La Jetée and Sans Soleil

At least one critic has dubbed Chris Marker a “cosmonaut”—this in apparent admiration of the French documentary filmmaker’s ability to make other cultures look like products of distant planets. Marker’s documentaries jettison conventional narrative, instead telling stories by way of letter-writing and striking imagery. Sadly, his fascinating oeuvre has rarely, if ever, been seen in this country. But the good folks at Criterion are now trying to remedy this problem by releasing Marker’s two most popular films on DVD. Sans Soleil (1983) involves odd footage of Africa and Japan—images of people and their ceremonies paired with poetic observation. La Jetée (1962), Marker’s sole fictional work, is a thirty-minute photo-roman—that is, a variety of stills culled together—with narration. The movie is a short and stunning science fiction work and noted in this country as the inspiration for the inferior 12 Monkeys. With its striking imagery and haunting story of time travel, love, and the trap of memory, you can watch La Jetée in the time it takes you to sit through an episode of My Name Is Earl, and be moved in ways you never imagined.