The
Image of Happiness
or:
'the black leader'
"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."
Chris
Marker begins his film Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983)
with the above quotation. It is accompanied first by the image itself: three
children on a road in Iceland in 1965. A second image, unremarked upon by the
narrator, shows fighter planes on a naval ship undergoing maintenance. The
first image, and Marker’s characterization of it as "the image of
happiness", seems like a provocation; one of several that occur throughout
the film. Is the filmmaker challenging the audience to find happiness in the
image? Or is he challenging us to find what signifies this as an image of
happiness in the context of the film, or indeed, in the life of his
fictionalized avatar, the photographer Sandor Krasna?
Admittedly,
I've never seen happiness in the image itself. The image for me looks like one
of fear and discomfort; three children reacting to the intrusive appearance of
a stranger, who films them without permission. As they move through the frame,
their pale skin and blonde hair turned silvery by the low sun, they seem
incongruous against the green of the surrounding landscape; out of place and
out of time. Marker's camera dehumanizes his subjects throughout Sans Soleil,
as he studies objects and individuals with the detached curiosity of an alien
anthropologist trying to make sense of a culture and its customs beyond his
understanding. As the children move, they do so like trapped animals,
retreating, clinging to the edge of the road, unsure of the intentions of this
photographer, who records them without consent.
Sans
Soleil [Chris Marker, 1983]:
While
it's perhaps irresponsible if not ableist to force a developmental diagnosis
onto someone based only on a slim understanding of their personality, I do
speculate whether there was something almost autistic about Marker. It would
explain his way of bending the world to meet his various interests and
obsessions, his ability to find meanings and connections in signs and symbols,
the unerring gaze of his camera and the need to make sense of actions and
interactions, as if straining to understand the deeper nuances of a glance, a
stare, a gesture. Of course, it's possible that this was simply a result of his
background in journalism, which had perhaps conditioned an approach to people
as subject-matter, rather than as individuals. For Marker, people and places
pose questions to be probed and explored. In turning his camera against them,
he finds different ways of telling his own story, but never theirs.
The
approach presents a barrier for many viewers. While Sans Soleil remains an
acclaimed and singular work, feted and debated by film scholars the world over,
there are many critics, especially on social media, that have found Marker's
depiction and discussions surrounding other cultures and people to be both
racist and colonialist in nature. The argument being that the filmmaker speaks
on behalf of his subjects; that he denies them a voice; that he takes their
images without consent and uses them in a context they could never agree to.
Throughout
Sans Soleil we see people flinch at the sight of Marker and his camera. We see
them pull away, turn, cover their faces. The images Marker captures are often
of people showing discomfort, made anxious by the presence of the camera and
the intrusion of the lens. On one level this creates an inherent truth,
revealing personal and private moments that are authentic and real, but it does
so at the expense of individuals who didn't agree to this exploitation. It
presents a moral conundrum for many viewers more sympathetic to invasions of
privacy and the loss of personal agency, especially those we now face with our
own images in the age of the internet and social media.
Sans
Soleil [Chris Marker, 1983]:
In
discussing Marker's later film, Tokyo Days (1988) – a work that functions on
some levels as a postscript to the film in question – I remarked upon the voyeuristic
nature of Marker's cinema. How life, once viewed through a lens that both
records but transforms its true reality, becomes a spectacle of performance, to
be viewed and interpreted in the same way that we interpret a photograph or
film. There's an element of this present in Sans Soleil, which moves between ethnological
studies of modern Japan and the islands of Cape Verde, but also the phantom
studies of the imagined San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo (1958)
or the cultural footprints left by writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.
There
is a sense that for Marker there is no clear delineation between the reality of
the modern Japan and the unreality of Vertigo's San Francisco; that there's no
line between his observations, both of and on the dock workers at
Guinea-Bissau (recorded here by the filmmaker Sana Na N'Hada) and his later
observations on the fictional characters of Scottie Ferguson and Madeleine
Elster from the aforementioned Hitchcock film; that everything is part of a
more intricate system of memory and human consciousness (or even subconscious),
which, like a foreign territory, is there to be explored.
Personally,
I find Sans Soleil to be a remarkable, genuinely profound work that defies
categorization. Many have called it a documentary, or cinema essay, and yet I
feel both terms misrepresent the film and only worsen the problematic nature of
some of Marker's observations, or the charges of Orientalism. The film is as much
a documentary as "Alice in Wonderland", operating instead on a level
of fantasy, or science-fiction. It's a film that demands the viewer to adjust
their perceptions and understandings of the world and its people to the same
wavelength of Marker, where an obsession with cats and TV commercials, sleeping
commuters and the realities of Kamikaze pilots, entwine with the influences of
Jules Verne, Hitchcockian mystery, computer systems, natural disasters and the
supposition that there is a layer of hidden reality that exists between all
things and all times. For Marker, this hidden layer is called "the
Zone"; an elevated state of being named in tribute to the metaphysical,
extraterrestrial territory seen in the film Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky.
Stalker
[Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979]:
Sans
Soleil [Chris Marker, 1983]:
Like
the image at the beginning of the film, of the three children on a road in
Iceland, we end the film with another provocation, and another admission of
happiness. When Marker asks us to find "happiness" in the picture,
it's a personal challenge. But are we seeing a depiction of happiness in the
conventional sense, of smiling faces and arms outstretched, or are we being
asked to find happiness in our own reading of the image, in the projection of
our own personal thoughts and experiences upon it? Perhaps we find happiness in
the memories and associations of our own childhood innocence, in the
relationship between siblings, in the landscape, or the sense of home? Perhaps
the real answer is in the Zone?
The
"Zone" for Marker is not the sentient, metaphysical space that it is
for Tarkovsky, but the space between images, between past, present and future,
between reality and memory. Here, Marker shows us the same images we've seen
before, only this time they've been run through a video synthesizer. This
transforms the image into a second image. One that exists between reality and
something else; not pictorial, nor documentary in nature, but a kind of
projection, a phantom image, an image in decay. This brings us back to the implication
of the first sequences of images and the significance of the black leader.
When
Marker, via his female narrator, challenges us to see happiness in the picture
of the three children, or be satisfied with only seeing the black, he's effectively
asking us, in retrospect, to see the layers between images: the
"zone" itself. In showing the two images concurrently, he isn't
creating a juxtaposition: it's not an either/or. It's about seeing both pictures
at the same time, one on top of the other, and finding the image that lives
in-between. The image that exists in the blackness, and the blackness as an
image itself. It's in these distinctions and the images between images that the
secrets of Sans Soleil are revealed.
