La jetée / Sans Soleil

“La Jetée. What I love about La Jetée is it’s got so many different elements that are in and of themselves very unconventional for a film. So it’s half an hour long, approximately. It’s a short film. Still photography, voice-over narration, science fiction, time-travel elements. It’s hard to put into words what it is, but it makes you really think about the possibilities of filmmaking and how the forms of filmmaking are up to us. There’s an infinite possible nature of how we approach moviemaking and the structures of movies and the types of movies and the art that we make, and I think this is a movie that makes you step back and say, “How am I making… What am I doing on a project?” or, “What are we all doing? Are we in forms just because people are doing certain forms? Or are we doing the forms because that’s the best way to tell a story?” La Jetée, very, very impactful for me.”

“Also when making Orlando, I was thinking about authors that have made films like letters that are being written to someone. And so Chris Marker, that was for me like a fundamental. It belongs for me to the films that are made by what I would call philosophers in a sense. So he really finds a completely new form for saying what he wants to say, and it's full of poetry.”

“This is Sans Soleil, which is my favorite film of all time. It's taught me so much about writing and film and about imagery and collage and the themes of time and longing and loss and space. Yeah, it will forever be imprinted onto my mind and onto my heart, and this is what really introduced me to Criterion in the first place. So the fact that I'm getting to pull this off of this wall and put it into this bag in this place, that, that makes, makes me very happy. I'm having a little moment here.”

“And so I'm gonna go back to my school days and get a Chris Marker, La Jetée. This is important.”

“But this girl ran away with my copy of La Jetée and Sans Soleil a few years ago and I think I need another copy.”

“I was in Japan two nights ago. Or last night. I don’t remember properly. That’s why my English is taking so long to come. But I was in Japan, and there’s a bar in Golden Gai, in an area of tiny bars, one next to the other, and one bar is called La Jetée because of this film, because of the Chris Marker film. Well, Chris Marker’s work is amazing. Whatever you see with his name, get it, watch it, pay attention. But I love the idea that in Japan there’s a bar called La Jetée, that is someone from Japan in love with cinema, and a beautiful place to go and have a drink. I’m telling this whole story because this time I was in Golden Gai and I couldn’t find the bar. And I don’t know if, because of Covid, it closed. If you find it for me, make sure you send me the address for it next time I’m in Japan, if you know something about the bar, if it changed, if it moved. And if it didn’t, then I just told you a story about a beautiful bar you’ll never know.”

“This... Sans Soleil is a film that I really love very much, of Chris Marker. It’s a film that liberated me a lot from what is fiction and what is nonfiction, and it’s a film that you can keep watching and gain something from every time.”

“Oh, yeah. Wait, I saw Sans Soleil too because Chris Marker. There’s many GOATs, right? The GOAT is the greatest of all time. There’s many GOATs and... He’s one of the GOATs. He has this line in La Jetée, “Nothing tells memory from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars.” Which was really great for Nickel Boys. Oh, yeah, Sans Soleil, Sans Soleil. Come on.”