Made two decades after his celebrated La Jetée, the feature-length Sans Soleil remains French filmmaker Chris Marker’s masterpiece. Ostensibly constructed from a series of letters sent by a freelance cameraman to an unknown woman, the film presents portraits of distant locales captured in ravishing imagery and through the poetic letters of the unseen cameraman. Remarkable for its prescient incorporation of video processing, Sans Soleil equally prefigures contemporary work in the fictionalized documentary as 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.