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Directed by Chris Marker
"Why sometimes do images tremble?" asks Chris Marker over
a shaking shot by a cameraman whose compulsion to film had
overruled his body's natural reaction to run; but just barely.
Edited from acquired footage in 1977, A Grin Without A
Cat was a four-hour essay on the rise and fall of the
New Left. Fifteen years later after the breakup of the Soviet
Union Marker decided to re-edit the film. Like a character
in La Jetee come back from the future, Marker revisited
1977 from 1993 and edited out one hour. One could say he had
simply more time to contemplate, as he once quoted from Sei
Shonagon, "the poignancy of things."
Did he check to see if things were in all the right places,
as he had once done with his favorite Tokyo animals in his
film Sans Soleil? At the time A Grin Without A Cat
was made Marker was in his late fifties - hardly the age of
those from the New Left who were gasping for air after running
from tear gas and bullets. Marker instead looked, as he always
has from the point of view of History. For him history is
like a film camera. "You never know what you are filming"
he states over footage of various politicians showing support
for one side and a few years later another.
An image tells many stories, but not at once as some may say. For Marker it is time that really tells the story. And with time an image becomes clearer, or more out of focus.
So what does this time traveler see through his movie camera? Marker watches as a fighter pilot grins at the success of scaring a group of Vietnamese under the fall of burning Napalm. He visits a hillside where under the patter of a slow Cuban rain he listens to a calm Fidel Castro speak about the roving Che Guevarra. He is in Paris in May 1968 and takes careful notice that later that summer this history consuming camera focused its lens on Prague. The first clear image he sees in Prague is of a Soviet tank that had come to occupy the city. It is parked in front of a memorial to another Russian tank that had once come for something else -- a liberation. It is precisely this keen sense of montage that gives this film its poignancy and its sadness. Even the comical observation of Castro's habit of grabbing and moving microphones during speeches is offset by a clip from the Soviet Union where finally he met his match - immovable microphones. Dedicated to those people of the New Left who were swept away in the fall of Soviet Totalitarianism, A Grin Without A Cat is perhaps the closest anyone has come to explaining how Capitalism, to put it simply, won.
As A Grin Without A Cat ended I was reminded of Orson Welles's The
Magnificent Ambersons. Welles regular Joseph Cotton plays
a turn of the century car inventor who shows up in his home
town for a reunion ball; the kind of ball that used to happen
more often and that people used to talk about. Dressed in
coat tails he dances his old sweetheart over to a friend he
has not seen in a long while Ð not since the dances of their
youth."Just like old times" the friend says as he dances in
the twirling merry-go-round motion of the crowd. "Old times?"
Cotton replies, "Old times are gone. The only times are new
ones."
-JG
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