Sans soleil, by Chris Marker, is a cornerstone of documentary film. Who could pass up the immense pleasure of diving back into the film’s hypnotic observations, inevitably rediscovering something that had previously escaped us? Was it not a harbinger of the current era? Images that question and confront what they endeavour to capture: time. The story of a shared but fragmented history: of a place, of people, of each of us. Even as Marker discusses the impossibility of memory, the images at work are no less effective. They become the product of a filmmaker asking how else can we remember just about anything. And they draw a line towards the Other that we inexorably find within ourselves. Then, projected before us, the memory of the film becomes our own.

If the challenge of capturing these times presents an irresolvable vertigo, it materializes here in the rhythm of a voice reading letters without pause, through images that link contemporary life in Tokyo and Africa, the realities of war with the banality of everyday life. The time that Marker fashions reveals an intimacy between us and others, through the contagious kindness of his perspective, with the ease of someone who has the right to examine everything, hidden behind his lens, mining the depths of perspective, contemplating the smallest gestures, finding ourselves somewhere we would’ve never gone otherwise.

Nadine Gomez
Filmmaker