I actually think those whispers are the captors whispering in German, which we aren't meant to have translated.

Yes, if you watch it that way they are horribly out of sync. Try the SDH option instead.

Another wonderful Criterion release! Superb video, good supplements, and it's all for two movies I love! I'm in a daze after Sans Soleil so please excuse the one note enthusiasm, but this is the sort of cinema I live for.
Anyway, I'm still not so sure about that Bowie supplement (I think that Kim Hendrickson must be a fan), but it was amusing. Gorin seemed a little strange to me in the interviews. Is he like that on the Boudu and Tout Va Bien interviews?

The Bowie segment was off putting to me, I was expecting a piece about the influence of La Jatee on Bowie, but instead the narrator all but informs me that Bowie IS in fact a time traveler and that is why he is such a trend setter.

The Bowie as time traveller conceit was amusing, I guess. I can't see how he invented punk, though. I guess the French don't like the New York Dolls. Or Roxy Music. Still, at least now there's a little Mark Romanek in the Collection.

Same here, Bowie might have been the perfect choice to play an alien but I drew the line at suggesting he actually is one! (no offence to Ziggy Stardust fans!)

I was surprised they didn't also include the full Jump They Say video with the relatively short segment. Here it is - I quite like the women wearing the flight attendant hats from 2001 and also was reminded of the bizarre appearance in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me that Bowie did. All the corridor shots in Jump They Say makes me think of the video as a kind of backstory for Agent Jeffries! (It came out only a year after the Twin Peaks film, so it might have been something in the ether while the video was getting made?)

I also found the Vertigo comparison piece to be a little forced. I actually prefer the Catherine Lupton description of the comparison that Kinsayder quoted at the bottom of the second page of this thread to be much more effective than seeing attempts to squash images from the two films together! Perhaps I felt that the segment was trying too hard to force the comparison rather than letting it arise naturally.

I'm not really a fan of Vertigo (I think I might have to go to the front office to hand in my film fan membership badge, and then be escorted out of the criterionforum.org building by armed guards for uttering such sacreligious comments!) but love La Jetée and so I'm more inclined to think of Marker using his obsession with themes and images from the film and expanding on them for his own ends rather than just slavishly copying them only in the hopes that his audience sees the homage, Tarantino-style! I certainly find the use of the tree trunk and the gesturing to a point beyond it as an indication of where the man is from to be far more interesting and moving than Vertigo's use of the same object as a part of the fabricated back story Madeline is using to sucker Scotty in to her story of being a reincarnation of a historical suicide.

Like all great references it expands on and deepens the original material it is quoting: I like the idea of reincarnation and time travel getting linked - Madeline's consciousness supposedly having moved forward in time to 50's San Francisco and the man in La Jetée going back to a remembered, idealised time before war (or back to a time before he was aware of the world being in a constant state of many conflicts - to returning to a childish state of non awareness of the world outside of his subjective experience?), both flights of fantasy unable to completely conceal the darker realities of the true situation that their creation is meant to obscure.

It seems that Criterion's relationship with Universal paid off in their being allowed to use the Vertigo clips for the segment though!

Did anyone catch the image from Overlord playing on one of the monitors in the installation from the Chris On Chris piece?

I also noticed Ligia Borocyzk and William Klein were in La Jetée. (Particularly interested in seeing Ligia Borocyzk/Branice, as Behind Convent Walls played a significant role in my teenage years! ) Was their casting as people from the future a suggestion that Marker felt they could represent future interesting directions for cinema?

I really liked Jean-Pierre Gorin's interview clips, fragmented in Immemory style so we can create our own structure to the interview. It is sort of like La Jetée itself in that while the images are powerful in themselves it is the editing rhythms that make the experience so powerful - we seem to be catching up to Marker in that we are now confronted by masses of information and meaning comes about through the way we as viewers construct it into coherent and meaningful patterns or find meaningful personal connections between material. It means that we are both more in need of people to create and present to us their own views of what they have assembled from the world to guide us but we also have to take on more responsibility for creating our own collages of material, our own worldviews that can be added to and manipulated as things change, we get more information, we ourselves change over time etc - that allows us to begin to interact more fully than just remaining passive consumers.

Off to check out Sans Soleil next!

colinr0380, after you've watched Sans Soleil, you might be interested in Marker's own fantastic essay on Vertigo, "A free replay: Notes on Vertigo."

The essay was originally published in French in Positif, but an English translation is available in the book Projections 4 1/2 edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue.

Marker's reading of Vertigo is fantastic and completely changed all subsequent viewings of the film for me... so it might add to your appreciation of Vertigo and save your board membership.

Thanks magicmarker, I have just quickly smuggled myself past the guards and into the forum under cover of an avatar to post!

I'll need to watch Sans Soleil a few more times to let everything sink in but I really enjoyed the film. It seemed to be as much about individual perception creating our version of the world as simply about memory. Experiencing and then seeing what sticks in the mind is just the first stage - the unconscious way that certain things are forgotten and others stick around and get triggered when similar things are experienced becoming a personal way of experiencing the world, almost an obsession. Maybe even worrying or strange seeming to those who do not share your perception. That could apply to Marker's interest in cats wherever he finds them or Scotty's obsession with recreating Madeline.

I thought the sequence watching the train passengers in Tokyo showed this well and was a kind of mini-climax to the film. The film imposed different television segments onto the sleeping passengers, making it seem as if that is what they are dreaming about. I remember thinking they were making pat assumptions by intercutting the young man with images from samurai films, but then it got extremely cheeky by showing the sleeping salaryman and intercutting sex scenes - if that wasn't naughty enough the film even pans across to the woman sitting next to him to suggest he might be fantasising about her in that kind of situation!

But the outrageousness of that sequence pushed me into wondering how much anything is based on the person watching imposing their view of the situation onto apparently innocent bystanders! How looking at airport protests and saying they represent the remnants of 60s protest, or gazing dreamily at young people watching rock concerts is less about the actions occuring on screen but about the person who is choosing to show and talk about what they are seeing and the significance to them. One of the nicest things about the film is that it suggests that life is to some extent what you get out of it and there can be beauty and interest in anything if you look for it and find some personal connection - so it is as wrong to disregard all displays of 'low' culture as being beneath you as it is to cut yourself off from 'high' culture in the belief that it is too arty!

As long as you do not get so lost in your own worldview that you cannot understand that others may have different responses. I think that train sequence (intended or not) is an illustration of the dangers of trying to fit someone into your perception of them and refusing to accept they may not be dreaming about sex or samurais! Someone may be dreaming about cats instead of conforming to a stereotype - and what is wrong with that?

I think the film also plays with how your impression of the truth of something can be twisted and modified by coming into contact with second or third hand portrayals of something first - of seeing the imitator before the original - for example what would somebody unfamiliar with JFK take away from that bizarre moving doll and song playing in the Japanese department store? And what does seeing that do to someone's pre-existing image of JFK? Will I ever be able to see footage of his "ask not what your country will do for you" speech without flashing back to that department store robot?(!)

Some of the most powerful moments in the film come from the brief moments or the insignificant detail lingered on that seems to sum up the whole experience. Probably the major example is the brief direct glance from the African woman, but I also thought the way the camera continued to return to the one doll in the fire during the Japanese burning ceremony was showing a connection with an object on a more meaningful level - the camera and editing was illustrating a feeling of having an emotional connection with that particular doll, and that feeling could stand for all those once loved dolls being let go of.

Something that Gorin mentions in his interview is that the film is so dense it is intended to be impossible to completely comprehend but instead of being so dense to pound the viewer into awed submission it seems the intent is to produce something where each member of the audience remembers different moments of the film from their viewing, such as the dogs playing around in the surf or the manufactured castle seen from the bus on the way into Tokyo. It would be the perfect film to sit down with people afterwards and find out about the moments they took from it - I get the impression you could learn a lot about people from their take on the film!

I wonder if Patrick Keiller's later films London and Robinson In Space were influenced by Sans Soleil? Journeys whose meanings are manufactured in the editing room from seemingly unconnected footage but which serve to create a unique portrayal of the era?

Marker was a part of the "Left Bank" group of filmmakers in the French New Wave movement, whereas Godard, Truffaut et al were the right bank group. Marker, along with others like Varda, Rouch, etc. certainly wanted to rebel against the staid institution of French cinema all the same, but they went about it differently; they were more concerned with political motivations, etc.

Sans Soleil, as one of my favorite films, is now the first entry in my new ongoing series of visual essays on films that have inspired and moved me, called Films I Love.

Jonathan Rosenbaum has made his commissioned, and ultimately unused essay for the Sans Soleil, available here.

A book which may appeal to some people here dedicated to La Jetée written by Janet Harbord to be published in March by Afterall Books. This is part of a series called One Work in which:

Guardian piece on LA JETEE...

Just watched this disc last night...I'm still somewhat reeling from Sans Soleil, which was much denser than I had expected. Watching it was like whipping through an entire book of philosophy or cultural theory by Baudrillard or Zizek in one sitting. I would almost consider treating the film like a book and revisiting it chapter by chapter in order to digest it more fully--though there's also something to be said for simply letting it wash over you like a wave or a dream. The film is more like a dream or a free-form poem than a rigorously constructed prose essay.

La Jetee was more immediately accessible for me and I immediately fell in love with it. Really haunting, lovely stuff. The sequence at the museum struck me as especially beautiful.

Haven't had a chance to work my way through the booklet essays yet, but I found the special features to be helpful (for someone new to Marker like myself, at least) in making some preliminary sense of his work. The Gorin interviews are somewhat informal but he still does a good job contextualizing Marker and the films. I'll definitely be revisiting these films at some point.

Looks like they are adding the Marker short Junkopia to the Blu-Ray. I've seen it (it might on You Tube) - small film about stuff in teh San Francisco Bay, as a start.

Junkopia is available on Ubuweb.

Beaver

I'm not at all convinced that the DVD was "plagued" with macroblocking patterns, as the Blu-ray.com review says. (The review suggests getting out the DVD and finding the frame to compare to one of their Blu-ray caps, but it'd be more convenient to include a comparison in the review, perhaps instead of including a full 30 caps from the Blu.)

TCM-HD showed this and "La Jetée" (which I still haven't seen) for the first time a few weeks back. My first Marker movie and I guess I need to watch this a couple of dozen more times before I truly 'get it.' On first impression I don't know what to make of "Sans Soleil" other than it's a fictitious travelogue documentary mixing still photography and color images of people in Japan, San Francisco, Iceland and Africa to get the point across that humanity shares with other cultures as much as we have cultural differences. That and "Vertigo" and cats are cool... sort of? It's like Wim Wenders' "Tokyo-Ga" (I know, not a popular comparison around here but that's exactly what I thought) but with a wider canvas of people/places/ideas to explore but the same 'what makes these people tick?' quizzical narrative force of an individual European filmmaker asking the questions. Marker jumps through many hoops (narration by the woman reading what she's written to the fictitious cameraman) to distance himself from his own work, the equivalent of Ozu not moving the camera in his latter movies to remove distracting pans/tilts from the viewer's attention being focused on the people/places the camera captures.

There is a lot more Marker out there to sample ("La Jetée" is still sitting unwatched in the DVR), and "Sans Soleil" is an abstract-enough viewing experience to tempt to me seek more. Guess the mistake I made is that what I brought to seeing "Sans Soleil" is exactly what I'm getting out of it: not much. It was just another movie to watch because I had a couple of hours to kill, and that's how I felt after seeing it: I killed two hours, big whoop.

Wait, with all due respect dad1153, The Raid and minor Zulawskis didn't waste your time but Sans Soleil did?

Your comparison to Tokyo-Ga seems right to me. All the more odd, I guess, that you don't like the Marker film, being that it seems to me the quintessential filmed essay -- as personal, idiosyncratic and digressive as any of the greatest literary essays -- and one without which later films like Wenders' would likely not have been possible and certainly not have been the same.

Godard once said something like "One should put everything into a film." And in Sans Soleil, Marker has, including everything he loves about and wonders about life on the planet. Among many other things, it's probably also the first important documentary about globalization. It's not a travelogue through physical space so much as it is a journey through Marker's mind as he ponders what air travel and computers and urban life and mass culture have done to our brains. His meandering musings about cats and video games and Vertigo, as disparate as they may appear at first, are unified by a common philosophical theme: the drive to make sense of this world and his place in it.

Maybe you should see it again sometime.

Honestly, I didn't respond strongly to the first Marker I saw, or the second- for me, he's a filmmaker whose work seems stronger with every instance of it I see, because I think it's sometimes hard to follow the train of thought in some of his films until you get a sense of how he thinks. La Jetee is an exception there- it's pretty immediately penetrable- but I think I understood Sans Soleil better once I watched A Grin Without a Cat and The Case of the Grinning Cat and a few more of his shorts.

It's worth it, though, he's a fascinating filmmaker.

Can't compare another director's atypical mise-en-scene and a conventional (though extremely well done) action picture with what is obviously a director's attempt to get his singular vision across through unconventional mise-en-scene. I'll give you this much though: "Sans Soleil" is better than Zulawski's "On the Silver Globe" (then again, almost anything is) and on par with "My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days" in tolerance-testing. I'd rather rewatch "Sans Soleil" than "My Nights..." but I don't really care to see either one for a very, very long time.

I finally watched "La Jetée" last night. I had to ask myself an honest question afterwards: would I have enjoyed "La Jetée" if I hadn't already seen "12 Monkeys" (a movie I like but I'm not particularly endeared to)? And the honest answer is no, if I didn't know the inspiration for Gilliam's movie was this 27 min. short film of B&W still images (26.5 if you exclude the so-startling few moments of movement), music and narration I wouldn't have enjoyed "La Jetée" at all. Without the Hollywood version of the same story filling in the unseen pieces of the narrative I would have been bored stiff by the B&W still photography (which looks rather silly actually). Reading through this forum I think the reason this and "Sans Soleil" didn't work for me is that, prior to seeing them, I had no idea who Chris Marker was. I had a vague idea of Marker's rep and mise-en-scene but I think the more you know and like Chris (not necessarily the man but his style and view of the world) the more likely you are to appreciate his work and his POV, i.e. 'Chris' World.' Plus I'm a dog lover, so... :wink:

I'm going to learn more about Marker and then re-visit these (which I gather are his two more accesible films, content and availability-wise) at a later date. I'm curious-enough to keep an open mind, but not impressed-enough to lie to myself (or you) and say he's changed my perception of cinema or storytelling technique. If anything "La Jetée" made me appreciate more than ever the importance of movement in cinema as a key compenent of the fictitious narrative movie-watching experience (even if its 'Jeanne Dielman'-type slow movement).

Really? I'm not sure learning all that much more about Marker will make a huge difference. I came into both these films cold. Only knowing of their reputation as things I "had to see" based on what other film nerds and interesting students and teachers at my college were into. And, though I wanted and needed to see both films multiple times, there was nothing huge that was hidden from me on a first viewing.

For me it's Marker's incredible imagination and his unique vision, his ability to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange with the most minimal of means that impresses me so much in these two films. Both of them are in many ways science fiction films of everyday life, about the strangeness and futurity of much of the world we're already living in, like the jetty at Orly airport or the streets of modern Tokyo. And about how memory itself is time travel.

La Jetée seems to me an all-time masterpiece of science fiction, with more elegance, mystery and imagination than most of the sci-fi features or novels I've ever encountered. I really can't relate at all to seeing La Jetée as mere supplement to 12 Monkeys, which I caught a few minutes of again a few weeks ago and found laughably bad. When people heap praise on filmmakers like Terry Gilliam for being so darn imaginative, I can't understand what they're talking about. For me, imagination has little to do with the fabrication of creatures and sets, much more to do with engendering a state of mind in the viewer such that he/she co-creates a fully imagined world for the film as its unfolding -- one that extends beyond the edges of the frame. I guess if you're uncomfortable with the work that Marker invites you to do then maybe a fills-in-all-the-blanks and connects-all-the-dots film like 12 Monkeys is more your speed.

Marker collaborated with Alain Resnais before he struck out on his own. There's a very good and very Marker-esque yet still fairly mainstream short on the Marienbad Criterion about the French National Library called "All The Memory In The World." That might be worth a look too.

Oh, you don't have to be all backhanded and condescending about it, Oates, I think La Jetee is fundamentally a more interesting work too but pulling the 'pff maybe you're just not working hard enough, go back to Hollywood movies' thing isn't going to lead anyone to want to follow what you're saying. Moreover, I see no reason why the brilliance of La Jetee has to be at the expense of 12 Monkeys, which you evidently haven't even watched.

The Gilliam is an interesting, moving, well performed piece of narrative cinema. La Jetee is something totally different- that story is in there, but also a meditation on Vertigo, a feeling of time collapsed into a single moment (which the photoplay aspect of the piece enhances immensely) and as you point out a work that makes the familiar seem totally alien (as Marker's post-apocalyptic city is more or less just carefully chosen shots of Paris, which is actually something that Gilliam picked up on in several places.) I think going into the Marker with the idea that it's just going to be the story of 12 Monkeys might be something of a straightjacket- the way going into 2001 after reading the Clarke novel was for me- but there are an unbelievable number of things going on in it for a 30 minute short.

I have the "Marienbad" Blu-ray warren oates, I'll check out that short. And me not liking these two Marker movies doesn't mean I'm a led-by-the-director's-hand pet viewer. I don't even care/like Gilliam's work (outside his 'Monty Python' films) that much except for "Time Bandits" (which rocks), or think that highly of "12 Monkeys" other than it's a better-than-most time travel sci-fi tale with an unforgettable ending. I just found both "La Jetée" and "Sans Soleil" disorienting and joyless cinematic experiences as they are, and I came to them the same way you did (by reputation of them being revered classic works of alternative narrative), but there's a kernal of curiosity left in me to not shut my mind completely to sample more Marker stuff down the line. It's just going to take some time and a considerable crushing of my kevyip pile down to manageable numbers for me to get back to it.