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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
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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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