Sans Soleil

Sans Soleil
1983, 100’
Director: Chris Marker
Language: French, Japanese, English
Screening: Friday, 8 February, 17.00, Sunday, 10 February, 15.00, Saturday, 16 February, 15.00

An outstanding travelogue that questions the relationship between time, human memory, and film. As it stretches from Africa to Japan, the two extreme poles of survival, “Sans Soleil” shows how personal and global histories are affected by memory. The film, which takes its title from the song cycleSunless by Modest Mussorgsky, is a kind of meditation. The amazing cinematography of sequences from life is evidently the work of a theorist of montage. A Japanese shrine where people pray to dead cats, a giraffe slaughtered by poachers… With many scenes of this sort, “Sans Soleil” extends the limits of the documentary.