Chris marker Monkeys (1995) on it; David Bowie, who centered a weird video around it; various contemporary sci-fi authors, whose time-travel tomes are invariably variations on it; and film buffs like me who know it by heart. Though viewers sometimes still watch his Grin Without a Cat (1977), a panoramic documentary about the beautiful energy and ultimate failure of 1960s leftist movements, and A.K. (1985), an interesting documentary about Kurosawa during the making of Ran, there’s really only one film besides La jetée for which Marker is well known: Sans Soleil (1982), the quintessence of his art. Sans Soleil (or Sunless) can’t be neatly described. When you start trying to list its subjects (time, a memory of three girls on a road in Iceland, obsession, video games, Tokyo, Guinea Bissau, things that quicken the heart, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, freedom, Mussorgsky, revolution, death), you quickly realize that it’s simply about being alive. Not only that, Sans Soleil itself is a kind of living thing that moves with the density of time. It’s certainly not for everyone, particularly not for those who reasonably demand a dose of entertainment in their movies. But if you believe that film can be a medium for the poetic and philosophical exploration of the world, Sans Soleil is a miracle. Though it’s not without cinematic influences, the predecessors I think of are the classic solitary walkers of human experience: Basho, Montaigne, Rousseau. One of Marker’s gifts is his ability to film the products of culture—from ceramic cat statues to video games to African masks—as if they were living things. They glow with their own uniqueness, energized by the memories and obsessions that created them. After watching enough Chris Marker movies, you eventually realize that these things really are alive. For time is what all experience is made of, and imagination—which also goes by the name memory—weaves and repairs time. So it’s no surprise that, in my book, he’s the filmmaker who has most successfully conjured life from a few celluloid frames. If you’ve already seen La jetée, you know which scene I’m talking about. The time traveler has finally made it back to the living woman whose face he could never forget. She’s asleep. Like the rest of the movie, the scene is told completely in still images; we see still after still of her sleeping face. Suddenly one of the still images blinks. And the heart skips a beat. Scott Samuelson teaches philosophy at Kirkwood Community College and blogs about music with his son at billyanddad.wordpress.com.
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