TV Reviews : Evocative ‘Sans Soleil’ Screens Tonight on KCET

Of all the great contemporary documentary film makers, France’s Chris Marker--whose most highly admired film, the 1983 “Sans Soleil” will screen tonight at 9 on KCET Channel 28--may be the most distinctive, unusual and personal. Marker’s films are as much about himself--his feelings and philosophy--as his camera subject.

“Sans Soleil” is a mysterious, evocative work that reverberates in your mind like distant wind chimes. It’s structured around a set of letters from Sandor Krasna read here, in English, by Alexandra Stewart. Krasna and Marker both seem obsessively preoccupied with time and the transience of life, the power of memory, the suggestion that “all that is visible clings to the invisible.”

Shooting primarily in Japan and Africa, occasionally in France or the United States, Marker shows us a modern world of high technology and an older, buried world of tradition and primitive feeling. He ruminates on time passing, shows us a city destroyed by a volcano, uses his camera to retrace the exact path of James Stewart following Kim Novak through the spectral San Francisco of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.”

He shows us the world distorted through video by an electronics specialist who calls himself the “maniac” and his domain of electronic blotches “The Zone” (after Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie, “Stalker”). The new bible, he reflects, may be “an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly--just to know it existed.”

He begins and ends with an image that he (or Krasna?) describes as a vision of perfect happiness: three little blond girls in Iceland, holding hands as they walk through a field and disappear, long ago, far away.

Marker’s films, and “Sans Soleil” especially, are a personal diary, a catalogue of images accompanied by impressions and reveries. An ex-World War II Resistance fighter, ex-journalist, novelist and poet, he uses language that is at once poetic and concrete, developed in a highly expanded social framework.

“Sans Soleil”--sad, dreamy, full of passionate attachment to images and words that recede from us every second--is a record of a struggle to capture the spirit that lies beneath the surface, the invisible or unheard that the camera can never show, that a tape recorder can never play back, that words can only hint at.