My response to Chris Marker's film Sans soleil.
It's hard to criticize this film.
Let's start from the basics:
What I know about Chris Marker: activist, leftist, secretive person, Parisian filmmaker.
About me: regular working person with average intellectual abilities and no filmmaker experience.
All I can offer is my personal feelings about the Sans soleil. I'll try to describe them as best as I can.
When I saw it, I didn't like this film. Probably, because I didn't understand it. Film's structure is relatively straight forward: a fictitious traveler videotapes and describes what he sees while traveling mostly in Asia and Africa. So, the whole film is a bunch of video clips from the countries he visits. Over the video clips, the narrator reads traveler's "letters." The letters describe the video clips and share traveler's thoughts about people, politics, and the world.
Sounds pretty normal, right? Not really.
I felt possessed by the movie. I wanted to turn it off and couldn't stop watching it at the same time. My classmate, Athena, described it as "an ACID trip."
While watching, I couldn't help feeling intellectually small, ignorant, incapable of understanding what the author is trying to tell me. And I felt embarrassed to admit to even having these feelings. Who wants to admit to not understanding a famous work of art? I felt uninspired.
Some 30 minutes into watching Sans soleil, I felt that this film is designed to confuse by setting countless mind traps. Here's some of the technique that I picked up:
1. Contradiction between video clips and narration
For example, the clip showed a sacred religious ceremony in Japan - a serious event. But, the narrator (letter) described it with contempt. Should I believe what I see, or what I hear?
2. Many details about unfamiliar places
The traveler visits and describes countries -- mostly Japan and Guinea-Bissau -- about which I know almost nothing. The excessive details -- names of people, towns, Japanese gods -- are hard to filter out.
For example, the narrator describes the Guinean president. The description is probably true. But, after hearing the full story, I realize that I don't have any knowledge about him. The description is useless to me. By this time, it's too late -- I've already wasted my brainpower trying to analyze this, and the movie moved on to the next clip.
3. Violence and obscenity
For example: a giraffe is gunned to death, statues of huge genitals, scenes from porno films.
Maybe, these shocking scenes are added simply to make me pay attention?
4. Predicting my questions and answering them
The film shows unfamiliar Asian countries for good 40 minutes. I begin to suspect that the film would be less confusing if it wasn't about foreign countries. Around this time, the movie carries me to San Francisco -- a familiar place. But, the narrator still describes something completely unfamiliar.
5. Narration is primary, visuals are secondary
The text of narration in Sans soleil is coherent. But, the film's video clips don't really make sense w/out its narration. This is different from most films. Usually, I can mute the sound on a movie and still understand most of what goes on.
6. Fast pace
The long-winded, carefully written sentences of the narration are quickly thrown at me. Processing them takes time, which makes me not pay full attention to the next narration and the video clip and reduces my ability to understand.
7. No idea of what's coming next
The separate video clips are not really related, so it's impossible to predict the development of the movie. It requires me to pay full attention all the time! It's like watching first 20 seconds of a hundred movies, and hearing the first paragraph of a hundred books, none of which I've seen before.
Have you seen The Word Color Test (below)?
Confusing, right?
Try doing the test for an hour and you'll get a headache.
The Marker's movie is doing something similar. In it, the text (narration, traveler's letters) contradicts the visual images.
If I read the narration separately, it looses most of its dramatic effect because the text actually makes sense. The contradictions occurs when the long-winded sentences of narration are combined with video clips.
------------------------------------------
BLACK RED GREEN
PURPLE YELLOW RED
ORANGE GREEN BLACK
BLUE RED PURPLE
GREEN BLUE ORANGE
------------------------------------------
Also, I made a primitive video to illustrate the contradictions between images and narration:
Image references:
Images of computer worms and spam
Blond girl on a bed
Another girl on bed
---
What also comes to mind is Salvador Dali's Abraham Lincoln Illusion. What looks like Lincoln's portrait from a distance, is, at a closer look, a portrait of his wife, Gala.
No comments:
Post a Comment