Chris Marker has made over 60 films in his long career (he's now 90). But his reputation has rested on just two. Sans soleil (1983), a meditative film essay on Japan, and La jetée (1962), a 20-minute sci-fi film in the ciné-roman photomontage style, are widely considered the finest examples of their respective genres. On top of that, La jetée was named one of the Top 10 sci-fi films of all time by Time magazine. Optimum Classics are re-releasing both this week on one DVD.
With its eccentric eye, its exotic locations, its peripatetic ways, zipping between the economic miracle of Japan and recently liberated Guinea-Bissau, and its philosophical musings, Sans soleil can look at times like the sort of thing Alan Whicker might have made had he had a nervous breakdown.
The purpose of the film journal from a fictitious cameraman is unclear. He seems to be on some mission to understand why the Japanese deal with time and place in such a different manner to us in the West, where, he suggests, "the partition between death and reality is thickest". He also wants to list things "that quicken the heart".
We visit numerous "neighbourhood celebrations": a temple consecrated to the souls of cats, another to the souls of broken dolls. There is a visual ode to the Tokyo underground, reimagined as a dream machine. There are numerous non sequiturs: random striking images and memorable bon mots.
My one concern (apart from the infrequent pretentiousness) is, is it not all too easy (and common) to make Japan appear foreign? I had to take it on trust that Marker wasn't giving me a skewed, simplistic portrait, but it did seem to plough a familiar Orientalist furrow: that of a spiritual, sophisticated East versus a rationalistic, hard-headed West.
La jetée inhabits a more tangible emotional world. Its sci-fi premise may have been copied too often too well for it to be gripping; and its technical achievement may have diminished with age. But it is a titan of a movie nonetheless, for delivering a remarkably economical yet authentic snapshot of young, fleeting love and our longing to recover it.
