Reaction and thoughts on Sans-Soleil

future Memories
Global, woven images.
a Haunting soundscape.

To reduce San-Soleil to a haiku would be trite, but I just did. Forgive me. I didn't get it. And it's been a while. I just read the online text from where we left off in class, but it's little substitution for watching it again, in it's entirety, to get a real feel for it. The first time I saw it, I had to reduce it to a series of images, a narrative of sorts. Actually, to call it a narrative just confuses the issue. It was a documentary - but about what? The association between the images of Africa, Japan, and Iceland is loose at best. Is it some sort of 41st-centurian travelougue? Am I supposed to see things in multiple Vonnegutesque dimensions? I mean what the hell people?

Here's a different approach: it's all about memory and it's recollection. Our 41st centurian is merely leaking images out of his visual cortex onto our video screens and being narrated by Marker to make things interesting. The stream of consciousness approach makes good sense in this case, the recollections come out in blocks, related somehow by time or in this case, place, but are otherwise scattered in their subject. One could pick out various themes, youth, protest, death, war, religion basically a cultural anthropologist's wet dream. The common thread that binds them, though is how they're remembered and recalled, through Marker's lens. We are not supposed to suspend our disbelief at all. We are supposed to know that the woman's face from the beginning of the movie is only visible for 1/24th of a second, owing to shyness or cultural taboo.

From this one can infer that memory is rather impersonal, almost collective in a Jungian sense, the rememberance of something past is put down on record, permanently, rather than a biochemical process and evoked by words or paralinguistic gestures. Memory comes from moving images. Thus, feelings come from moving images. Everything so unique about visual cognition can be simulated by current technology. Mind you, it's completely ersatz in many ways. Its original context is lost. Its exigency is lost. The way the memories were originally assembled is lost. In a way, Marker is pointing us to how he wants to remember things, what to feel while remembering it, and what to tell the grandchildren when you talk about San-Soleil.

This is a potent example of how we are supposed to consider the potential of images as a series of memories. They are meant to tell. They are meant to evoke. Clever showing this before we begin our aesthetic video process... I'll end this by speculating on the meaning of 'san-soleil'. It means 'sunless' in english. That's half the battle. The other half is trying to pick out something from the film. The only part in the narration that refers to 'sunless' is alluding to the Mussorgsky song cycle. I tried to find a part of it on Altavista and got some guy singing operatically. Never mind on that. I'll assume it's full of pathos and longing for glories past, good Russian emotions. I'm guessing the 41st centurian hasn't a conception of emotion, at least in the kind that makes you shoot yourself, prompting him to jog in memory back in time. Thus the title refers to the dissattached view with which Marker tries to assemble his memories. Is he successful in this mission? Perhaps. Or perhaps it's an ironic comment on the fact that cinema cannot be dissattached if it merely an extension of memory.