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Marker’s experimental documentary,
Sunless, was heralded by critics and admirers as a return to personal filmmaking after a decade of radical, collectively produced films. Ostensibly a documentary about Japanese culture,
Sunless blasts apart the realist documentary tradition, continuing the radical aesthetic ideology of Vertovian cinema. Marker’s revival of Vertov’s montage techniques are used in this film to study the ontology of truth in documentary images and narrative films from the past.
Sunless features sequences from Tokyo, the Il de France, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, and outer space much in a way that resembles how Vertov combined images taken from opposite ends of the Soviet Union that compressed space-time in their montage. Vertov did it in the service of creating agitprop films that were meant to buttress the Leninist political program and Marker did it to explore connections between various practices, rituals, objects, nations, and cultures that were already co