The DVD, put out by The Criterion Collection, is one of its best offerings, even if neither film comes with an audio commentary. Both films are shown in 1.66:1 aspect ratios. The extra features for La Jetee include video interviews with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, a bit of an odd duck, whose small filmic rhapsodies on Marker are a bit too much, in the masturbatory sense. Then there is Chris On Chris, a video on Marker by filmmaker Chris Darke. It’s more interesting than Gorin’s hyperbolic reactions, but then we get some film clips from a filmmaker who idolizes Marker, and it is so inferior to Marker’s work that one can only be thankful the guy gets only a minute or two in the sun. Then there are two excerpts from the French TV series Court-Circuit (Le Magazine). One is a take on David Bowie’s music video Jump They Say, reputedly inspired by La Jetée; and the other a delightfully silly homage to Marker’s influence by Hitchcock’s Vertigo, because it posits that Marker’s La Jetee is really about the man traveling in Vertigo. Naturally, there is not a whit of logic nor proof behind the claim.

The extra for Sans Soleil is a seventeen minute interview with Gorin again. In this extended segment he comes off a bit more knowledgeable than in the deliberately coy smaller excerpts for La Jetee. The films come in English (dubbed) and French, with English subtitles. The musical scoring for both films is very good, with wistful music often acting as the mortar between images in La Jetee, when the images are static and sans narration. All the visuals and editing were done by Marker, and he proves masterful at both.

As these two films are Marker’s best known works, and considered his best, one wonders if this is a critical misinterpretation, or apt. Naturally, I’ll decide when I see other films of his.

That stated, it bears repeating that these films, despite many claims by critics notorious for the tack of critical cribbing, are definitely about memory. They will use some mnemonic devices, but they are about perception; and there is a difference. Perception is memory in the moment, in the now, whereas memory is perception of the now’s shadow, the moment’s shadow. Therefore they scan two different beats. One is the thing as it is, and the other a recreation of what seems to be the thing as it was. Memory is always an act of creation, or re-creation, which takes talent and skill to effectively convey. Perception just takes good senses. Perception requires attention, but it can be loose and amorphous. Memory does not. It requires strict concentration for seeming accuracy. And, as great as the purely cinematic elements are, as I’ve shown, both La Jetee and Sans Soleil would be vastly different and inferior films without the narration that sutures word to image, and both to a whole. These films are essential works of art from the 20th century, and will likely have impacts that reach far into the future, long after much more celebrated works and artists have been forgotten.