Review of Sans Soleil (1983) by Justin B — 25 Jul 2007

Sans Soleil gets my vote for the best movie ever, a brilliant eulogy for mankind with all the contradictions that implies; this will be the movie they show at the end of the world.

"Coming back through the Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon's list, of all those signs one has only to name to quicken the heart, just name. To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's radiant, and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid. Here to place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on purchases. Japanese poetry never modifies. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all. Newspapers have been filled recently with the story of a man from Nagoya. The woman he loved died last year and he drowned himself in work, Japanese style, like a madman. It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics. And then in the month of May he killed himself. They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring.'".

"I thought of all the prayers to time that had studded this trip, the kindest was the one spoken by the woman of Gotokuji, who said simply to her cat Tora, 'Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you.'".

If I am left merely quoting chunks of narration, it is because the film is so complete that, like with the poetry mentioned in the quote above, any commentary or annotation would be almost obscene; it speaks for itself with a clarity not seen in the essay form since the death of Samuel Johnson. And yet for all its indebtedness to the history of the essay, this is a work of art that would be entirely impossible without its visual element, a variety of images culled from Marker's travels in Japan and Guinea-Bissau, previous documentaries, late night Japanese television and anime, and a device called the Zone which both saves and distorts all the other images forever. What results is a densely layered web of one man's all-perceiving experience of the world; what results is as near perfection as I have seen in cinema. See this film, for to see it is to see your own life and your own death.