Sans Soleil with La Jetée

Chris Marker—filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and now videographer and digital multimedia artist—has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. Sans Soleil is his mind-bending freeform travelogue that journeys from Africa to Japan, while La Jetée is one of the most influential and radical science fiction films ever made—a tale of time travel told in still images.

“Chris Marker’s expert-level art documentary Sans Soleil—100 minutes of transnational street footage intermingled with the secondhand musings of an anonymous writer’s melodic and soporific voice—can’t really be “seen” in any comprehensive sense: this is cinema as waking dream, and maintaining focus on any one of its uncountable subjects is like trying to read an epistolary novel while being held under hypnosis…” —Michael Castelle, Cine-File Chicago

“This familiar theme is treated with remarkable finesse and imagination, its symbols and perspectives continually reinforcing the subject matter. Not once does it make use of the time-honored conventions of traditional science fiction. Creating its own conventions from scratch, it triumphantly succeeds where science fiction invariably fails.” —J. G. Ballard on La Jetée

Film Details

Sans Soleil
Language: French, English subtitles
Year: 1983
Running time: 103 min
Director: Chris Marker

La Jetée
Language: French, English subtitles
Year: 1962
Running time: 29 min
Director: Chris Marker

Films and schedules may be subject to change.