List Price: $39.95You Pay Only: $23.49 You Save: $16.46 (41%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
Brand: Image Entertainment
EAN: 0715515023924
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
Label: Criterion Collection
Manufacturer: Criterion Collection
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Criterion Collection
Region Code: 1
Release Date: June 26, 2007
Running Time: 130 minutes
Sales Rank: 10373
Studio: Criterion Collection
Theatrical Release Date: 1963
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Editorial Review:
Description:
One of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made and a mind-bending free-form travelogue, La jetée (The Jetty) and Sans soleil (Sunless) couldn’t seem more different—yet they’re the twin pillars of one of the most daring and uncompromising careers in cinema history. 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. These two films—a tale of time travel told in still images and a journey to Africa and Japan—remain his best-loved and most widely seen.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Chris Marker's visions
Chris Marker's short film La Jetee (1962) is a classic. It was later re-made by Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys, also a good movie but very different. The basic story is not entirely new to SF-readers: in a post atomic-war future some government (they speak german) make experiments in time travel. The protagonist manages to slip in and out of the past, before the war. It's better to see it than read the story - the strength of La Jetee is the imagery (still pictures) and the poetic feeling. Either you like it or you don't. This Criterion edition also includes Sans Soleil, a sort of travel film for the most part taking place in Japan. It's very unique, like a flow of images and narration that is almost hypnotizing. Some of the extras on the Criterion edition are just silly (the booklet and some pointless interview with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin), and some is very good: I especially liked Luc Lagiers analysis of Hitchcock's Vertigo compared with La Jetee, fascinating!
Rating: - A wonderful trip
'Sans soleil' is a wonderful film that defies classification (beyond that of 'cult'). If you know anything about this quasi-documentary and the accompanying short, La jetee, (the two bookmark the beginning and the latter stages of a long career), then this review won't tell you anything new, but if you're half-interested/undecided, it might help. 'Sans soleil' takes the form of a letter presented in voice-over narration fashion, describing life in Tokyo, circa early 1980s. Tokyo is presented almost as an alien city, yet the viewer begins to be as fascinated with it as is the narrator. It's no exaggeration to say it's a kind of kaleidoscope or phatasmagoria of images and signs. Occasionally, there are flashes of life in Guinea-Bissau, to which Marker and the letter-reader cross-cut, though the point of which still somewhat escapes me. Tokyo, with its various media images from manga and horror films, seems to stand in for Japan as a whole, though the narrator does go on the odd excursion, for example to Hokkaido, and to a museum dedicated to male fertilty. There are some occasional scenes of extreme violence or just plainly disturbing images (even almost-subliminal out-takes from other films) taken from other media, but the whole is knitted together into an unlikely but rewarding patchwork. You couldn't get this much quality exposure to things Japanese if you watched Japanese TV or stood browsing in a Tokyo bookshop for two weeks non-stop, that's how rich it is. My favourite sequence deals with commuters ... Read More
Rating: - Language and subtitles
Just in reply to the other user note about subtitles on the Criterion release: you can turn them off on the 'Languages' menu, it's just kind of awkward and counter-intuitive to figure out how to use the menu, and what 'SDH' means (subtitles for the deaf, I guess).
I do not speak French, and I can't imagine trying to follow anything as dense and philosophical as Sans Soleil via subtitles. The consensus among folks I've talked to who know both languages is that the performance of the English narration is very good. On the other hand, I first saw La Jettee in French with subtitles, and it was easy enough to follow. Hearing the film with English narration, I was greatly diasappointed, as the English narrator sounds bland and too casual for the story. Again, my multilingual acquaintances concur. So, for the best user experience IMHO, watch La Jettee with the French audio and subtitles, so you get the sense of texture from the French voice. It's been released on video before (e.g. in the 'Short' series), but this Criterion edition is the first one that will let you hear the French and get English subs... hooray Criterion!
Rating: - Two amazing films
Both La Jette and Sans Soleil are amazing and innovative films. The first one, La Jetee, way ahead of Ken Burns, by the sole use of black and white photography, camera panning and narration (except for a magical few seconds), manages to convey a futuristic story, part sci-fi, part romance, creepy, beautiful, with a condemming anti-war message. The photographs themselves, some of war-torn cityscapes, but most of them taken for the film, are stunning.
Rating: - La Jetee: genius.
La Jetee (Chris Marker, 1962)
I'm not terribly sure what I can say about Chris Marker's La Jetee that hasn't been said by just about everyone else, so I'll keep this short. You probably already know this, but if you don't, it was the inspiration for David and Janet Peoples' screenplay for the Terry Gilliam film 12 Monkeys, rightly considered by the various-and-sundry on the IMDB message boards to be one of the top 250 movies of all time. (Interestingly, La Jetee has a slightly higher numerical rating; it lacks enough votes to secure a top-250 placing.) But where Gilliam molded the storyline into his most accessible (and commercially successful) film, Marker seemed to have no interest at all in making something accessible, or even likable; it's hard, in fact, to even call La Jetee a film, in the sense we know the word. That, of course, makes it all the more enchanting.
The story (if you haven't seen 12 Monkeys, a quick synopsis: a guy is sent through time in order to try and prevent the war that effectively ended civilization on Earth) is told, with one stunning exception, in a series of still images, over which there is narration. A story is being told, with accompanying pictures. The film, which clocks in at only twenty-eight minutes, barely draws the outline of this story, leaving the viewer to fill in as many of the blanks as he or she wishes. It's a bold move, and when it doesn't work, it's awful. Here, it works on every level it can.
If it were just that, it would ... Read More
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