'Time' in Chris Marker's 'Sans Soleil' (1983), Poverty of Language and Reminiscing Violence

Writing about time and death seem to have been a favourite way of passing them as if they were seasons since my adolescent years. It would not be honest to claim I have never had the same weird obsession writing about time as I have had with death, and their appears to be an intestinal connection between the two - one that had so crudely been explored in Neruda's 'Walking Around' or amongst the microcosm of the shortest of Kafka's stories. Chris Marker remains one of my most favourite filmmakers of all times, one of those handful of people whose work one can comfortably compare with that of the indispensable Jean-Luc Godard. And although the New Wave and the Left Bank movements, with the exception of Agnès Varda in case of the latter, have persisted as men's clubs: men talking about Marxism, men talking about class struggle, men talking about the poverty of women, men talking about the beauty of women, men's men - intercolonial, transnational, postmodern networks of men; more men advocating for the experiential representation of women...but I still can't help but admire Marker...or Godard, or Pasolini, for that matter. These were proponents of leftist cinematography who tried. And these were people who tried making cinema like a relevant form of art - an indispensable narrative that is as relevant as breathing. That of course comes with flaws, irreconcilable ones, but that also comes with courage. And courage remains one of those human qualities that memory cannot substitute with something else. Sensory memory un-serves the purpose of distance - and it is in such distance that effort prevails. Marker tried and Marker extensively, beautifully juxtaposed his verses, streamlined against a current of images that are neither docile, nor drenched in their solemn naivete - a form of art that is libidinal but not domineering, a form of art that speaks for itself. Marker was as much a poet as Godard was. Kafka was as much a poet as he wasn't. Time is, as one might have interpreted over the centuries, instrumental in shaping the vitality of verbs and linguistic expression, time enthralls and time, like a magician obsessed with his toy rabbit, haunts the hollowness, the blank gazes that language mercilessly casts upon us, its subjects. Time, like a whirlwind, time like a harp, time like an exodus, like slumber...dawns upon us when we are not looking. There is but a thin line between 'horror' and 'haunting' - and time knows, that the latter awakens when coupled with desire. Horror imposes, haunting allows. It is not the exorcism that draws Marker to look at history or time as much as does the haunting. "Horror has a name and a face", he remarks..."...you must make a friend of horror." 

I do not recall having gathered these many stills from a single film for a blog post - like, ever. 'Sans Soleil' also happens to be one of my most favourite films of all times, perhaps...a soulfully, boldly arthouse film that doesn't give much of a damn about the labels that would be cast upon its identity, nor does it overtly pronounce its associativity with visual poetry. Whip-smart, tender, libidinal, bold, sharp and magnificently brilliant are adjectives one might use to describe this stellar piece of work. The way Marker speaks of Amilcar Cabral or of the forgotten people of Guinea-Bissau is also centered around a feeling of solidarity and a feeling of solitude, intertwined in a continuum, defying spatiality and embracing time. Perhaps a bit of a paradox, as life is, Marker sets the tone in a strange collection of notes and is able to lay a finger upon the primordial umbilical cord that ties time with death. And death is neither morbid, nor exempt from the memory of genocide, it is what it is - an imposition when left at the hands of men and transcendence when welcomed, perhaps even desired. Marker knew how to talk about the deepest of elements associated with life in a tone that had the efficiency to represent their harrowing nudity, unfiltered, crude, and untamed.