Sunless
The below is an edited extract from a work in progress.
An hour into Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1982), an unaccompanied voice enters on the soundtrack. It seems to arrive twice, an unidentifiable lament editing in as the narrator advises that “I am writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances”, its words inaudible – some French syllables poke out – to clip, as the image shifts out of distorted colour, into a voice of a slightly different rhythm. For all its nakedness, it seems a function of the growling, pulsing sonic fabric that precedes it, having no clear beginning even as it detaches itself from the image in its ostentatious purity. The movement of the syllables, high and clear – the vowels elongated and the syllables rolled in on themselves – is close to a parody of English folk song.
The voice is clearly not that of the narrator, but seems to double it, continuing in a different register where its narrative impulse leaves off. English-language writers on Marker's work fixate on its genial, literary aspect: David Thomson compares his films to “the journal of some eighteenth-century traveler”. But the minute or so that follows articulates a very different force in this most polyphonic of films – and one that opens out onto the film’s treatment of difference itself, at once produced and negated. Its words are those of Ophelia when, in Act 4 Scene 5 of Hamlet, she enters the stage, “her hair down, with a lute”. She sings, in what FW Sternfeld calls “a new level of the playwright's development”, four songs. Her father killed and the object of her romantic obsession exiled, she has apparently gone mad: “Divided from herself and her fair judgement, / Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts”. The songs mark out death through the colours of its appearance:
He is dead and gone lady
He is dead and gone
At his head a grass-green turf
At his heels a stone
White his shroud as the mountain snow,--
Larded with sweet flowers
Which bewept to the grave did go
With true-love showers.
This is not quite an elegy. As in the folk tradition of murder ballads, there is no pathos, only a flat accounting of the customary referents of burial: a heap of turf, a rock, a shroud, the space and time that a body takes up (“the length and breadth of a pair of indentures”, as Hamlet remarks of a fresh hole in the graveyard). Madness neutralises the reflex to immerse consciousness in the memory of the missing life, of how and why the dead lived or were loved. Memory, in its devotion to its funereal task, moves through the frozen stations of vanished life. “In the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space”, the narrator remarks earlier. “The great question of the 20th century was the co-existence of different kinds of time.” As with many of the script's careful overstatements, the truth of this will be realised and negated in the fugue of a paralysed memory, shifting among its own immaterial, sonic memorials. Time, as will become apparent in the course of the film’s elaborately masked struggles, is only accessible in its terrible fullness through an unmappable space.
Music remains a privileged interpretive term in writing on Sans Soleil, even as critics stay vague about its precise role or, on the other hand, indulge in a logorrhaeic revelry in its textures (as Carol Mavor does in her study Black and Blue). It was certainly an important figure for Marker himself. He described the film as treating its materials “in the fashion of a musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints and mirror-like fugues”. The contrast here with both the extant French documentary tradition and the essay film, which Marker had effectively invented, places the film’s meanings in the abstract movement of its parts, like those of the fugue and sonata form. This formal rupture comes in part from some simple technical decisions. After the years of organising and activism that fed into Grin Without A Cat (1977), he shot the footage, without an overall plan, during travels between 1978 and 1981, almost entirely on his own, on “a little 16mm Beaulieu with 100 feet reels, silent (which means noisy)”. Marker was also his own soundman: “the sound was made separately on one of the first small cassette recorders (not yet the Walkman), there isn’t one synch take in Sans Soleil”. This technical severance – long standard practice in Soviet cinema, with which Marker had such an ambivalent relationship – establishes much of the film's strangeness. Sound follows the image track, as Sarah Cooper remarks, “at one remove”. Even when the location sound seems to match the ambience of the onscreen action, a second look shows that speech doesn't quite emerge from the moving mouths. Market noises in Bissau, the rattle of trains in Tokyo, continue over the edits that separate locales. But at the same time, the film goes out of its way to dissemble this break in its fiction. The sound editing brings most of the location sound and speech close to a movement with which it could plausibly be synced; the mixing blurs Foley sound and the pulses of non-diegetic music into a single, porous layer through which the voiceover weaves, so that the viewer only notices at second or third glance that a sequence is filled with a skein of electronic noise. (Marker composed the soundtrack himself on the EMS VCS3 and Moog Source.)
The title comes from a piece of music, an 1874 song-cycle by Mussorgsky, a late Romantic litany of despair. In a sci-fi story-within-a-story narrated late in the film, a time traveller from the year 4001, “when the human brain has reached the era of full employment”, is drawn to our present by the piece. In the future memory works so perfectly that he “has lost forgetting” and thus the substance of memory: suffering and desire have slipped from recall. Mussorgsky’s songs “are still sung in the fortieth century. Their meaning has been lost. But it was then that for the first time he perceived the presence of that thing he didn’t understand which had something to do with unhappiness and memory, and towards which slowly, heavily, he began to walk.” Music had been criticised, from Plato onwards, as an art premised only on sentiment, “the muse of those who weep and of effeminate sobs” as Vladimir Jankélévitch puts it. Such inner softness or sentimentality – which is also a closeness to the language of kitsch – becomes a site for memory in its productive weakness and impermanence. Music becomes the figure of an excess, that form enables and channels but can never properly contain – the danger and impurity that form itself inevitably gives rise to, threatening to burn up “like a piece of film stopped before a gate”. It is just such excess that makes historical justice legible, in the same movement that it opens onto a danger that threatens to wipe it entirely. It is to this fate that Marker counterposes the concept of the Zone, a data bank in which the images of the anti-imperialist uprisings of the 60s live in substanceless perpetuity.
There is little vivid colour in Sans Soleil, except, as Mavor points out, the “piece[s] of black leader” at its opening. The occasional extreme fragment – lens flare sun near Tokyo, the neon tunics of takenoko dancers, the reds and yellows of Bissau carnival marchers in homemade masks, the saturated light of Japanese malls – create no tension, allowing colour to settle into a wide, muted band. Krasna admires the lack of modifiers in Japanese poetry: “To us a sun is not quite a sun unless it’s radiant, and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid. Here to place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on purchases…. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all.” It’s an aesthetic to which the film aspires, blurry, washed-out and fragmented scenes accumulating through the uneven flow of its editing. Music forms a screen of clouds, an infinitely variegated ambience of tints and texture, cracked at moments by sun-shafts as the wind drifts and just as quickly closing: a surface into which to sink that never yields to depth. It comes close to what Roland Barthes calls “the Neutral”, which is precisely not the middling or median but that which is freed from tension or dialectics. The lightless, cloudy world of Sans Soleil is filled with what Barthes calls “grisaille, figure that could be called the ‘color of the colorless’”, which “substitutes for the idea of opposition that of the slight difference, of the onset, of the effort toward difference, in other words, of nuance: nuance becomes a principle of allover organization… which covers the totality of the surface”. But this figure, in and around the twin voices of narrative and sound, is a fatal lure: “this integrally and almost exhaustively nuanced space… the shimmer” is utopia and nightmare in one – the lucid sleep of the end of history.