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Feature ArticlesFeature Articles, , Issue 66 | March 2013Issue 66 | March 2013
Notes on Sans Soleil
by Murray PomeranceMurray Pomerance March 2013March 2013
1
“I’ve been around the world several times, and now only banality still interests me.” At the beginning of Chris
Marker’s Sans soleil (1983), a voice tells us, “He wrote” this.
“He”: Marker? We have no reason to think so. But “he” had been around the world several times. “He” had
made other comments to her, the bearer, the unseen body, of that voice, as she tells us. She is surely an
acousmêtre–
Acousmatic, specifies an old dictionary, “is said of a sound that is heard without its cause or source being seen.”
We can never praise Pierre Schaeffer enough for having unearthed this arcane word in the 1950s. […] This was
apparently the name assigned to a Pythagorean sect whose followers would listen to their Master speak behind
a curtain, as the story goes, so that the sight of the speaker wouldn’t distract them from the message. […] When
the acousmetric presence is a voice, and especially when this voice has not yet been visualized—that is, when
we cannot yet connect it to a face—we get a special being, a kind of talking and acting shadow to which we
attach the name acousmêtre. (1)
–but “he” is an acousmêtre’s acousmetre, removed from us not only by an inconceivable infinity of experiential
distance, as she is, but by a distance that could be expressed by an infinite number raised to the power of
infinity. Yet also, shockingly, here and present as we watch and listen. On a Japanese ferry from Hokkaido,
watching a few sleeping patrons young and old in the cavernous well-illuminated seating area, he had thought
of war, a war zone. Remember, he had been around the world several times. (Remember because what we
hear is temporal, and time flies past us. The moment we have heard it, it dissolves; and we remember only by
fighting against the flow of time.) In the days of Marco Polo (she goes on), it was a grand thing to go around the
world—as any traveller might think himself to do—just once. Who but a trader would go around the world
several times? Who but a modern man, whose world had shrunk?
(I write these words as a living throwback to the time of Marco Polo. For me, though I have travelled it, the
world remains an indecipherable and incalculable immensity. To go “around” the world is a project I find
inconceivable. It is all I can do to go through a sentence. Stanislaw Lem wrote once, “Nothing is ever lost in
space: toss out a cigarette lighter, and all you have to do is to plot its trajectory and be in the right place at the
right time, and the lighter, following its own orbital path, will with astronomical precision plop into your hand at
the designated second.” (2) For me, plotting a trajectory first requires imagining a universe that is bounded and
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knowable, “around” which one can imagine oneself, or a cigarette lighter, flying. But I suspect that even to orbit
successfully is not to return “home” in the same state as one left. Even Marco Polo, after one journey east, was
never the same again.)
“Banality”: The picture accompanying the aural presentation of this word, if still we need it, shows a middle-
aged man stretched out asleep in aqua-coloured light. Only banality is still interesting. The banal is the
everyday, the ordinary, the unnoticeable, the routine, the small in proportion to the grandiose and important,
that which is very often (and casually) repeated. The banal is the ordinary: and this ordinariness applies not to
the essence of things but to its traces. Stanley Cavell: “The idea that the evidence of life produced by each of
us is of the order of traces, conveys a picture according to which no concatenation of these impressions ever
reaches to the origin of these signs of life, call it a self.” (3) Yet we struggle. The often repeated gesture, “Hello,
how are you?,” the often repeated sentiment, “Oh, that’s beautiful!,” the often repeated pose. It is interesting to
look at the dozing, slumbering, slumping bodies in the seat on the ferry (so many of the seats are empty) and
note that even if we do not recognize the person involved in it, even if the poseur is hidden from us by its
intrinsic alienation of borders and distance, still the pose itself is both utterly banal and utterly recognizable.
What it is that the dozers do, their accomplishment, is so commonly done that it can be seen—carefully seen,
not only noticed but admired, considered, wondered about—as detached from the personal idiosyncrasy of their
sleeping selves. That a complete stranger can be so completely familiar. If only we can focus our
concentration on what it is that he is doing, rather than on him as a doer. To leap away for a moment (but not
really): Lawrence Durrell’s narrator in Justine has just caught two love-makers during a festival one night. He
cannot forbear to describe the sight:
The bed was inhabited by an indistinct mass of flesh moving in many places at once, vaguely stirring like
an ant-heap. It took me some moments to define the pale and hairy limbs of an elderly man from those of
his partner—the greenish-hued whiteness of convex woman with a boa constrictor’s head—a head
crowned with spokes of toiling black hair which trailed over the edges of the filthy mattress. My sudden
appearance must have suggested a police raid for it was followed by a gasp and complete silence. It was
as if the ant-hill had suddenly become deserted. The man gave a groan and a startled half-glance in my
direction and then as if to escape detection buried his head between the immense breasts of the woman.
It was impossible to explain to them that I was investigating nothing more particular than the act upon
which they were engaged. I advanced to the bed firmly, apologetically, and with what must have seemed
a vaguely scientific air of detachment I took the rusty bed-rail in my hands and stared down, not upon
them for I was hardly conscious of their existence, but upon myself and Melissa, myself and Justine. The
woman turned a pair of large gauche charcoal eyes upon me and said something in Arabic. (4)
It would be the same for “him,” the “he” who originates this recounting here now, for us: impossible to explain
that he was investigating nothing more particular than the act upon which they were engaged, these sleepers,
these readers of pulp fiction, these citizens of the world he has travelled, these familiar strangers, smoking,
gazing, waiting, waiting, as Leslie Fiedler had it about American fiction of the 1930s, “waiting for the end.”
“Interest”: “Only banality still interests me.” Not that the banalities stand out (for if they did, they would no
longer be banalities) but that the interest has mastered the trick of penetrating the ether, touching and sensing
—quite beyond the flagrant flowers of experience—the background loam. It is as though in some marvelous
painting the dramatic figures have suddenly been removed. In “The Madonna of the Rocks,” suddenly to be able
to languish in consideration of the grotto, the grotto only. (Assheton Gorton showed me this.) With Van Gogh’s
“Sunflowers,” to finally see that yellow ground. And to be interested is to invest one’s powers of concentration
and also the secret key that opens the gate of consideration. Only banality still interests me. Still interests me:
continues to provoke and (finally) satisfy me, in the face of my long, long experience of being provoked and
satisfied, my long quest for meaning, my rich cupboard filled with the noteworthy and the canonical.
It is a marvel of cinema that immediately after Marker’s opening title, we see the sea rush past—the gray-blue
sea—from the railing of the ferry, where a loudspeaker is poised with its vulva open to our faces. Would this be
the orifice, perhaps, out of which the sounds of the film are to come, including the voice that has been telling us
about interest, banality, travelling around the world? The loudspeaker is not onscreen when we hear the first
stirrings of that voice; one could say there is no picture of the sound coming out of it. But there is never a
picture of sound coming out of any speaker, even when we see the lips moving. (Every speaker, in all speech, is
in some way an acousmêtre.) The sound is invisible, like the picture contained safely in black leader.
Michael Powell MIFF Orson Welles Paul
Cox Robert Bresson Roberto Rossellini Roman
Polanski Samuel Fuller Stan Brakhage Viviane
Vagh Yasujiro Ozu
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2
At dawn, says the voice, that female voice, we’ll be in Tokyo. Cut to a shot of an elevated train moving across
the screen, old buildings (one with a water tower on top), a dove gray sky, a radio tower in the distance—very
grainy, recalling Gojira—with the sound of that train passing. It would seem we are in Tokyo. It must therefore
be dawn. Life is what one says it is, after all. “There were many harsh words,” writes Peter Gay of the beginning
of the Weimar Republic, “words never forgotten or forgiven, and words were not all. Everyone was armed,
everyone was irritable and unwilling to accept frustration, many had been trained and remained ready to kill,
the widespread disorder encouraged irrational mass action and offered protective cover to political adventurers.”
(5) In Tokyo, life was, perhaps, more conversational. “Ike Toshiyuke recently defined the basic Tokyo styles [of
katsuben, storytelling speech] as riarizumu (‘realism,’ meaning ‘conversational’ in this context), roman
(‘Romantic,’ suggesting melodramatic tendencies), and koten (‘classic,’ which meant the katsuben borrowed
phrases and images from classical literature).” (6) I’m telling you, just to keep you briefed, we’re in Tokyo now.
Oh, but this is Tokyo! And in the great Kantõ, we find ourselves, and so I give it to you.
3
A temple in the suburbs of Tokyo consecrated to cats. Hundreds of variously sized white cat dolls, their right
paws raised and waving in salute and supplication, their ears carnation red, and with carnation-red collars and
little bells. (Someone has belled all the cats.) The black and yellow eyes staring presciently forward, missing
nothing, seeing nothing, seeing nothing, missing nothing. Whiskers painted on the faces, oh so delicately. The
pink noses. No actual cats present. The temple cat is the reminder of cats. The lumpen poor drinking
fermented milk and beer in Namidabashi, feeling nothing less than equality, “the threshold below which every
man is as good as any other, and knows it.” I am reminded of Paul Goodman’s observation, “To each person it
seems to make all the difference where he draws the line!”, (7) and of his majestic poem, “Horatio’s Mourning
Song,” where he writes,
Unarmed, yet we have the power
of when the bottom drops out.
Lonely, loyal, murky-minded,
doubt-free we go our way. (8)
These destitutes are like stray cats, ignominious even when they are smiling. They have only the identity that
comes with existing. Wishing they could have the giant bottles of sake that are “poured over tombs on the day
of the dead,” the lumpen poor are reminders, tokens of those who can afford to purchase and pour such things,
and who seem real because they can afford to have no thirst. Cut briskly to the Island of Fogo in the Cape Verde
Islands, people waiting on the jetty (at Sao Filipe), people who have nothing, people standing and looking, “a
vertical people” of wanderers, world travellers. (Have they been around the world several times?) It stands to
reason that they are looking into the camera. They have not learned better. And this: “Frankly, have you ever
heard of anything stupider than to say to people, as they teach in Film School, not to look at the camera?” Eyes
looking into the camera, not questioning, not remarking, not showing off as they look into the camera and in this
looking travel around the world. Not looking to see if you recognize them. “The idea of resistance,” wrote
Goodman, “is to make it impossible for society to continue a bad routine—and to awaken its better judgment.”
(9) Here in the Cape Verde Islands the Portuguese who had colonized four hundred years previously, and who
had used the place as a station in the slave trade, were fought by the disaffected locals under Amilcar Cabral
(assassinated January 1973, before his half brother led them to independence). Here a line was drawn. Those
cat dolls in Tokyo were seen in close-up, their right paws raised and waving in salute and supplication.
4
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“What I want to show you are the neighbourhood celebrations.” Somewhere in Africa there is a street festival.
Celebrants marching along the road, in front of lined-up viewers, are wearing gaily painted plaster-of-Paris
animal heads, for example a ruby-red elephant. A chimpanzee is being led along (by a man in brown trousers),
dressed in a white shirt and a pair of faded carpenter-style dungarees (very much as a person might be, but in
this case isn’t). As he walks, his left hand clasped in his master’s, he moves his long right arm behind him and
with the hand reaches forward to take hold of the inside of his own thigh. Someone has put white powder on
his face, so that he can “dress up,” too.
It is possible for us to reach around and grab our thighs as we walk, too, so why don’t we tend to do it? (The
chimp’s arm is proportionally longer than a human’s, is this really the reason?) Behind him, we see dozens of
walkers from the waist down and their hands are dangling at their sides, quite uselessly. Hands so ineffective
they do not even search for something to do. The chimp seems to recognize that the hand can be used for
grasping, and has found something to grasp with it. When humans grasp themselves they are thought to be
self-conscious in some way—controlling or shaping their embodiment—but we do not find ourselves
compelled to read such self-consciousness into the chimp. We read instantaneity of purpose. The hand on the
thigh and the feet stepping along the pavement are equivalents; this because the hand of the chimp, as we read
it and are capable of understanding it, does not motivate a consciousness of itself, since its dexterity is fully
naturalized. The human hand does more complex things than a chimpanzee’s hand does, once it has been
taught. And for chimpanzees and those who march with them, the hand that is taught is always self-aware,
through the echoes of that teaching.
“In his landmark treatise on the hand,” Frank Wilson tells us, “Sir Charles Bell noted that ‘we can hardly be
surprised that some philosophers should have entertained the opinion, with Anaxagoras, that the superiority of
man is owing to his hand’. Bell, taking exception to what he judged in Anaxagoras to have been excessive
regard for a mere bodily appendage, opined that these hands were given man ‘because he was the wisest
creature.’” (10) Wilson of course debunks this kind of Romanticism, but confesses, “What we can cautiously
postulate is that, under the influence of all it was exposed to beginning about 2 million years ago, this hand
with an altered grasping potential may have become part of an unprecedented and uniquely successful survival
strategy for at least some of the hominids who had come to possess it on a genetic basis.” (11) So what we see
in Marker is a testament to the “class” structure implicit between men and apes. Having human hands, the
marchers in this parade can afford to do nothing with them, but the lumpen chimp is making a point of doing as
much as he can. Chimpanzees, however, “stand out among pongids as . . . avid learners and improvisers in
environments where the animals can be influenced by human artifact and teaching” (12): they are like humans.
And perhaps soon they will walk the streets dangling their hands, too.
Now Geishas in pink kimonos and geishas in yellow kimonos are marching in Tokyo. Waving their hands, with
bounce in their step; waving their hands, with bounce, with bounce. The specific gestures they make with their
hands in the air: teasing apart the silk threads on a loom? Picking beans from a shoot? More dancers hopping
and hopping, their arms out like birds’ wings. “Watch me, I’m taking off”? Teenage girls giggling and imitating
the geisha dance, making those hand gestures I do not find myself equipped to read. Bells clanging, janga-
janga-janga-janga, the black nocturnal sky, the eyes searching, the hands telling. What story are the hands
telling? This is the experience of knowing that a story is being told, but not understanding the story. Pure
narrative. And also a use of the hands. The hands articulating language—“The praxis movement . . . is perforce a
sign for the act which it accomplishes” (13) —a silent language, a language of the night. “To us, a sun is not
quite a sun unless it is radiant.”
“Japanese poetry,” we hear her tell us (she who has such a monotonously persuasive voice and is always present
with us, before us, behind us as we watch this film), “never modifies.” I understand the word “modify” and the
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word “never,” therefore I grasp what it could be in principle “never” to “modify.” But I cannot understand at all
how one could write without modifying. I see a man rowing a boat in a red windbreaker. To me he is wearing a
windbreaker, and that windbreaker is red, that is, participates in redness. (It has been dyed red; subjected to the
chemical action of red dye.) I cannot imagine a single word that would describe the “red” “windbreaker” in a
unity. My hand could touch the redness and the windbreaker at once, but my language cannot. So my
language is alien to my hand. When I see the picture, the “redness” and the “windbreaker” are unified visually,
yet when I word the vision to myself it is instantly divided. The picture is closer to my hand than is my language.
Japanese poetry does not effect this division, however. I can conceive of myself learning enough words to use
the Japanese language, but I cannot conceive of myself using that language to speak Japanese. In the same way,
I can imagine writing words about something that a filmmaker could film; but I cannot imagine myself writing
words that are a film. The right hand of the rower, by the way, is at the end of an arm fully extended, and has
grasped the very end of the oar. Now she tells us of a man from Nagoya whose wife died, so he drowned
himself in work, even invented something electronic, but in the month of May he killed himself; they say he
could not stand hearing the word “spring.” What was it that the word “spring” was connected to for this man?
The dead wife? The absence of the wife? The presence of the self in the face of possibility? Perhaps he
merely killed himself and it was others who decided he could not bear to hear the word “spring” or that
between not being able to bear that word and taking his own life there was a connection. Is there some link
between a man taking his own life and the opening of the green world?
And we are wondering, too, not “What is this film about?” but “What is this film?” Who is speaking in this film? Is
that speaker speaking with, or without, modification? Let me tell you a little story that seems appropriate at this
moment. I was driving early one morning, very slowly, down an empty street in a small town in the midst of a
dense fog, on my birthday, many many years ago. Suddenly a figure stepped across the road in front of the car.
A man, tall, wearing a long shepherd’s robe and bearing a staff which he pounded into the road as he walked. A
fulsome beard, longish hair. He turned and stared into my eyes as he passed. It was an internationally famous
film actor, dressed now as some Mosaic titan and emerging, literally, out of the mists. Beyond the fact that I use
modification in telling this story, is this story a modification in itself of the event it describes? Or, does the story,
by telling the event, actually create it? Did nothing happen at all, until I told you this story? Is the story
therefore a modification of nothingness? And what is this little story about? And what is this little story?
5
She is telling me that he has returned to Tokyo and is inspecting familiar places “to see if everything is as it
should be.” Who is this man she keeps telling me about? A retired locomotive positioned near a building as a
statue. A temple atop a department store. “He was told that a disfigured woman took off her mask in front of
passers-by and scratched them if they did not find her beautiful.” Well, yes, the irony of acculturated vision. The
proprietary aesthetic. Beautiful according to what credentialed experts? “Everything interested him” . . . but “He
didn’t give a damn if the Dodgers had won the pennant.” Everything local, then. Everything here. (I suspect
that in Los Angeles, they care if the Dodgers win the pennant; this while knowing that the Dodgers are not the
same Dodgers who left Brooklyn.) Everything of the world can be defined through this particularly isolating
way of viewing and knowing. A live cat peering down from the roof of the Hotel Utopia (of course). Automated
signs and display windows, an automated panda, a man walking a rhesus monkey clad in a red vest, the red train
under the blue sky. “Tokyo is a city criss-crossed by trains, tied together by wire” —now we live in a world
where almost any city can be described this way, but when we think of such places we must be daunted by the
terrors that linger there beneath the surface. Gojira, I recall, tore a train off its tracks and lifted one of the cars—
full of people—near his mouth. And Wolfgang Schivelbusch observes how with early trains the anxiety of the
accident was a constant phantom:
In the technological accident and the shock released by it, the fear that has been repressed by the
improvement in technology reappears to take its revenge. It becomes obvious that the original fear of the
new technology has by no means dissolved into nothingness during the period of habituation, but that it
has only been forgotten, repressed, one could even say, reified as a feeling of safety. (14)
“Tokyo is a city criss-crossed by trains.”
Also a city criss-crossed by electronic signals, so-called “content”: “They say that television makes her people
illiterate.” It’s hard to know what television does while it is doing it; but illiteracy is the new world plague, that
much is certain as I write. (Who am I?) As to the possibility of being literate, Edgar Friedenberg told me once
that he thought the last man who had understood the entirety of his culture was probably Aristotle.
This film is, or seems, entirely a puzzle or a riddle, and our task is to assemble it in such a way that we see a
“picture.” (It would be less delicious if it were not a riddle. Our pleasure stems from our participation—Marshall
McLuhan called this “cool”—and I am reminded of Karal Ann Marling’s breezy comment to the effect that Dr.
Ernest Dichter, an admirer and consultant to the company, “claimed credit for the decision to leave powdered
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eggs out of General Mills cake mixes in order to give the housewife a sense of making a creative contribution to
the process.” (15) But what is marvelous and idiosyncratic about Marker is that even his puzzle pieces laid out in
a line (“Film is like a train in the night,” we learned from François Truffaut, in La nuit américaine) make a picture.
One feels no impulse to move them, to make assembly, although obviously a myriad of connections between
shots and shots, or between shots and sounds, that he has not bothered to make could be made. Now, pictures
of people reading—“I’ve never seen so many people reading in the streets”—but much of what they read is
anime, books and books and books full of pictures and pictures and pictures. It is the word made flesh that is
dying. At the bookstore Colloquia in Shinjuku, because of the way the pages are laid out, we see evidence that
“The Japanese invented CinemaScope ten centuries before the movies.”
CinemaScope demands a moving eye, an anxious looker.
6
Watching television, “he” has the fleeting suspicion he speaks Japanese but then realizes it is a cultural program
on Gérard de Nerval. I have experienced this same illusion. A sudden, almost piercing sense that I know in my
own self what I cannot possibly know, that the outside world has penetrated me and become incorporated into
my flesh. That the abyss has magically disappeared from the contexts of my involvement. It is interesting that
when I look at motion picture images—say these images of Tokyo by Marker, which work as neatly as any other
for this argument, yet which also bear the additional weight of inspiring me to this thought—I am seeing in fact a
framing produced by another person’s (Marker’s) sense of balance and importance, yet I can manage to see.
This is probably at least in part because the camera disguises its mechanism through the magic of verisimilitude.
When I look at paintings, I have a distinct sense of the otherness of the painter, and I struggle to position myself
so that I will see. With film, the struggle has been performed on my behalf by a device which is separate from
the hand (in the way that for a painter, the canvas can never be—the hand, or its extension the shoulder, as in
the case of Jackson Pollock). With film, some eye has merely been opened onto a world, and so I can merely
open my eyes. Then the editor’s hand comes in to give me confusions—how does this image join to that one?
If the content of an image might be foreign to me, yet the arrangement within it, a result of the choice made in
framing it, the clarity of recording—all these are immediately accessible. And so it becomes possible for me to
make the claim that I witness and comprehend the documentary vision, while all of me struggles to accept that
it is not I who have framed and chosen these shots, linked them to sounds, lined them up, moved that camera.
Not I, even though the filmmaker seems so very proximate, jumping now through the horrors of the Khmer
Rouge to Apocalypse Now to Japanese horror cinema, where, I’m told, everything is “ornate.” I am chilled by
this, since to me, who grew up near streets filled with drying horse manure, the word and idea “ornate”
immediately bring to mind ceremonial splendor, elevation, separation, control. Ornate torture is a new one,
arranged, I have to suspect, by puissant alien forces who look down on my life.
Well, perhaps not so alien. Marker, who continually challenges his viewer, has provoked me to search the origin
of “ornate” and I find that it comes from the Latin verb “to equip.” It means, originally, well equipped; then later,
adorned and elaborately embellished. I remember that when I played the partitas of J. S. Bach, there came a
point when the embellishments were so thoroughly learned and accomplished that they became, in
themselves, only music: that is, the notes being embellished and the embellishments upon those notes ceased
belonging to separate categories, and there were no longer any embellishments at all. To see adornment is
always to presume the true “unadorned” nature of a thing. Schivelbusch, for instance, notes “the typical
nineteenth-century desire to disguise the industrial aspect of things by means of ornamentation.” (16)
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“The eye is at the centre of all things.” Yes. And no. The memory is at the centre of all things, and memory is
blind. Blind memory. Searching and searching in the dark rooms for the touch. In the film, these great
spontaneous patches and passages of darkness, the zone where the sun does not shine. Living on top of a
continually potential earthquake, she’s telling me, the Japanese have come to inhabit a world of appearances.
But appearances dominate altogether in modernity, and so we must wonder our way beyond the frame edges
of this film, to ask whether we are all living on ground that could give way at any instant, riding a train that could
go off the rails. Think of the global desire now to say everything in a single breath—the sound bite, the tweet,
the silent reproachful glare. Or the pornographic obsession with climax, as though there is no work, no
patience, no history, no dedication. It might seem that the fuller become the shelves of our libraries, the more
likely our young scholars are to multiply, and shrink their affiliations to, footnotes. Already with every group of
images I feel Marker’s film is done, yet I must sit through it as through a long and wordy lecture in a room too
warm and too old. This is his magic, of course. He is unrelentingly conveying to me a flash of imagery, a train
whistling forward, while invoking thoughts of what always was and always will be. But more and more, one
feels the world bending over to give a mere lick; one sense oneself wanting only to taste one’s life, not build
upon it; and that taste is so elusive. The buildings, in fact, are all coming down and being replaced. (Gojira
might as well be wandering here, effecting the demolitions.) Concrete is turning into glass (the promise of the
nineteenth century finally being realized: “The impression of glass architecture can be summed up in one
word: evanescence.” (17)
Look at the samurai battle playing now on the screen. Gray men, swishing and swinging, backing off and
advancing, against a white sky. Difficult to know what it is all about, beyond a tipping of mortalities in a muddy
stream. What is the samurai battle of prose?
7
Marker has found a form in which he can think openly. Beethoven did the same, and Nabokov. And Montaigne.
And Sebald. Anything can become anything, is the rule of thought, unless thought is censored and constrained.
It is one thing to say what it is appropriate to say and another thing to say what one needs to say, all the while
maintaining a grammatical tension that holds weights in balance. Marker’s filmmaking permits his movement,
and so the film is a dance, that has instances of acute contraction and instances of rippling looseness. When I say
he has “found” a form: Beethoven did not create the symphony, but he found, he invented, the freedom to
inscribe passages bound by their own rigorous internal logic, that is, passages that owed no obligation to the
extrinsic demands of what had by that time been recognized as the “symphonic form.” In the same way, Marker
works cinema beyond itself, in the same way that Jean Vigo did with L’atalante (1934), or that Jean Renoir did
with La règle du jeu (1939), or that Alfred Hitchcock did again and again, but perhaps principally with Vertigo
(1958). The emergent phrase must come of the necessity to go on living, not respect for anyone else’s
strictures.
8
“‘Mens’ fashions this season are placed under the sign of John Kennedy.” An animatronic JFK in a gray flannel suit
is nodding, talking, nodding to department store visitors. “Ask not what your country can do for you!” he intones,
and behind him, is it on the sound track or in the store, which marketer is purveying this to us?, is a happy group
of female voices, “Ask not! Ask not! Ask not! Ask not! Ask not what we can do for you!” The waxen flesh of the
face seems very lively, the shirt is a little too large to fit the neck. “Ask what you can do for your country.”
Marker has an eye for ironies, cultural jokes, discontinuities, displacements. A show of treasures from the Vatican
on the 7th floor of the Sogo department store, with hundreds of silent and gawking visitors, staring at the objects
as though through a microscope. But he is not entirely ironic. At Guinea Bissau, he stares at the women,
indefatigable women, who will not, most of them, show that they see him staring. He is touched by their
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strength, their permanence. Not “the permanence of woman” but the endurance of these particular women,
whose ancestors fought the Portuguese. Film gives us a splendid sense of the instantaneity of things, the flash
of a moving hand, the contingency of a speaker on a podium at a particular moment, the sky gray behind him,
his words vibrating through the loudspeakers. The easy dismissive wave of a hand as a pedestrian breezes past a
student offering a pamphlet.
Whether, as Marker would like to claim—honouring Andrei Tarkovsky by honouring a videomaker who honours
Tarkovsky, the Tarkovsky of Stalker (1979)—the space he creates is a “zone” or just a picture, nevertheless its
boundaries are sharp and pressing, especially when telephoto shots bring us close to people, all people, but
especially the Takenoko dancers, whom he calls “baby Martians,” but whose gesticulations, soft and delicate and
frenzied all at once, leap out off and into the frame, notably as they bounce up and down, as they turn, as their
hands flash up. As their hands flash up. As their hands flash up. The frame is suddenly a cage, an inviolable
grammar, and we see the way the nervy urgencies of the spirit are held and reduced by it, reduced, yes, even
here, in Marker’s frame.
“More and more, my dreams find as settings the department stores of Tokyo.” Is this not another way of saying
that the department stores are constituting a dream? Capital working against itself incessantly and without
awareness. “The department store, as a new form of retail merchandising [1852], was predicated on a well-
developed intra-urban traffic system.” (18) “Tokyo is a city criss-crossed by trains.” For the artist, every march is a
dance, every rigid framing is a grid for energizing the dream of release.
9
He told me—now, this is not the “he” who is informing the space of Sans soleil, this is a different he; and “me” is
not the woman in the film who is telling me all these things “he” communicated to her, it is me, in fact, and only
me—he told me that in any conversation a moment presents itself when one no longer wishes to speak. “He
told me”: who is he? I’m not saying. Indeed, in any speaking at all, in any posture of the self, a moment comes
when one tires, when one’s piece is done. Not because one has addressed the entirety of what presents itself
but because suddenly one wishes to look up into the sky. (So often one has the feeling with critical writing that
it does not breathe: worse, that the author of it did not breathe, and thus was not writing out of a living
impulse.)
10
“I begin to wonder,” he told her (“him” again), “whether those dreams are entirely mine,” in this reflecting Jung,
of course, but he wonders only whether the dreams encompass the “totality” of the whole city (of Tokyo), and
this is because he is locked by his own vital fascination into the prison of Tokyo as an experience. We benefit
from that imprisonment, because the images are continually shocking and alive. Yet in watching this film,
grasping its threads, dwelling upon its riddles, we are not in Tokyo ourselves; need not be Japanese; have not
become Japanese; have not shed our skins and left them behind in a locker room so that we can bring into the
shower of Marker’s imagery some naked international all-enduring self. We see a close image of civilian hands
offering up tickets for entry in the subway. The gleaming silver metallic turnstiles, the perpetual march of
bodies, the hands reaching out to leave the innocent white tickets for the collector to amass. Consumer after
consumer. This is the box office, the gate to the Underworld where one must quote a password to be admitted.
The thousands, the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands, who beg for admission, who squeeze between the
confines of these turnstiles the bulging perplexity of their corpulent—diligently capitalist—selves. Ticket,
ticket. Ticket, ticket, ticket. Ticket, ticket, ticket, ticket. The arm with a wristwatch, the arm with a bracelet, the
naked arm, the arm in short sleeves, the arm with a shopping bag. Everyone wants to see the show. The show
is for everyone who wants to see it, and therefore is for everyone. Yellow shirt, blue shirt, pink shirt, blue shirt.
Purple shirt, orange shirt. One young fellow sees Marker’s camera—only one—and he turns and gives a friendly
wave. Inside the tunnels. People riding off in train cars into the night. “The original fear of the new technology
has by no means dissolved into nothingness during the period of habituation, but . . . has only been forgotten.”
On a train in the countryside, looking backward. Green fields, the electric standards holding the power cables.
The tracks glittering and receding—that lovely scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) where
Maria Schneider is told by Jack Nicholson, in the red car, to turn her back to the front, with the plane trees
receding and receding down the perfectly straight road. History.
The faces on the train, eyes closed. Meditation, self-critique, aspiration, anxiety about today’s shopping list,
weariness, defeat, exhaustion, compliance, satisfaction, release, delay, perseverance—we cannot know what
we will find when these reposeful masks are peeled away from these faces and we may gaze at the true
interior.
What’s in there, a scream? What’s in there, the scream of an ejaculation, the tender beasts? What’s in there, a
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horror film, a map, a map of consciousness or civility? “He told me about the January light on the station
stairways. He told me that this city ought to be deciphered like a musical score.” This isn’t a city, of course, it is a
filmic moment addressing a city. Every filmic moment may be deciphered as a musical score. But some
musical scores are very involving, owing to what? Complexity, simplicity? Directness, clarity? Time, the
pauses, the emptinesses? The dark spots where there is no sun?
11
Pac-Man as “the most perfect graphic metaphor of man’s fate.” This may well strike at a truth, but if it does, then
man’s fate is less interesting than man’s life. The fate for Pac-Man is to be gobbled up by the array, devoured by
his context. A simple fate. The brilliant lights of the video game signal the facts of video game life, the
movement, the stasis, the termination. But they also radiate with an appealing glow, and the depth of
forgetting and desire concealed by that glow, yet also offered by that glow, are more involving than facts. I love
about Marker that while watching him one can argue with him. Instead of saying “Yes, yes, yes,” we can say (in a
new kind of viewer commitment), “Possibly, yes; but also no.” Yes, but also no: the ability to contradict. The
lights of the video game are turn-ons, but also endings. In my end is my beginning.
12
A giraffe is slaughtered. (And from a distance.) Why? (Vultures.) In the Cape Verde Islands we find men who
“parade their personal laceration in the great wound of history.” Isn’t it finally a sacrilege to use the word
“wound” to describe an infliction upon honour or courage, to think of “laceration” as a degradation or military
failure, when one is still alive to brag about it? The voice is telling us that “he”—we really need to know who
this “he” is!—began to wonder about the use of the word “guerrilla” to modify the word “filmmaking,” once he
had understood guerrilla warfare and the degradations and hardships it inevitably implies. Yes, and the same
with “wound.” That tumbling giraffe . . .
13
“He is dead and gone, lady. He is dead and gone . . ..” The camera slowly moving across an electronic matrix
board. Is this the soprano voice, the crystalline voice, of Arielle Dombasle, whose face we see, under her mop
of blonde hair? Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5. “He” had wondered about Vertigo, and time. The titles portraying
continually receding fields of time. “His” visit to Podesta Baldocchi (the tiles hadn’t changed—but now, reader,
be warned, the flower shop is no more as it was then). Trailing Madeleine: in truth this is about “power and
freedom, melancholy and dazzlement.” Coasting by the Top of the Mark (“so carefully coded that you could
miss it”), and thinking that the “vertigo of space and reality stands for the vertigo of time.” Yes, surely, and why
not? “He” visited the cemetery at Mission Dolores, and followed Madeleine to the Museum of the Legion of
Honour. (I also did these things. I think I may have found her.) Falsely, he notes the cut sequoia in Muir Woods
—it’s so evocative, why should he not be lured? (The scene was shot in Big Basin; and the cut tree was made by
Henry Bumstead.) But “he” is in love with the film, and is thus entranced. Cavell is slightly troubled: “This
invitation to obsession—must I decide whether it is fetishistic attachment, or honest labor?—is something I have
sometimes felt I must ward off.” (19) The painted horse at San Juan Bautista—Hitchcock “had invented nothing; it
was all there” (and it is still there, still with a painted eye that is Madeleine’s, according to “him”). At the Golden
Gate, Scottie had “saved Madeline from death before casting her back to death; or was it the other way round?”
“He” says explicitly that he has seen Vertigo nineteen times, and is speaking to those who have done so as well.
I do not know what numeral to apply to the times I have seen it. (I suspect I have not really seen it yet.) I write
somewhere in my book An Eye for Hitchcock that in this film, the present is always standing upon, and thus
vertiginously perched atop, the past, and that the fall in time is always available for us. I mean to imply there
something that the correspondent in San soleil, meditating feverishly upon Vertigo, does not quite bring himself
to say to the lonely and satisfied woman who is recounting all this to us, namely, that history is vertical; that as
time goes by we descend; so that we realize we had begun upon a high promontory so that—as George Bernard
Shaw put it—our catapult would be all the more dramatic.
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14
We suspect finally that “he” is Marker. Or was Marker. The Marker who was. (But “not really.” An end title
indicates, “Sandor Krasna’s letters were read by Alexandra Stewart.” And who is Sandor Krasna?) At any rate, he
met three little girls in Iceland, while he was beginning a film. “Something to do with unhappiness and
memory,” with the sound of the pathetic Ondes Martenot, swelling, falling, alienating. He was going to give his
film, a film he could not finish—he knew this already—the title of those Mussorgsky songs, “Sunless” (1874—the
same year that Anna Karenina meets Vronsky). And now, I will tell you about the three little girls. Marker begins
his film with them (a film I have only begun here to describe and circumscribe, to debate with, to work upon, a
film that shows again and again the multitudes walking, walking on streets, walking in stores, walking forward,
walking to the middle of the road, but where is everyone going?), and ends his film with them, too; the same
shot. Completely silent. The tall one in the middle, in a beautifully knit sweater. To the left, a younger one
seeming to lead, and at her own left, a much younger one going along because she always goes along. The
older two look at the camera. They move leftward and the camera pans. Behind them a pale green grassy
knoll. “My three children,” he says, noting a second shot of them on the road, standing in the force of the wind
and not anticipating yet, in the year 1965, that not long afterward the volcano would cover all this with
smouldering fires. Or, as we look at them, standing together in the blaze of daylight, are they anticipating fact?
Are they seeing the future?
Endnotes
1. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Glaudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press 1999,
pp. 18, 19, 21.
2. Stanislaw Lem, “On Patrol,” in Tales of Pirx the Pilot, trans. Louis Iribarne, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1979, pp. 120-21.
3. Stanley Cavell, “The World as Things: Collecting Thoughts on Collecting,” in Cavell on Film, ed. William
Rothman, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005, p.250.
4. Lawrence Durrell, Justine, London: Penguin, 1991, p. 186.
5. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001, p. 13.
6. Joseph L. Anderson, “Spoken Silents in the Japanese Cinema; or, Talking to Pictures: Essaying the
Katsuben, Contextualizing the Texts,” in Arthur Nolletti Jr. and David Desser, eds., Reframing Japanese
Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 283.
7. Paul Goodman, Drawing the Line: Political Essays, ed. Taylor Stoehr, New York: Free Life Editions, 1977,
p. 9.
8. Paul Goodman, “Horatio’s Mourning Song,” in The Lordly Hudson, New York: Macmillan, 1962, pp. 3-5.
9. Paul Goodman, Drawing the Line: Political Essays, ed. Taylor Stoehr, New York: Free Life Editions, 1977,
p. 166.
10. Frank R. Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Cultures, New York:
Pantheon, 1998, p. 290.
11. Wilson, p. 287.
12. Wilson, p. 22.
13. Wilson, p. 204.
14. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th
Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, pp. 162-163.
15. Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s, Cambridge, Mass.:
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Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 213.
16. Schivelbusch, p. 175.
17. Schivelbusch, p. 47.
18. Schivelbusch, p. 188.
19. Cavell, p. 272.
Chris MarkerChris Marker Sans SoleilSans Soleil
About the Author
Murray Pomerance is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University and the author of
Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema and The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film
Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory, and editor or co-editor of numerous volumes including A Little
Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film.
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