Yours Truly

Sans Soleil (1983)
directed by Chris Marker
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

Sans Soleil is like W. G. Sebald or Jean-Luc Godard without Godard's explicit love for the movies. Sans Soleil wouldn't be as good as it is if Marker wasn't a sucker for Vertigo, but memory and its obligations preoccupy him, and images represent his effort to make sense of the past. For Marker, memory is fiction; in life, as in Hitchcock's masterpiece, it is impossible to live with memory without falsifying it.

Sans Soleil wanders across continents, and a woman relays observations framed by her relationship with a man meant to be Chris Marker, but named something else. This man finds comfort in the taste of fresh donuts and remarks that youth is not wasted on the young. "They wanted to give a political meaning to their generosity," says the narrator, "and their generosity has outlasted their politics."

Or this: a romance in the past appears at first to be a love forgotten or diminished, but is instead a case of the heart in love but removed from now, and therefore disembodied and adrift in time. I appreciate the fullness of that sentiment, and it is nice to have someone give voice to the idea. Directors like Chris Marker are acutely aware that the people they film will look the way they do only for the duration of the shoot. When I watch La Jetée or Days of Being Wild, I do not revisit 1962 or 1990 so much as part the sheen to find that disembodied heart still beating.