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La Jetee and Sans Soleil
Mar. 17th, 2012 12:40 pmWe sat down last night to watch two films by French new wave director Chris Marker, Le Jetee and Sans Soleil. If you liked Twelve Monkeys, Le Jetee is a must-see. The main idea for that film comes from this half hour long movie told entirely in black and white photographs. In post-apocalyptic Paris, a prisoner is subjected to time travel experiments. I liked the minimalism of it and the style would be easy for anyone to imitate - it must have been a very inexpensive film to make.
Sans Soleil was much more difficult to watch and we started dozing off around the hour mark. I had assumed both films were science fiction, but Sans Soleil is not quite a mockumentary, travelogue or narrative film. It was a bit long at an hour and a half, and I think it could have used some tighter editing. It's mostly interesting from the viewpoint of being a snapshot of Japanese life in the early 1980s interspersed with scenes of guerilla warfare in Guinea-Bissau. The narrative is provided by a woman's voice in the form of letters addressed to her from a friend, traveller and cameraman, Sandor Krasna. There is very little action, a little bit of humour, but it was like mostly like being stuck in someone's vacation slide hell after a while. The foreign nature of the subject matter to a Western audience is supposed to call in themes about accuracy, fact, and such. Some of the footage was obviously stock, and some of the synthesized effects were just painful because of their dated appearance.
Sans Soleil was much more difficult to watch and we started dozing off around the hour mark. I had assumed both films were science fiction, but Sans Soleil is not quite a mockumentary, travelogue or narrative film. It was a bit long at an hour and a half, and I think it could have used some tighter editing. It's mostly interesting from the viewpoint of being a snapshot of Japanese life in the early 1980s interspersed with scenes of guerilla warfare in Guinea-Bissau. The narrative is provided by a woman's voice in the form of letters addressed to her from a friend, traveller and cameraman, Sandor Krasna. There is very little action, a little bit of humour, but it was like mostly like being stuck in someone's vacation slide hell after a while. The foreign nature of the subject matter to a Western audience is supposed to call in themes about accuracy, fact, and such. Some of the footage was obviously stock, and some of the synthesized effects were just painful because of their dated appearance.
