Sans soleil. 1983. France. Written and directed by Chris Marker. DCP courtesy Janus Films. In French; English subtitles. 100 min.
Sarah Maldoror shot clandestine footage of liberation fighters in Guinea-Bissau on the eve of independence from Portugal in 1974. She gave this material, intended for a film she never completed about the revolutionary poet Amílcar Cabral, who was assassinated in January 1973, to her friend Chris Marker, who used it for his own masterful, globe-trotting essay film Sans soleil. Marker offers far-ranging dispatches from a Tokyo bar called La Jetée and the San Francisco streets of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, along with scenes of child’s play in rural Iceland and Indigenous resistance on the Bijagos Islands, observing that “[Africa]...is represented by two of its poorest and most forgotten countries, even though they played a central role: Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde islands.” Fusing Marker’s unique brand of Marxism with Surrealism, Sans soleil is a beguiling collection of disparate images and electronic sounds that becomes, in the words of one of his most astute observers, Jonathan Rosenbaum, “a musical conversation that sings to us about the differences between past and present, colonizer and colonized, witness and participant, reporter and friend.”