“The journey to the two extreme poles of survival.” As I am writing this I am thinking about this sentence. I rewatched Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) again yesterday, and there was so much comfort in the contemplation of small things. I noted that Chris Marker gave himself the fictional name Sandor Krasna. He said he has been all over the world and still banality interests him. I looked at those not-so-banal moments through the invisible cameraman traveling Asia, Africa, and Europe, sharing his thoughts and musings through letters read by a woman. Would it have felt the same if the cameraman had read his own thoughts aloud? I realize how drawn I am to this epistolary form, to the way the woman’s voice reads his musings and turns private thought into correspondence, into a one-sided exchange. I still have not quite grasped why I am so attracted to one person’s thoughts being read by another, like in Chantal Akerman’s News from Home. Why do we not write to each other anymore? Who wants to be my pen pal? Sans Soleil has the quality of giving me the perfect illusion of being a world traveller, walking down the streets and taking notes of anything new to my senses. He described his reunion with Tokyo:
“like a cat who has come home from vacation in his basket immediately starts to inspect familiar places. He ran off to see if everything was where it should be: the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive, the temple of the fox at the top of the Mitsukoshi department store, which he found invaded by little girls and rock singers.” There are several parts that stayed with me. I will not try to describe the after-images. I meditated on certain things in my life while listening to the letters:
“Later he told me he had eaten at the restaurant in Nishi-Nippori where Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of ‘action cooking.’ He said that by watching carefully Mr. Yamada’s gestures and his way of mixing the ingredients one could meditate usefully on certain fundamental concepts common to painting, philosophy, and karate. He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed in his humble way the essence of style, and consequently that it was up to him to use his invisible brush to write upon this first day in Tokyo the words ‘the end.’”
I am becoming more and more lured by the magic of banality. It reminds me of the feeling I get reading Renata Adler’s Speedboat. Only when you look closely do you realize it is not banal at all. Marker left me with melancholy images of something I have not yet experienced, and a homesickness for all the places I have not yet seen.