Letters From an Unknown Filmmaker- Chris Marker's Sans Soleil and the Politics of Memory

8/8/2019 Letters From an Unknown Filmmaker- Chris Marker's Sans Soleil and the Politics of Memory

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12/08/2010 10:06 ..Rhizomes 8: Chuck Tryon

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rhizomes.08 spring 2004

Letters from an Unknown Filmmaker: Chris Marker'sSans Soleiland the Politics of MemoryChuck Tryon

[1] During an early sequence of his 1982 film, Sans Soleil, Chris Marker's

restless camera records what he describes as a Japanese ceremony for

broken dolls. On a specific day every year, Marker tells us, Japanese girls

bring their broken dolls to this ceremony to be consumed by a fire. In the

shot we witness the detritus of everyday life, the discarded objects that might

provide us with an interpretive clue for understanding our position within

mass culture. A following shot shows a broken doll Marker later found in the

marketplace in Guinea Bissau. The shot of the burning dolls seems to suggest

the speed with which they have become outmoded, fallen out of fashion. This

disjunction between the temporality of Guinea-Bissau and of Japan provides

Marker with a position from which he can consider, more broadly, the

construction of cinematic time and space. These questions of constructions of

time and space inevitably have political consequences in that our

understandings of time and space inform our definitions of history, memory,

utopia, crisis, and revolution [1]. Sans Soleil, itself an artifact from analready receding past, uses emergent digital technologies to disrupt the

reified, regulated time of cinematic movement in order to challenge the

dominant historical narratives ofthe 1980s that had come to celebrate the

spectacular culture associated with the expansion of capitalism into new

sectors of the world and the subsequent transformations of everyday life that

this expansion entails. In Sans Soleil, this reflection on cinematic time takes

the form of a traveling filmmaker who circles the globe, filming images that

capture his interest. Through this figure, Sans Soleiloffers a new way of
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seeing and thinking not only our relationship to images but also the role of

images-cinematic and otherwise-in producing our experience of time. This

disruptive force involves the relative temporal structures of cinema,

television, and new media as they impose upon definitions of history,

memory, and utopia, in that the disruption of reified and regulated cinematic

time constitutes an interruption of the standardized chronological time thatemerges with the development of industrial capitalism. This disruption of

chronological time also enacts a resistance to the present that can be

understood as a starting point for utopian thinking.

[2]Sans Soleilemploys a time-travel narrative in order to reflect on the

temporality of cinematic, televisual, and digital images. The film focuses on

the journeys of a fictional filmmaker, Sandor Krasna, who travels around the

globe, filming whatever interests him and sending those images to an unseen

woman, Alexandra Stewart, who reads, paraphrases, and sometimes

comments on the letters that accompany his films. In one of his "letters," the

filmmaker reports that he has become interested in "the coexistence of

different concepts of time." Marker's film generally consists of documentary

footage taken in Japan, Guinea-Bissau, San Francisco, and Iceland, though

many of the film's images are composed on a synthesizer that Krasna refers

to as "The Zone," in homage to Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. Thesedocumentary images are reworked, worked on, by the new technology of the

computer synthesizer, establishing Marker's complicated analysis of the

viewing technologies of the cinema and television and the new one associated

with the computer. Sans Soleilshifts restlessly between Iceland, Japan, and

Guinea-Bissau, drifting back and forth between the 1960s and the 1980s,

simulating the space and time travel of the cinematic time machine. These

cinematic journeys, which resemble the unpredictable rhythms of memory

itself, allow Marker to create a "resistant memory" through the work

performed by the computer synthesizer, which "remembers" the images of

the past, but also transforms them, reactivating them in a new context, for

the purposes of political transformation [2]. This physical transformation of

the image becomes a means of rethinking the ways in which the past is

rewritten by technologies of history and memory and therefore provides a key

for resisting the current social order, which Marker accomplishes through the

disruption of cinematic time, which he presents as homologous to thedisruption of the everyday. Through the "disruptive" visual interpretations he
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creates in the Zone, Marker reactivates the forces of resistance from the

social revolutions in the 1960s, reclaiming them for the present in the spirit

of continued resistance against domination. This emphasis on disruption,

figured through the Zone, allows Marker to think historically, while at the

same privileging the act of creating new concepts and mew images.

The Emergence of Post-Cinematic Time

[3] In order to understand the disruptive force of Marker's cinematic time

machine, it is important to keep in mind that cinema itself has long been

understood in terms of its capacity for representing time. Within discussions

of film theory, it is not uncommon to understand cinema as a type of time

machine, a technology that, figuratively speaking, can transport us through

time and space. Anne Friedberg, tracing cinema's tendency toward producing

time-shifting experiences, notes that cinema constructs what she calls a

"mobilized, virtual gaze," which had the potential to provide spectators with

the illusion of being transported in time and space. Friedberg reads this

virtual mobility as potentially overwhelming to viewers who were not familiar

or comfortable with such time-shifting technologies, creating the effect of

"detemporalized" spectators [3]. Friedberg's concept of a detemporalized

spectator seems to imply an original, temporalizedsubject-before theemergence of the cinema and other time-shifting technologies who had an

unmediated relationship to time.

[4] More crucially, this understanding of cinema as producing temporal

disorientation requires a cinematic time characterized by the construction of a

reified, regulated, linear time. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Mary

Ann Doane notes that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

"the emerging cinema participated in a more general cultural imperative, the

structuring of time and contingency in capitalist modernity" (3-4). Doane

argues that new technologies of representation led to a thorough

reconsideration of the representability of time, a question that re-emerges in

contemporary considerations of digital technologies and their relationship to

the construction of time. In this context, it is important to note that I am not

arguing for the existence of a natural, or unmediated, experience of time that

antecedes the emergence of cinema and other "time-shifting" technologies.Instead, cinema is one of many technologies that emerge during industrial


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capitalism that were involved in changing human representations and

experiences of time and space. The image of time that emerged in the early

twentieth century, Doane points out, "became increasingly reified,

standardized, stabilized, and rationalized" (5), a temporal organization that

can be understood in terms of the inexorable progression of photograms at

twenty-four frames per second through the film projector [4]. Doane furtherargues that this rationalized, irreversible time is complicit with "notions of the

inevitability of a technologically induced historical progress" (7).

[5] This automatic movement produces, as Gilles Deleuze points out, an

automatism of thought as well, reinforcing habitual ways of seeing and

thinking [5]. Deleuze describes this relationship in terms of the transition

from the regime of the movement-image into that of the time-image. Rather

than the ordered, logical, and rational movement of chronological time

associated with the early cinema's attempts to track movement, the time-

image becomes identified with "images of disorder, instability, and diversity"

(Rodowick 16). Deleuze argues that the crisis of the movement-image grew

out of an increasing number of situations that outstripped our abilities to

react and describe [6]. Like Deleuze and Doane, I see the cinema of the

movement-image as producing habitual ways of thinking and seeing. Further,

cinematic time develops alongside other technologies-such as the assemblyline and railroad transportation that have similar effects on structuring

experiences of time and space [7]. It thus becomes the goal of cinema to

create new concepts of time.

[6] Against the irreversible linearity of cinematic movement, other

temporalities can and do emerge to challenge this notion of progress. In fact,

it is precisely this homogeneous time that allows for Marker's temporal

experimentation in Sans Soleil. During the opening sequences of the film,

Sans Soleiluses tracking shots taken from the window of a commuter train,

creating a homology between the linear movement of the train along the

railroad tracks and the steady progression of the filmstrip through the movie

projector. Gradually, in Sans Soleil, as new visual technologies are introduced

into the narrative, this homogeneous cinematic time begins to unravel,

opening the film up to the temporal structures of television and computers. In

this context, it is important to recall that cinema itself constantly engagesmultiple temporalities simultaneously. Thus far, I have been speaking
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primarily of the temporality of the apparatus itself, the ordered movement of

film frames through the projector, but against that temporal movement, we

must also consider the temporality of reception, which may very well be

distinct from the apparatus, despite efforts to fuse them together. Further,

the time of the narrative itself may diverge considerably from the time of the

apparatus and the time of reception.

[7] In Sans Soleil, Marker not only disrupts the regulated chronological time

of cinema with the incursion of the digital, but he also makes visible time

relations within the image by invoking pasts that haunt the present, but may

also provide a key to transforming the present and the future. This approach

to cinema is consistent with what D.N. Rodowick refers to as a "utopian art

and philosophy." According to Rodowick, "The utopian aspect of art and

philosophy is the perpetuation of a memory of resistance. This is a resistance

to habitual repetition-a time that is calculated, rationalized, and reified. But it

is also a resistance to all forms of commerce or exchange, whether in the

form of communication or that of commodities" (204). Sans Soleilenacts this

form of resistance by disrupting cinematic time through the new digital

technology that Marker refers to as "The Zone," which is explicitly portrayed

as breaking the habitual repetition of the "everydays" of both Tokyo and

Guinea-Bissau and recovering forgotten aspects of their pasts in order totransform the present.

[8]Sans Soleilchallenges these dominant narratives, in part, through its

critique of documentary form. One of the typical expectations of documentary

filmmaking is that the film will be "objective" in its presentation, that the

camera, because it is "objective" can or will present the material it films

without bias. In "Signs of the Time," Laura U. Marks writes, "documentary's

discursive stumbling block is the myth of objectivity" (201). According to

Marks, because the ideal of truth in documentary filmmaking is based upon a

fiction, working within the logic of objectivity will always reaffirm the

dominant history. Marker resists this logic through his efforts to acknowledge

the subjectivity of his approach to the images he films. He emphasizes the

filmmaker's subjectivity through the trope of the letters or "cinematic

postcards" that the film's fictional filmmaker sends to the unseen narrator. At

the same time, this "subjectivity" is complicated by the distancing effect ofthe narrative premise of the fictional filmmaker Sandor Krasna. Further, the


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narrator's comments on the letters emphasize the role of the viewer in

making sense of the images. Catherine Lupton affirms this complication of the

distinction between objective and subjective images, commenting that this

layering of recollections in Sans Soleil"alert us to the fact that even the most

apparently spontaneous verbal expressions of personal memory are no less

representational and conventional than filmed images" [8]. Instead of anauthoritative account of these global relations, Marker offers us a partial

narrative, one that is clearly filtered through the lens, and language, of the

fictional filmmaker. Through this method, Marker avoids the dangers of

producing a purely objective or subjective image of Japan or Guinea-Bissau.

[9] This recognition of the difficulties of representation and recollection

manifests itself in Krasna's reflection on how to film the women of Guinea-

Bissau, culminating in a series of medium-close-ups of African women in the

marketplace conducting their daily business. The camera sustains a respectful

distance, looking closely without invading the space of the other. These

sequences acknowledge Marker's self-consciousness about the possibility that

his camera may be seen as invasive. As Olu Oguibe observes, "Wherever

open hostility developed towards the camera, it almost always had to do

more with the invasive tactics of its European operators than with a peculiar

African inability to understand or accept the medium" (567) [9]. WhenMarker films the African women, most of the women look into the camera

with a frankness that contradicts the cinematic practice of creating the false

image of an objective event taking place in front of a silently observing

camera. This sequence culminates in an exchange of glances between

Krasna's camera and an African woman: "I see her. She sees me. She drops

me her glance but just at an angle where it is still possible act as though it

was not addressed to me." Finally the woman looks directly into the camera,

but only for the duration of one film frame, reinforcing the extent to which

cinematic movement is the product of isolated photograms passing

relentlessly through the projector.

Marker's Cinematic Postcards

[10] In order to develop these questions about cinematic time and memory,

Sans Soleilalso investigates the problem of cinematic address, meditatingnot just on the recording and production of motion pictures, but their
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reception and transmission as well. This conceptualization of the cinema

reworks the formula offered by Jean-Luc Godard who once claimed that "to

make cinema or television, technically, is to send twenty-five postcards per

second to millions of people, either in time or in space, of that which

technically can only be unreal" (quoted in Dienst 129). The logic of the

postcard as a system for thinking about images, messages, and theirtransmission is developed in Jacques Derrida's The Post Card, with the

postcard becoming a means for thinking about not only the relationship

between sound and image, but also about the need for sufficient postage, the

tremendous capital required to make a film. Postcards also require a correct

address, an audience that is directly addressed by the film [10]. In Sans

Soleil, the visuals are accompanied by the voice of an unseen woman,

Alexandra Stewart, reading letters she has ostensibly received from aglobetrotting filmmaker, Sandor Krasna. This motif makes us more fully

aware that the sender of these images, Marker or Krasna, chooses only those

images that interest him. At the same time, the unseen reader receives the

letters, sorts through them, making connections, and interpreting them in the

light of the images that accompany them. More significantly, the postcards

convey a sense of fragmentation, of partial and incomplete narratives that

stand in for the fragmentation of contemporary experiences of time and

space.

[11] This notion of travel is also bound up in the image of the postcard,

which as Malek Alloula notes, always involves traversing spatial and temporal

distances: "Travel is the essence of the postcard, and expedition is its mode.

It is the fragmentary return to the mother country. It straddles two spaces:

the one it represents and the one it will reach. In the postcard there is the

suggestion of complete metaphysics of uprootedness" (520). Only a small

number of shots in the film were filmed in France, Marker's home. Marker's

alter ego, Sandor Krasna, has the capital necessary to make these journeys

around the globe, a position that is open only to a small number of people.

His apparent unregulated mobility suggests a liberation from the regulation of

a public time-schedule based on his apparent freedom to travel unlike the

forced mobility of many of the people that Krasna encounters during his

journeys across the globe. In Questions of Travel, Caren Kaplan addresses

the various distinctions between travel and displacement, reminding us thatfor many people, the world has changed so deeply that "staying home" is no


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longer possible (7). Thus, images of travel are always marked by other terms

that signal far less desirable separations from home-displacement,

homelessness, and exile, a theme that returns with incredible frequency in

Sans Soleil. Marker's attention to Tokyo's unemployed and homeless during

the opening sequences of the film underscores this focus. This sense of

uprootedness is also reflected in the experiences of the people of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands, whom Krasna describes as "travelers,

wanderers, and navigators." Finally, Marker considers another, more

pernicious form of displacement when Krasna reflects on the experiences of

the men and women of Okinawa who were suddenly thrust into the twentieth

century due to the violent World War II battles that took place on the island

country. He reports that gift shops now sell cigarette lighters modeled on the

hand grenades that several Okinawa girls used to commit suicide rather thanface the brutality of the war. More recently, the American military base on

the island brings with it the detritus of contemporary capitalism and Western

culture, such as bowling alleys and gas stations, with the result that the

indigenous culture of the island will be lost forever, with history being

transformed into mere image.

[12] It is also important to note that all postcards require sufficient postage

in order to ensure delivery. In this context, the "stamp" of a documentaryfilm would be the funding required for production and distribution, and as

Marks observes, funding institutions tend to privilege those films that already

have an established viewpoint: "The funding process therefore biases

documentary production to prejudge the world, rather than to allow the world

to flow into the film" (202). This approach to documentary filmmaking

obviates the creation of new thoughts and merely reproduces accepted truths

about the world [11]. Such an approach not only limits the production of new

concepts, it also affirms the existent social order. As Richard Dienst observes,

"The stamp commemorates a payment to tradition, to heritage and authority"

(139). In this sense, the goal of a critical documentary filmmaker is to

counteract the official discourse, in Marker's case, on the global relations

being mapped by the Cold War proliferation of destructive weapons and the

capitalist expansion into new markets. Throughout the film, the images

captured by Marker's camera struggle against already established meanings

or interpretations of Japan and Guinea Bissau.


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"Only Banality Still Interests Me": Marker and the Everyday

[13] Marker's critique of documentary filmmaking in Sans Soleil is informed

by his complicated treatment of the everyday. Kransa introduces this focus

on the everyday early in the film, commenting, "I've been around the world

and now only banality still interests me. On this trip, I've tracked it with therelentlessness of a bounty hunter." This "everyday" is intimately linked to the

homogeneous time of the dominant history and the reified, regulated time of

the cinematic image. During an early sequence of the film, Marker develops a

critique of the everyday-the Japanese commuters rising before dawn to travel

to the city center and the African women shopping in the marketplace-

through images of repetition. The implacable movement of film frames

through the motion picture projector echoes the rhythm of the commuter

train, with tracking shots out the train's window confirming this perception,

this way of seeing. This contemplation on the everyday is framed through

Kransa's reference to Sei Shonagon, the 11th century poet who, according to

Krasna, drew "a melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest

things," by creating lists of elegant things, things not worth doing, and things

that quicken the heart. Krasna identifies himself with Shonagon, noting that

her lists are "not a bad criteria" when he is filming his cinematic postcards. At

the same time, the references to Sei Shonagon emphasize the act of

creation, her act of producing the lists that so profoundly affected Japanese

culture.

[14] By everyday, I mean precisely the banality, the daily activities that are

taken as commonplace, habitual, or normative, the repetition that prevents

thinking. At the same time, the everyday involves the possibility of the

chance occurrence that can potentially disrupt it. In his discussion of Henri

Lefebvre, Peter Osborne comments that "in the past, the everyday was

offset by the interruptive break of the religious holiday, the festival, or the

carnival. In capitalist societies, on the other hand, the break from work

becomes increasingly routinized within the everyday" (193). Marker engages

with this tension throughout Sans Soleil: shots of carnivals in Guinea Bissau

link to images of neighborhood festivals in Japan. Japan fascinates Krasna in

part because of the many religious ceremonies he encounters and their

implied connection to an ancient past, but at the same time, there is thedanger that these ceremonies may lose their ruptural force, instead


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interruptive technology of Zone.

Impossible Connections

[17]Sans Soleilasks us to think through the multiple temporalities of cinema

in order to rethink the politics of the representation of time. This problem issituated around the logic of cinematic movement and the concept of the

everyday. In order to investigate this relationship between cinematic time

and the everyday, Marker opens with a compelling montage sequence that is

fulfilled only much later in the film. The film opens with a strip of black

leader, as Alexandra Stewart reads one of Krasna's letters: "The first image

he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland." We then see,

without any sound or narration of any kind, a shot of three laughing children

walking across a lush green field in Iceland in 1965. Over black leader, the

film's narrator recounts that

He said that for him it was the image of happiness, and also

that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but

it never worked. He wrote me, "one day I'll have to put it all

alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black

leader. If they don't see the happiness, at least they'll see the

black."

The image of happiness cannot be "seen" in its fullness, recognized, until the

film cuts to a segment of black leader, disconnecting the shot from the rest

of the film and calling attention to the cut, to the links between images and

how they create meaning. In this sequence, Sans Soleilintroduces the

"postcard" motif, with Krasna's letters and images traversing distances of

time, space, and thought, while also establishing a disjunction between soundand image, between what the camera witnesses and what the filmmaker says

about it. However, rather than affirming either sound or image as primary,

Sans Soleilputs into play the tension between the two in order to rethink,

and potentially rework, cinematic representation. The voice-over narration

emphasizes the opposition between the camera capturing the image and the

relays and gaps between filming the image and broadcasting it, while

establishing the distinction between sound and image. This method

immediately invokes the fragmentary logic of the postcard motif, recalling for


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the viewer the representational limits of both sound and image, specifically in

the context of ethical documentary filmmaking. Laura U. Marks comments

that in cinema, "image and sound tracks usually corroborate each other, but

they can also be used to undermine each other, to show the limit of what

each is able to represent" (204). This limitation has powerful implications in

that it gestures toward the impossibility of representing everydayexperiences. The image is initially isolated, stranded, at the beginning of the

film, in a self-conscious resistance to images that are easily understood and

connected to other contexts.

[18] The impossibility of linking two seemingly incommensurable shots is

reinforced by the physical and temporal "space" between the first two shots

of the film. Following this strip of black leader, we see acquired footage of

bomber planes disappearing into an aircraft carrier and satellites orbiting

around the earth, recalling the Cold War context in which the film was made,

suggesting the potential for apocalyptic destruction and placing the entire film

under the sign of crisis. This framing narrative will return later in the film

when Krasna "returns" to Iceland a few years after he filmed the children,

when a volcano erupted burying their village. The implication is that this

moment captured by Krasna's restless movie camera-"the image of

happiness"-has been endangered, that it cannot be connected to thecontemporary situation in which he produces the film. The bomber planes and

Polaris missiles might also be understood in terms of their relationship to

cinematic perception, echoing the arguments made by Paul Virilio, who has

linked cinematic perception to the logistics of war and fascism [12].

[19] Shots of satellites floating over the earth have a slightly different

significance. As Lisa Parks points out, "both satellites and computer networks

became the quintessential strategic technologies, emerging at the peak of the

Cold War" (279). For Parks, while computer networks, during the Cold War,

had the tendency to close worldly space, satellites had the opposite effect,

suggesting that "the world would become a smaller and more intimate place"

(279). The satellite photographs, which began to appear during the 1960s

context crucial to Marker's politics, reinforce this notion of fragility associated

with the isolated "image of happiness" at the beginning of the film. However,

as Parks points out, more recent projects, such as the Digital Earth, shouldremind us that these satellite representations are far from innocent and may


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have the effect of presenting a Eurocentric, culturally elitist, and sanitized

history that reinforces official discourses on global relations. Marker's film

explicitly challenges this ideology by invoking the images of the satellites and

reinscribing them precisely in order to challenge these discourses.

[20] These impossible linkages, connected through the narrative structure ofthe traveling filmmaker, anticipate the shift in time and space from 1960s

Iceland through 1980s Japan and finally to Guinea Bissau, with Marker

himself shifting to a focus on opening up, and rupturing, the everyday. After

the shot of the bomber planes, Sans Soleil cuts to an early morning ferry off

Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan, carrying sleeping commuters into

Tokyo. During this sequence, Marker begins his reflection on the everyday,

linking it to the repetition of cinematic movement through the tracking shots

taken from the window of the ferry from Hokkaido and the commuter train

entering Tokyo. Krasna comments in one of his letters that "rich and harried

Japanese take the plane. Others take the ferry. Waiting, immobility, snatches

of sleep-curiously, all of that makes me think of a past or future war. Night

trains, air raids, fallout shelters; small fragments of war enshrined in

everyday life" (my emphasis) [13]. Because the shots of the commuters

follow several shots of powerfully destructive weapons, the specters of past

and future violence-including the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima andNagasaki-haunt the image, but at the same time, the shot sequence

emphasizes the extent to which these technologies condition the

everydayness of Japanese life.

[21] This shot sequence introducing the everyday life of Japan is disrupted by

a cut to shots of the everyday in Guinea-Bissau; the "spectacular culture" of

Tokyo is contrasted with the African marketplace. Marker interrupts the

everyday of Tokyo through the sudden, unexpected cut to shots of ordinary

life in the tiny African nation of Guinea-Bissau. It might be tempting to see

these sequences in isolation, to read them in terms of two versions of daily

experience, as if the idea of "everyday life has always existed," but Sans

Soleilshort-circuits that interpretation, focusing instead on how the two

locations have much different experiences of time and space. This disruption

pivots, in part, on the different temporalities established during these

sequences, and these temporal structures are reflected in part by thecontrasting modes of production identified with the two locations. During this


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sequence, Stewart recalls that Krasna had "contrasted African time to

European time and also to Asian time. He said that in the nineteenth century,

mankind had come to terms with space and that the great question of the

twentieth century was the coexistence of different concepts of time" [14].

This division between the two concepts of time is explicitly connected to

technologies of visual representation. Tokyo is characterized as a culturecompletely immersed in spectacle, with televisions, robots, and computers

dominating the mise-en-scne, while Guinea-Bissau is initially identified with

the illusion of realism associated with documentary filmmaking. Images of

work and leisure in Guinea-Bissau might initially appear to be unmediated,

the result of a camera objectively filming whatever happens to pass in front

of it, but the disjunction between sound and image shatters this apparent

objectivity.

[22] During this sequence, Marker also explains his fascination with Guinea

Bissau and the Cape Verde islands, noting that they successfully fought a

guerilla war, led by Amilcar Cabral, against their Portuguese colonizers, with

Krasna recalling in one letter that "they did what they could," freeing

themselves from their Portuguese colonizers. After the successful revolution

against the injustices of colonialism, the two nations fell into political strife.

Amilcar Cabral was assassinated before he had a chance to lead the postwargovernment, and one of Cabral's former generals led a coup against Cabral's

brother, Luis, forcing him into exile in Cuba. As Krasna points out, this

revolutionary moment is in danger of being forgotten, lost within the official

discourses that neglect this history. At the same time, Marker suggests that

contemporary images of Guinea Bissau are inadequate in representing this

history or the experiences of the people of Guinea Bissau and the Cape Verde

islands. Instead, new ways of seeing must be imagined.

Television, or the Sense of History

[23] Marker expands this reflection on visual technologies and their

corresponding representations of time and history by returning to Japan.

Tokyo comes across as a futuristic city, already well into the age of

simulation. In Terminal Identity, Scott Bukatman notes that the Tokyo

sequences present the city "as a science fiction metropolis" (25), producing inthe viewer a sense of disorientation due to the signs that Krasna encounters


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and chooses to film. In this context, Bukatman argues that Tokyo entails "a

proliferation of semiotic systems and simulations which increasingly serve to

replace physical human experience and interaction" (26). This alienation,

however, is still being contested, as the images of the neighborhood

ceremonies and the teenage subcultures imply. These activities continue to

offer one potential disruption of the everyday, however attenuated they mightbe. At the same time, Bukatman misreads Marker's full treatment of

spectacular culture when he identifies the experience of Tokyo as utterly

passive. Such a reading glosses the film's dialectic between the different

temporalities of Tokyo and Guinea-Bissau and their potential disruption in the

Zone.

[24] This gradual transformation of the everyday in Tokyo emerges in

Marker's treatment of Japanese television. TV, of course, offers a much

different representation of time and space than the cinema. As Richard Dienst

points out, television is "a machine for the prodigious regulated construction

and circulation of time" (159). However, unlike cinema, which tends to

produce a regulated, linear, chronological time, TV produces an experience

characterized by multiple simultaneous channels. Margaret Morse notes that

television entails "multiple worlds condensed into one visual field," adding

that "the representation of mixed and simultaneous worlds is deeply alliedwith the cultural function of television in symbolically linking

incommensurabilities of all sorts-the system of goods or commodities and the

economic relations it orders, the sexual-matrimonial system which orders

sociality, and the symbolic order of language, including images, symbols, and

the spoken and written word" (115). Television, in Tokyo, performs precisely

this operation, linking together a broad array of images, including a show on

Cambodia and a documentary on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which Krasna

struggles to understand as he watches in his hotel room, leading him to ask

whether these connections were accidents or "the sense of history." Because

the images all appear on television, they now have equal status and can be

exchanged for each other. The images that Krasna encounters span the

globe, suggesting that like the satellites that we see earlier in the film, TV

embodies a dream of "seeing" the entire world. Krasna later refers to

television as a "memory box," reinforcing this question of TV's status as an

object for organizing and ordering our experiences of time and space.


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[25] This experience of watching television is characterized by Krasna's

passivity, his inability to make sense of the images that he watches, as

Bukatman points out. Further, watching TV in Japan defamiliarizes the images

he sees, making them virtually incomprehensible, with Krasna finding that

the images of Europe are the most difficult for him. Later, Krasna reports the

sensation of feeling watched by Japanese television ("voyeurizing thevoyeurs"), a perception he reinforces by panning and tilting between stacked

televisions showing heroines from Japanese horror films, all staring directly

into the camera. This is not to suggest that television's construction of time

and space is necessarily destructive or utterly resistant to historical thinking.

Instead, as Margaret Morse points out, "'Kinks in the road' on television are

temporal in order, possibilities of irruption of the unexpected in a plot or a

schedule within an endlessness of parallel worlds which go on whetherswitched on or not" (121). This possibility of the emergence of the

unexpected will inform Marker's later attempt to use the Zone as a

technology that disrupts the everyday.

[26] This meditation on cinematic and televisual time becomes emblematic of

the contemporary experience of Tokyo, with the everyday is permeated by

the transmission and flow of images, producing a sense of passivity and

artificiality. Krasna himself reflects that Tokyo's residents have "got in thehabit of moving around in a world of appearances." Later in the film, Marker

expands the stakes of this observation as Tokyo itself becomes a film. A shot

of a transit worker collecting tickets from commuters suggests a ticket-taker

at the movie theater providing admission to a movie. The shot, showing

dozens of passengers passing through the turnstiles, also recalls the

association between repetition and the everyday established earlier in the film

in the sequence filmed from the commuter train. Then, after the commuters

have boarded the train, Marker imagines their "dreams" to be haunted by the

television broadcasts we have just watched, specifically the violent images

from Japanese samurai and horror films. The filmmaker tells us,

More and more my dreams find their setting in the department

stores of Tokyo. [] I begin to wonder if these dreams are

really mine, or if they're part of a totality, a giant collective

dream of which the entire city may be the projection. [] Thesame companies own the stores and railroads that bear their


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name. The train inhabited by sleeping people puts together all

the fragments of dreams, makes a single film of them, the

ultimate film.

The implication of imagining the city of Tokyo, specifically its department

stores connected by the subterranean rail system, as a giant collectivedream, one that must be read through the objects of that dream, the

television images that grow increasingly disturbing, and the setting, the

department stores that contribute to the production of this world of

appearances. This "collective dream" can be interpreted via Benjamin's

discussion of the Paris Arcades. Howard Hampton comments that Marker's

films "could be considered the cinematic equivalent of Benjamin's sprawling,

saturnine notebooks for his unfinished, literally interminableArcades Project"

(33) [15]. In this sense, television, fashion, and transportation all participate

in the fabrication of an everyday experience characterized simultaneously by

repetition and acceleration. It then becomes the goal of the film to

reconfigure the everyday, disrupting it in order to imagine alternative forms

of existence.

Into the Zone

[27] The world of appearances creates one possibility for reproducing an

everyday characterized by repetition and acceleration. However, there are

other possible configurations of the everyday that might challenge the official

discourse, providing a reconsideration of what can and cannot be seen and

said. In this context, it is important to emphasize that older concepts of

liberation are untenable. It is impossible to return to a pretelevisual world of

politics and the everyday. The concept of the Zone is a potentially resistant

memory in that it entails a recognition that we cannot return to a world

without television or an economy before capitalism. Instead, according to

Marker's model, we are better served by recuperating elements of the failed

revolutions of the past in order to imagine a way of transforming the present.

[28] This is not to suggest that all uses of the digital are inherently capable

of defamiliarizing or transforming the everyday. In fact, Sans Soleil

specifically shows how digital technologies, specifically video games, arealready complicit in a kind of sensory training. Krasna recalls that on one of


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his visits to Tokyo, he became fascinated by the video games that began

appearing around the city, including games built into tables so that people

could continue to play while they were eating. In these games perception is

aligned with weapons intended to shoot alien invaders in much the same way

that the Digital Earth would align the viewer with the point of view of a

sanitized historical narrative [16].

[29] Even though computer technologies have now remade constructions of

time and space in ways that reinforce the logic of consumer capitalism and

national defense, Marker identifies, in the defamiliarizing images of the Zone

an alternative means of remaking perception and rewriting memory [17]. In

order to enact this disruption, Marker thus turns to the emergent computer

technologies to work through the representability of history, and the

possibility of oppositional memory. This sequence essentially allows the

filmmaker to regain control over the image, to overcome the passivity

imposed by televisual images. Named in homage to Tarkovsky's Stalker, the

Zone radically transforms the cinematic images captured by Marker's camera.

In these sequences, shots of revolutionary soldiers led by Amilcar Cabral and

of protestors resisting the building of an airport are digitally reworked, so that

we become conscious of them as representations. Yamaneko tells Krasna at

one point that he prefers the Zone to film because at least its images callattention to the fact, admit, that they are images, inauthentic representations

of a lost past: "at least they proclaim themselves to be what they are,

images." We recognize them immediately as manipulated, partial, and

incomplete, virtually unrecognizable in comparison to the realist documentary

footage presented earlier in the film. These sequences disrupt the linear

progression of cinematic time, the reified, regulated time that represents

technological progress. Instead, they combine a lost past, one that is in

danger of being forgotten, with the anticipated future of digital technologies.

[30] Because of this complex temporality, Yamaneko sees in his synthesizer a

means for establishing an oppositional memory, telling Krasna, that if he does

not like the images of the present, then he can change the images of the

past. Because of the Zone, Yamaneko and Krasna are capable of changing

the memory of the past, of running images through the synthesizer in order

to activate the "unfulfilled but possible futures" of the social revolutions ofthe 1960s [18]. In Marker's treatment of the Zone, the political resistance of
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The Spirit of Unmailed Letters: Reactivating the UtopianImagination

[32] As I have suggested, the role of Alexandra Stewart in reading Sandor

Krasna's letters opens up this question of the temporality of reception,

including the possibility that the letters, the film, might not be received at all.At the end of the film, Krasna, largely assimilated into the culture of Tokyo to

the point that he imagines himself to be Japanese, reflects that "even if I was

expecting no letters, I stopped at the general delivery window for one must

honor the spirits of torn up letters and at the air mail counter to salute the

spirits of unmailed letters." This recollection, made at the end of the film,

over the defamiliarized and defamiliarizing images of the Zone, ultimately

reinforces the utopian logic of the Zone, with its fragmentary images that

invoke, for Marker, the possibility of a resistance to the present social order.

[33] As the film concludes, Marker takes us back into Yamaneko's Zone,

which produces the falsifying images of the 1960s struggles for liberation that

Marker had shown earlier in the film. He tells us in the final letter of the film

that he is finally persuaded by Yamaneko's enthusiasm for the Zone: "His

language touches me because he talks to that part of us which insists on

drawing profiles on prison walls, a piece of chalk to follow the contours ofthat which is not, or is no longer, or is not yet." The Zone is therefore the site

not only of opposition but also of creation, of a utopian imagination. As the

film concludes, the reader of Krasna's letters can only ask, "Will there be a

last letter?" This question suggests, of course, the impossibility of

representing everything, of capturing all the details of everyday life, but it

also implies the incomplete project of transforming the everyday, and by

extension, the impossibility of such a project ever reaching completion.

[34] Marker's film is deeply concerned with the new, the emergent, the

ephemeral, the not-yet-thought. This belief in utopia is not a belief in a new

world or a transformed world within the traditional dialectic. Instead, it is

focused purely on a resistance to the present, represented in part by the

presentness of television broadcasts, an attempt to activate the political

resistance of the past through the then emergent technologies of digitization.

Sans Soleilasks us "to believe again in the inventiveness of time where it is

possible to think and to choose other modes of existence" (GDTM 200). In


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Sans Soleil, the inventiveness of time meets the inventiveness of cinema in

the attempt to develop a utopian resistance to the present. Marker's

emphasis on the creative act, whether scribbling lists, scrawling on prison

walls, or making movies, becomes a crucial means by which we can navigate,

and potentially transform, the everyday.

Works Cited

Alloula, Malek. "From The Colonial Harem." The Visual Culture Reader. 2nd

ed. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge, 2002. 519-24.

Beller, Jonathan L. "Capital/Cinema." Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings inPolitics, Philosophy, and Culture. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1998. 77-95.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin

McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

----. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York:

Schocken, 1968.

Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904).

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

Brunette, Peter and David Willis. Screen/Play. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern

Science Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and

Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

----. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.

Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans.

Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.

Dienst, Richard. Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television. Durham:


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Duke UP, 1994.

Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity,

Contingency, and the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Studies in Parapsychology. Ed. Philip Reiff.

New York: Collier, 1963.

Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: U

of California P, 1993.

Hampton, Howard. "Remembrance of Revolutions Past." Film Comment39.3

(May/June 2003): 33.

Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement.Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Cambridge:

Harvard UP, 1983.

Kirby, Lynne. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and the Silent Cinema. Durham:

Duke UP, 1997.

Lefebvre, Henri. "The Everyday and Everydayness." Yale French Studies 73,

1987.

Lupton, Catherine. "Chris Marker: In Memory of New Technology." Silver

Threaded Presents: Chris Marker. 3 June 2002. Silverthreaded.com. 5 April

2004. http://www.silcom.com/~dlp/cm/cm_memtech.htm

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press,

2001.

Marks, Laura U. "Signs of the Time: Deleuze, Peirce, and the Documentary

Image." The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Ed.

Gregory Flaxman. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. 193-214.

Morse, Margaret. Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture.

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.

Oguibe, Olu. "Photography and the Substance of the Image." The Visual
http://www.silcom.com/~dlp/cm/cm_memtech.htm


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Culture Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge, 2002.

565-83.

Osborne, Peter. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. New York:

Verso, 1995.

Parks, Lisa. "Satellite and Cyber Visualities: Analyzing 'Digital Earth.'" The

Visual Culture Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge,

2002. 279-94.

Potter, Daniel. "Wounded Time." Silver Threaded Presents: Chris Marker. 3

June 2002. Silverthreaded.com. 5 April 2004.

http://www.vajramedia.com/Passagen/cm.home2.html

Rodowick, D. N. Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge,

1996.

Stewart, Garrett. Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. PatrickCamiller. New York: Verso, 1989.

Walsh, David. "Chris Marker and the Talking Heads: Two Films from 1983."

World Socialist Web Site. 13 May 1999. World Socialist Web Site. 4 April

2004. http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/may1999/sff4-m13.shtml

Notes

[1] For a more detailed discussion of the political valence of these terms, see

Peter Osborne's The Politics of Time.

[2] In this context, my use of the term, "resistant memory" consciously

echoes D.N. Rodowick's use of the term "memory of resistance" in Gilles

Deleuze's Time Machine.
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[3] Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping, 2.

[4] In Between Film and Screen, Garrett Stewart emphasizes this problem,

noting that cinematic movement generally seeks to suppress its basis in

photograms, the still images that create the illusion of cinematic movement.

[5] See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The

Time-Image.

[6]Cinema 2 xi.

[7] See also Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey

(1830-1904) (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992); Stephen Kern, The Culture of

Time and Space 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983); and Lynne

Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and the Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke

UP, 1997).

[8] Lupton's essay focuses primarily on Marker's more recent multimedia

work, such as Level Five and Immemory, in order to trace Marker's ongoing

interest in new media technologies and the possibility of memory. See

Lupton, "Chris Marker: In Memory of New Technology,"

http://silcom.com/~dlp/cm/cm_memtech.htm.

[9] See Olu Oguibe, "Photography and the Substance of the Image," The

Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed, Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge,

2002). Kaja Silverman echoes these observations, noting that although Sans

Soleilpresents images that are apparently ethnographic, Marker's film "does

not attempt to 'penetrate' these cultures" (186).

[10] For discussions of Derrida's The Post Cardin relationship to film theory,

see Richard Dienst's Still Life in Real Time (Durham: Duke UP, 1994), and

Peter Brunette and David Willis, Screen/Play(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989).

[11] This observation would seem to affirm the Deleuzian maxim, borrowed

from Fellini that "When there is no more money left, the film will be finished"

(77). In this context, Deleuze acknowledges that "The cinema as art itself

lives in a direct relation with a permanent plot [complot], an international

conspiracy which conditions it from within, as the most intimate and mostindispensable enemy. This conspiracy is that of money; what defines
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industrial art is not mechanical reproduction but the internalized relation with

money" (Cinema 2 77). Unfortunately, Deleuze abandons this line of

argument quickly without fully resolving this "internalized relation." In this

sense, like Jonathan L. Beller, I am somewhat troubled by Deleuze's formalist

account of cinema as an "expressive machine," which tends to reduce

emphasis on questions of political economy. See Beller, "Capital/Cinema," 86-7.

[12] See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema. See also, Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's

Time Machine, 188, and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 164-65

and 309.

[13] The shot of the commuters, associatively linked to the shot of the

bomber planes and footage of Polaris missiles through the disjunctionsbetween shots, and between sound and image tracks, suggests what Kaja

Silverman refers to in The Threshold of the Visible Worldas "Japanese war

memories" (187).

[14] Paul Virilio notes this transformation in Open Sky, commenting that in

the twentieth century, "the urbanization of real space is currently giving way

to a preliminary urbanization of real time" (9). Lev Manovich notes this logic

at work in Virilio, commenting that Virilio noted that "whereas space was the

main category of the nineteenth century, the main category of the twentieth

century was time" (278).

[15] See Howard Hampton, "Remembrance of Revolutions Past." Film

Comment39.3 (May/June 2003): 33. This Benjaminian reading also seems

confirmed by Daniel Potter's online essay, "Wounded Time," in which Potter

triangulates between Benjamin and Marker through the figure of the

collector: http://www.vajramedia.com/Passagen/cm.home2.html.

[16] Parks, 281.

[17] Lupton argues that Sans Soleilcelebrates the Zone's ability to illustrate

"the distorting, transforming operations of recollection. The Zone blocks the

illusion that mimetic images of the past give us, which is that we have

immediate access to that past."

[18] This term comes from Sigmund Freud's essay, "The Uncanny." In this
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context, it might make sense to speak of history as haunted.

[19] Marker's treatment of the 1960s gets a much more critical treatment in

David Walsh's essay on the World Socialist Web Site:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/may1999/sff4-m13.shtml. Walsh's

reading of the film ignores the dialectic between the film's mediation betweennostalgia for the 1960s and its utopian imagination associated with the new

technologies of memory that serve to "change the images of the past."
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Letters From an Unknown Filmmaker- Chris Marker's Sans Soleil and the Politics of Memory

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Transcript of Letters From an Unknown Filmmaker- Chris Marker's Sans Soleil and the Politics of Memory