SANS SOLEIL

<![CDATA[<i>]]>As well as excerpts from <filmlink id=\"2608\">Le Fond de l’air est rouge</filmlink> und <filmlink id=\"2607\">Le mystère Koumiko</filmlink>.<![CDATA[</i>]]>
<![CDATA[<i>]]>With a lecture by Jean-Pierre Gorin.<![CDATA[</i>]]>

The images are of an award ceremony in a small African country. The president, a former freedom fighter, is decorating his ex-guerrilla comrades, who now make up the army's senior officer corps, and one general cries, as the medals are attached to his uniform. A voice on the soundtrack interrupts the subsequent moving embrace. The general, this voice tells us, is not crying out of sentiment; he's angry that he hasn't been raised higher than his brother officers. A year later, to rectify the error, he will overthrow his old friend, Luis Cabral of Guinea-Bissau, sending him into exile.

The image is only partial; it requires the soundtrack to complete the circle of understanding. And that is part of the program of Chris Marker's <![CDATA[<i>]]>Sans Soleil<![CDATA[</i>]]> (1982), a fictional documentary that questions our ideas of appearance, memory, and history. Marker is not after glib solutions; he's not here just to state that appearances are deceiving. For the narrator of his own movie is a fictional newscaster reading letters from a cinematographer who doesn't exist. The images are real, the soundtrack is created. Each tells its own truth. (Henry Sheehan, 1991)