Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Matylda Swan It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Paynbob It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Jerrie It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

SnoopyStyle This is a film pondering time and place. The narrator is retelling a travelogue written by a world traveler. He traveled and commented on life in various places from Japan to Cape Verde to Guinea-Bissau. Trying to comprehend the ideas coming from the narration may be a fool's errant but it does flow with a hypnotic rhythm. One does wonder if the stories being told are real or made up but it almost doesn't matter. The commentary on these foreign lands come with a grain of salt. The images themselves are interesting. They are sometimes banal everyday life. Sometimes they are fascinating bits of a different culture. This is more than a simple travel vacation video but I couldn't really explain what it all means. Even as a simple home video, this is still entrancing. One starts to fall into the movie. I'm not sure what to take away from this other than the awesome knowable unknowable foreignness of the world.

Dalbert Pringle Directed by French film-maker, Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (meaning Sunless) was a bore.It was without dialogue (only narration) and had a gruelling running time of 100 minutes.Shot in colour, this film's imagery was live-action, showing endlessly repetitive activity in urban Japan.It's too bad that there is nothing memorable to say about any of this film.For me, the only way to watch this dreary picture from hell was in fast-forward mode.Between this 1983 film and 1962's La Jetee, movie-director Chris Marker has shown absolutely no improvement in his craft.

federovsky One of the most worthless things I've ever seen put on celluloid. I had previously tried to get through it twice and failed - finding it miserably tedious. The images were barely more than home movie quality, every sentiment was abysmally banal, and there was something me than faintly self-congratulatory about it all. What on earth can Marker's fans get out of this…? He seemed to think he was the first westerner to set foot in Asia - and with a camera too! He tried to invest everything he saw with such utter gravity and meaning, but fell head first into every clichéd image and hackneyed idea of Asia there is. I waited for something to grab me… some remarkable insight or pearl of wisdom… nothing… just a film-maker (a fairly amateurish one) desperate to film every little oddity, and when there are none, every little banality.I knew this was going to be a hard ride, but I tried to shrug off any preconceptions and prejudices to give this another try. After only three minutes I had to hit the pause button. Later I tried again, a non-believer reading the Bible.Bland images. This kind of thing needs-pictures like Baraka to at least provide some justification. Five minutes are spent watching a Japanese street carnival. Marker takes a fascination in people that comes across as simply naïve. He waxes philosophical about a man frying food on a hotplate, presumably because it's the first time he has seen it happening. A Japanese cameraman of equal naivety might well point his camera at a little old woman frying chips in a British chippie and call it meaningful. Thankfully, nobody ever did.His camera craves little oddities, such as the temple of the beckoning cats, but it's no more than touristic innocence.The observation that people ought to look in the camera is typical of the 'aren't I being meaningful by seeing something that no-one else can?' attitude. But by doing so they are not revealing themselves with curiosity, only hiding themselves with insecurity.There are two ways of looking at every human emotion. A blithe side and a cynical side. Marker is full of the tourist's childish fascination in things he little understands, and which he photographs for precisely that reason. Every image is the gawping of an idiot - at the beginning we stare at people asleep on a ferry as if there is something unique and profound about this particular ferry this particular day.Drawing filigree connections is his main past-time: Marker thinks it clever to move from formal stylised movements of a Japanese traditional dance to awkwardness.He sets himself a challenge at the very beginning - how to follow an idyllic image of three Icelandic girls? Nothing works - certainly not the fighter plane he suggests. He gives us a long black pause instead. So, there's a game of meaning going on, couched in a game of imagery. Absolutely every piece of film here is the same.The woman's deadpan voice-over constantly riles. She has the tone of Virginia Woolf reading her suicide note. She is narrating the traveller's letters. It's earnest, adulatory - and you never forget it is Marker talking about himself, massaging his own ego through a fantasy girlfriend because it conveniently avoids the too-blatant first person. There's something unpleasantly adolescent, almost JD Salingerish, about this trick, and I instinctively resist.I felt like I was supposed to be impressed by the fact that Marker had travelled, had had reflections, that he was alive. It was not just self-congratulatory, but self-ratifying, self-aggrandizing; the immodesty of the adolescent that hasn't yet learned sophistication.At the end of it he had shown me nothing about the world or about people. He had made mountains out of philosophical molehills and was dining off the tale.

porlawright This film keeps coming back to me. It utterly confused me at first but something about it made me go back and watch again. It is a film that can fit into many definitions, none of them however, definitively.The problem of capturing reality is a problem central to film theory, most do it by creating the 'reality effect' via the familiar codes of continuity editing etc, but it is just that, an illusion. Marker, like Godard, purposely confounds these codes and explores the limits of film/the image/art in order to examine what Benjamin called 'erfahrung' - a formulation for experience aligned to memory as apposed to immediacy. True experience is the recollection of events, a retracing of the path of memory. Only when experience is assimilated in this way can meaning be derived from it.Sans Soleil plays with the idea of grand historicising themes, focusing on the narratives left untold in the history books, the story of the defeated, strange cultural idiosyncrasies, the easy, lazy way emotions are manipulated by the camera, so a man's tears of gratitude are revealed by context to be tears of rage. Marker takes canonical historical signposts and challenges their ability to tell us anything of worth about the world and humanity within it. He jolts (and it is a jolt) our attention away from the official processes of historification, that goes on beneath our noses in cinema, towards the banal and the everyday detail that comes the stuff of life itself.On first viewing, especially if you are unfamiliar with the codes of progressive, experimental or 'counter' cinema, you may well be confused. But you will also be intrigued and on second viewing its secrets begin to reveal themselves. This is released with Marker's short la Jetee, another treat.This is a truly remarkable film, the only piece of cinema that has, for me, chimed on a similar level of complexity and profundity with the works of Shakespeare and one that similarly continues to resonate.