Sans Soleil begins two ways: invoking T.S. Eliot's poem "Ash Wednesday"
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
and with a long piece of black leader, the imageless film that pulls every movie through the projector and into its light.
Watching this movie filled me with aphorisms and allusive images. I scrawled in the darkness, "It was now little girls who made and unmade stars." That night I had vivid dreams that woke me up just as I was cresting an enormous wave and plummeting into its trough. I distinctly recall I was doing it for science.
Poet Susan Howe wrote
Often Sans Soleil seems largely about footage shot somewhere else. This is a film of quotations, outtakes, retakes, tape delays, failed military coups, dead pilots, and ghostly warriors. Everything is acted out on the borderline that divides introjection and incorporation.
I think part of the secret of this film, itself "a list of things that quicken the heart," is that its use of found documentary footage, knit together into narrative by a woman's voice reading letters, makes it feel like part of a longer, ongoing film. One that began when cinema began and that stretches past today into the future.
I can't wait to watch it again.
[See also Stalker, Tarkovsky; Until the End of the World, Wenders]