North Coast Journal September 27, 2007 : DIRT: TITLE

September 27, 2007

In Review heading

DVD: La Jetée/Sans Soleil
CD: Love Is the Song We Sing

La Jetée/Sans Soleil
Directed by Chris Marker
Criterion Collection

Once again the Criterion Collection has rescued the work of a masterful director from the annals of obscurity. Here they couple two key works by French director/photographer/activist Chris Marker, La Jetée and Sans Soleil, vastly different films that still clearly stem from the same artistic vision.

Marker is a notoriously enigmatic figure. He’s never made public appearances or even allowed himself to be photographed, offering only intentional misinformation about his personal life, leaving us only with is his professional life -- work as an early assistant and collaborator with Alain Resnais followed by a series of cinéma-vérité documentaries of his world travels made up his early career, leading to his best-known work, 1962’s La Jetée.

A landmark in the poetic and evocative possibilities of film, La Jetée is set in a post-apocolyptic Paris, telling the story of a man haunted by his pre-war memories who is subjected to a time-travel experiment, subsequently falling in love and experiencing a desire across time. Despite its importance in the lineage of the French New Wave, the film is known by the average video store clerk merely as the source Terry Gilliam pillaged for his 1995 sci-fi flick 12 Monkeys, which lifted the skeletal La Jetée storyline and expanded it to a significantly less risky Hollywood art film. Marker’s approach to the story, however, is notably idiosyncratic: It’s essentially a moving photo essay consisting of a series of motionless black and white photographs, the action and plot conveyed through third-person voiceover. In a scant 27 minutes, stagnant images shift like a poetic slide show to create a world that marries a dream state with a stark, cold reality, fully utilizing film’s (and photography’s) often-neglected ability to stop time (and, in this case, re-work it).

Nineteen years and 13 films separate La Jetée and Sans Soleil, a period where Marker mostly focused on documentaries about political resistance, testaments to his long association with the leftist causes that are often at the forefront of his work. Sans Soleil is truly Marker’s masterwork, a culmination of all his previous explorations as a filmmaker. Made up entirely of travel footage shot by Marker and his colleagues, the film stitches together images from Japan, Africa, Iceland, San Francisco and other places to create a cohesive whole that straddles the line between documentary and fiction. Shot without sync sound, the footage is augmented by voiceover of a woman reading a series of letters from a fictional cameraman relating to the on-screen action (or lack thereof). The narration, combined with a subtle electronic score, lets the inherent inner beauty of the moving images -- Marker calls them “the fragility of moments suspended in time” -- slowly seep out, building multi-faceted meanings. Children on a road in a volcanic Icelandic town, the hesitant glance of a Guinean woman towards the camera, a homeless Japanese man directing traffic, all are given their own context and significance. At its core, the film is a philosophical essay on the concepts of memory and time, and on the greater implications of filmmaking itself. The masterful cinematography is the sort of thing that can never be intentionally orchestrated on a set and can only exist as an individual’s personal vision in relation to their reality. Through his awareness of this relationship, Marker articulates a bold, overarching viewpoint with a profound understanding of the more abstract nuances of different cultures (achieved largely through contrast), yet he is still able to retain the naïve, inquisitive eye of a traveler. Possibly the only weakness of the film is its density: Only after repeated viewings does the true extent of its depth become palpable.

This release marks the first real stateside appearance of any of Marker’s works on an official DVD. Tragically, the remainder of his five-decade body of work remains nearly impossible to locate even on VHS. Regardless, it’s great that these two films are now widely available, as they remind us that the poetic, visual and philosophical possibilities of film -- of art, even -- have still yet to be fully explored.

-- Spencer Doran, a musician

Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970
by Various Artists
Rhino Records

The Summer of Love still casts its patchouli-scented shadow on the Bay Area forty years later, a legend blessed and cursed by old hippies and academics who weren’t even alive at the time. One thing you can’t refute is the Bay Area’s revolutionary impact on the music business. It gave birth to psychedelia, jam bands, Latin rock, light shows, electrified protest music, rock posters and freeform FM radio. Yet despite the talk of a “San Francisco sound,” the music of the ’60s was too diverse for that. Garage noise, blues, folk, jazz, country, pop, rock and more went into the pot, and with the pot, to create a smorgasbord of anticommercial sounds.

On this four-CD set, you get all the expected hits, from Jefferson Airplane’s “It’s No Secret” to the Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” to Santana’s “Evil Ways.” You also get the minor hits and obscure gems from dozens of bands long forgotten. “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Blackburn & Snow was a big club hit but never made it as a single, despite Sherry Snow’s stunning looks and the duo’s amazing harmonies. Concord’s Immediate Family set verses by Omar Khayyam -- a loaf of bread, a glass of wine, a book of verse and thou -- to a vaguely Eastern scale played on a mysteriously trebly keyboard. “Hearts to Cry” is an expansive, innovative, psychedelic pop gem by Frumious Bandersnatch, a great East Bay band that never quite made it. The Ace of Cups, one of the first all-girl bands in rock, delivers “Glue,” an indictment of the commercial mentality that unfortunately still sounds timely. The Loading Zone, with Linda Tillery on lead vocals, turns in a soulful, psychedelic version of “The Bells,” a tune made popular in the ’50s by Billy Ward and his Dominoes.

You can buy this for the hits, but you’ll enjoy the thrill of discovery as you explore the obscure and unsung bands that produced much of the era’s legendary aura.

-- j. poet, a veteran Bay Area music journalist

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