The key question, beyond revolutionary romanticism, is what happens after independence, Chris Marker wrote of Cape Verde when assembling for Sans Soleil footage shot during the Angolan and Guinea-Bissaun independence struggle of the 1970s. For Marker, Cape Verde served as a potent figure for points of access, of entry or exit. Located in the central Atlantic ocean, and inhabited only upon discovery by Portugese explorers in the 15th century, it was the first European settlement in the tropics, and a key stopping point during the Atlantic slave trade, and its independence struggles during the era of decolonisation-along with its innovative linkage with the struggle in Guinea-Bissau, spearheaded by Amilcar Cabral-suggested new ways in which internationalism might be incorporated into a praxis of liberation. Likewise, the efforts of the Guinean filmmakers suggests what Cesar calls "the promise of a militant cinema of emancipation, born from the struggle as a praxis of liberation". Yet in 'Sans Soleil', the Guinean archival footage, along with Marker's images of Cape Verde, serve as indices of failed hopes, of the failure of both political struggle and the aesthetics of what he calls 'revolutionary romanticism' which invests in that struggle a hope for the future of the world. Over footage of Cape Verdean ports, queues at stores and labour on building sites or market places, Marker's narrator comments: 'Rumor has it that every third world leader coined the same phrase the morning after independence: "Now the real problems start." Cabral never got a chance to say it: he was assassinated first. But the problems started, and went on, and are still going on. Rather unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism: to work, to produce, to distribute, to overcome postwar exhaustion, temptations of power and privilege.'
Originally planning to make a film along the lines of the agitational, collective work developed with the SLON and ISKRA groups, Marker subsequently reshaped footage shot through the 1960s and 1970s into a video-essay meditation as much on his own role as on the broader narratives of which his footage provides a slice: a meditation on memory and on ways of narrating history, rather than that narrative itself. Including the footage shot by the Guinean filmmakers-Cabral embracing fighters, shaky black and white images that appear to be shot from within guerrilla conflict-Marker presents a doubly-lost moment of possibility, in which the documentation of African independence struggles by African filmmakers both fail. "Who remembers all that?" asks Marker's narrator at one point, referring to the Cape Verdean-Guinean liberation struggle. "History throws its empty bottles out of the window". Much of this filmmaking activity was lost when cannisters of film were thrown into the street during the civil war at some point in the 1990s.
As Marker notes, hearing the stories of the sheer hell of such guerrilla warfare makes a mockery of those who described theirs as 'guerrilla filmmaking'. If, at one stage Marker travelled the globe, documenting the revolution, documenting new modes of living--in footage that was, as in his early film on Cuba, often banned within Euro-American contexts--and emphasizing film-making as a collective process, later films like 'Sans Soleil' take the very same footage as the basis for the melancholic reflections which have as their overarching theme the failure of global transformation promised by radical movements in Europe and Third World struggles in Europe's colonial 'possessions'. The out-of-time nature of that footage, material to be re-inscribed, alternately written over or uncovered in a kind of politicised Proustianism, a palimpsestic reflection on defeat, needs as its corollary Marker's science-fiction image of the future traveller, the traveller from the year AD 4000 in which earth has become a world of total recall, viewing with compassion the sadness mixed with aesthetic pleasure--the forms of art, of cinema, the failures of memory and desire. Noting the problematics of the gaze he projects onto the Cape Verdean women he films until they cast their gaze back at the camera, Marker ends his film on the image of the Cape Verdean woman who locks eyes with the camera for a fraction of a second--the exact length of a frame of film--Marker appears to hold this out as a possibility, if not of mutual contact, of the resistance to objecthood, and the possibility of a self-creation that would not need the mediation of the white, male filmmaker, world-traveller, revolutionary romanticist. Yet, as with much of the footage in the film, Marker feeds these images into the image-synthesizer of the (fictional) Japanese artist Hayao Yamanoko, producing solarised, distorted images that distort and transpose their sources into blotches of irreal colour and indistinct, amorphous forms. Feeding the footage into the machine serves as a surreal analogy for the mediations that exist between filmmaker and object, the problems of colonial framing, and the vagaries of historical memory, that are Marker's subject. The returned gaze, the flicker of tacit acknowledgment of performance, suggests the possibility of an artistic response--to frame oneself, rather than to be the always-framed-a fragile, yet vital force against the power imbalances of a 'world cinema' whose legacies are still firmly rooted in colonial power relations.
Originally planning to make a film along the lines of the agitational, collective work developed with the SLON and ISKRA groups, Marker subsequently reshaped footage shot through the 1960s and 1970s into a video-essay meditation as much on his own role as on the broader narratives of which his footage provides a slice: a meditation on memory and on ways of narrating history, rather than that narrative itself. Including the footage shot by the Guinean filmmakers-Cabral embracing fighters, shaky black and white images that appear to be shot from within guerrilla conflict-Marker presents a doubly-lost moment of possibility, in which the documentation of African independence struggles by African filmmakers both fail. "Who remembers all that?" asks Marker's narrator at one point, referring to the Cape Verdean-Guinean liberation struggle. "History throws its empty bottles out of the window". Much of this filmmaking activity was lost when cannisters of film were thrown into the street during the civil war at some point in the 1990s.
As Marker notes, hearing the stories of the sheer hell of such guerrilla warfare makes a mockery of those who described theirs as 'guerrilla filmmaking'. If, at one stage Marker travelled the globe, documenting the revolution, documenting new modes of living--in footage that was, as in his early film on Cuba, often banned within Euro-American contexts--and emphasizing film-making as a collective process, later films like 'Sans Soleil' take the very same footage as the basis for the melancholic reflections which have as their overarching theme the failure of global transformation promised by radical movements in Europe and Third World struggles in Europe's colonial 'possessions'. The out-of-time nature of that footage, material to be re-inscribed, alternately written over or uncovered in a kind of politicised Proustianism, a palimpsestic reflection on defeat, needs as its corollary Marker's science-fiction image of the future traveller, the traveller from the year AD 4000 in which earth has become a world of total recall, viewing with compassion the sadness mixed with aesthetic pleasure--the forms of art, of cinema, the failures of memory and desire. Noting the problematics of the gaze he projects onto the Cape Verdean women he films until they cast their gaze back at the camera, Marker ends his film on the image of the Cape Verdean woman who locks eyes with the camera for a fraction of a second--the exact length of a frame of film--Marker appears to hold this out as a possibility, if not of mutual contact, of the resistance to objecthood, and the possibility of a self-creation that would not need the mediation of the white, male filmmaker, world-traveller, revolutionary romanticist. Yet, as with much of the footage in the film, Marker feeds these images into the image-synthesizer of the (fictional) Japanese artist Hayao Yamanoko, producing solarised, distorted images that distort and transpose their sources into blotches of irreal colour and indistinct, amorphous forms. Feeding the footage into the machine serves as a surreal analogy for the mediations that exist between filmmaker and object, the problems of colonial framing, and the vagaries of historical memory, that are Marker's subject. The returned gaze, the flicker of tacit acknowledgment of performance, suggests the possibility of an artistic response--to frame oneself, rather than to be the always-framed-a fragile, yet vital force against the power imbalances of a 'world cinema' whose legacies are still firmly rooted in colonial power relations.