In the opening minutes of Sans Soleil Chris Marker meditates upon what he calls “an image of happiness”: three blond children on a road in Iceland in 1965, staring at the camera as they walk past.
These seconds of grainy and saturated footage are among the most beautiful moments in this documentary stitched together from the memories that a fictional cameraman (Sandor Krasna) has gleaned during decades of travels around the world. But the evocative allure of this brief sequence is soon cancelled by a black screen that precedes the film’s titles: “if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black,” declares Krasna/Marker through the female narrator, the same narrator who later in the film informs us that the kids’ village was destroyed by a volcanic eruption in 1973.
I write about Sans Soleil when I really want to write about London, a place that for better or worse doesn’t feature in Marker’s 1983 film. I could justify this digression by confessing that my whole literary career has been the story of someone writing about Sans Soleil while pretending to write about something else. Nevertheless, I believe that on this occasion the reference to this film is justified. Because here I want to summon an image of happiness of my own.