Aspect Ratio 1: Sans Soleil

Toronto friends, happy to announce I am curating a new series titled Aspect Ratio: Hybrid Documentary Masterworks for Hot Docs. Our inaugural screening of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil will take place at 16:00 on October 3. Please come. Detailed description below. Purchase tickets here.

SANS SOLEIL

Part travelogue, part essay, part epistolary reverie, this endlessly seductibve magnum opus from the late French polymath Chris Marker eludes categorization. An unseen, unnamed narrator comments on or reads from letters written by a vagabond cameraman named Sandor Krasna over a beguilingly digressive stream of images captured in Iceland, Japan, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Île-de-France, and San Francisco. Associative and lyrical, playful and meditative, Sans Soleil circles themes of memory and history, time and its ceaselessness. There are continual leaps in editing, sudden freeze-frames, and the fleeting, rebellious thrill that arises when a subject looks directly at the camera. A quintessential example of the fusion of documentary and invention, it’s a film for those who long to wander with insatiable curiosity, who are fascinated by the sacred-exotic, who want to remember everything, even though they know perfectly well that memory’s really just the lining of forgetting.

ASPECT RATIO: HYBRID DOCUMENTARY MASTERWORKS From its origins, cinema has carried varying ratios of material staged and material captured. This series seeks to celebrate, educate, and prompt dialogue around the rich history of films that brazenly straddle the liminal, whether infusing fiction with shards of the real or forging a palimpsest of documentary and myth. Each screening will be introduced by author, critic, and curator José Teodoro and followed by an informal conversation.