Jean-Pierre Gorin on Chris Marker's Sans Soleil

December 19, 2020 5:23 PM

Like a good magician, he's blatantly telling you what he's going to do to you, and then he does it and he does something else on top of that so the magic is constantly explained and constantly reaffirmed.

Jean-Pierre Gorin on Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. Chris Marker previously.
posted by juv3nal (6 comments total)

Ahh! I took a bunch of film classes from JP as an undergrad! Thanks for sharing this, I haven't thought about him in years but so much of how I think about film and acting owes a lot to him.
posted by potrzebie at 6:06 PM on December 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

Sans Soleil is a great film (except for the giraffe). Changed my life when I first saw it. Has similarities to Wim Wender's Tokyo Ga (in which Chris Marker makes an appearance, just after the one-hour mark).
posted by Rash at 7:40 PM on December 19, 2020

i, too, took film classes with Gorin -
(potrzebie, i wonder if i know you? likely not but that would be fun. sounds like you were at UCSD?)
the screening and discussions of this film were pretty damn amazing. it's such a dream-like film it burrows in and stays in the mind. i often think of "action cooking" when i am in the kitchen.
posted by lapolla at 1:14 AM on December 20, 2020

Fellow Tritons, I have...not-positive memories of classes with JP. So much so that just hearing his voice on that vid made it an instant no for me. Still, hello from a VA/media major from the late 80s
posted by BlahLaLa at 8:29 AM on December 20, 2020

I saw La Jetee and Sans Soleil on a whim at the Castro theater in San Francisco. My partner and I were left so breathless that we could barely talk about it without risking tears. I hesitate recommending Sans Soleil because there's a lot of "I'm a sophisticated Westerner who is going to look at these other cultures as curious artifacts" going on. That said, it's such a hypnotic and beautiful tone poem, unlike anything I've ever seen.
posted by treepour at 5:40 PM on December 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Derail but I really hated Terry Gilliam version of LA Jeta (12 Monkeys)
posted by Narrative_Historian at 11:54 PM on December 20, 2020