Chris Marker's essay-films have opened up new possibilities in cinema, influencing directors as diverse as Terry Gilliam (who remade La Jetée as Twelve Monkeys) and video diarist Alain Cavalier. Until the release of this Criterion DVD compiling his two best-known films, they've been easier to read about than to see in the U.S., despite Marker's early adoption of digital technology.
La Jetée is Marker's best-known film, but it's also one of his least characteristic. While not his only foray into fiction, it's the most distant from his documentary work. A story of time travel in post-apocalyptic France, it's told almost entirely through still photographs. Viewers may be surprised how quickly they forget this fact; through sound design, dissolves and editing, La Jetée creates its own fast-paced rhythm. Drawing heavily on Vertigo, it's filled with a doom-laden romanticism, as much a love story as sci-fi. As critic Catherine Lupton suggests in her liner notes, it's also a reflection on the tensions of early '60s France and the ghosts of World War II — its images of dangerous medical experimentation recall the concentration camps.
As ambitious as Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (to which it pays homage), Sans Soliel defies easy summary. It purports to be the record of cameraman Sandor Krasna's globe-trotting; a female narrator reads his letters over images shot by Marker in Japan, Africa and Iceland. Marker's first major work since A Grin Without a Cat, his 1977 dissection of the '60s left, it's personal without narcissism or self-indulgence. It also honors the legacy of radical politics without glossing over its failures and excesses. It was prescient when released in 1983 — in its Japanophilia (long before anime was a household word in America) and embrace of computers — and in many respects still seems ahead of its time. After watching Sans Soliel, you realize that the paths Marker blazed for documentarians remain largely unfollowed. — Steve Erickson
DVD Extras: The DVD includes an interview with director Jean-Pierre Gorin and two Marker-related excerpts from the French TV show Court-Circuit. Deprived of direct access to Marker, critic Chris Darke's superficial ten-minute short, Chris on Chris, relies on clips and chats with Gilliam and Michael Shamberg, on whose film Marker contributed some computer work.