Sans Soleil!

Sans Soleil was exactly what I needed to watch at this point in the semester. The most engrossing topics of study in my classes recently have been The Left Bank filmmakers, especially Franju and Renais, in my French Cinema course, and the cultural devastation of nuclear warfare on the Japanese as discussed in my WWII Dialogues on Violence course. As was Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marker’s visual essay served as a crucial curricular vertex.

I found the film beautiful. Marker is a strong writer, unafraid to employ the enigmatic and express the inquisitive. His insight seems able to penetrate any cultural body, while also so phantasmal and ephemeral as to hover gently over it. While watching, it was sometimes difficult to discern if Marker’s anthropological observation guides the viewer towards an analysis of ethnic specificity or abstract universalism—not to say that these perspectives cannot coexist. Marker handles all his subject matter, I believe, with love. A love of contradiction, a love that recognizes the luminous orb in every person’s chest cavity, and knows it to be the very Earth itself.

The narration and imagery dance so harmoniously throughout the film. It was so very difficult to believe that Marker had managed to pair found letters and found footage into such an elegant symbiotic embrace—it simply had to be him. This deliberate formal method, creating for the viewer an experience of hearing a woman recall words from letters accompanied by an image, speaks strongly to the faculty of memory. The narration expands the information of the image, adding context, insight, anecdote. Likewise, the image mounts flesh onto the disembodied narration. The two are interdependent, and it is uncertain whether the image recalls the word or if the word recalls the image.

I was highly cognitively engaged throughout the film. In addition to visually following the images, I had to maintain aural focus in following the narration—often having to momentarily derail from it to explore the massive ontological spaces it produced, unsnarl its enigmatic coils—only to return to the narrative as it continued onward without resolving the quandaries posed. There is a lot to take in. What makes it even more challenging is that this visual/aural cascade flows over many, initially seemingly disparate, cultural platforms. The enterprise in Sans Soleil is to accompany a philosopher of dissociative identity as he teleports transcontinentally and intertextually—simple right?

I want to focus my attention on Marker’s portrait of Japan in the 1980s. Marker's portrait of Japan in many ways contests with the longstanding occidental derision of the nation as coated by procrustean homogenous culture—a derogatory framing of a Japan that rejects individualism and whose hubris lies in the fact that their citizens' hearts beat as one. Sans Soleil, airing almost forty years subsequent to the dropping of the bomb, illustrates a culturally inchoate Japan, whose palpitations are no longer synchronized but polyrhythmic. Wolfgang ball describes the work as Marker’s endeavor to capture the "meshing of cultural customs" in Japan, examining “which elements of Japanese culture will survive in a capitalist self-understanding and which will probably be abandoned." Indeed, Japan in Sans Soleil illustrates recognition of its diachronistic culture: samurai films, tea ceremonies, prayer, sumo wrestling, kimono dress—each, however, re-positioned within a new synchronic context. Japan’s historical chronology is difficult to view as a diachronic whole, as it contains ruptures marked by radical socio-industrial alteration. Japan was at one point an isolated, intranational feudal hermit, organized as a military-nobility caste system under a shogunate. Then, suddenly, it became internationally extroverted, and abruptly adapted itself as a modernist chameleon, championing the Early 20th Century Vogue of mass industrialism and colonial imperialism. For its Eurocentric mimesis, Japan was brutally castrated. In this way, Japan presents a rapid and condensed model of what was for other nations a glacial transition from pre-modern to modern to postmodern.  

Marker, interested in time and memory, shows an interest in understanding the current cultural state of Japan, trying to reconcile the “traditional mythic consciousness and perfection of society” as Ball describes. At times it seems critical—critical of whether the upholding of tradition is sincere or merely a pastiche that necessitates diachronic stability—critical of the future which Japan seeks, what it has built atop its bombed rubble. However, as I said before, Marker approaches his subject with love. I believe that the criticism is not positioned as occidental, haughty towards the orient, but rather, positioned with the orient and criticizing the etiology of toxic occidental ideology within Japan’s cultural and industrial structure. Ball writes, for example, that Marker examines "how Western cultural styles are being reproduced in television” in Japan - no judgement placed on the Japanese as perpetuator of Americanism, but sympathy towards Japan as victim to ongoing American imperialism. Ball describes Marker’s observation position of the “extra terrestrial” as one that “liberates [his] view for abstract concepts.” I concur that Marker, as a European in Japan, is not a superior, but does occupy a unique position to view Japan abstractly and examine how occidentalism has become increasingly manifest.    

Ball describes the television as something that “transmits and receives gazes/images” in Sans Soleil. It is in this way that Americanism is both industrial and cultural - implemented by the machine and reciprocally adopted and accepted by the population. Marker describes a kind of mis-en-abyme in which ubiquitous sentinel surveillance observes a mass populace who itself exercises panopticism over a perpetual manga panorama. The people simultaneously identify with the observer and the observed. Japan seems in many ways virtual. A great epitomization of this is the recurrent cartoon of the train which, as it approaches a break in the tracks, adapts and becomes an airborne vessel. The train, an archetypal symbol of modernity - its chugging a mechanic poetry. The viewer at the front of the train can see the tracks ahead - a linear perspective, the march towards progress, the objective certainty of the renaissance, a sense of time that advances forward through eureka and innovation. Just as modernist certainty lead to the ubermensch, The Third Reich, and the Manhattan Project, the tracks in this cartoon lead to a fatalist rupture. At this impasse, what option does the train have but to enter the virtual, the fantastical, to disavow its own death?    

In this regard, The Zone, the digitalization of images throughout the film, seems to me as a kind of necessary hyperreality. If everything has become an image, then what empowerment is granted by creating an image? Does associating the image with reality simply assimilate oneself to the ideological screen? By tampering with the image, by refusing it as a signifier of something but merely as a signifier - and, by obfuscating the original, making the resultant image a signifier of the mere signifier—the digitalization of The Zone in Sans Soleil allows the individual mastery over technology information rather than submission to it. It recognizes information as information, something that can, and is, manipulated, warped, and contorted.

I could talk about Japan all day, but I should probably wrap up this blog.

Overall, I found the film’s non-linear and transcontinental approach very interesting. Marker jumps, in a way that may seem mercurial, to various places and times without precedent. To me, this nonlinear approach is not meant to hinder our understanding, but expand it. The juxtaposed, disparate fragments allowing the viewer to construct a paradigmatic interweb between resonant syntagmatic elements. The resultant journey transcends travel itself, collapsing spatial boundaries. Any image is relatable to another, emphasizing a terrestrial and humanist unity. If one were to dissolve every shot of Sans Soleil into one, it would produce an image that approaches an integrous anthropological Earth. “Marker likes standing outside the spatial/temporal limits in order to observe the world from a different perspective,” Ball writes. Marker’s geographic range is in a certain sense limited in this film, but if he were ever given the resources to document the full anthropological gamut of Earth, he could have shown the universality, the cultural string theory, binding ever terrestrial.