Film - Think

This film, renamed A Grin Without a Cat for English audiences, was completed in 1977 but re-edited in 1992 (most in the know say that these edits are “slight”). It would be as possible to give a brief synopsis of its narrative as it would be to describe the stories behind a sackful of socialist political tractates of a dozen countries from the 1960’s. Spanning the rise of socialism and the political Left as a global force, Marker takes us newsreel image by image through Vietnam, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the insurgence of Che Guevera in the first half, and then down the slopes of Watergate, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the denouement of Stalinism in France in the second half. An unflinching montage of borrowed sources, Marker’s documentary plays as an eyelids-peeled-back historiography of the sort that Alex was forced to watch in A Clockwork Orange.

There is a rhythm or a cadence to the film and its voiceover that defies categorization. Though approximating documentary, Marker's entrancing editorial impulse seems jacked (in a William Gibson way) straight into the media mainframe that recorded and incited these events, and is simply releasing various streams of reportage improvisationally. As poetic as it is political, his voiceover doesn’t interpret what we are seeing in the film as much as it prefigures our gut reaction, and gives a human voice to Marker’s overall project. Somewhere along the way Marker mentions that history “always seem to have more imagination than we do.” Perhaps in the more human and ironic moments of the film (like Castro fiddling with a stubborn microphone) we can see this imagination in action. Sure, this film raises all sorts of theoretical questions about film, documentary, and montage. But it is hard to get far enough past the centrifugal gravity of these film clips themselves to make such questions seem significant. Like Godard's La Chinoise, it's formal significance is inextricably bound up in its stunning political self-awareness.

The literal translation of the almost untranslatable original title is as curious as a Magritte painting. “The Foundation Of The Air Is Red” has been described by Marker as "scenes from the Third World War.” So perhaps the difficult irony of the title is intentionally associated with the sketchy accidence of history, these images rolling in waves towards their conclusion, yet constantly shifting and resisting each other along the way. (Perhaps this is the same resistance we feel in the oversaturated and oddly editing images that begin Godard's Notre Musique?) The English title, “A Grin Without a Cat,” may suggest that the film’s odd concluding scenes of a Belgian cat festival in full swing represent the mythologizing nature of Marker’s montage as a whole. As artist, he vanishes into the background like his Cheshire namesake, leaving only the ironic connections he makes as a signal of his presence.