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A Grin Without A Cat

1993, Movie, NR, 179 mins

A Grin Without A Cat: Review

GRIN WITHOUT A CAT, A | LE FOND DE L'AIR EST ROUGE
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The English-language title of Chris Marker's three-hour essay on the history of France's political left during the heady days of the 1960s is taken from Alice in Wonderland: Marker sees the image of the grin that lingers after the rest of the Cheshire Cat has vanished as an apt metaphor for the solitary armed guerrilla, alone in the mountains of Latin America, fighting the revolution within the revolution like "a spearhead without a spear." But Lewis Carroll's cat is also emblematic of Marker's method of constructing history from the traces it leaves behind — filmed images that flicker on after the events themselves have evaporated. Rather than beginning with the fabled May 1968 student uprisings in Paris, Marker's timeline of the French New Left starts in Berlin, June 1967, when protests over a state visit from the Shah of Iran sparked violent clashes that led to the shooting death of a student and showed the French how to agitate for radical change. Marker's history ends on May 1, 1977 — the last May Day of the Fifth Republic — but implies that the movement's spiritual death began years earlier, with the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected socialist president, in a U.S.-backed military coup. In between, Marker charts years of upheaval and the sites of revolt — Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Bolivia, China and Vietnam, the left's ultimate rallying point — in a dense, provocative and occasionally impenetrable mixture of political fact and personal reflection voiced by a variety of narrators. Maoists, Trotskyites, Geurvaristes — the distinctions will probably be lost on those who haven't made a study of the fractious left. But it's always fascinating to watch Marker the essayist at work, assembling this enormous historical mosaic with bits and pieces of his own and other people's films and raising the same questions about the relationships among history, memory and images that he explored in his masterpiece, SANS SOLEIL (1982). This film was originally released in 1977 with a running time of four hours under the original French title, LE FOND DE L'AIR EST ROUGE (1977); Marker revisited it in 1993 after the fall of the Soviet Union: He trimmed an hour and added a remarkably prescient coda: "Terrorism has replaced Communism as the ultimate evil." The ever-mysterious Marker has since begun exploring the promising frontiers of new media, creating work specifically designed for CD-ROM while hesitating to communicate in any mode other than email, virtually disappearing into cyberspace like some William Gibson hero. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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