Certainly the most difficult documentary I’ve watched so far (and they’re not many). I was lost. I couldn’t read the beginning or the end of any situation or tale that this world traveler was telling. Her (or his?) thoughts were so random that couldn’t be easily focused. Until she said “ I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me..”.
There was the point. Only someone who had experience the world could understand the mixture of feeling and thoughts shown in Sans Soleil. There is a link among the memories of a traveler that cannot be explained. The banal suddenly has a reason. And your eyes can see that reason. And so does Chris Marker summary of his Japanese experience (if it is his experience). When I realized the structure of such a complex editing I began enjoying every frame of the film like if it was picking those pictures from my own mind.
Then the film becomes such a personal reflex of Marker’s (or whoever) experience that the audience can only see unrelated places and people in sequence without catching any emotion. Until the train scene shows up. For some reason, that I still cannot explain to me but has to be related with my own traveling experience, the train scene smacked me in the face. This people sleeping somehow on a quite decent train alternated to Japanese cartoon, aka Anime, bits found their way to my emotion centre. It made me feel extremely uncomfortable. A discomfort that didn’t relate to the sleeping position but to the apparently repetitive situation of that train journey.
After showing an hilarious Japanese corporation version of “whack a weasel” and a gory savanna-like hunt day, the film turns into a classic documentary with historical notions and a report of the social condition of Japan. Still now I can’t focus the way Marker moved from talking of the emus in the Île-de-France to Hitchcock’s Vertigo without losing his way and actually apologizing for ” disorganized thoughts. I’m leaving you a rather melancholy picture, but in the depths of my heart I am happy. I have spoken frankly, forgive me.”
a Tiger in Coventry 