SANS SOLEIL

Marker the intellectual, the theorist of montage, and the leftist are all evident in Sans Soleil, whose intellectual breadth seems ostentatious at first but eventually coheres. The film opens with the voice of a woman who is reading the letters she has received from the fictional Sandor Krasna, the continent-hopping cinematographer who has supposedly shot the footage we will be watching. She punctuates her reading often with «He said» or «He went on» but makes no comments other own - she is the vessel of another consciousness, one that is warning us to beware of every separate and detached subjectivity. As she talks, the film's first images appear on the screen: We see children playing. She reads from a letter that describes this as Sandor's perfect image of happiness, and the film then takes a circuitous route to fulfill that image.