Poetic notification of desire and death
Having composed this title which summarises my impressions, I could stop at this point.
This film does not tell a story but only covers anecdotes, minute facts, metamorphoses of objects, the divinity of cats and video games - to make a lyrical collage - and, although I admired the perfection of this cinema of anticipation, I equally admired the beauty of the text, punctuated by those gripping letters from Sandor Krasna, a dense text full of sparkle.
However, it should also be recognised that this work has the strange merit of accomplishing something very rare, something like a discreet staging of the most scientific of today's human societies. Evoking the slim divisions between reigns, sexes, life and death, is to identify with extreme precision what is known as 'structure' - a word borrowed from the ancient language of architects. The pages of Sans soleil have much more to say than our teachers on the absolutism of sex, the drama of the search for self-identification, the nature of religions, the power and logic of the ends of revolutions and, finally, on the proliferation of human inventions to complete the cycle of love and life.
I noted a persistent to-and-fro of African and Japanese images. I also noticed the extreme variety of ideas: personnel managers, broken dolls, the Bissau carnival, the coming-of-age party, awards being presented to former guerrillas, the su icide, using grenades, of two hundred young girls during the war, political sermons in a Tokyo street, etc. Not a bric-a-brac Japan but, within the gentle tranquillity of this film, a high-speed poetical tale, a sort of hyper-industrial myt hological gamble.
As I was leaving, I thought of the European expression for Ars docta, Art that teaches, invented by people during the Renaissance to say something that was very human, very negro and very Japanese. We cannot help being affected. I a lso remembered the jargon of Ancient peoples to define the ultimate tragic knowledge: a footprint that cannot be erased which we must pass through. We are here in the vestiges of what has already taken place and in the vestiges of the unkno wn that is to be accomplished, we are here in the timelessness of desire and death. This is why Sans soleil is not an affectation of the electronic era but an announcement that industry is going to become a metaphor for Humanity.
Pierre Legendre