Sans Soleil

Presented by Mount Analogue ○ Art + Cinema

Considered one of the best documentaries of all time, Chris Marker's 1983 film Sans Soleil (Sunless) is a mind-bending free-form travelogue that journeys from Africa to Japan.

A voice off-screen (Alexandra Stewart in this English version) reads letters sent to her by a fictional cinematographer named Sandor Krasna. The film opens and closes with images from Iceland from 1965; Krasna shares his observations as he travels through Paris; Africa, specifically the Cape Verde Islands and Guinea-Bissau (with footage provided by an uncredited Sarah Maldoror); San Francisco, where he retraces the steps of Hitchcock’s Vertigo; and to Japan in the early 1980s.

Considered one of the best documentaries of all time, Jonathan Rosenbaum in his Criterion essay describes Sans Soleil as “a cinematic essay and travel film made up of asides and digressions that form a portrait of late twentieth-century civilization."

“Sans Soleil is unique in the documentary canon for its simultaneous embodiment of both documentary’s most classical and radical qualities…[It’s a cliché to say that about a movie – that its true shape or texture is in the eye of the beholder – but it’s true of Sans Soleil, which not only withstands multiple viewings, but never seems to be the same film twice. It addresses memory even as its different threads seem to forget themselves; it parses geopolitics without betraying any affiliation; it might be Marker’s most elaborately self-effacing film, or his most plangently personal.”—Adam Nayman, Sight and Sound

DCP courtesy Janus Films