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.

Mount Analogue are excited to screen Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, widely considered one of the best documentaries of all time, as our first film in an ongoing series presenting artists’ cinema in Seattle.

Chris Marker (1921-2012) was a French writer, photographer, filmmaker and multi-media artist. Sans Soleil shares Marker’s meditations on the infallibility of human memory and its interplay with recorded history, political revolution and the legacy of colonialism, and the nature of technology and the mediated image.

Structured as a travelogue and told through letters sent by a fictitious cameraman, Sans Soleil is composed of images from Iceland, Paris, the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, San Francisco, and Japan in the early 1980s and is interwoven with excerpts from other films, stock imagery, commercials and films from Japanese television. Sans Soleil explores a form of time travel, with Marker making connections between events and people that are otherwise separated by time and place.

The film’s original format is 16mm, and will be screened from a DCP (courtesy Janus Films). This will be the film’s English language version, with narration by Alexandra Stewart.

“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