About

I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

'Chris Marker's ruminative, melancholy masterpiece channels the imagination of a lonely traveling cameraman – evoked in letters from distant Africa and Japan – into a profound meditation on the creative conjuring powers of memory, place and image. Among the most brilliant examples of the essay film, Sans Soleil uses a lyrical, associative structure to transform modern Japan into a vivid metaphor for the scintillating mosaic of fact, fiction and fantasy that defines the increasingly mediated image world in which we live. A crucial bridge between Marker's adventurous earlier travel films and his growing interest in media and technology, Sans Soleil is one of Marker's most dazzling and inexhaustible works.' Harvard Film Archive