Chris Marker's provocative film Sans Soleil (Sunless) (1982) demonstrates how technologically-mediated ethnographic vision in the late twentieth century can foster an environment for potentially empowering and responsible ways of seeing. Presented in the intentionally- transparent guise of a documentary, the film chronicles the travels of a fictional filmmaker, Sandor Krasna, via footage he has shot in locations as diverse as Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and France, as well as via letters Krasna has written to an anonymous woman, who reads them as voice- over narration of the footage. The woman's voice-over is often ambiguously attributable (i.e., it is unclear whether she is still reading Krasna's letters or momentarily providing her own extra-textual commentary). Such vocal ambiguity upsets the narrational consistency practiced in more classically-aligned ethnographic and narrative filmmaking; it calls attention to a located perspective by challenging the too-easily located viewpoint. Still, Krasna/Marker's footage and their/his scripted letters convey a semi-autobiographical feel, through which Marker appeals to viewers to travel with--or more precisely, through--his film to experience differently situated perspectives.
Through the vehicle of Sans Soleil, Marker elegantly explores memories of variously located cultures/viewpoints, but not by " borrowing another's memories," as has been professed so often of Marker's film (e.g., Kaja Silverman 1996). Such an "amusement park" approach, where one (empowered) appropriates the culture of another (disempowered), does not challenge but reinforces the binary power structures of center and margin of Self and Other. Marker's film makes no such appropriative move. Instead, Sans Soleil revels in a plurality of mnemic positions. It defies the narrower act of merely seeing one's own memories in the memories of an Other. Marker's methodology is more sensitive and more interactive than that. It encourages exponential proliferation of memory--indeed, of agency--for all participants by unmasking and repositioning the power of vision (particularly of cinematic vision).
Marker's filmmaking accomplishes this feat both spatially and temporally. Sans Soleil navigates a nonlinear network of interconnecting images that portray the cultures and peoples of widely-dispersed nationalities. Marker highlights these visions precisely as images through methods of self-conscious juxtaposition, narration, and manipulation of the visual and auditory with a synthesizer. The film's method and message move beyond a sense of postmodern irony or play to a realm of interactive, "diffractive" (Haraway 1997) filming. Marker's film questions concepts of memory, time, space, banality, and agency--but with a candid sense of ethical, acknowledged responsibility in his visual authorship.
The film's synthesized images and sounds emerge in a metaphorical space Marker labels "the zone." The zone demarcates a meaning-making area between the filmmaker, the filmed, and the spectator. It renders "'images affected by the moss of time,'" radically altered images subsequently imbued with fresh meanings.
A device for creating "'electronic graffiti,'" the zone's synthesizer solarizes and distorts Marker's filmed imagery, and thereby complicates any essentialized notions of cinematic space and time. The distorted, fractured imagery reassembles to multiply meanings rather than elide or destroy them; in short, in Sans Soleil Marker employs the tropes of photograph, still, and film expressly to rework them, to redefine meanings as structured by vision.