Sans Soleil also moves beyond film to suggest convergences between newer media technologies and the operation of human memory, thereby heralding a principal preoccupation of Marker’s later multimedia, film and video projects. It celebrates the exaggerated visual mutations wrought upon mimetic film images by the digital image synthesizer called the Zone, precisely because they give concrete and graceful visual form to the distorting, transforming operations of recollection. The Zone blocks the illusion that mimetic images of the past give us, which is that we have immediate access to that past. Its synthetic image manipulations function both materially and metaphorically to underline the irretrievability of the past, the nature of memory as selective, transformative, and indeed aesthetic representation, and the fact (by virtue of the novel technology adopted) that memories are always formed in and for the present.
Sans Soleil
Chris Marker: In Memory of New Technology by Catherine Lupton