Constructed around a series of letters sent by a peripatetic freelance cameraman to an unknown woman, Sans soleil presents portraits of distant locales through its ravishing imagery and through the poetic language of the correspondence. Remarkable for its prescient incorporation of video processing, the film is notable equally for its prefiguration of contemporary work in fictionalized documentary. Marker pushes beyond the boundaries of the traditional narrative cinema to invent a singularly personal film genre—part diary, part essay, part documentary, and part fiction.