If you compiled every Kai Neville movie ever made and took all the surfing out, the end product might look and feel a lot like this week’s friday night flick, Sans Soleil.

It’s been called a “travelogue,” but Chris Marker’s surrealist vision of the world is really much more than that - it can’t be pigeonholed into any typical categories. Shot on location across multiple continents, including Asia, West Africa, Europe, and North America, Sans Soleil (or Sunless in english) is a recounting of an imaginary globetrotter named Sandor Krasna’s eye-opening journey around the world. Each destination provides a ceaseless bombardment of hallucinatory imagery, and each destination is more strange and foreign than the last; the film’s overall “trippiness” is only exacerbated by its intensely poetic narrator, who claims to be reading from a series of letters written from Krasna himself.

Needless to say, Sans Soleil covers a lot of philosophical territory, including but not limited to meditations on human memory, the animal kingdom, time, art, and political revolution. Here are a few of my favorite bits:

“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. That’s how history advances - plugging its memory as one plugs its ears.”

“Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything - except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits.”

“Poetry is born of insecurity.”

“I've been around the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.”

* * *

Journalists and film analysts have squabbled for years over Sans Soleil’s seemingly indecipherable central theme. Personally, I think the film was designed to be openly interpretable, to exist without clear definition. But if anything, it’s a sign to say “f**k it” and buy that one-way ticket to location X you’ve been eyeing for a few months now. Pick up a copy of T.S. Elliot’s Ash Wednesday in the airport bookstore for full effect. —Jackson Todd

Before watching: Sans Soleil is a real film about real life, and real life, as we know, can be pretty damn brutal. This is our “sensitive content” warning.