Prime Cuts #3: “Sans Soleil” (Argos Films: 1983), directed by Chris Marker.

In the Prime Cuts essays so far I’ve focused on music and how two tracks on an album placed back-to-back can impact each other (Abide With Me and Well You Needn’t from “Monk’s Music” by Thelonious Monk; also Money Jungle and Fleurette Africaine from “Money Jungle” by Duke Ellington).  The series is also meant to examine the ramifications of how two scenes in a film placed next each other create the effect of A+B=C, or why Robert Bresson’s statement from Notes on The Cinematograph, “The same image brought in by ten different routes will be a different image ten times”, is true.  First up in these articles on film is a discussion of the opening sequence to Chris Marker’s essay-film, “Sans Soleil”.

The jump cut Stanley Kubrick created for “2001: A Space Odyssey”, of a bone flung in the air to a station in space, is considered to be one of the most iconic in the history of cinema.  The edit moves the viewer forward in time a few million years, indicating in an instant the advancement of technology from the first tool to humankind inhabiting outer space.  Chris Marker made a jump cut of a different kind at the beginning of “Sans Soleil” in two ways: by adding the component of black leader between the two shots and, rather that utilizing the jump cut to indicate a leap forward it time (as it is usually implemented), Marker uses it as an ultimate manifestation of Sergei Eisenstein’s use of montage, where images collide in a dialectic that transcends the meaning of the individual scenes.

This jump cut takes place in the opening minute of “Sans Soleil” and its effect is profound.  Like a micro-overture, the opening minute indicates the essay-film methodology for the entire movie: voiceover, documentary footage, fictional and factual narratives working in tandem.  And, as with the rest of the film, the alignment of these components creates an emotional and intellectual response that’s unlike any other film that I know.

The voice over is from a fictional letter from a fictional camera man, Sandor Krasna, who shoots the majority of the film’s footage (actually Chris Marker): “The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland in 1965.  He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images but it never worked.  He wrote me one day, “I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader.  If they don’t see happiness in the picture at least they’ll see the black.”

Marker describes in words exactly what takes place with the images: “I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader.”  The jump is then to a shot of an American fighter jet moving into the hull of an aircraft carrier.  “The image of happiness” collides with what could only be called its opposite, an image that projects a symbol of war.  The leap that Kubrick creates in “2001” is absolutely masterful and visually impacts the intellect, expressing the advance of technology in a moment, utilizing the parallel shape of the bone and space station as a visual guide.  The leap that Marker creates is, in my opinion, more profound. 

Marker takes the “Overtonal Montage”  concept of Eisenstein (which juxtaposes metric [length], rhythmic, and tonal [shots with similar emotional or thematic elements] components) and turns it on its head: The duration of the scene of the children is almost three times longer than that of the fighter jet.  The rhythm of the image of the children holding hands and walking moves right to left, the shot of the jet moves straight down.  There is no similarity in emotional or thematic content between the two scenes.  

The voiceover begins over black leader, “The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland in 1965.”  Marker then shows us that image.  Black leader is used again as a conduit between the two shots, with the fighter jet scene following the words, “he had tried several times to link it to other images,” then as we see that image as the words, “but it never worked”, are spoken  In this instant, Marker devised a jump cut between two images with an emotional and intellectual power that transcends Kubrick’s: one that spans time, place, and content.  It’s one of the great moments in cinema history.