Sans soleil

Chris Marker's Sans soleil arrived in 1983 as the fullest expression of the essay-film form he had spent twenty years inventing, a form that went on to become one of the central modes of late-twentieth-century non-fiction cinema. Marker had been making politically engaged documentaries since the 1950s, including La Jetée (1962) and A Grin Without a Cat (1977); Sans soleil brought the techniques he had been developing together more ambitiously than anything he had made before.

The film is a 16mm assembly of footage Marker shot over more than a decade, principally in Tokyo and on the volcanic island of Sal in Cape Verde, with material from Iceland, Guinea-Bissau, Paris and the United States. The narration (letters from a fictional cameraman named Sandor Krasna, read in different language versions by different actresses) was written by Marker himself. The English-language version is voiced by Alexandra Stewart; the French version by Florence Delay.

It entered Sight & Sound's Greatest Films of All Time list in the 2002 poll, climbed steadily through later rounds and reached the top fifty in 2022, the highest position any feature-length documentary has reached apart from Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. It is the reference point for the documentary essay film, and directors as different as Harun Farocki, Joshua Oppenheimer and Werner Herzog have named it as a primary influence on the way they work.