sunless

[a reaction, delayed, two months and counting]

i finally watched Sans soleil. less clear than La jetée, but equally amazing, centered in Japan and Africa; a narrator reading letters about time and memory juxtaposed with views and images of ceremony and everyday life...

strange digressions into Vertigo and the making of the film itself. the interplay of the two and the bizarre look at early 1980’s Tokyo – which looks like 2009 Any City, USA – displaced the whole film within time itself, and i felt like i was watching a past window on the future. maybe not the one i'm living in, but a window nonetheless...

by its end, the film left me disembodied. i could not truly feel my hands and yet saw them in lap. i could not connect the image to sight or differentiate between dream and waking. ultimately i missed the final frames and heard only an echo of the voice over. i started to rewind, but instead chose to acknowledge the slippage in time and not wrangle it back in to some familiar continuity...

i went to bed and dreamed and dreamed and dreamed…