La jetée / Sans Soleil

“La Jetée. What I love about La Jetée is it’s got so many different elements that are in and of themselves very unconventional for a film. So it’s half an hour long, approximately. It’s a short film. Still photography, voice-over narration, science fiction, time-travel elements. It’s hard to put into words what it is, but it makes you really think about the possibilities of filmmaking and how the forms of filmmaking are up to us. La Jetée, very, very impactful for me.”

“Also when making Orlando, I was thinking about authors that have made films like letters that are being written to someone, and so Chris Marker, that was for me like a fundamental. It belongs for me to the films that are made by what I would call philosophers in a sense. So he really finds a completely new form for saying what he wants to say and it's full of poetry.”

“This is La Jetée/Sans Soleil, which is my favorite film of all time. It's taught me so much about writing and film and about imagery and collage and the themes of time and longing and loss and space. Yeah, it will forever be imprinted onto my mind and onto my heart. And this is what really introduced me to Criterion in the first place so the fact that I'm getting to pull this off of this wall and put it into this bag in this place, that makes me very happy.”

“I'm gonna go back to my school days and get a Chris Marker, La Jetée. This is important.”

“This girl ran away with my copy of La Jetée and Sans Soleil a few years ago and I think I need another copy.”

“I was in Japan, and there’s a bar in Golden Gai, in an area of tiny bars, one next to the other, and one bar is called La Jetée because of this film, because of the Chris Marker film. Well, Chris Marker’s work is amazing. Whatever you see with his name, get it, watch it, pay attention. But I love the idea that in Japan there’s a bar called La Jetée, that is someone from Japan in love with cinema, and a beautiful place to go and have a drink.”

“Sans Soleil is a film that I really love very much, of Chris Marker. It’s a film that liberated me a lot from what is fiction and what is nonfiction, and it’s a film that you can keep watching and gain something from every time.”

“Wait, I saw Sans Soleil too because Chris Marker. There’s many GOATs, right? The GOAT is the greatest of all time. There’s many GOATs and... He’s one of the GOATs. He has this line in La Jetée, 'Nothing tells memory from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars.' Which was really great for Nickel Boys. Oh, yeah, Sans Soleil, Sans Soleil. Come on.”