Sunless

Filmed with a silent 16mm camera and a rudimentary tape recorder, Chris Marker’s essay film could be described as the most dazzling home movie you’ll ever see. Not that Marker — a Frenchman who rubbed shoulders with the nouvelle vague — spends much time at home. There’s footage here he shot in Iceland (supposedly for a planned sci-fi film), Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and San Francisco. Incorporating movie clips and early digital post-production effects, Marker — using the alias Sandor Krasna — ruminates on topics that range freely from ritual, philosophy, politics, movies and memory. It’s a work of great erudition but also poetic and playful, a movie for the permanently curious, a movie about connection, the creation of meaning, souvenirs for the mind.

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