Review of Sans Soleil (1983) by Reece L — 22 Nov 2015

Sans Soleil is magical, both in content and in execution, a snapshot of the world that sums up the human experience and contextualizes it within the unknowability that comes with strict rules of perception. Marker avoids mere exoticism by questioning the nature of this perception, a subject that not only accommodates his foreignness but makes it entirely appropriate, adding a layer to the obscurity (obscurity which itself offers further truth through its universality). He looks at time and how it shapes humanity, voyeurism and how it plays a role in both the ways different cultures perceive each other and how it unites them, the idea of universal connection through an overarching narrative of shared feelings and gestures, modernity and how it provides new outlets for facets of human nature, and, most importantly, how memory's profound emotional resonance can lead to insight into both the identity of the one doing the remembering and the world they inhabit by way of their unique reconstruction of it through recalled images.

Sans Soleil is both singular to its director and universal through the way audiences will draw their own interpretation of it, a landmark film that gets at ideas that regularly make for transcendental nonsense in a way that is both overwhelmingly powerful and quietly probing, never masking itself in pretense or social niceties. This honesty is what makes its content so accessible, the result a masterpiece that is both intellectually minded and appealing to our humanity on the basest of levels.