Research Note

Chris Marker’s Real and Unreal Japan —Sans

Soleil as Intercultural Document

HOWELL Brian

:
Chris Marker, Lupton, Sans Soleil, documentary, intercultural

Abstract
This paper examines the work of the French filmmaker Chris Marker, focusing on his
film, Sans Soleil (1983). Chris Marker’s distinctive work is difficult to categorise, but he has
had a long association with Japan. For the purposes of this paper, I concentrate on the
theme of Japan and its representation in Sans Soleil, discussing how true a picture it
paints of the country, its people, and its culture. In particular, I analyse one particular
sequence to show that Marker’s Japan in some respects shows these elements in a way
that reflects reality, whilst in other respects it provides a false representation.
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1. Background
The French filmmaker Chris Marker cannot be easily introduced as simply a
“filmmaker” as such, but for the purposes of this paper, it should suffice to start with this
description, as his reputation rests solidly, though not wholly, on two landmark films, one
of which is the main subject of discussion here, Sans Soleil (1983), the other being La Jetée
(1962). When we think of Chris Marker, more than with most filmmakers, we immediately
enter a mystery or puzzle world revolving around the identity of Marker himself. Indeed, it
is a wonder that he bequeathed this very un-French name to the general public at all:
some of the many identities by which he is known include Chris Villeneuve, Sandor
Krasna, and Chris.Marker1). As has been remarked by various commentators, despite this
seeming anonymity, Marker’s imprint is very much that of an individual; David Thomson
writes of his “unaffected independence”2). Nevertheless, despite an enormous output of
work which includes feature films, photography, a novel, commentaries3), film reviews, art
installations, and a recent revival of interest in his work, it is probably safe to say that for
the most part only those specifically interested in film and art will recognise his “name” or
body of work as belonging to the same artist.
Standing head and shoulders above the rest of his eclectic oeuvre are the two
particular aforementioned works, La Jetée and Sans Soleil, separated by almost twenty
years. These are the key works for which he is known, despite his intense engagement
with left-wing politics throughout his career. La Jetée is exceptional for being a motion
picture made up almost entirely of still frames and for telling a fictional story, whereas
Sans Soleil is perhaps more typical of Marker because it tells a fictional story under the
guise of looking like a documentary. These two assertions hold true despite the fact that
Marker is principally known as a film-essayist, which is to say a maker of essays on film,
and as a documentary filmmaker. We thus already have in his filmography the two poles
of the real (documentary) and the unreal (fiction).
The above reservation about Marker’s disputed name and biography notwithstanding,
we can nevertheless piece together some minimal details about the trajectory of his life
as revealed through his career. His earliest work is rooted in his writings and associations
with the periodical Esprit, the publishing house Editions du Seuil, and with Parisian Left
Bank intellectuals; his interests can be characterised as very eclectic. Even before he
became involved in film, he showed an “interest in transposing conventions and
techniques across media”4).
For the purposes of this essay, the above background could be said to be both
necessary and unnecessary, given the title. For those who want to know more about
Marker’s other works, there is no doubt in my mind that the deeper one looks into those,
 Chris Marker’s Real and Unreal Japan —Sans Soleil as Intercultural Document

in many cases, hard-to-find works, the more understanding one will take away from any
individual work. However, if we consider the true subject of Sans Soleil, there is a case for
an interesting contradiction. The subject of Sans Soleil, discussed in this paper, can be said
for the most part to be Japan, and Marker has shown a consistent interest in Japan and
other Asian countries throughout his career; Le Mystère Koumiko (The Koumiko Mystery,
1965) and Dimanche à Pékin (Sunday in Peking, 1956) are just two examples of this
interest. At the same time, we have to ask ourselves how “real” the Japan that is portrayed
in his works is and how far Marker attempts to go in conveying such a reality.
I think there are two obvious ways of looking at this question as a viewer. One way
would be as an outsider with little or no connection with Japan who looks upon Marker’s
description of Japan as an intercultural text, if we consider Marker to be engaging with
another culture by being there and interacting with it, even if it is only by observing. This
is the unreal side. Another way would be as an insider, a Japanese person or someone
who has spent most of her or his life in Japan, and thereby gauge his or her reaction to
this more “real” Japan as presented in the film. This would be the real side. My interest
straddles the two options. I am interested in the film for its experimental (unreal) content,
but I am also interested in how far the representation of the idea of Japan can be said to
be real, or truly representative.

2. Sans Soleil
To even those already intimately in love with the cinema, Sans Soleil on first viewing is
a puzzle film and probably continues to be that over several viewings, even when the
viewer has availed himself of the wealth of research materials available on the Internet, in
books, articles, and other media. Setting aside formal concerns over whether Sans Soleil is
a documentary, an experimental film, or a fictional entity, or all of these together, we
must first and foremost wrestle with the basic narrative.
Sans Soleil was perfectly summarised by Marker himself in a contemporaneous press
release, reprinted in the American Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray5) editions of Sans Soleil, as
well as on the site devoted to Chris Marker hosted by Daniel L. Potter6), so I will quote this
in full here:

‘An unknown woman reads and comments upon the letters she receives
from a friend – a free-lance cameraman who travels around the world and is
particularly attached to those “two extreme poles of survival”, Japan and Africa
(represented here by two of its poorest and most forgotten countries, even
though they played a historical role: Guinea Bissau and the Cape-Verde Islands).
Language, Culture, and Communication Vol. 9 2017

The cameraman wonders (as cameramen do, at least those you see in movies)
about the meaning of this representation of the world of which he is the
instrument, and about the role of the memory he helps create. A Japanese pal of
his, who clearly has some bats in the belfry (Japanese bats, in the form of
electrons) gives his answer by attacking the images of memory, by breaking
them up on the synthesizer. A filmmaker grabs hold of this situation and makes a
film of it, but rather than present the characters and show their relationships, real
or supposed, he prefers to put forward the elements of the dossier in the fashion
of a musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints, and mirror-like
fugues: the letters, the comments, the images gathered, the images created,
together with some images borrowed. In this way, out of these juxtaposed
memories is born a fictional memory…’

In its simplest guise, Sans Soleil is framed as a letter written by a travelling cameraman
by the name of Sandor Krasna, actually the name of Marker’s own grandmother, to a
female friend who can see and show us the various scenes he has filmed from around the
world as she reads the letter. We must, however, be careful to consider that, although we
do not find this out until the end credits, Marker – or “Krasna” – has certainly not filmed
everything that we have seen. It is obvious that many still and moving images have been
taken from movies and television programmes of every kind, many of these from
Japanese television, of varying original or transfer quality, and that some are excerpts
from others’ artistic works whose quality is much better than those taken from television
broadcasts. The sentences as read from the letter in general echo or reflect in very
thoughtful, often poetic ways, the various images or filmed sequences found by Krasna.
We should also take into consideration a comment by Marker made outside of the film,
perhaps disingenuously, that he views Sans Soleil as “nothing more than a home movie” 7)
and that his “main talent has been to find people to pay for my home movies”8).
However, there is certainly an element of truth to the above claim in so far as one
could walk away from a viewing of Sans Soleil with the impression that a very talented
amateur filmmaker has thrown together his own filmed scenes with pieces of found
footage and overdubbed these with a loosely-narrated story. At the same time, this would
involve discarding completely any knowledge we have of Marker’s previous work in many
fields and the fact that Sans Soleil is ultimately, at the very least, a highly-structured and
professional work. It is also a mesmerising film by the well-travelled Chris Marker himself
which displays a vast amount of experience in piecing together and contributing to
others’ works, in many cases that of now very famous filmmakers in their own right, Alain
Resnais being one of these, a French director of the 50s and 60s New Wave who started
 Chris Marker’s Real and Unreal Japan —Sans Soleil as Intercultural Document

out as a documentary filmmaker, but, unlike Marker, gravitated towards fiction, where he
has mostly stayed throughout his career.
We should try to gain a general picture of the movement of scenes and the reflections
on offer in this film without going into too much detail, as that is beyond the scope of
this paper, before looking in detail at one particular sequence which for me sums up the
theme of unreal versus real.
Sans Soleil begins with a quotation from T.S. Eliot in Marker’s English version of the
film – there are also French, German, and Japanese iterations – and an assorted series of
images interspersed with sections of black screen (“film leader”) and shots of children on
a road in Iceland and a glimpse of fighter jets on an aircraft carrier. This prologue soon
gives way to the main thrust and situation of the film, scenes from what we might term
the “real” Japan. We are introduced to that country as we observe, guided by the letter
being read aloud by the female narrator, various people sprawling and resting on seats on
a ferry on which the narrator has been travelling on his way from Hokkaido; we are told
that the scene reminds him of wars past and future. The obvious impossibility of the
phrase speaks to one of Marker’s main concerns in the film, memory, as well as the
mutability of time. We soon find ourselves in Tokyo, but we are whisked off in quick
succession to the Île-de-France in Paris, the Bissagos Islands in Guinea-Bissau, and back to
Tokyo. We are treated to small, seemingly trivial pieces of information, basically Krasna’s
memories of places, for example a couple’s attending a temple for cats, homeless people
in the streets in Namidabashi, the sight of an emu in Paris, an African girl smiling, some
landscape scenes, then a bar in Namidabashi. We should note that almost every utterance
that is attributed to the cameraman is introduced by the phrase “He told me”. Gradually,
the narration begins to take on weightier issues.
The first direct parallel that is made to link the ex-Portuguese colonies with Japan is
that these countries have a deep knowledge of survival. To images of space technology
and then a sustained sequence of a Polaris nuclear missile being launched from a
submarine, we are given a history lesson on power in which Krasna describes how during
the Heian period power resided not in the Emperor’s court but with certain hereditary
regents, leaving literary work to flourish in such works as, for example, Sei Shonagon’s The
Pillow Book. It is hard to resist the message here that real power resides with the West; we
should note that for a large part of his career Marker was associated with supporting
struggles for independence that were often of a Marxist, anti-US bent, but I would not say
this is an overt theme of Sans Soleil. Indeed, Sans Soleil itself is a kind of pillow book, a list
of various, seemingly unconnected things. In keeping with this Japanese theme, we
witness a long sequence showing a street festival in Japan that concentrates on
traditional music and dance, this part without commentary, although there are very quick
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shots of someone rowing a boat, an emu from Paris, and what looks like an African ritual
intercut with the main street festival sequence.
After a very brief flash of an African desert scene, we have a sense that the
cameraman’s story proper – and I stress that this is always narrated or voiced by a female
narrator, making the term of narrator somewhat ambiguous – now begins. He writes of
returning to Chiba, and we accompany him on a bus journey, soon arriving in Shinjuku,
where he speaks of his “reunion with Tokyo”. There follows a series of shots of well-known
landmarks such as the Ginza owl, a locomotive train in Shinbashi, a temple devoted to
foxes in the Mitsukoshi department store, along with various fairly mundane street scenes,
followed by a number of more unusual sights such as a robotic panda, and a monkey on
a lead, culminating in a series of shots of Tokyo’s omnipresent mode of transport. Over
this, the female narrator reports, “He wrote, Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains; tied
together with electric wire, she shows her veins”. We also have references to the world of
media, to people reading manga in the street, and to television, which will take on an
increasing importance as the film continues. The narration links manga by turns to the
strange modern architecture, statuary, and giant voyeuristic faces on billboards around the
town before returning us to quieter locales such as local cemeteries as night falls. In
particular, we are shown the inside of a bar which in actuality was owned by Marker
himself; the bar is called La Jetée, after Marker’s film, and even has stills from that film
clearly visible on the walls.
The traveller now spends the rest of the day in front of the television, referred to as a
“memory box”, experiencing the first of a number of sustained television images and
excerpts, images of deer in Nara, commercials, and a programme showing gruesome
drawings of atrocities in Cambodia perpetrated during the Vietnam War, shown to the
soundtrack of Marlon Brando expatiating on the nature of horror from the American film,
Apocalypse Now (1979), although we cannot know whether the sound proceeds from the
television set or is in some way mixed in by Marker-Krasna. Through the female narrator,
Krasna charaterises these scenes as, for the most part, quintessentially Japanese, the
dominating feature being that of horror and pain. To reinforce this point we see a series
of still television images from Japanese horror and samurai films to a treated soundtrack.
There is some brief relief from the harrowing soundtrack when these images give way to
various items of news coverage from home and abroad, including an election, linked to a
tradition of blacking out the eye of a daruma doll followed by mention of an earthquake
that has just occurred in Tokyo and Krasna’s meditation on how poetry follows from
insecurity and that in the case of the Japanese in particular they have survived the
fragility and impermanence of life by attaching themselves to superficial things and to an
unchanging world of fantasy represented on television by samurai dramas and animated
 Chris Marker’s Real and Unreal Japan —Sans Soleil as Intercultural Document

trains that can fly. He prides himself on watching everything, including “wide shows”,
whose obvious censoring of nudity he derisorily views as “mutilation” as it at the same
time reveals nudity and hides certain parts of the body, mainly pubic hair.
Moving away from television, the traveller visits an exhibition of treasures from the
Vatican, then jumps to a sex museum at Jozankei in Hokkaido which features gigantic
penis sculptures and copulating animals, marvelling that at this location one can visit a
museum, a chapel, and a sex shop. The narrator here seems to be both empathetic
towards, and critical of, Japanese society in that he sees this egregious depiction of the
sexual act as something that can only be explicitly shown with animals and is therefore a
way around the censorship that prohibits the graphic depiction of sex between humans.
By way of some brief comments about Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde’s political history,
our traveller returns to Tokyo and displays his fascination with various technological,
mainly robotic, inventions in and around the Mitsukoshi department store. However, he
rarely leaves radical politics out of the picture, visiting the anniversary of a famous 1960s
protest against the building of the new Narita Airport. At this point he also introduces the
character of his friend Hayao Yamaneko, an alter ego of Marker, who has developed a
form of visual representation through a combination of a synthesiser and computer
images which purports to represent the world more truthfully.

3. Train sequence and conclusion

I would now like to go to a detailed discussion of the sequence that for me is at the
heart of the unrealness of Marker’s Japan. It starts at 00.47:26 minutes into the film and
lasts for about ten minutes. Over successive shots of customers sitting in restaurants from
both inside and then outside, the female voice states, “One day he [the cameraman
Krasna] writes to me: ‘Description of a dream – More and more, my dreams find their
settings in the department stores of Tokyo, the subterranean tunnels that extend them
and run parallel to the city; a face appears, disappears, a trace is found, is lost … I begin
to wonder if those dreams are really mine or if they are part of a totality, a gigantic
collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection.’” These words are
enounced over a mixture of shots of ordinary scenes of people commuting and shopping
in the underground areas which link the train lines to the department stores, with the
occasional shot of what to a foreigner might seem very unusual, such as a window display
of two giant masks either side of a kimono. After a little more information about the
mundane aspects of the building complex, the voice continues: “The train inhabited by
sleeping people puts together all the fragments of dreams, makes a single film of them,
the ultimate film. The tickets from the automatic dispenser grant admission to the show”.
Language, Culture, and Communication Vol. 9 2017

This last sentence is the perfect introduction to a mesmerising sequence of footage

taken by Marker, along with found footage from various sources. A long take of hands in
close-up depositing tickets as people pass through a ticket barrier to the trains is
accompanied by intense, otherworldly synthesiser music which creates an alienating,
almost stressful effect. A brief shot of truncated arms placing money in coin lockers shot
through a narrow space as if the filmmaker is spying adds to this disembodied effect; we
only see a few heads or parts of heads edging themselves into the frame here. The right-
to-left rhythm of the people passing through the barrier like a flowing river is picked up
by a shot of a train filmed from a parallel moving train looking slightly down at it from an
angle. This train carrying the cameraman seems to be moving to the left, though this
could be the result of parallax. However, disorientatingly, in the next cut the train being
filmed with the same passengers is moving to the right. It is of course possible that the
train being filmed simply stopped for some reason and changed direction, but we do not
have enough information to know this for sure. In addition, we catch the occasional
reflections of passengers reflected in the inside of the carriage from which Marker is
filming. Whether this was intentional or not, we cannot know, but given the conditions in
which Marker filmed, it was probably unavoidable. Soon after this, we see the same train
moving to the left, and this is followed by a different train moving to the right.
At this point we have the first of many inserts from different sources: an animation
that shows a train moving up some tracks to a dark background and the title of the
programme in kanji ( 999, also known as Galaxy Express 999); receding train tracks
shot from the back of an overground train; passengers entering an overground train on a
crowded platform; a shot from inside a train of a man holding on to a hand strap; a
dozing woman who briefly opens her eyes as if aware of being filmed; another sleeping
woman; a middle-aged man covering his eyes; a younger man reading a newspaper; a
shot of the crowded interior of the train with people standing and holding the hand
straps; close-ups of hands hanging on to the hand straps; a woman reading a book; a
young woman listening to music through headphones; a man wearing sunglasses and a
surgical mask; a young woman who yawns; someone playing with a Rubik’s cube; a
dozing man; the very pale, almost ghostly face of a young woman; a dozing middle-aged
woman; another dozing older man; a woman in a kimono; an old woman sleeping; an
insert of the animated train we saw earlier now flying into the sky; a woman falling asleep
as her head lolls around; the floating decapitated head of a young girl saying “okaasan”
(mother) from a horror film; a gigantic eye presumably taken from a film; another shot of
the same woman falling asleep; a middle-aged man whose face we cannot see; a man
from a horror film who is taking off a latex mask to reveal a horribly mutilated face;
another shot of the same man whose face we could not see earlier because it was in
 Chris Marker’s Real and Unreal Japan —Sans Soleil as Intercultural Document

shadow, albeit we now see he is sleeping; a shadow of what we can guess is some kind
of monster or ghost on the ceiling of a dark room, quickly followed by a shot of a
garment billowing in a draft, and then a child’s doll-like face, all three shots in all
likelihood being from the same horror film or even the same original sequence; a different
middle-aged man falling asleep; a shot of the Japanese monster known as rokurokubi,
which is characterised by a woman’s head on a long, snake-like body, and her confronting
a person, again from a horror film; a return to the previous sleeping man; another young
man sleeping; a fighting sequence from a samurai film; a sleeping young man; a woman
whose throat is impaled by a sword; a return to the same sleeping young man; back to
the same woman whose throat has been impaled in which she is screaming and then is at
rest; two more sleeping passengers; brief shots of their hands on their laps; a shot of a
naked man making love with a naked woman; a longer shot of the same sleeping
passengers we saw before the love-making scene; a return to the couple making love; a
cat meowing on a television screen; a sleeping older woman in the train just waking up;
and, finally, a billboard sign from an American movie looking over the train as it passes
by.
As we arrive at a station and people exit, the narration returns and, as if to
counterpoint some of the seemingly negative images that we have just seen from
Japanese culture, the voice continues with Krasna’s thoughts: “He told me that this city
ought to be deciphered like a musical score. One could get lost in the great orchestral
masses and the accumulation of details. And that created the cheapest image of Tokyo,
overcrowded, megalomaniac, inhuman. He thought he saw more subtle cycles there –
rhythms, clusters of faces caught sight of in passing…as different and precise as groups of
instruments”. From here the visuals and narration move on to the dizzying plethora of
television sets and their accompanying images that can be seen around the city in
different places, then on to video games, but we must note that his narration is not
critical of these modern forms of technology and tends on the whole to delight in all the
particularly Japanese cultural elements that are reflected in these machines.
For me, the sequence on the train that I have outlined is the most important section
of the film. It is certainly true that in that sequence Marker homes in on clichéd images of
Japan: the emphasis on sex, nudity, and violence, as well as the customary habits of
people sleeping in trains, which in many cultures is still extremely unusual.
Looked at more closely, some interesting aspects are revealed about the train
sequence. We have twenty shots of realistic scenes of everyday passenger life followed by
a mixture of forty-eight shots of everyday shots and fantasy scenes, taken mainly from
television and film. However, Marker gently prepares us for this change of focus by
interspersing in the first sequence of shots two realistic scenes that have a bizarre, though
Language, Culture, and Communication Vol. 9 2017

perfectly plausible, quality: the man wearing the sunglasses and the mask and the woman
with the extremely ghostly, pale face. These real-life scenes foreshadow the sequence of
increasingly bizarre, dream-like shots already mentioned, though we should note that the
latter are interrupted every one or two shots by real scenes from the train car. The longest
sequence of scenes from popular culture is three, and these decrease in number as the
train slows down and enters the station.
We also notice that the scene depicting a child’s levitating head from a horror film is
squeezed in between shots of the woman with the lolling head in real life. Similarly, the
shot of the man removing a mask to reveal his damaged face is bracketed by real shots of
a man in the train whose features very much match that of the man with the mask.
Following this, the shots of the sleeping young man are matched by the shots of the
impaled woman, implying a psycho-sexual dream on his part. Finally, shots of a couple in
the train who might be together are matched by the gentler scene of a couple making
love on film. The fact that we see a film poster as the train arrives in the station is
perhaps a telling nod to the fantasy element we have just witnessed in this sequence.
Anybody who has lived in Japan for any length of time will know that the Japanese
are extremely hard-working and that there is very little random crime, whilst there are a
plethora of ways of diverting oneself with forms of entertainment that are not bound by
Christian values. These three points alone go some way to explaining why someone in
Japan can feel relaxed enough to fall asleep on a train and let his or her mind wander.
What the real people seen in the train carriage are thinking or dreaming is of course
impossible to know, but Marker’s linking their oneiric moments with scenes taken from
different media that reflect how foreigners often see the Japanese world represented is
entirely reasonable to me from a sociological point of view. What we cannot say for sure
is that this is a real portrait of Japan, though it makes one question the essence of
“realness” and “unrealness”, as it is completely dependent on the perspective and life of
the one making the interpretation. As I have stated before, the whole film, although it is
framed as a realistic collection of images put together by a cameraman, is more
specifically a collection of memories of a fictional cameraman who has the same interests
as Marker the filmmaker. To this extent, Marker’s representation of Japan is “unreal” in the
sense that this view of Japan comes to us through the eyes of a fictional character, yet
rings true to many, perhaps even Marker himself, and yet it appears untruthful to others
who may not wish to see the truthfulness of the fiction.
Some Japanese viewers might conclude that Marker’s Japan is ‘unreal’, although I
regard this position as somewhat unfair. I would say unfair because it is obvious to me
and to many outsiders who have praised this as Marker’s masterpiece that Sans Soleil
shows a deep love and fascination with other cultures, in this case predominantly Japan.
 Chris Marker’s Real and Unreal Japan —Sans Soleil as Intercultural Document

In addition, it is hard to resist the feeling that in Sans Soleil one is watching a
documentary film. The viewer has this feeling in spite of the fact that it is actually very
clear from the beginning that the form of the film is in essence fictional and highly
organised. I personally believe that the Japan that Marker the filmmaker and person
makes available to us is both not completely real in the sense that not every Japanese
person will recognise the Japan that she sees in the film as representative of the Japan
that she knows. Yet, it is real enough to provide the viewer with insights into the essence
of both the Japan of today and of the past.

Notes
1) Lupton, 2008, p. 12.
2) Thomson, 2010, p. 625.
3) These are essay-style books accompanied by photographic stills from films he has made
or been involved in.
4) Lupton, op. cit., p.14.
5) La Jetée/Sans Soleil, The Criterion Collection, 2012, Blu-Ray edition.
6) [Link]
(Retrieved, 06.09.16.)
7) Chris Marker, “Letter to Theresa by Chris Marker – Behind the Veils of Sans Soleil”, http://
[Link]/chris-marker/notes-to-theresa-on-sans-soleil-by-chris-marker/ (Retrieved,
06.09.16.)
8) Ibid.

References
Alter, Nora M. (2006). Chris Marker. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Lupton, C. (2008). Chris Marker: Memories of the Future. London: Reaktion Books Ltd.
Thomson. D. (2010). The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. London: Little, Brown.