Cheap La Jetee/Sans Soleil (Criterion Collection) (DVD) (Chris Marker) Price

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Customer Reviews of La Jetee/Sans Soleil (Criterion Collection)

You are traveling through another dimension. A dimension not only of...
aka Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve! Well, no need wondering why he changed his name. No left-wing group would have taken him in with a posh handle like that :) <
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>How to explain Chris Marker? How to explain these works? Gorin said something true about La Jetée when he pointed out that the one moment of motion in this film is "the birth of cinema". It's lodged in the midst of 28 minutes of what I'll call still life montage. He called it a miracle moment and it is. To have this dead woman, alive in a past he's returned to, re-animated at that moment with the birds singing as if it were the first Spring on earth is breathtaking. <
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>Sans Soleil is about memory and sight and sound and cinema and the whole world within and without. Grandiose, ridiculous language comes too easily while trying to describe this man's vision. It's possible to fall into a reverie while watching this. It's musical in it's being "unpinned" and (un)bounded by the viewer's imagination. <
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>The cliché "dreamlike" is a good word to use here, but these pieces are about so many things I can only say: watch them and change.

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Je ne peux pas le recommend, mais...
These two films are both simply astounding; we've already been over that. The idea to include them on one DVD should seem like a good idea, and it certainly makes for a very convenient package. Yet anyone who is familiar with Chris Marker's films, particularly these two, knows that they are not made for the sake of convenience--for that, you go to the comedian Gilliam and his 12 Monkeys. There is no "one-stop-shop" for classic Chris Marker films. Moreover, a film like Sans Soleil does not benefit from a classy DVD release. It has a certain rough edge, a grainy intensity to it, that the Criterion treatment cannot hope to improve upon. The same might be said for La Jetee. Part of the appeal of the film, for me at least, is its potential to blindside its viewers, which can hardly happen on a double bill such as this. If I were to put La Jetee on a DVD (which might not be necessary), I'd probably include it as an Easter egg with Godard's Alphaville, say. Or, since there is actually a Criterion edition of Armageddon, one might also hide it there, if only to mitigate the overbearing sense of waste. Of course, this is only wishful thinking on my part. See these films on separate occasions if you can; this disc should be a last resort.

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Two classics by Chris Marker
This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the films <
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>La Jetee is about a post World War III Paris where the survivors live underground. One survivor, haunted by dreams about an event in his childhood of a man being gunned down is asked to volunteer to go back in time to bring supplies back to them. <
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>The film is a series of still photographs with narration by an unseen reader. <
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>This film later became the main inspiration for the film Twelve Monkeys. <
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>Sans Soleil is a documentary about life in Japan. The film is in an avant garde style and has elements of the Qatsi trilogy and other films. <
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>Both films are excellent and very nice in this version. <
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>Both films have an optional English dubbed track and two versions of subtitles. <
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>One flaw is they can be out of sync when switched they also have different content. Use the regular subtitles for the French dub and the SDH (Subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing) for the English dub. The SDH subtitles follow the English dub verbatim but are not as precise as the other subtitles. <
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>The special features are an interview with Jean-Pierre Gorin, and excerpts from the French TV program Court-circuit, and exerpts from David Bowie's music video "Jump They Say" which contains a scene inspired by La Jetee. <
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>This is a must buy!