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Sans Soleil

Original title: Sans soleil
  • 1983
  • Not Rated
  • 1h 40m
IMDb RATING
7.7/10
13K
YOUR RATING
Sans Soleil (1983)
A woman narrates the contemplative writings of a seasoned world traveler, focusing on contemporary Japan.
Play trailer1:46
1 Video
46 Photos
DocumentaryDrama

A woman narrates the contemplative writings of a seasoned world traveler, focusing on contemporary Japan.A woman narrates the contemplative writings of a seasoned world traveler, focusing on contemporary Japan.A woman narrates the contemplative writings of a seasoned world traveler, focusing on contemporary Japan.

  • Director
    • Chris Marker
  • Writer
    • Chris Marker
  • Stars
    • Amilcar Cabral
    • Florence Delay
    • Arielle Dombasle
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    7.7/10
    13K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Chris Marker
    • Writer
      • Chris Marker
    • Stars
      • Amilcar Cabral
      • Florence Delay
      • Arielle Dombasle
    • 44User reviews
    • 62Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 5 wins total

    Videos1

    Official Trailer
    Trailer 1:46
    Official Trailer

    Photos46

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    Top cast11

    Edit
    Amilcar Cabral
    • Self
    • (archive footage)
    Florence Delay
    • Narrator (French version)
    • (voice)
    Arielle Dombasle
    Arielle Dombasle
    • Self
    Riyoko Ikeda
    • Narrator (Japanese version)
    • (voice)
    Charlotte Kerr
    Charlotte Kerr
    • Narrator (German version)
    • (voice)
    Kim Novak
    Kim Novak
    • Self
    • (archive footage)
    • …
    Alexandra Stewart
    Alexandra Stewart
    • Narrator (English version)
    • (voice)
    James Stewart
    James Stewart
    • Self
    • (archive footage)
    • …
    Bin Akao
    • Self
    • (uncredited)
    David Coverdale
    David Coverdale
    • Self
    • (uncredited)
    • …
    Chris Marker
    Chris Marker
    • Self
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • Chris Marker
    • Writer
      • Chris Marker
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews44

    7.712.8K
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    Featured reviews

    9alice liddell

    Documentaries record the real; this is beyond 'real'.

    When is a documentary not a documentary? SANS SOLEIL is a film comprising 'real' images, narrated with 'real' observations. The subject-matter is Japan, post-modernism, the erasion of memory, the flattening-out of history, decentring, surface, pastiche. It records life-styles, trends, habits, rites, artistic movements with the rigour of an anthropologist. It is a film about travel: throughout the world, throughout time. It is science fiction (Terry Gilliam's TWELVE MONKEYS fleshes out an anecdote here). It is a Borgesian fantasy, (the filmmaker is actually a fictional creation , Sandor Krasna). To call it a documentary, or even a film, would be like calling the Sistine Chapel a ceiling.
    10carrienations

    This is not a documentary

    To call this film a documentary is to cheapen it. It's life on screen, not a mere document. It's poetry... and I'm not sure that word is adequate. How about your view of how you live and the world around you? Have you ever seen a film that gave you the questions to ask yourself? This film is startling... I can't praise it enough. My mind was exhausted by considering the layered imagery, both audio and visual, and the contextual shifts between them. How does anyone pick up a camera after seeing this? You might as well toss it in the trash because Marker has made Earth's last film.

    It's a crime that this film is not available on VHS or DVD in the U.S. Fans of this film should also seek out "The Koumiko Mystery", another transcendant film by Chris Marker.
    10the red duchess

    In the entire history of cinema, there have been only two truly important, indispensible, founding films - this is one of them.

    'Sans Soleil' opens with a ferry trip to Japan, with the camera peering at sleeping passengers. This is a perfect encapsulation of the film as a whole, a beautiful mixture of journey and dream. The film is ostensibly a documentary, that holier-than-thou genre convinced of its own superior truthfulness. And the film is full of documentary images, snapshots from the faraway places Marker visits, Japan, Africa, South America, San Francisco, Iceland, Paris. The film is full of the observations of the filmmaker about the cultures he observes.

    But 'Sans Soleil' couldn't soar further from the prosaic ambitions of the documentary. Like the film it most resembles, Marker's own 'La Jetee', it is in fact a work of science fiction, as much about time travel as literal travel. Each place Marker visits is stripped of its familiarity, and made eerie, alien. Concrete images become springboards for dizzy philosophical speculations. The film moves with ease from the court of 11th century Imperial Japan to the revolutionary struggles in 1960s Africa to emus on the Ile de France to an interpretation of Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' to astrological rumination on a desert beach, and still remains thematically coherent and full of the most startling connections.

    It is this structure that creates the feel of science fiction, the linking of seemingly disparate images, symbols, stories, experiences, places to create a strange pattern which emanates something spiritual, that seems to make sense of increasing chaos, dislocation, displacement. But we are constantly reminded that these are secular, man-made, ad-hoc, arbitrary constructions, as phantom as the relationship in 'La Jetee', but, similarly, a necessary construction to cover the abyss.

    The distortion of the soundtrack, the mixture of silence and mooged classics; the computer visuals of Marker's friend, known as The Zone, which seep conventional, representational images and turn them into ghosts, traces, stripped of history, recognisability, humanity; the film's fictional framework (the narrative comprises letters to the narrator by the filmmaker, Sandor Krasna) all add to this unsettling science fiction appropriation of the documentary genre.

    When the history of cinema comes to be written in centuries to come, there will really only be two films that will survive from its first century, films dense, supple, playful, renewable enough, and full of enough possibilities for future direction, to transcend the local, the generic, the pretentious, the narrative. One is that final gasp of modernist cinema, 'Vertigo'; the other is this epitome of post-modernity. in many ways, 'Sans Soleil' is a stunning exegisis on Hitchcock's masterpiece (which had only just been re-released after two-decades withdrawel), echoing its circular structure, its concern with time, memory, the elusiveness of history.

    'Soleil' locates the crisis of post-modernity in Japan, that most modern of modern capitalist societies. With the curiosity of an anthropologist, the good humour of an essayist, and the eye for the unusual of a rare filmmaker, Marker gives us a Japan we rarely see, even in the country's own cinema; on the one hand a culture of startling modernity, leading the way in computers, technology, department stores etc., on the other full of residual traditions, rituals, superstitions, ceremonies, going back centuries. The co-existence of these two time-scales has resulted in a kind of blur, a temporal vacuum, whereby all sense of time and perspective is lost, where religious ceremonies for the souls of stray pets co-exist with state-of-the-art video games.

    Japan is like a ship that has lost its anchor, where all time is the same, and therefore irrelevant, just as Scottie Ferguson wanders around dazed, in a loop of fantasy and distorted memory. Without history, memory, a culture ceases to be a culture and lays itself open to all sorts of vulnerability. But this lack of foundation ironically leads to a greater freedom, particularly of the mind, and the film, as it reaches its conclusion, becomes visionary and hallucinatory.

    'Soleil' is anything but bleak - its stories, myths, cultural tidbits, observations are unfailingly entertaining and full of good humour. Krasna compares the overcultured, saturated Japan to the timeless emptiness of Africa, to the spooky otherworldliness of Iceland, as his 'objective' narrative becomes increasingly a personal odyssey that must be teased out from hints and ellipses. In its focusing on the minutae, the forgotten, the arcane, the ephemeral, the back alleys, the garbage, but suggesting that 'Soleil' is ultimately only one film out of a possible multitude made possible by new technologies, Marker's film is at once profoundly democratic yet exhilaratingly idiosyncratic; an apocalyptic vision teeming with life.
    10cromwell-3

    An amazement

    I've only seen this film twice, both on the same day, nearly fifteen years ago; and yet its poetic-philosophical themes, its melancholy, its images still remain with me. Viewing it was an intensely personal experience; I find myself a little startled to find that other people have seen it. I find myself plagiarising it constantly; I think of it at odd times (when I accidentally catch someone's eyes and immediately look away; whenever I visit San Francisco); it is a work of lingering and subtle beauty that percolates through my bloodstream, informing the hours and days, changing the things and ways I see...
    10joeloh

    A film that can make earth seem like a strange and foreign planet

    A poetic and rambling essay film, in the form of a letter from a lost and lonely traveller. Chris Marker lets his mind and camera roam through the landscape of early eighties Japan, and his imagination drift across the world. Memory history and emotion blend into a loving study of human existence. The film's form is loose and sprawling and it it almost impossible to try to follow it in any linear fashion. Instead it washes across the surface of you conscious mind, occasionally burrowing deep with images you can never forget. It is a completely unique film and is inspiring in its ability to bring the political, the philosophical and the poetic together on screen. Chris Marker is one of the unsung greats of film history.

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    Related interests

    Dziga Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
    Documentary
    Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight (2016)
    Drama

    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      The scenes from Iceland were filmed by Haroun Tazieff in 1965, on the island Vestmannaeyjar. It shows 3 sisters, Kristbjörg Sigríður Kristmundsdóttir, born 1954, Halldóra Kristmundsdóttir, born 1957, and Áshildur Kristmundsdóttir, born 1959. They first found out about being in this film in June 2015.
    • Goofs
      The narration refers to the year 4001 and the 40th century. But the year 4001 will belong to the 41st century, not the 40th.
    • Quotes

      Narrator: 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?

    • Connections
      Edited into The Green Fog (2017)
    • Soundtracks
      Sunless
      Composed by Modest Mussorgsky

      Arranged by Chris Marker (as Michel Krasna)

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    FAQ17

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    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • March 2, 1983 (France)
    • Country of origin
      • France
    • Languages
      • French
      • Japanese
      • English
      • Cantonese
      • Japanese Sign Language
    • Also known as
      • Sun Less
    • Filming locations
      • 224 Grant Avenue, San Francisco, California, USA(Florist is Podesta Baldocchi Grant Street shop)
    • Production company
      • Argos Films
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

    Edit
    • Gross US & Canada
      • $30,878
    • Opening weekend US & Canada
      • $6,460
      • Oct 12, 2003
    • Gross worldwide
      • $31,111
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      • 1h 40m(100 min)
    • Color
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • Mono
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.66 : 1

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