Welcome To Tokyo

(from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil)

Planet Manga

He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains, tied together with electric wire she shows her veins. They say that television makes her people illiterate; as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in the streets. Perhaps they read only in the street, or perhaps they just pretend to read—these yellow men. I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku. The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScope ten centuries before the movies compensates a little for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines, victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship. Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls. The entire city is a comic strip; it's Planet Manga. How can one fail to recognize the statuary that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central? And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down on the comic book readers, pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.
At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages, with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, with its stations and temples. Each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.

Excerpt from Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, photo by Matthieu Kasimiri

Full script can be found here

Ascension Day

He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?
He didn't like to dwell on poverty, but in everything he wanted to show there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model. A world full of bums, of lumpens, of outcasts, of Koreans. Too broke to afford drugs, they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk. This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes from the glories of the center city, a character took his revenge on society by directing traffic at the crossroads

(Words by Chris Marker. Clip: music By Talk Talk , shot and edited by Pyke)

Sans Soleil: Snatches of banality

He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and hurried 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. He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function it being to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.

(Words by Chris Marker, photo by Mick Feuerbacher)

Sans Soleil (1983) part 1

Narrated by Alexandra Stewart.

Written & Directed by Chris Marker

"Sans Soleil"

This is a still photo from Chris Marker's "Sans Soleil". A town in Iceland covered in ashes from the erupted volcano. The town was built on its "feet". This story is not even the film's central piece but the opening and closing sequence. "Sans Soleil" is a globe trotting film essay unlike anything you've ever seen by a director who is a true film visionary and an unsung hero of the moving image. The film is uploaded split in 10 parts on YouTube by a user. Don't watch it at work though. It might seem a little pretentious to some people but try to follow it. For all those who are really intrigued by cinematic experience and haven't heard of it yet ...watch carefully and let yourself go. You're about to witness something really different even for today's high standards in visual culture...