Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil is a free-form style travel diary told through the letters of a fictional cameraman Sandor Krasna. A woman, Alexandra Stewart, who remains unseen throughout the entire film, reads these letters. The film explores themes of time, memory, and history. In the essay “In Search of the Centaur: The Essay Film” author Phillip Lopate defines five characteristics he believes a film must have in order to be considered an essay film (245-7). It can be argued that Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil is an essay film based on most if not all of Lopate’s defining characteristics. The first characteristic that Lopate defines is, “An essay-film must have words in the form of a text either spoken, subtitled, or intertitled” (245). The text in Sans Soleil is in the form of letters from the fictional cameraman, Sandor Krasna. Lopate argues that an “utterly pure, silent flow of images” cannot be considered essayistic (245). In the case of Sans Soleil the images alone would not be essayistic because you would not have an understanding of them. The text of the film could not stand-alone well either because the text explains the images as well as gives us a visual representation of what is being talked about. An example would be the beginning of the film; the narrator speaks about the cameraman seeing children on a road in Iceland and how he thought it was the image of happiness. As the narrator is telling us this we are presented with an image of these children. He then goes on to tell us that he wants to put it at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader so “if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.” We are given this image as she reads about it; the words and images together are s... ... middle of paper ... ... history and the thoughts they evoke for Marker. It goes beyond documentary to create an essay-film. Works Cited Everett, Wendy E., Peter Wagstaff, and Catherine Lupton. "Exile of Remembering: Movement and Memory in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil." Cultures of Exile: Images of Displacement. New York: Berghahn, 2004. Print. Lopate, Phillip. "In Search of the Centaur: The Essay Film." Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film. By Charles Warren. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1996. Print. Rascaroli, Laura. "The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments." Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49.2 (2008): 24-47. JSTOR. Web. 08 May 2014. Sans Soleil. Dir. Chris Marker. 1983. DVD. Tryon, Chuck. "Letters from an Unknown Filmmaker: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil and the Politics of Memory." Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 8 (2004). Web. 6 May 2014.
Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
November 1998, written for FILM 220: Aspects of Criticism. This is a 24-week course for second-year students, examining methods of critical analysis, interpretation and evaluation. The final assignment was simply to write a 1000-word critical essay on a film seen in class during the final six-weeks of the course. Students were expected to draw on concepts they had studied over the length of the course.
Phillips, Gene D. Conrad and Cinema: The Art of Adaptation. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1995.
Rosenstone, R.A, "The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age," in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by Marcia Landy, (New Brunswick,New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001): 50-66.
Johnston, Robert K. Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000.
Lehman, Peter and Luhr, William. Thinking About Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
film and the play script and the aim of this essay is to see what the
Lebow, Richard Ned. "The Future of Memory." American Academy of Political and Social 617 (2008): 25-41. JSTOR. Web. 21 Apr. 2014.
Mittel, J., 2007. Film and Television Narrative. In: D. Herman, ed. 2007. The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.156-171.
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1978.
Film Society of Lincoln Center , ND/NF Q&A: "Stories We Tell", Sarah Polley, online video, May 10 2013, viewed May 5 2014,
It is obvious that cinematic and electronic technologies of representation have had enormous impact upon our means of signification during the past century. Less obvious, however, is the similar impact these technologies have had upon the historically particular significance or "sense" we have and make of those temporal and spatial coordinates that radically inform and orient our social, individual, and bodily existences. At this point in time in the United States, whether or not we go to the movies, watch television or music videos, own a video tape recorder/player, allow our children to play video and computer games, or write our academic papers on personal computers, we are all part of a moving-image culture and we live cinematic and electronic lives. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to claim that none of us can escape daily encounters--both direct and indirect--with the objective phenomena of motion picture, televisual, and computer technologies and the networks of communication and texts they produce. Nor is it an extravagance to suggest that, in the most profound, socially pervasive, and yet personal way, these objective encounters transform us as subjects. That is, although relatively novel as "materialities" of human communication, cinematic and electronic media have not only historically symbolized but also historically constituted a radical alteration of the forms of our culture's previous temporal and spatial consciousness and of our bodily sense of existential "presence" to the world, to ourselves, and to others.
The auteurs discussed in this volume write from the inside of the society they address, however, they may see themselves as outsiders. Their liminal position, in-between opposite worlds elevates them to a kind of Weberian “charismatic” auteurs or readers, beyond the analytical framework of prophecy and religion. Through writing and filmmaking, the auteur’s intention opens up to the aesthetical world of the audience’s cosmos. The auteur accepts the role of the charismatic prophet, whose poetic metaphors open to the potentiality of transforming the reader or viewer from within, by critically reflecting upon the collective consciousness of a particular historical and political framework through which the text or film was produced. This paradoxical and amateurish condition, being outsiders and insiders at the same time, empowers them to accurately offer semi-fictional or fictional accounts of their own experiences in the world, emancipated from the burden of professional anthropology. Furthermore, it enables them to historically contextualize and politicize the material they have gathered from their lived experiences, represented through fictional or semi-fictional chunks of everyday life. It is this emancipating freedom that fiction gives to ethnographic writing, which radically reverses the politics of representation in ethnography, moving away
Williams, Linda. “Mirrors without Memories. Truth, History, and the New Documentary.” Film Quarterly 46.3 (1993): 9-21.
In this article, Jones discusses the marginalization of motion pictures, yet touches on the great aspects of film, and how these aspects can expect to survive in the future. Major topics that Jones addresses are: developments in video narrative through flawless storytelling, the use of digital tools for film restoration and preservation, and an audience shift from film to digital. These points detail the love and appreciation that goes into filmmaking, and how the narratives, despite having changed formats throughout the years, have been able to survive and appear to be timeless. Jones also further discusses the idea of using audiovisual material to create narratives appealing. He details how the stylistic approach of a film, and the techniques like cinematography and editing, can enhance and provide for a greater narrative. In summary, the sum of the parts of a film are what make the entire experience, which not only makes for a great film, but for a lasting story as