Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Porky Pig Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1938 Porky's Party , directed by Bob Clampett.
Chuck Jones was an animator in Bob Clampett's unit at this time. His work can be identified in the scene where Black Fury gets drunk on a hair restoration tonic. Jones became a director and was awarded his own unit shortly after this cartoon was produced.
Someone on the staff of The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour found another: musical mashup from the great Bill McClintock. Let's all watch it together:
It was as though Van Halen and Donna Summer were meant to sing together
We’ve selected another entry from the excellent reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Today’s film is the remarkable 1982 documentary Sans Soleil (also known as Sunless), directed by Chris Marker. The film is a meditation on the nature of human memory, composed of stock footage, clips from Japanese movies and television shows, excerpts from other films, and documentary footage shot by Marker. It is widely considered one of the greatest documentaries ever made.
Structured as a travelogue and narrated through letters sent by a fictitious cameraman, Sans Soleil weaves together images from Iceland, Paris, the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, San Francisco, and Japan in the early 1980s. These are interspersed with excerpts from other films, stock imagery, commercials, and footage from Japanese television. The film explores a form of time travel, with Marker drawing connections between events and people otherwise separated by time and place.
The film does not focus on any single event. It leaps from modern Japan to Guinea-Bissau to the films of Alfred Hitchcock and back again whenever Marker chooses. It belongs to that unique genre of films (stretching from Man with a Movie Camera to Koyaanisqatsi) that attempt to make the entire world of human activity their subject—to make accessible the entirety (or at least a significant portion) of the human experience, with varying degrees of success. So please, find a comfy chair and join us here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour as we watch this incredible film: Sans Soleil.
Sans Soleil was shot entirely with a silent 16mm Beaulieu camera (there isn’t a single synchronous shot in the entire film), using 30-meter reels and a small cassette recorder. The only sophisticated element—for the time—was the Spectre image synthesizer, which was borrowed for a few days.
Demand Euphoria!
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