so far I've watched the first half of the film sans soleil by Chris marker. it was incredibly inspiring in terms of the way it was shot and narrated, it even inspired me to think of a script for a future videowork maybe. there was also some really good shots of things I'm interested in like trains / rails / taxidermy etc, and it also introduced me to the manga / anime galaxy express 999 which i love the imagery of. it definitely provokes thout with its references to African and Japanese culture, and makes you think broadly about humanity and fiction and everything. definitely will watch the second half.
--------- https://chrismarker.org/chris-marker-2/wounded-time/
This sequence encodes Marker’s profound compassion for animals, which suffuses all of Sans Soleil and many other of his films as well, and it takes on the weight of visual allegory for his verbal speculations on “survival.”
Early on, Africa and Japan are introduced as the explicit topics (literally, places of discourse, sites of memory and seats of arguments as in rhetorical tradition); they are named the “two extreme poles of survival.”
Africa and Japan are linked through visual and philosophic means, visually through sequences of public celebrations — Carnival in Bissau (borrowed footage), a parade/dance in Tokyo, Shinjuko youth culture dances, African women in a marketplace, a military medal awarding ceremony conducted by Amilcar Cabral, as well as diverse ceremonies of acknowledging and commemorating death.
Apart from and before the giraffe, we are shown several dead animals in the sub-Sahara, laid out in what might have been a pond whose water has been absorbed and whose oval indentation in the earth is cracked, parched, the animal dead, dehydrated, and recorded mutely by the camera without commentary.
There is a very similar scene in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s first film, Reassemblage. Both are filmic gateways to Africa, and attempts to transcend tourist (and even ethnographer) status. Marker’s essaistic technique of utilizing threaded association (or the fil conducteur, as he mentioned in person in connection with his film Le dernier Bolchevik — in which he tells the history of the Soviet Union through the story of filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin), is nowhere more evident than in the way he weaves various topics, themes, visual and musical combinations, which are cross-stitched, delay-echoed, textured.
Sans Soleil is a film about animals, but also about political struggle; about memory and space-time travel, but also about Hitchcock, poverty, guerilla struggle, dreams . . . . Both spaces and times (past present and future) are woven together, and if the whole seems to contain notable sections and a segmented architectural plan, this model coexists with multiple strategies of erasure of the perpendicularity of the cut.
Montage is put in the service of weaving, and this weaving is equally that of a fabric as of a magic spell or the multiple return of memories to the surface-screen of the mind.
Part of this weaving evolves in the vein of self-portraiture, a reflection on the journey of the self and its senses through space and time (we are the “third worlders of time,” returning to the past with the gaze but also the ears of compassion). Each scene as it finds its place in the structure/texture of the whole marks a lived moment — lived but mediated by the recording apparatus, and thus perhaps not fully lived but rather cut off by the intervention of the machine between the sense-body and the exterior.
The final film effects perhaps a redress of the transgressions of this mediation — of the intrusions of film recording between the subject and the world, and of the appropriation of individual subjects through eavesdropping, surveillance, imperialist salvation.
This redress takes place within a melancholic, confessional discourse which is simultaneously one of erasure and self-erasure....
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