Chris Marker on UK DVD: SANS SOLEIL review

Watching Chris Marker's philosophical documentary Sans Soleil feels like reading a story inside someone's diary. Not in the sense you're doing anything wrong, but that for all the genius on display here - the eye for a great image, the wit, insight, humanity - Marker's film is arguably too personal to be a masterpiece. Sans Soleil isn't quite a documentary the way a film school would have it; what we see as Marker travels the world is linked by a female narrator reading letters from a (fictional) friend of hers, a cameraman, who comments on what he supposedly shot.

Much of this is trenchant, fantastically written stuff which along with the brilliantly judged visuals feels almost timeless, for all it was put together more than twenty-five years ago. But Marker throws himself into expanding on anything and everything that passes through his head, heedless of any kind of professional detachment, and while this has its advantages it does also strike some bum notes. At its best Sans Soleil plays out like something Haruki Murakami might have done if he went into multimedia. At the other end of the scale it's uncomfortably close to a student in political studies who's just discovered Lost in Translation.

It's difficult, perhaps impossible, to describe what Sans Soleil is about in a convenient paragraph. There's a framing device - a brief glimpse of Iceland before one of the volcanic eruptions during the 1960s, expanded on at the end. But although the letters feel as if they're following some chronological progression, Marker never explicitly sets out any point. And despite the heady nature of the things he writes about, the idea this is a film concerned with the big picture, most of the footage comes from Marker's beloved Japan.

An enigmatic talent, reluctant to give interviews or release photographs, Marker is probably best known in the West for the 1963 short La Jetée, which Terry Gilliam adapted into the film 12 Monkeys. The story of a time traveller returning to his childhood memories from a post-apocalyptic future, it encapsulates several of Marker's fascinations, shaped by his wartime military service and journeys filming in socialist countries around the world. He writes about perception - what we see and how we interpret it. He's continually fascinated by history, how the past influenced the present, and he also uses this to touch on social constructs - morality, censorship and control.

So Sans Soleil goes from idiosyncratic religious ceremonies in Japan, to ruminating on memory, to the poor, to thoughts about common bonds between the underprivileged, attitudes to deprivation across different cultures and the work of Sei Shōnagon, all of which covers roughly the first ten minutes. But Marker's genius lies partly in how well he can carry you through even the most disparate subjects. Sans Soleil is never too much information. It's thought-provoking, but never too highbrow, rather witty, dryly sarcastic, often moving.

Marker always seems to be in control, even when the narrative seems as if it's purely free-wheeling. Partly this stems from his eye behind the camera - there's no sync sound (the audio was captured on a separate tape recorder), and Marker is clearly more interested in what he's looking at than what he's hearing. Much of Sans Soleil is gorgeous, from the simplest wander through Tokyo back streets to workers in New Guinea passing rubble hand over hand, and stray dogs on the beach in São Tomé. Like so many great documentaries, the subjects are ordinary enough, but seeing them as Marker sees them sticks in your head for some time.

Yet Marker has no pretensions to an objective viewpoint, and while technically there's nothing wrong with that there are moments his poetic worldview grates somewhat, or his visionary spiel feels dated, even contrived. Several reflections on Japan - particularly the Hokkaido sex museum - skirt close to rose-tinted Asian exoticism, and the increasing use of stock footage for tenuous links feels jarringly at odds with the lyricism in the rest of his writing. Intercutting to a Polaris missile in flight or dispassionate recordings of animal slaughter seems worryingly superfluous.

And Marker's love for early video synthesisers - turning his footage into surreal, digitally treated smears of clashing colour - also drags the film down a notch or two. It's easy to condemn formative technology in retrospect, but there's something about the director's devotion to this clumsy process that doesn't sit right. Marker might imply mashing his work up like this unlocks some deeper secret related to meaning and perception, but neither clumsy allusions to Tarkovsky nor an enigmatic 'Perhaps...' make that case.

Nonetheless, for all its faults this is still unquestionably a great, great video record. Marker may lack the awe-inspiring detachment of someone like Wang Bing (West of the Tracks) but although his subjectivity trips him up every now and then Sans Soleil could never be the same film without him treating it so personally. Comparatively few people can talk about time, impermanence and other such weighty subjects for a hundred minutes and keep things interesting. Nearly three decades after it was first released Marker's dreamlike meditation on these themes may not be a masterpiece, but Sans Soleil still remains essential viewing.

THE DISC:

Optimum Home Entertainment are releasing a UK DVD under their Optimum Classic label collecting La Jetée and Sans Soleil, available to buy from Monday 22nd August. This is a bare-bones release, without the extras available on the recent Criterion edition, for example, but it's still a solid presentation providing an excellent way to see two classic features that could do with more exposure. There are no trailers: the disc launches straight into the main menu, which is a simple, static design but clear and easy to navigate. La Jetée is divided into four chapter stops, and Sans Soleil into eight.

Both films come with two language tracks, a French and English dub in the original mono 2.0. While neither English track is bad as such, both date each film more than any of the subject matter - the narration for La Jetée in particular has the crisp, stilted diction of a radio play. Oddly, one of the best reasons to get this disc is the subtitles employed, not so much because the French audio is better but because whoever wrote the subtitles adopts a far more poetic, less literal translation than the voiceovers are using. Technically, they're fine, well positioned, readable and free from errors but it's the writer's facility in English - and in adapting the original French - that's immediately obvious. Whether Optimum commissioned these or simply bought them up from one of the previous home video releases, they're fantastically well written for both films and make the viewing experience that much more rewarding.

Very little seems to have been done to the picture on both films. La Jetée is very distinct, with some deep, deep blacks, but it looks exactly what it is - a series of photographs taken by a very old camera - and each one appears with several very slight imperfections, judder, grain, dirt and so on. Marker's footage in Sans Soleil is frequently beautifully shot, but subject to a great deal of the minor wow and flutter you'd expect from what is essentially home video footage three decades old, pedantically speaking. When he films the television in his hotel room or includes ancient archival footage these things are even more obvious. It bears reiterating both films are perfectly watchable, and all of this seems to be down to the source material, but the disc would probably suffer a great deal blown up onto a big screen. There are no extras included bar the English dubs for either film.

This DVD represents two great films on a single disc from a phenomenally talented artist who's never had quite the recognition he deserves. La Jetée remains a captivating piece of filmmaking that's awe-inspiring for its craft as much as the poignancy of its brief, yet memorable narrative, and one or two dated moments don't stop it from being an enduring classic. Sans Soleil is a documentary that abandons all notion of the filmmaker's objectivity, and arguably suffers for it, but Marker's keen insight, wit and deep compassion make watching the film a journey worth taking. It's a shame Optimum Home Entertainment couldn't include any extras with their release, but for anyone interested in bold, experimental narrative features with honesty and heart to shame established cinematic convention, this should be an essential purchase.

(Thanks go to Optimum Home Entertainment and EM Foundation PR for facilitating this review.)