Retrospective: A Grin Without a Cat (1977,1993,2009)

[Mark R. Leeper]

                      A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: Chris Marker's epic four-hour history
     of the New Left from 1967 to its fall in 1977
     has rarely been seen in the United States until
     now.  Cut to three hours, it may still feel
     ponderous and obscure to some.  As mostly a
     hodge-podge of roughly edited footage, it
     recreates the feel of the period, but in the end
     its obscurity undercuts its power.  Tracking the
     leftist movement from the exuberance of the late
     1960s to dissolution of the movement in the late
     1970s this is a huge project that feels like it
     veered off course.  It probably works much better
     in France than in front of an international
     audience.  Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4) or 5/10

One type of film that the French do better than anyone else is the
epic-length documentary.  Marcel Ophuls's THE SORROW AND THE PITY
and Claude Lanzmann's SHOAH have been shown in the United States to
deserved acclaim.  In my opinion the only epic documentary from the
United States that stands with these films is Ken Burns's THE CIVIL
WAR.  One major French documentary that has never gotten much of a
release here was Chris Marker's A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT.  To be honest
I had not even heard of this film until a few weeks before its
scheduled DVD release in the United States in May 2009, though it
had a low-key release in 2002.  The film was originally 240 minutes
in 1977 and was cut to 177 minutes for a European rerelease in
1993.  Why the film has been so rarely seen in this country is not
hard to guess.

The name Chris Marker may sound familiar, by the way.  He wrote and
directed a 28-minute film "La Jetee."  Terry Gilliam remade the
film, enlarging on the ideas, for his TWELVE MONKEYS.

Here is a test to see for yourself if this documentary is for you.
Suppose you were to see a film clip of a young Jacques Delors.
Would you know who that was?  Would you recognize him?  Would you
know that he was later to become a major figure in the French Parti
Socialiste?  Would you enjoy hearing him or someone like him
discuss dialectic in French accompanied by frequently difficult to
read subtitles?  No doubt there are some who will answer with "no"
and some who can answer with "yes".  I freely admit I am in the
"no" camp.  Perhaps greater numbers of French would be in the "yes"
group.  Still, Marcel Ophuls and Claude Lanzmann made their
documentaries accessible with little presumed preparation.  Chris
Marker did not.  Marker will have someone lecturing in French and
intercut a picture of what looks like a raccoon.  It appears a
complete non sequitur.  Meanwhile the person talking usually is not
given any identification and his speech is not very clearly
translated into English.  At times even the subtitles are hard to
read.

Marker begins with the Odessa Steps scene of Serge Eisenstein's
BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, intercutting it with nearly identical scenes
taken from then current news footage.  Marker's study of the New
Left starts in 1967 with protests of the Vietnam War.  Then early
on there is a disturbing sequence of an American flyer taking great
pleasure from the sport of dropping napalm on Viet Cong on the
ground and watching them scatter.  "We saw people running every
which way ... I really like to do that."  Intercut we see footage
of people burned by napalm and get a better feel of why they do run
every which way.  So far the narrative is fairly clear, but it does
not remain that way.  Soon it will be littered with long speeches
with obscure references.  Someone will just start talking about the
Grenelle Report without any explanation of what it is or what its
importance is.  Presumably it is more meaningful in France.

Marker will give us footage of Fidel Castro making a speech about
policy.  It will not be clear how it fits in.  But Castro's style
is to speak with long pauses between sentences to collect his
thoughts.  Marker needed to do something to edit out the pauses,
but instead the viewer sits and waits.  There is a lot of footage
of crowds protesting.  The camera will pick someone out of the
crowd and focus on him.  Is he someone important or just supposed
to represent a typical member of the crowd?  We never know.  Again,
this might be a very different film in France.

The film is divided in two parts.  The first part titled "Fragile
Hands" chronicles the Vietnam War and the protests it generated in
the United States and also in Europe.  The title is a reference to
a quote that the workers will takes the revolution from the
"fragile hands" of the students.  As I remember that period, most
of the workers wanted to part of the protest or the protesters.
Norman Lear was more accurate when he personified the typical
worker as Archie Bunker.  The second part, entitled "Severed
Hands", is more downbeat and starts with the schisms in the left
brought about by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.  It
covers the leftist movement in France, Japan, Venezuela, Cuba, the
United States, China, Chile, West Germany, Northern Ireland,
Mexico, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and South Africa.  It
ends with Chile and the bringing down of reformer Salvador Allende.

While the footage cobbled together gives a feel for the excitement
and disappointment of the times, the editing seems rough and the
sound is often muddy.  This feels almost like a rough cut rather
than a film that has been re-edited more than once, but the
crudeness is probably intentional to give the film tone.  Still
this film seems more like a pile of scenes than an edifying
history.  Some of the electronic music used sounds like something
 from a Dario Argento film.

To get full value from A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT, it would be necessary
to watch it taking notes on what is not familiar.  Then one would
have to research those topics--Wikipedia is probably fine.  Then
watch the film a second time.  And no doubt there will be more to
look up.  That is not saying that it is a bad documentary, by any
means, but it is made for a different audience than the film will
likely find in the United States.  This is a long documentary that
recreates feel of exciting times but does not explain those times
as clearly as an Ophuls film would.  I rate A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT a
low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 5/10.  The title of the film is
obviously a reference to the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll's
ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, but the meaning remains unclear.
The French title of the film, LE FOND DE L'AIR EST ROUGE, means
"the bottom of the air is red."  If anything, that makes less
sense.

The DVD is being released on DVD on May 14 from Icarus Films.  It
comes with a 16-page booklet which includes essays by Chris Marker
and film critic Phil Hall.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0076042/>

What others are saying:
<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/grin_without_a_cat/>


					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper