narrations, the beauty of the images and the sound juxtaposition, the economy of the technique. it’s all so personal and masterful, mysterious yet historically mindful. i’m looking forward to “discovering” more of his work.

If that were not enough, fogblog presents a stunning set of faux High-Renaissance portraits of (in large part) aristoc(r)atic felines: “L’Histoire des Grands Chats—Religious Leaders, generals, courtesans and clowns” which would no doubt offer a pleasing Sunday afternoon virtual museum expedition for M. Marker himself.

I found a poetic evocation of Chris Marker and his trans-temporal take on earth history, memory and compassion in Sans Soleil on a blog today called simply politics. The entry starts out by making an auspicious connection between the Zapatistas of Chiapas, who “call their gatherings to build international solidarity ‘Intergalactic,’” and the spirit of Marker’s films. It goes on to point out that Marker is known to film buffs much more widely than revolutionaries, noting that voice-over narration has at times been associated with a maligned “Voice of God,” but that ain’t necessarily so, and Marker has provided the template for a true alternative. I’m in tune with this blog man; Marker is not Euripides; his commentaries come at the image track not as a deus ex machina to explain all and wrap all up, but to infuse questions, associations, parables and compassion to the mix, always leaving space (and time) for the viewer to travel back and forth and make new connections.

He riffs on, half-quoting half-paraphrasing some major nodes of Sans Soleil:

That’s just it, he can’t understand. He hasn’t come from another planet he comes from our future, four thousand and one: the time when the human brain has reached the era of full employment. Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara, like the youth of the sixties, with indignation. He is a Third Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet’s past is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their present.

- “Marker, again,” June 16, 2008, politics-live.blogspot.com

How close the phrase “long and painful pre-history” is to the current hullabaloo around 2012, earth rebirth and the shift to the Mayan calendar (Carl Johan Calleman, Daniel Pinchbeck, José Argüelles, Barbara Hand-Clow et alii). With these writers, prophets and mystics we again encounter the themes of time travel, co-existing time patterns, non-linear time and the role of suffering, personal and historical, as experience redeemed through cataclysmic change. Marker has never been explicit about our future, but he provided, well before the new century and its eschatologist-prophets of Earth Apotheosis, a diverse set of audio-visual documents about history and memory, and a few poetic clues about where the Earth Experiment might be heading.

This enigmatic diagram was found at the Pacific Film Archive in 1990. It seems to provide a kind of map for the locations and temporal flow of Sans Soleil. We welcome your interpretations. Click the image for a larger view.

transcription courtesy of: markertext.com

A marketplace is the Republic of things (I mean the ideal Republic, of course): the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, it is beautiful even if the details are gauche or banal. Thus the Mercato Nuovo in Florence, where every object taken separately is an offense to the spirit’s good manners, while the whole is as flamboyant and funny as a high altar. The Mercato Coreano is not so simple. “Korea,” writes Father du Halde, “furnishes white paper, brushes of hair and wolf tail, Ginseng, gold, silver, iron, yellow varnish so beautiful that anything coated in it appears gilded: the tree whence this gum is distilled resembles a palm: chickens whose tail is three feet long, ponies three feet high, sable and beaver pelts, and fossil salt.” To which I would add, on the basis of my modest knowledge of Korean marketplaces: playing cards which are pleasant-looking flat dominoes, as in Japan, women’s clothing – the short tapestry bolero, transparent and stiff as a chrysalis, and the long, dark-colored skirt knotted at the first swell of the breasts – ribbons covered in gilt letters to encourage longevity, cothurne sandals with incurving prow, blue elephants, pink cats, pens and lamps, old opium pouches modestly called the smoker’s necessary, watch faces strung together like sapeks, flowers… and a somewhat Promethean, I mean aquiline, taste for the entrails of things: the innards of radios, the plexus of an electric razor or the thorax of a lock. Men sit chatting, squatting like the dead in the niches of Mexican cemeteries. And Mexico is not far off: it’s in the white cloth suits, the broad-brimmed straw hats, it surfaces in the tanned faces, in the nonchalance of an eye stretched out in its slit like a hammock at the gleaming crest of the cheek – it’s walking with this peasant (it could be an old Tarasco) who amuses himself scaring groups of people by uncovering, in a single movement, the serpent (though not plumed) that he holds on his fist – it bursts out of just as I frame, when suddenly another figure violently enters the field and bang! – he slaps the old man with the back of his hand, and the latter shies away to disappear who knows where, bringing his serpent along with … maybe for a baby-sitting at Alcmena’s? An instant later the self-appointed lawman had disappeared in his turn, and the people on the street are smiling at me and gesturing that everything is fine now. It all went by as quickly as a forgotten image between two shots, but what I felt there, the way a foot laid inadvertently on a tomb makes you feel the cold of death for one second, was a flash of hatred (so Mexican!). Toward me? Toward him? Blame, shame, fear? A critique of bad country manners, exasperation at my desire for the picturesque while they’re trying to build a modern Korea – or is it just that ophiolatry is prohibited in this town? I’ll never know.

- Chris Marker, Corréennes, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1959.

• GUILLAUME-APPROVED EDITION
• New, restored high-definition digital transfers, approved by director Chris Marker
• New video interview with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin
• Chris on Chris, a video piece on Marker by filmmaker and critic Chris Darke
• Two excerpts from the French TV series Court-circuit (le magazine), directed by Luc Lagier: the first, a look at David Bowie’s music video for “Jump They Say,” inspired by La Jetée; the second, an analysis of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and its influences on Marker
• Both films presented in two versions: English and French with English subtitles
• New and improved English subtitle translation

Criterion.com

“Schon Alexandre Astrucs Vision von der Caméra-Stylo liegt der Gadanke zugrunde, Bilder schreiben zu können.”
- Christa Blümlinger

Schreiben Bilder Sprechen: Texte zum essayistischen Film

Hrsg. Christa Blümlinger und Constantin Wulff
Wein: Sonderzahl, 1992

CONTENTS:

I. Versuch als Form
Christa Blümlinger: Zwischen den Bilder/Lesen
Birgit Kämper: Sans Soleil – “ein Film erinnert sich selbst”
Raymond Bellour: Zwischen Sehen und Verstehen [Sechs Filme (en passant); "Der Brief sagt noch"]
Karl Sierek: Stimme Lotse auf der Reise Du
Martin Schaub: Filme als Briefe

II. Gespräche
Selbst-Bilder des Kinos
Praktische Filmkritik

III. Filmisches Denken
Frieda Grafe: Der bessere Dokumentarfilm, die gefundene Fiktion
Harun Farocki: Unregelmässig, nicht regellos
Thomas Tode: Demontage des definitiven Blicks
Bill Krohn: Welles: Fernsehen und der Essayfilm
Hartmut Bitomsky: Nanooks Lächeln

IV. Materialien
Hans Richter: Der Filmessay, Eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilms
Alexandre Astruc: Die Geburt einer neuen Avantgarde: die Kamera als Federhalter
André Bazin: Lettre de Sibérie
Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge, Wilfried Reinke: Wort und Film