Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

BeSummers Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

Curt Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

framptonhollis Bizarre in its extreme unconventionality, "Sans Soleil" remains the second best known film in Chris Marker's prolific and legendary filmography. During his lifetime (one not at all wasted due to his massive and consistently brilliant production of art in almost all of its forms, most famously the cinematic form), Marker remained a mysterious figure, and his films only add to the mystery. "Sans Soleil" is perhaps among the most enigmatic works in all of cinema's history; it is something of a collage of images, a travelogue primarily taking place in Japan (Africa is also often visited, among a few other areas from around the world) scored by atmospheric electronic music and a narration injected with profound philosophy, occasional wit, provocative melancholy, and a knack for unique and sometimes absurdist detail.Dealing with everything from the primary theme of memory and the existential nightmare of time's passage (or, as the narration at one point puts in (more poetically): "the moss of time") to oddly humorous (yet still often thought provoking) encounters with phallic statues and an animatronic designed to bear the appearance of former U.S. president John F. Kennedy, "Sans Soleil" reaches a point of pure unpredictability. While mildly slow in bits, the overall product is uniquely entertaining in its ability to portray and provoke a wide and diverse palate of human emotion. With its grainy yet pleasantly colorful cinematography and semi surrealist atmosphere, "Sans Soleil" successfully entertains the eyes and the mind of any viewer that can appreciates its wildly experimentalist and almost structureless style. This is a film likely to divide viewers, but big enough fans of art house and avant garde cinema can all agree that it is among the finest documentary/experimental/drama/essay films ever made; a truly fresh and original project that is playful and profound like no other masterpiece before or after] it.

federovsky One of the most worthless things I've ever seen put on celluloid. I had previously tried to get through it twice and failed - finding it miserably tedious. The images were barely more than home movie quality, every sentiment was abysmally banal, and there was something me than faintly self-congratulatory about it all. What on earth can Marker's fans get out of this…? He seemed to think he was the first westerner to set foot in Asia - and with a camera too! He tried to invest everything he saw with such utter gravity and meaning, but fell head first into every clichéd image and hackneyed idea of Asia there is. I waited for something to grab me… some remarkable insight or pearl of wisdom… nothing… just a film-maker (a fairly amateurish one) desperate to film every little oddity, and when there are none, every little banality.I knew this was going to be a hard ride, but I tried to shrug off any preconceptions and prejudices to give this another try. After only three minutes I had to hit the pause button. Later I tried again, a non-believer reading the Bible.Bland images. This kind of thing needs-pictures like Baraka to at least provide some justification. Five minutes are spent watching a Japanese street carnival. Marker takes a fascination in people that comes across as simply naïve. He waxes philosophical about a man frying food on a hotplate, presumably because it's the first time he has seen it happening. A Japanese cameraman of equal naivety might well point his camera at a little old woman frying chips in a British chippie and call it meaningful. Thankfully, nobody ever did.His camera craves little oddities, such as the temple of the beckoning cats, but it's no more than touristic innocence.The observation that people ought to look in the camera is typical of the 'aren't I being meaningful by seeing something that no-one else can?' attitude. But by doing so they are not revealing themselves with curiosity, only hiding themselves with insecurity.There are two ways of looking at every human emotion. A blithe side and a cynical side. Marker is full of the tourist's childish fascination in things he little understands, and which he photographs for precisely that reason. Every image is the gawping of an idiot - at the beginning we stare at people asleep on a ferry as if there is something unique and profound about this particular ferry this particular day.Drawing filigree connections is his main past-time: Marker thinks it clever to move from formal stylised movements of a Japanese traditional dance to awkwardness.He sets himself a challenge at the very beginning - how to follow an idyllic image of three Icelandic girls? Nothing works - certainly not the fighter plane he suggests. He gives us a long black pause instead. So, there's a game of meaning going on, couched in a game of imagery. Absolutely every piece of film here is the same.The woman's deadpan voice-over constantly riles. She has the tone of Virginia Woolf reading her suicide note. She is narrating the traveller's letters. It's earnest, adulatory - and you never forget it is Marker talking about himself, massaging his own ego through a fantasy girlfriend because it conveniently avoids the too-blatant first person. There's something unpleasantly adolescent, almost JD Salingerish, about this trick, and I instinctively resist.I felt like I was supposed to be impressed by the fact that Marker had travelled, had had reflections, that he was alive. It was not just self-congratulatory, but self-ratifying, self-aggrandizing; the immodesty of the adolescent that hasn't yet learned sophistication.At the end of it he had shown me nothing about the world or about people. He had made mountains out of philosophical molehills and was dining off the tale.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU This film is the illustration of the letters of some traveler who travels a lot in Japan, some in Australia and from time to time in Africa, Guinea Bissau precisely. It is a film on rites and rituals having to do with life and death, trying to accommodate death so that we can survive a little bit more than expected. Life is always a survival and not an end in itself. This is very Buddhist but the filmmaker is trying to make it general.The interest then when he speaks of the guerrilla warfare in Guinea Bissau is not the communist guerrilla warfare itself that will eventually turn socialist and then realist, but in fact the side remark that in Europe it brought the Portuguese fascist dictatorship down but that it also made the Europeans suddenly dream of a new revolution. It sure was a revolution (dedicated to carnations) in Portugal and then there was the post-Franco era in Spain, but the revolution was a dream in the corner of a narrow-minded communist leader in Portugal and very fast things went back to the democratic order and the soldiers went back to their barracks and let elections decide on who will be governing the country.This is the real discourse of this second film, emphasized by the killing of a giraffe whose objective was nothing but the final and lethal bullet in its head since the repast, the banquet, the feast will be for a band of vultures. The discourse becomes general then. Life is always the result of death. Something has to die for something else to live, but if you try to force this historical movement, you produce quite a lot more death than life and anyway the vultures will come and put things back in place. It is the vision of Buddhist rites, prayers and meditation in parallel with the tranquil walk of some emus that represent the natural course of history and we do not have the right to get out of the lane: dangerous and useless.The allusion to Hitchcock's film Vertigo is typical: the prey is in fact attracting the predator and the prey knows she/he is doing that, even if the chauvinistic predator considers he/she leads the game, from behind mind you as if the prey were on a leash, but when a farmer takes a pig to the market with a rope around its neck, who leads who? The farmer or the pig? Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

jonathan-577 This is Marker's much-lauded travelogue-essay film about Japan, Guinea-Bissau, and Hitchcock. The imagery is gripping and the intuitive structure is marvelous, although I think he's jaded about resistance and in spite of his best efforts there's some exoticizing going on in the Weird Japan stuff. Also - the version of this Siue's roomie got from the library is dubbed by this BBC type woman, and her civilized recital almost wrecks the movie! I guess in art you can't get away with that heartlessly professional tone of voice without sounding utterly pretentious, even in an avowed 'masterpiece'. Well, let that be a lesson to you. I stuck with it and would advise you to do the same, it goes places.