A transitory experience held in darkness, cinema has always had a troubled relationship with memory. With the historic changes of beginning in the early 1980s, changes in technology and distribution, cinema altered its course and therefore its relationship with memory. While a viewer's memories of a film may once have been embellished with mistakes, imaginings, or misrecognitions, now the viewer could have the film itself at hand in tape or disk or electronic form to confirm or negate the memory - or to manipulate it. Film essayist Chris Marker, in his study of human survival Sans Soleil (1982) explores these early days of the emergence of this new media, and its implications for human survival. In the film a filmmaker writes a series of letters about his travels and his feelings towards the footage he has shot, received, and carefully pieced together. Memory, in Marker's film, is filtered through ceremony, photography, and other media.