Sans Soleil

A woman's voice reads letters from a cameraman travelling the world. He has filmed in Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland and San Francisco. There is no connection between the images; the letters make the connection, and most of the time they say something other than what the image shows. The subject is not travel but remembering itself. The film treats forgetting not as a fault but as how memory works; the ceremonies held in Japan for discarded objects and the passage in San Francisco visiting every location of a particular film build the same idea from two directions. The form is close to the essay. Chris Marker refuses narrative; the scenes connect thematically and some passages turn into computer-processed images. A cat shrine, passengers on a train, a deceived emu and footage shot in Guinea-Bissau after independence sit side by side. The Vertigo section is separately cited: the cameraman finds and films every location in Hitchcock's film and ties its idea about time to his own subject. Marker never appears and the letter writer is a fiction. Who it is for: viewers who like essay cinema and films built on memory. Who it is not for: anyone looking for structure; the film is deliberately scattered and does not resolve in a single viewing.