In his scholarly essay entitled History in Images/History in Words, Robert A. Rosenstone explores, with much nuance, whether or not it is possible to accurately express history in a visual medium—to do so, he suggests, we may have to “necessitate a change in what we mean by history” (Rosenstone 1175). He approaches this challenge from the perspective of a Ph.D historian who, although predominantly working in the written form, was the historical advisor on two films, both a Hollywood feature and a small-time documentary, and therefore initially has much to express about his qualms with the medium of film/images—that they often call for a compression of the past “to a closed world by telling a single, linear story with, essentially, a single interpretation” (1174). However, he later acknowledges the existence of films that, in resisting traditional storytelling, “present the possibility of more than one interpretation of events [that] render the world as multiple, complex, and indeterminate” (1182). In his essay published almost ten years later, The Documentary as (Visionary) Truth, Rosenstone explores, in detail, one such film that practices this avant-garde form of depicting history, and, in doing so, redefines the mainstream meaning of history. Sans Soleil (1983), written, directed and produced by Chris Marker, challenges the function and meaning of history and therefore is able to create a space in a visual medium in which pure “historical” truth can exist. The film does so by utilizing a variety of cinematic techniques that are essentially unheard-of in the context of traditional film, including (but not limited to) the complete removal of any linear plot, central characters or primary setting, and the constant forth-wall breaks in which the narrator (Alexandra Stewart) acknowledges the images on the screen as images (denying the viewer’s desire to be sutured). These techniques come together to, unintentionally or not, display an unorthodox but nonetheless “true” history that is centered around subjectivity, the fragility of memory, and the overall non-existence of what humans perceive to be and call “time.” Yet we, Rosenstone says, “must be the ones to write the words and create the images” (164) of memory and history even in their futility in order to (Rosenstone quotes R.J. Raack) “recover all the past’s liveliness” (1176), and ultimately make something out of human existence.
Devoid of any tangible plot, characters, or consistent environment, Sans Soleil gives the spectator very little to grasp onto and identify with. Although this may deter a mainstream audience, it does, for the patient viewer, allow room for a practically endless range of interpretation, and it is this vagueness that actually opens up the ability to reimagine history, and to debate its meaning; the latter, Rosenstone suggests, is critical in order to explore the nuances of traditional history in the written form (1177). Plot or narrative, that is, Rosenstone writes, “coherent stories with beginnings, middles, and endings, are constructed by historians as part of their attempts to make sense of the past” (1180). Sans Soleil makes no such attempt to order and therefore make sense of the footage that makes up the body of the film; however, there is some callback to previous thoughts or images throughout the film. Sandor Krasna, the fictitious cameraman (who is essentially Marker himself) whose reel is all the viewer ever sees, writes to the narrator and asks two separate times in his letters, once early on in the film, and once towards the end, “Did you know that there are emus in the Île de France?” We circle twice back around to the Japanese couple who prays everyday for their runaway cat’s peace and safety; twice we see the video of the three Icelandic children, which is, Krasna says in a letter to the narrator, “the image of happiness.” But the repetition in Sans Soleil does not imply plot/linearity so much as memory. These motifs are visited again and again by Krasna in the same way we absent-mindedly revisit our memories—he is not remembering his remembering, so to speak, but rather going to them as if living them for the first time. The way in which the same moments reemerge is, perhaps, even more anti-plot than if nothing in the film were ever revisited because it further dislocates the viewer in time; something we thought was in the past will suddenly be in the present once again. The film does not exist as a “story,” and neither do “people nor nations” (1180). Most of the human activities we see in the film are only bits of the day in the life of the given subject, which cannot—and do not attempt to—tell an entire “story” on their own. What we are left with in each shot, if not a story, is a fact, a neutral statement: the market lady of Praia looks into the camera; the people sleep on the ferry back from Hokkaido. The viewer may interpret personality or intent of the on-camera subjects, but we can never hear their words, and the narrator never tells us what to think of these people (who they actually even are is also left unsaid). The removal of the assumed Western spectator from a Western setting and mainly into the distant, unfamiliar lands of Japan and Guinea-Bissau makes it all the more difficult for the viewer to identify with or decipher the people on screen; if we are unfamiliar with the country’s traditions, values, history, how can we expect to understand what its people do, or how they behave? We can then only try to understand based on what they are not, what we might see in Japan but not in Guinea-Bissau, or vice-versa. Gathering all of Sans Soleil’s beautifully fractured pieces, we find what Rosenstone calls:
“a new form of history for the visual age: a history which does not consist of assembling data into some kind of logical argument, but in ruminating over the possibilities of memory and history, personal experience and public events—and the relationships among them” (156).
Of course, in conversation about the “possibilities of memory and history” that the film opens up, viewers may well find themselves questioning the very relevance of the two when, as Krasna states or implies repeatedly in his letters, “we rewrite memory as history is rewritten.” Hand-in-hand with each other, memory is nothing more than history, and history is nothing more than memory—yet in them “lies our humanity, our connection to the world and each other” (158).
But, then, what makes Sans Soleil—as a “free-form visual essay” (152), a poetic documentary, and/or a work of visual media—the ideal format for expressing a historical theory on memory (or, a memorial theory on history)? I argue that it is due to the nature of modern film itself, that is, twenty-four frames per second of a moving image that comes incredibly close to replicating motion as perceived by our eyes, often accompanied by audio, whether synchronized or not, that in some way adds to our understanding of the images, or, at the very least, expands the world of the film into two dimensions. Sans Soleil’s narrator (who she is, we do not actually know, but it might be assumed she is a friend or lover of Krasna) does not always align her dialogue with the on-screen images—and at times it may feel ramble-y—and the on-screen images do not always look the way life looks through our eyes (as in the case of The Zone), yet it is these qualities that cause the content of the film to be all-the-more “true,” that strengthens the film’s, and Rosenstone’s, thesis on how the nature of memory discredits “any unitary narrative of history” (154). Perhaps the most powerful visual tool that Sans Soleil utilizes to explain the subjectivity of history and memory is the altering of images by filtering them through a synthesizer called “The Zone.” Krasna explains in a letter how his friend, Hayao Yamaneko, built the machine in order to create “pictures that are less deceptive.” Once in The Zone, the images can be toyed with in a variety of ways, but the general result is a colorful and fuzzy video in which it is difficult to decipher just what you are looking at. An image in The Zone cannot help but remind the viewer of its own artifice, in both the world of the film and the world in which the film is being watched. Krasna writes, “At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.” The Zone’s images are “true” in a way that the unaltered footage we see is not—while each is open for interpretation, the clean footage contains clear and “objective” information that The Zone does not. However, even to call the unaffected images “objective” requires a bit of backpedaling from my earlier statement that each shot is factual; each is only factual and objective in terms of Kransa’s memory, but the introduction of The Zone calls their objectiveness into question because it suggests that our memory, “our politics, our poems, our children, our favorite place, our lives, our deaths can be shifted into new shapes, colors, and meanings depending upon who sits at the board of control” (165-6). To Kransa, this is a fascinating notion: “I envy Hayao in his ‘zone,’ he plays with the signs of his memory,” Kransa writes. “He pins them down and decorates them like insects that would have flown beyond time, and which he could contemplate from a point outside of time: the only eternity we have left.” Rosenstone asks in response, “how can one remember a world, or have a history, when the images on which our sense of the past is based can be changed, altered, even bled of meaning?” (158). The answer may lie in the moral of the anecdote Kransa tells us about a time traveler from the year 4001, who, although able to remember everything, knows nothing of unhappiness or pain, which are, perhaps, the very things that cause the humans of our day to remember, to misremember. “Somehow,” Rosenstone writes, “we need out memories to be selective and imperfect” (163). If so, what, then, can we expect of history beyond our small, flawed human minds?
Sans Soleil is a historical film just as much as it is a film about history. Yet, unlike the mainstream “historical” movies that Rosenstone is particularly concerned with in the beginning of History in Images, it is hard, even for historians, to point to any moment in Sans Soleil and declare it to be inaccurate, something of pure fiction; this is, perhaps, because the film has almost nothing to prove in the way of recounting a specific historical event. That being said, part of the film’s argument, in my interpretation, is that every single one of the images displayed are just as much historical moments as say, for example, the footage from Auschwitz in Night and Fog (1955). It is especially easy to see this viewing Sans Soleil almost forty years out from its initial release—it documents a country and a decade on the cusp of technological assimilation, and a country that is, perhaps, further away from that takeover, each living in a seemingly different period of time. The film captures humanity, and certain inhumanity, with an unapologetic accuracy. At its core, Sans Soleil is a film about our species’ imperfections, delicate and tender, or monstrous, and our humble attempts to preserve our memories, calling them history, not knowing that it is all merely “a gigantic collective dream.”
Works Cited
1. Marker, Chris, Alexandra Stewart, Anatole Dauman, and Sandor Krasna. Sunless =: Sans Soleil. France: Argos-Films, 1982.
2. Rosenstone, Robert. "History in Images/History in Words." American Historical Review, vol. 93, no.5 (December, 1988) pp. 1173-1185. JSTORRosenstone, Robert. "History in Images/History in Words." American Historical Review, vol. 93, no.5 (December, 1988) pp. 1173-1185. JSTOR.
3. Rosenstone, Robert. "Sans Soleil." Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press: 1995, pp. 152-166.