Chris Marker - La Jetée & Sans Soleil

Gary (the director of Broken Bottles) gave me Chris Marker's film Sans Soleil to watch for inspiration with regards to how the soundtrack is constructed. The sounds in this film are amazing, a blend of electronic sounds, musique concrete, documentary sound and analogue manipulation. See the below clip:



The sounds in this film add a very "dream like" quality to the visual footage, and with the addition on the soundtrack of the narrator reading out correspondence from letters received, this gives the film, in my mind, the impression of a friend recounting a story of being on holiday, and you only have the words of your friend to guide you as to the description of a location, and with the words, you start to imagine the location and it's not quite tactile and fleshed out but it's an impression of a place.

It's quite a coincidence that I had only recently watched Chris Marker's other celebrated work La Jetée. Whilst reading William Whittington's excellent book Sound Design & Science Fiction Whittington devotes a section of the book within the chapter "Sound Montage" to La Jetée and talks about how the codes in this film go against the traditional naturalised codes of cinema, at that time. This film is almost entirely comprised of still shots (you could say photographs) accompanied by voice overs, sparse sound effects and music. I couldn't find a good quality example with english subtitles on Youtube. However, you can certainly appreciate the construction of the film and how different it is to conventional movies, even without understanding the dialogue. It's a great film, try and find youself a copy.



A lot of the shots in Broken Bottles remind me of La Jetée. Mainly because the shots in Broken Bottles, whilst not photographs, are static and are in some instances framing subjects that exhibit very subtle movements, if any. This also gives the opportunity for the audience to study and investigate a shot in much greater detail and really explore the content on screen.