So this is another film by Chris Marker, who did La Jetée. And like that one, it’s hard to categorize precisely. It’s considered a “documentary,” because it’s real-world footage that’s presented in essentially real-world context. But it’s not that simple.

Because the frame for the movie is that a female narrator is reading letters from the person who took these shots, and in the narration it’s not Chris Marker (as it is in real life), it’s a fictional character. So it’s real-world shots being described in real terms, but as if they were described by a character in a fictional letter, rather than by the director in straight narration. It’s like… meta-documentary?

Anyway, the shots are mostly from Japan and Guinea-Bissau (in West Africa, which had recently had a revolution) and various other places, and they were taken in the ’70s. The narration doesn’t really have a coherent through-line in any way — this isn’t a documentary about anything in particular — but touches on themes of death, sex, religion, war, and politics. At one point in the narration, he’s “scouting locations” for an imaginary SF movie to be entitled “Sans Soleil” that he then says he’ll obviously never make.

ALSO, this is another entrant in the “omg horrible animal cruelty” series, with a scene where a giraffe is brutally shot and killed and then its eyes are pecked out by vultures. (This is borrowed footage, not something Marker shot himself, apparently.)

Marker has described this as basically a glorified home movie, and that’s kinda weirdly what it is. If you had a friend who was a gifted film-maker and they went on vacation around the world and took a lot of videos and then narrated them a bit portentously, this is about what you’d end up with. But Marker is an exceptionally talented “friend” in this context, so it’s better than that makes it sound.