Feature 07
below Sunless opens with a few-second
"Images Are My Memory": Chris
Marker's Sunless
By Nace Zavrl
keywords: documentary cinema, essay film, Chris Marker, Sunless, film and memory,
authorship, found footage film
Documentary film theory
has recently turned toward discussing
the rigid definitional divide between fiction
and nonfiction in a more flexible manner.
Recognizing its constructed nature and its
inability to relate to reality in any direct,
unmediated or objective manner, Stella
Bruzzi has argued that documentary
filmmaking stems from a productive,
dialectical relationship between the text,
the reality it represents and the spectator
(7). Contemporary engagements with the
documentary form are multifarious and
complex, extending far beyond the genres
traditional assumptions of fly-on-the-wall
immediacy or quasi-scientific objectivity.
Encouraging critical and nuanced readings
42
of film images, the cinematic essay stands
here as a distinct form of nonfiction
filmmaking that self-reflexively interrogates
its constituent documents: in David
Monteros words, essay films question the
state of affairs they present and reflect on
how cinematic language interacts with
the domain of the real (Thinking Images
49). Rigorously interrogating the multi-
faceted relationships between reality and its
representation, the essay film understands
itself not as a neutral picturing of an outside
world, but as a way of probing, challenging,
and coming to terms with actuality by
working through its many and varied moving
images. As Olivia Lory Kay has noted, the
essay film is rooted in fragmentation and
Film Matters Winter 2016
shot of children in an unidentified Icelan-
dic village
heteroglossia, appropriating diverse material
and multiple viewpoints in order to draw an
audiences attention to the way nonfiction
filmmaking manipulates and constructs its
reality (256). Rather than a detached or
disinterested observation of actuality, the
essay film emerges in the late twentieth
century as an acutely self-aware and deeply
personal mode of nonfiction filmmaking
whose relationship to the real world reaches
above and beyond documentarys traditional
associations of immediacy, authenticity, and
objectivity.
In the context of contemporary essay
filmmaking and documentary theory, Chris
Markers Sunless (Sans soleil, 1983) presents us
with an intriguing case study. Both a critical
Feature 07 Images Are My Memory

below Markers images document seem-

examination of cinematic representation ingly random Tokyo commuters taking
and a deeply personal reflection on the a nap
nature of memory, Sunless combines a
mixed assortment of audiovisual material
into a rich yet syncretic whole in which
fact and fiction, images, sounds, and words
consistently intermingle. As this paper will
argue, Markers appropriation of diverse
documents from multiple sources constitutes
the film as a visual simulacrum of memory
processes, as images and sounds take on the
role of recorded representations of Markers
own thoughts or memorized information,
at the same time as Markers incorporation
of heterogeneous documentary elements
liberates the individual images from their
iconic quality as historical signifiers. In
other words, by turning its documents into
direct representations of human memories,
film and memory are constituted as
equivalents, casting Sunless into the realm of
the imaginary and challenging established below Images from Alfred Hitchcocks
notions of documentary form, authorship, Vertigo appear as part of Markers Sunless
and spectatorship.
A large part of the moving image
material for Sunless is purportedly provided
by Sandor Krasna, a fictive traveler and
cameraman who writes from geographically
diverse places (Iceland, Japan, Guinea-
Bissau, Paris) and multiple at times
nonexistent moments in time (from World
War II, to 1980s Japan, and the imagined
future of 4001), reflecting on culturally
diverse attempts to come to terms with
temporality and the passage of time. The
basic structuring principle that will come
to define Sunless is delineated at the films
very opening by a quotation from T.S. Eliot:
Because I know that time is always time.
And place is always and only place (89).
Throughout the course of its two hours, the
film indeed continues to thoroughly exhaust
the possibilities and permutations of space
below A miniature sculpture at the Tokyo
and time, freely moving between diverse and
cat temple as observed by Markers camera
incongruous places and time periods; while
the first shot is said to depict children in a
1960s rural Icelandic village, the next image
is one of Japanese commuters in the 1980s,
soon followed by a shot of an emu in Pariss
le-de-France. Such seemingly disjointed
editing patterns lead Catherine Russell to
argue that the images are collected and
edited together as if they had been found,
insofar as they are systematically detached
from their origins and sociopolitical contexts
(305). Markers disparate assortments of
images started life as documentary fragments
of a time now long gone and forgotten, its
last remaining traces persisting in the form of
visual images with little to no relation to the
reality they once represented. In the unstable,
loosely defined architecture of Sunless, the

43 Film Matters Winter 2016

Feature 07
filmmakers recorded fragments lose their
referential connections to the world they
visually depict, as Markers heterogeneous
editing arrangements put forward above all
the individual images potential to stand in
for isolated elements of the narrators own
consciousness and personal memory.
The internal structure of Sunless goes
beyond the exploration of spatiotemporal
possibilities, and begins to reproduce the
random drifts of human remembering.
Through the images of the film, Krasna
remembers and retraces his past experiences
with little to no predetermined beginning
or end, constantly triggering new sets of
concrete memories, carrying the spectator
from one branch to another. At one point,
Sunless moves from San Francisco and a re-
reading of Alfred Hitchcocks Vertigo (1958)
to an idea for an imaginary science fiction
film set in the future year of 4001: discussing
Vertigo provides the Proustian Madeleine that
leads Krasna to envisage his own, fictitious
film, one existing solely within the confines
of Sunless. In what Raymond Bellour has
termed wandering with precision (Barr
173), it is precisely the personal drifts and
random digressions that structure Sunless,
leading Carol Mavor to argue that Markers
fast-moving cine-collage can be compared to
the experience of watching the difficult art
of Japanese action cooking, insofar as both
are exhilarating mixtures of raw ingredients
that suddenly transform in front of our eyes
(746). Markers essayistic practice is hardly
one of uniformity or coherence, instead
moving closer toward radical instability and
energetic fluctuation, as the films diverse
moving images enter into erratic and
persistently dynamic assortments in which
drifts and deviations are not exceptions to the
norm, but the norm itself.
44
Nace Zavrl
below Giraffe running across a savanna
in Chris Markers Sunless
After depicting a Japanese ceremony
mourning recently deceased animals, the
film suddenly cuts to a slightly degraded film
shot of a giraffe running across a savanna,
then after three seconds cuts back to the
procession in Japan. The giraffe, an image
from Krasnas vast labyrinth of memory,
appears as though slowly surfacing to the
filmmakers consciousness, but has not yet
fully materialized. After another ten seconds,
the film cuts to an almost imperceptible
half-second television image, depicting a
Markers disparate assortments of images started life
as documentary fragments of a time now long gone
and forgotten, its last remaining traces persisting in
the form of visual images with little to no relation to
the reality they once represented.
Film Matters Winter 2016
person firing a gun, followed by another cut
to the giraffe, this time being shot in the leg
from long distance with a firearm: through
a series of cuts and juxtapositions, Sunless
here transforms from a serene depiction of
human grievance to a shocking image of
animal death in a matter of seconds. Further,
after observing the giraffes painful death for
thirty seconds, the film cuts to another almost
imperceptibly short take, this time depicting
the Japanese mourning ceremony focused
on previously. Following Krasnas stream of
consciousness in its aggregation of layers, the
film consistently alternates between a number
of memory layers existing simultaneously in
the filmmakers mind, remaining open to any
newly surfaced images yet never suppressing
ones already encountered. In Olivia Lory
Kays words, Sunless returns, pre-empts,
repeats, and revisits its images and sounds
in a move toward spatial and associational
rather than linear narrative logic (259).
Visualizing the unpredictable, branching
paths of Krasnas memory consciousness,
Sunless combines its individual images into a
stream of consciousness larger than the sum
of its constituent documents.
In Sunless, seemingly insignificant banal
moments captured by Markers or Krasnas
documentary camera are combined into a
meaningful, coherent whole. In its emphasis
on the mundane, the inconsequential, and
b e l o w Television image of a person fir-
ing in a gun, later intercut with images of
a giraffe being shot to death with a firearm
Feature 07 Images Are My Memory

the ephemeral, the film offers its spectator below A woman from Guinea-Bissau
subtle fragments from Krasnas personal locks eyes with Markers camera
collection of memories, encounters, dreams,
thoughts, and mental associations; images
of stray dogs running along a Cape Verde
beach, of morning commutes in Tokyo, and
of emus in the le-de-France are individual
fragments, lived moments or personal
recollections lifted out of and materialized
from Krasnas deeply intimate collection of
memories. In David Monteros words, Sunless
becomes here nothing less than a catalogue
of things that never were, as they would
have been lost without the presence of the
camera (Film Also Ages 110). Indeed,
Markers essay can be seen as a resistance
against the fragility and destruction of
intimate memories, of everyday banality
that would have eventually been, in Krasnas
words, swallowed up by the spiral of time
and history. The film rescues ephemeral,
abstract images of Krasnas camera- below A sleeping commuter on a Tokyo
consciousness from being forgotten, doing train observed by Markers camera
so by visualizing them in the form of
externalized visual documents. In the process
however, memories become indivisible
from the media that records them: as
Krasna remarks, [images] have substituted
themselves for my memory, they are my
memory. I wonder how people who dont
film, dont photograph, dont tape, remember
things? The act of remembering becomes
for Markers narrator synonymous with
the act of recording. Further, in much the
same way that Sunless could hardly exist as a
coherent cinematic text without its diverse
visual documents, the documents themselves
have little to no existence independent of
the film. That is, while Krasnas memory
images compose and structure Sunless,
the audiovisual fragments are themselves
granted coherence by the film, as they
would otherwise never materialize any place
below Marker intercuts brief shots of dreaming
outside of Krasnas imagination. Sunless
commuters with images from television broad-
and its documents exist here in a state of casts and video game segments
interdependence: the documentarys non-
linear, unpredictable structure is dependent
on Krasnas memory labyrinth at the same
time as the images that form that same
labyrinth would hardly have existed were it
not for Sunless.
Furthermore, Markers documentary
images exist not in an ethnographic power
relation with their subjects, but closer to
something of a reciprocal equality. As Kaja
Silverman notes, the film does not attempt
to penetrate these cultures, like a traditional
ethnographic film ... Rather, it opens itself up
to penetration by them (186). Indeed, the
people stared at by the camera consistently
and restlessly stare back, breaking the fourth
wall and breaking the historical conventions

45 Film Matters Winter 2016

Feature 07
of ethnographic documentary film. The
returned gaze, as Paula Amad has recently
noted, unbalances the cinemas dominant,
objectifying gaze upon the Other and refers
to exchange, interaction, dialogue, and
relay, rather than imperialist stereotyping
or oppression (64). Insofar as Sunless does
not convey any ethnographic background
information about the observed cultures, its
images figure as something of a document
of the encounter that is, the exchange of
looks between filmmaker and his subjects,
but not by any means a documentary about
these cultures. Both the visual images and
the voice-over consistently avoid any detailed
or in-depth ethnographic examinations
and instead resort to brisk commentary on
surface appearances and brief engagements
with racial stereotypes. At one point, the
narrator refers to Cape Verde islanders
simply as a people of nothing.
Sunless, as Yvette Biro notes, merely
identifies and points to its visual images
without including further commentary that
might distort or influence what is portrayed:
just to name is vital [Marker] indicates
without adjectives, because adding
ornaments to the images would be as rude
as leaving pricetags on purchases (176). In
its abundance of diverse memory-images,
in which surface level racial and national
stereotypes prevail (Japan is depicted solely
through images of high technology, Tokyo
crowds, and mystical rituals, while Africa is
depicted as a vast rural expanse, struggling
for survival and independence), the camera
appears to extend above and beyond what
Dziga Vertov referred to as kino-eye
and closer toward what Carol Mavor has
termed in her discussion of Chris Marker
as camera-mouth (752). That is, rather
than a Vertovian recording of life caught
46
Nace Zavrl
below Marker includes footage from
television broadcasts alongside footage
recorded by his traveler persona, Sandor
Krasna
unawares, Sunless instead chomps on
the world, as often as possible, with little
regard of ethnographic or documentary
conventions, attempting instead to enter into
intimate contact with the inner lives of its
filmic subjects. While largely uninterested
to delve into detail about who or what is
being represented in Markers documentary
images, the film nevertheless speculates on
their intimate thoughts, dreams, emotions,
and feelings. At one point, as the camera
observes a group of morning commuters
taking a nap on the Tokyo over-ground train,
images of their sleeping facial expressions are
intercut with a variety of television images,
video games, and short film segments,
perhaps standing in as visualized dream
images extracted from the commuters
own sleeping minds. Rather than scientific
examinations of global cultures, Sunlesss
visual documents stand closer to subjective,
speculative ruminations on what the
Film Matters Winter 2016
characters might be thinking, even if their
thoughts will in the end remain unknowable.
Chris Marker has reflected upon his
filmmaking in a similar fashion:
I stare at them, but not enough, not long
enough ... There is something of that
megalomaniac melancholy in the browsing
of past images. Perhaps, if I could catch
up with that absolute beauty in Cape
Verde, the violinist in Stockholm lost in
her thoughts ... perhaps I could conquer
a world. Or rather, they would conquer a
world for me. (80)
The filmmakers voyeuristic staring can thus
be seen less as an Othering objectification
that reaffirms the dominance of Euro-
American identity, but as an attempt to
grasp mental processes and the subjects
inner worlds of dream and fantasy, both of
which will ultimately remain inaccessible
to the cameras gaze. In the process, Sunless
loses its ethnographic significance; Markers
documents begin to rupture their iconic link
with outside reality as they come to represent
little else than the filmmakers own subjective
speculations on the world and its inhabitants.
Further, Sunless repeatedly points toward
the various mediations taking place between
film and its represented reality. Echoing his
fiercely guarded privacy as an artist, Chris
Marker invents for himself a trio of alter
egos: the sound production is attributed to
Michel Krasna, who along with the fictive
traveler Sandor Krasna and Japanese visual
artist Hayao Yamaneko are all simply three
manifestations of Markers own filmmaking
persona. Moreover, Chris Marker is itself
one of many pseudonyms that Christian
Franois Bouche-Villeneuve has used in the
course of his artistic career: along with Fritz
below An abstracted cat as it passes
through Hayao Yamanekos video synthe-
sizer The Zone
Feature 07
Markassin and Jacopo Berenzi, Chris Marker
is merely one of many incarnations of the
diverse visual artist, whose alter egos obscure
simplistic understandings of the source
and enunciator of his filmic texts. In Stella
Bruzzis words, the boundaries between
these different personae are far from rigid and
thus the central relationship between image
and words, traditionally so logical, becomes
fluid and mutable (59). The many sources
of the films narration, mediated through
the enigmatic voice-over, thus complicate
and challenge any documentary claim of
unmediated correspondence between reality
and its representation. Markers fragmented
points of enunciation serve to create rather
than collapse the critical distance between
film and its spectator. While the voice-over
purports to transmit Sandor Krasnas written
letters, the female narrator continually
indicates independence, though commenting
and expanding on Krasnas own reflections.
At times, the narrator prefaces her sentences
with he told me or he wrote me, indicating memories appear to originate from the persons
that the following thoughts are Krasnas alone;
yet at other times the voice-over remains
ambiguous as to whether the narration is a
direct quote from Krasnas letters, or the result
of the female narrators own independent
thought. As the films images pass through
Hayao Yamanekos graphic distortion
device (an aspect I shall return to later), the
narrator is ambiguous as to who she refers to
with me: Hayao showed me my images,
already touched by the moss of time ...
Referring both to Marker, Krasna, or perhaps
the unseen narrator herself, the on-screen
images relationship to reality is obscured and
challenged as their source and author remain
fundamentally unknowable to the spectator.
Sunless presents something of a challenge to
traditional notions of documentary authorship,
as the films memory images originate not from
a clearly defined, unitary source, but from a
heterogeneity of different authors and media
devices. As already described, Marker remains
open toward incorporating memories and
dreams of strangers, visualizing the undisclosed
dreams of a group of Japanese travelers and
engaging in what Kaja Silverman has dubbed
heteropathic remembrance, a process in
which thoughts of unnamed strangers become
an active part of the memory surface that
forms the narrative (187). In a similar way,
Sunless visualizes memory images that would otherwise succumb to the
paralyzing spiral of time and history; it rescues immaterial traces of dreams and
buried memories precisely by visualizing them into tangible moving images that
compose the core of Markers essayistic narrative.
47
Images Are My Memory
the film remembers and recounts the final
thoughts of a Japanese kamikaze pilot before
his final takeoff; however, while the visualized
observed (kamikaze fighters and Tokyo
commuters), their perspective is evidently
impossible, insofar as the filmmaker has no
physical access to what his or her subjects
are thinking at the moment of recording.
Alongside visualized dreams and memories,
extracts from other filmmakers works (among
them, Alfred Hitchcock, Haroun Tazieff, and
Danile Tessier) are continuously employed
alongside Markers own footage, together
with few-second clips of television broadcasts,
and brief excerpts from video games. What
matters is not the representational truth-value
of individual images, but the meaningful
documentary whole that they form together,
as a group. In its eclectic mix of visual
media, Sunless disregards the impossibility of
its subject positions and instead suggests, in
Sarah Coopers words, that they come from
a far broader perspective simultaneously: the
images of sleeping Japanese commuters and
the accompanying film excerpts merge into a
continuum, insofar as the film veils the origins
of both (56). That is, neither the filmic images
recorded either by Marker (or an altogether
different, unacknowledged filmmaker), nor the
visualized dreams (told from an impossible,
paradoxical perspective) seem to originate
from a clearly defined source; Sunless blurs
the boundaries between the films respective
Film Matters Winter 2016
below Barely recognizable graphic images
as they appear in The Zone
subjects and authors, subverting the narrators
assumed position of control and dominance.
Rather than passive consumers of
generalized truths narrated by an omniscient
voice-over, audiences of Sunless occupy a
fundamentally active position. As Carol Mavor
has pointed out, the spectator imagines herself
as a kind of pilgrim leader, taking many
roads, but not the road, nor even nearly all the
roads, to be in Sunless (744). In its fast-paced
cutting strategy, densely narrated voice-over,
and its abundance of audiovisual material, the
spectator cannot comprehend all documents
in their entirety, but must necessarily choose
between them, eliminating some while
retaining others if a comprehensible fabula
is to be constructed in her mind. Prefiguring
Markers interactive CD-ROM Immemory
(1997), where viewers are asked to manually
navigate through a labyrinthine model
of Markers digitized collection of quasi-
memories, the spectator of Sunless is charged
with constituting her own mental connections
between the films individual memory-
images. Further, when confronted with the
unrecognizable and thoroughly abstract images
of Hayao Yamanekos The Zone, spectators
cannot but adopt an active, scrutinizing gaze.
The Zone is an innovative cinematic
space in which film images are manipulated
through synthesizers that turn the once
representational recordings of actuality into
abstract colored shapes that bear little or no
resemblance to the profilmic reality they once
Feature 07
depicted. Divesting images of their iconic
qualities of representation and indexical
veracity, The Zone breaks the illusion that
cinematic images may ever provide even a
brief and authentic snapshot of the world
in itself. Separated from their origins in reality
and divorced from the flow of historical
time, images in The Zone are freed from
any possessive access to the outside world
and are instead granted something of a
non-representational autonomy: in David
Monteros words, they travel the road from
their often misinterpreted documentary
value toward a much more complex regime
that inscribes them as the raw material of an
artistic practice, open to manipulation and
deception (Film Also Ages 113). As Krasna
points out when first faced with Yamenekos
device, these pictures are less deceptive ...
than those you see on television. At least they
proclaim themselves to be what they are:
images, not the portable and compact form of
an already inaccessible reality. Affirming an
insurmountable distance between the event
and its filmic representation, visual images
from The Zone are thus dispossessed of
their value as documents of a profilmic reality,
and instead serve as purely visual elements,
raw ingredients of the memory mosaic that is
Sunless.
In conclusion, individual audiovisual
documents in Sunless are combined into a wide
set of more and less coherent arrangements
of moving images that together form an
unstable yet meaningful documentary
surface that figures as something of a
simulacrum of human memory processes:
its seemingly disjointed editing strategy
works not according to linear causality, but
follows the unpredictability and branching
of Sandor Krasnas own intimate stream of
consciousness. In its emphasis on banality
in events of little to no wider consequence,
Sunless visualizes memory images that would
otherwise succumb to the paralyzing spiral of
time and history; it rescues immaterial traces
of dreams and buried memories precisely
by visualizing them into tangible moving
images that compose the core of Markers
essayistic narrative. As they pass through The
Zone, the films documents lose any of their
remaining value as historical documents or
representations of reality, now serving instead
as raw visual elements of Markers deeply
subjective and speculative documentary
surface. Documents and documentary
thus appear in a state of interdependence:
the images exist qua documents only insofar
as they visualize a specific memory (be it
Markers, Krasnas, or a strangers); having
no existence of their own outside of Sunless,
its documents depend on the documentary
48
Nace Zavrl
surface as a whole, while, at the same time,
they actively constitute it and establish it as a
coherent entity.
/end/
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Film Matters Winter 2016
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