Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

WiseRatFlames An unexpected masterpiece

Winifred The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

SnoopyStyle This is a film pondering time and place. The narrator is retelling a travelogue written by a world traveler. He traveled and commented on life in various places from Japan to Cape Verde to Guinea-Bissau. Trying to comprehend the ideas coming from the narration may be a fool's errant but it does flow with a hypnotic rhythm. One does wonder if the stories being told are real or made up but it almost doesn't matter. The commentary on these foreign lands come with a grain of salt. The images themselves are interesting. They are sometimes banal everyday life. Sometimes they are fascinating bits of a different culture. This is more than a simple travel vacation video but I couldn't really explain what it all means. Even as a simple home video, this is still entrancing. One starts to fall into the movie. I'm not sure what to take away from this other than the awesome knowable unknowable foreignness of the world.

Sergeant_Tibbs Sans Soleil is an incredibly unique veritie documentary film, which follows the voice of the cameraman and filmmaker through the fictional voice-over of a woman reading out the author's letters. It's a film-essay, aware of the image and aware of the edits. The film is hyper- observational, sometimes quite general, judging the human condition, or sometimes very specific to the history and actual ritual that it's portraying. As it's so directly and constantly analytical, it does however lose the sense of spontaneity that it sometimes tries to achieve, in moments as if the camera has stumbled onto something accidentally, and works best when it's studying controlled situations and knows the environment. It's similar to Koyaanisqatsi in the unconventional documentary sense, sharing a kind of computer generated and video-game- esque musical score. Instead of nature v. man, Sans Soleil is art v. man.The narration is completely non-stop throughout the whole film though there are a few sequences where it lets the images take centre stage. This gives the whole film an incredibly urgent pace which made it often hard to follow. There are a few scenes with jarring freeze- frames designed to focus the viewer, but it wasn't a long enough break for it all to sink in. Even so, it is clear that Marker has a lot to say. Within the film is a short analysis of Vertigo, even revisiting all the sets to demonstrate the point, which sums up Sans Soleil's themes of memory and time using the art the author loves. There are also frequent references to Apocalypse Now ("the horror") and Stalker (where the influence for the screenshot I chose came from) to further illustrate the author's passion.It's main point I found profound is how what we have come to observe as voyeurs, be it art as expressive or consumerist, these now observe the voyeurs, demonstrated by television advertisements and the self-conscious use of showing and referencing people looking down the lens. The film feels bound with rage in criticisms with the media, in how television has overtaken reading and censorship has become the true thing that the authorities want us to see. There's a particularly interesting set of sequences with some staccato scenes where the voice-over stops and shows clips of horror, action and pornography films intercut and contrasted with commuters on a train, implicated them as the voyeurs. Later in the film, there's a similar scene where contrasting images of a static desert and the loud buses of Japan are spliced together. Sans Soleil is an intelligent, inventive and interesting film. I will definitely need more viewings to be able to digest everything it has to say. But it's absolutely a film for film enthusiasts.8/10

Chris Barry Visionary filmmaker Chris Marker creates a portrait of ever encroaching globalization in this 100 minute odyssey between the 'two poles of survival'.Probably one of the greatest 'avant-garde' films of all time, don't let its classification dissuade you. This is a very simple film with a very simple message: though time changes, what nourishes humanity remains constant, namely love, memory, hope, understanding, recognition and belonging. The only frustrating thing about this film is that one viewing is not enough. This is a work you will cherish re-watching for years to come. Direct cinema science-fiction set on Planet Earth.

joeloh A poetic and rambling essay film, in the form of a letter from a lost and lonely traveller. Chris Marker lets his mind and camera roam through the landscape of early eighties Japan, and his imagination drift across the world. Memory history and emotion blend into a loving study of human existence. The film's form is loose and sprawling and it it almost impossible to try to follow it in any linear fashion. Instead it washes across the surface of you conscious mind, occasionally burrowing deep with images you can never forget. It is a completely unique film and is inspiring in its ability to bring the political, the philosophical and the poetic together on screen. Chris Marker is one of the unsung greats of film history.