Last Letters: Sans Soleil and the late popularity of Chris Marker
One of the strangest and most satisfying developments in the last decade of film and art history is the widespread interest that North Americans have finally taken in Chris Marker, whose drifting discursive essay films have come to seem, even after his death, among the most urgent interventions in contemporary life.
Memories of Marker
Only ten years ago, Film Comment, the most widely circulated serious film magazine in North America, could preface their two-part Marker dossier with the assertion that he was “movie history’s most incompletely understood major artist.” A year later, Catherine Lupton would introduce her monograph on Marker (Chris Marker: Memories of the Future), the first to appear in English, by noting that “until very recently”, and outside of France (where he has always maintained a high-cult notoriety), he was one of visual culture’s “best-kept secrets.” And even as efforts such as these were consolidating a new Anglophone critical line on Marker, many of his works remained inaccessible in much of North America.
Last year, both La jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1983) made their first-ever appearances in the top 100 of the Sight & Sound critics poll, which also found Vertigo (1958), the once-maligned film that haunted Marker’s imagination like no other, in the #1 position. When Marker died just a few weeks later, it became obvious how far the Marker secret had spread. Loving memorials appeared farther and wider than one would have ever imagined; no less a barometer of American middlebrow tastes than the New York Times saw fit to publish an appreciative and informed 1000-word obituary by film critic Dennis Lim. The filmmaker was treated to tribute screenings in cities across the U.S., many of whose cultural institutions now contain copies of his films, videos, some of which can be otherwise accessed by anyone who walks into a Barnes and Noble or visits YouTube.
Within certain sectors of the film and art worlds, Marker’s influence approaches hegemonic. The essay film, a form with which he is more closely associated than any other filmmaker, was once a kind of catch-all for an otherwise unrelated set of unclassifiable works that evaded the dictates of both fiction and documentary. It has become a generic go-to for many of the artists who hope to change the world through doubly radical descriptions in form and content; a standard bearer for the old aspirations of the avant-garde. It is now unusual to attend a film festival without seeing new works that proudly bear the sign of Marker’s influence or to conclude a year of documentary filmgoing without seeing at least one that refers to him directly. The most remarkable symptom of Marker’s predominance in these corners is the dearth of dissenting judgments of his achievement that one encounters in these small, but fractious and iconoclastic communities.
Marker’s current notoriety is partly the product of the usual processes of filmmaker canonization, as well as the unusually tireless, decades-long promotional efforts of Marker’s American friends. But Marker’s acolytes don’t just respect him or imitate him, they adore him. Many of the tributes that followed his death conveyed sincere feelings of personal loss at his passing and genuine gratitude for his accomplishments. Deeply held affection has long characterized Marker appreciation. These feelings are no doubt partly attributable to Marker’s personal approachability, and the natural result of the uniquely intimate forms of address he forged with his audience: the rhetorical “exchange” that French film theorist Raymond Bellour identified as a guiding principle in Marker’s body of work, in which “the viewer is always taken as a third party to what he sees, through what he hears.”[1] Still, the nature of Marker’s currency—the affection he generates and the influence his work exerts—supersedes practical explanation alone. We haven’t merely caught up with Marker’s vision or reached the right point in some art-historical trajectory. Marker’s frequent glimpses to the future penetrated something of what actually came to pass, capturing greater speculative bounty than most such forward projections. He now serves some larger purpose, his body of work speaking to some deeply held need in contemporary life.
Memories of the Future
To have become one of the most urgently relevant contemporary artists to an era that followed his death could not have been the goal of such a reflexively modest filmmaker. But it is a fitting achievement for Marker, whose signature flight of rhetorical imagination was to reflect upon the present from the vantage of a distant future.
These flights of temporal fancy were underwritten by Marker’s unyielding attention to the present of each era in which lived. He tracked developments in culture, politics, and technology like Sans Soleil’s narrator Sandor Krasna claims to track banality: “with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.” And the real Marker stayed as attuned to banality as the Krasna avatar, seeing beyond the novelty of each new epoch’s innovations to grasp the changing paradigms of everyday life. In the last three decades in which Marker worked, this meant an early adoption and analysis of the digital and networked technologies through which we now experience much of our lives. His sensitivity to the implications of new information technologies has—with assistance from some of the kind of inexplicable coincidences that always fascinated him—contributed to the surface of contemporaneity that blankets Marker’s legacy.
This direct engagement with the technologies through which we now experience much of our lives has done much to create a figure of Marker completely at home in the present: a verbally and visually witty multimedia explorer of life in the networked, digital world. But while these later projects have contributed to the conception of Marker as a posthumous contemporary, none of the efforts that followed Sans Soleil are part of the body of work that garners Marker the widest or warmest contemporary interest. To understand the urgent contemporary relevance of Marker’s legacy, we must turn back towards to the twin achievements that have always attracted his largest constituencies: La jetée and Sans Soleil.
The destruction of memory
Art historian Jonathan Crary’s recent book 24/7 [2], an anxious, wonderfully intemperate assessment of the conditions of modern life, argues that while the infrastructures that undergird our globalized, round-the-clock schedule of working and buying have existed for some time, “now a human subject is in the making to coincide with these more intensively.” Pandered to, harassed, and finally controlled by the networked technologies that define work and leisure today (and from which we are now never absent), Crary’s 21st-century one-dimensional man loses his capacity for thoughtful, critical reflection as capitalism’s new arrangements rob him of the time once reserved for sleeping and dreaming. Particularly disturbing for Crary is the attendant destruction of our ability to truly see or interpret images. Though now more images pass before our eyes on a daily basis than ever before, the onslaught atrophies our critical capacities, creating the circumstances in which “individual acts of vision are unendingly solicited for conversion into information that will both enhance technologies of control and be a form of surplus value.”
In the final chapter, Crary turns to La jetée. In Marker’s future-tense imagining of post-war Europe’s present—a culture haunted by a similar set of concerns about new forms of mass media”—Crary finds an affirmation of the combined powers of imagination, memory, and literal vision. For him, the film pictures these human capacities as the only means of sustaining the attachments to history and to other people that give meaning to life in a world where, as in our own, people are exploited via the very dreams that have been stolen from them. Crary positions Marker’s seminal film as a necessary model for any contemporary art that seeks to resist the reduction of human life by information technologies. By situating La jetée as both an anticipation of and an antidote to the forces that govern the 24/7 world, Crary reveals one of the ways in which this film, which has always been Marker’s most widely-seen, has now become more urgent than ever before.
The situation that Crary describes is the present culmination of all the cultural and political ruptures that began in the early 1970s; the markedly different forms of politics, culture and technology that have been variously described as “neoliberalism”, “post-modernity’, “globalization”, and “the information age.” Coming toward the end of the previous epoch, La jetée was a premonition of where things were heading, But if we really want to understand the grip that Chris Marker holds on our present era, we must turn to Sans Soleil, the Marker film that has, as the exemplary work of essayistic, hybrid non-fiction filmmaking, exerted the most visible aesthetic and rhetorical influence on contemporary cultural production.
Completed in 1983, exactly a decade into the era in which most standard timelines situate the triumph of the neoliberal political order and the cultural forms of post-modernity that came with it, Sans Soleil reflects on a world whose borders and distances have collapsed. At least for those who live in the kind of comfort of the artist whose letters narrate it—somewhere between the “two extreme poles of survival” that fascinate him. One pole being the familiar deprivation and exploitation (and the resilience that meets it) in the former Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. The other, the dizzying mixture of rapidly proliferating images, ascendant new information technologies, and the increasing population density that Marker’s beloved Tokyo has long represented. The film’s beguiling form is marked by an editing style that dissolves distinctions between different kinds of images and different temporal experiences. Moving seamlessly from one of these poles to the other, and many places between, setting its narrator’s own memories within the constant stream of other images and other stories that he ravenously absorbs, Sans Soleil inhabits a world that looks closer to our own than the one in which it was made, a now very distant 30 years ago.
Marker had inhabited this kind of world from the earliest days of his career, but it took a few decades for the actual world to catch up. Rather than the unsustainable overload that Crary locates in the reality of such a place, Marker finds a bustling playground for the human imagination. Instead of a globalization that refines the means of capitalist exploitation and social conditioning, Marker imagines one that creates reciprocal sympathies between people in far-flung times and places, establishing a means by which we can begin to address the intolerable inequalities that history has left remaining. Instead of overwhelming and manipulating us, the digitally reproduced images of Hayao Yamaneko’s [3] video synthesizer sharpen our relationship to the world they depict, announcing their status as images, “not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.” Marker’s liquefied temporalities do not rob us of sleep or leisure, they allow us a greater sensitivity to the passing of time, the sensation from which poetry is born. And though he does not anticipate the new communicative forms made possible by the internet, the multiple levels of mediation through which Marker makes his epistolary address bear some resemblance to the dense layers of mediation and camouflaging of identity that characterize online communication. Marker enacts their ego-dissolving ideal instead of the intensified atomization and hyper-individualism that Crary locates in their application.
Sans Soleil makes no claims to prophecy. The world that the film imagines does not perfectly map onto the realities of the 21st Century, but the similarities are hard to ignore. If you wanted to take a skeptical approach to Marker’s current acclaim, it would be easy to stop here and argue that Sans Soleil has inadvertently come to occupy a central place in a boosterish contemporary imaginary of techno-globalist capitalism—particularly in light of the relatively small interest that many new Marker fans take in his radical collective productions of the 60s and 70s. But to do so, you would have to ignore quite a bit of what passes in Sans Soleil: notably its attention to the political dynamics that create its polarities of survival, and its attempt to recuperate the impulses that fueled upheavals of the 60s and 70s from the vanity and naivety that contributed to their failures.
Not to mention that when the film does look directly to the future, things appear a little bleaker. In an imaginary film that Sandor Krasna describes, we encounter a visitor from 4001, “the time when the human brain has reached the era of full employment.” All human capabilities have been perfected; most notably for Marker, memory. The cost is tremendous. Without the selectivity and unreliability that distinguish memory from total recall, recollection no longer allows us to make meaning from our lives: “In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history.”
Krasna’s visitor from 4001 sounds much like Crary’s rendering of the 21st-century human subject. Our technologies’ awesome powers to indiscriminately store and transmit the products of the human imagination mimic Marker’s nightmare of perfect memory and the inability to forget. Conspiring to take from us the time or energy to call forth our own visions, to atrophy our feeling for the images that they deliver, and to sap us the power of our creative misremembering, these technologies have produced a form of life that stands in opposition to everything that Sans Soleil celebrates. “Ah well,” Krasna reminds us, “history only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar coated.”
History, which Marker always maintained was his true subject, is what matters here. Catherine Lupton has read Sans Soleil and Marker’s other digital age-productions in a manner similar to Crary’s take on La jetée: as an “insistent reminder of the present’s historical nature, by invoking a perspective from which our present itself has been absorbed by myth.” [4] The temporal drifts on which Marker floats do not follow the clean forward lines of the time travel fantasy, but the winding routes of history. Sans Soleil did not predict our future, it historicized it in advance.
The recuperation of memory
There is a still deeper yearning to which Sans Soleil speaks. Crary’s account of a newly diminished subjectivity is undoubtedly a little hysterical, but it is nevertheless a powerful synthesis of some widely shared anxieties about the direction life is taking in today’s networked, globalized world. Who does not feel harassed by the exhortations to work and to spend that now arrive around the clock? Who does not find the time they once had for daydreaming and reflecting consumed by irresistible distractions? Who is not troubled by the energy they find themselves devoting to online self-presentation? Who does not feel their grasp slipping on the big picture of a world that seems only to get bigger, more malign, and harder to change? Who does not feel themselves being reduced, little by little, into someone incapable of experiencing the present in the transformative fashion modeled by Sans Soleil?
The guiding intelligence of Sans Soleil, evident in the subtle connections teased out by its editing and the poetic leaps made in its narration, embodies precisely the kind of reflective, outwardly engaged subjectivity that Crary sees endangered. The film’s remarkable density, its seemingly inexhaustible trove of moments to discover, its sinuous movement through a tangled thicket of documentary evidence, and its relentless good humor, have only become more astonishing as the conditions in which one might themself produce such a capacious depiction of the world have become ever more difficult to attain.
24/7 concludes with a call for a newly radical commitment to ways of sleeping and dreaming that will disrupt the demands of the 24/7 world. But at the end of this book, which projects no alternative to its thorough and convincingly negative description of the world into which we are heading, this gesture is insufficient. The meager comfort it offers is itself a symptom of the problem it describes.
Throughout his working life, Chris Marker dedicated himself to actually taking the radical flights of imagination that most others content themselves to cheerlead. Marker never instructed us to dream new futures, but dreamed them himself, inviting us along with him and welcoming our contributions. His ability to locate the possibilities that lurk within the dreary confines of the present and follow their trail to a potentially better future has always been the signal urgency of his films and videos. What makes Sans Soleil so particularly poignant today is that the future it imagines looks more like our present than ever before, at a moment when the critical intelligence that guided it there has never looked so far out of reach.
Notes
[1] Quoted at chrismarker.org, "Understanding Immemory with a little help from Raymond Bellour." Accessed August 10, 2013.
[2] Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso Books, 2013.
[3] Marker’s fictive Japanese avatar in Sans Soleil.
[4] Lupton, Catherine. “Shock of the Old: How the "Gentleman Amateur" of the Digital Era Uses Not-So-New Media to Map the Workings of Human Memory” in Film Comment, May/June 2003.
First printed in Wuxia 2, 2013