Paper short abstract:

This paper pursues connections between Chris Marker's experimental film turned 'classic', Sans Soleil, and contemporary theories of affect, focusing in particular on their mutual relevance to anthropological conceptions of ethnography (textual or filmic) as a form of trans-cultural mediation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper pursues connections between Chris Marker's experimental film turned 'classic', Sans Soleil, and contemporary theories of affect. It focuses, in particular, on their mutual relevance to anthropological conceptions of ethnography (textual or filmic) as a form of trans-cultural mediation.

Brian Massumi's recent theorization of affect in terms of potential connections, over against captured and contained 'emotions', and his interest in the philosophical implications of the new media, artistic and scientific experiments, offers an important conceptual ally. Rather than first theorize 'affect' and then treat the film Sans Soleil in terms of how it exemplifies that theory, however, I seek to trace out the conceptual claims that the film itself makes - explicitly, in words, no less than implicitly, in images, and their mutual articulation.

Sans Soleil continually draws attention to the unresolvable tension between the filmic text and the extra-filmic world, and the role of affect in at once evoking and mediating such tensions without resolving them into a finished form. As such, it is suggestive of the stakes entailed were the ethnographies anthropologists write to be refigured as experimental forms of trans-cultural mediation. Conversely contemporary anthropological conceptions of the role of ethnography in coming to terms with the complexities of transcultural connections,are suggestive of the stakes involved in treating Sans Soleil not just as an 'experimental film', but as an ethnography of anthropological import in its own right.