DVD Review: A Grin Without a Cat and Inquiring Nuns

Director Chris Marker is best known for his masterpiece La Jetee, a 22-minute film consisting almost entirely of still images. This meditation on time and memory, which inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys, is one of the very few fiction films in Marker's vast oeuvre. (Less known is the music video he directed for Electronic's "Getting Away With It," which pays homage to La Jetee in its brooding remembrance of things past).

Marker's primary work has been in the documentary genre - but not the documentary as practiced by Ken Burns or even Errol Morris. Rather, Marker is a film essayist. Where La Jetee masterfully edited and juxtaposed the elements of still photographs to fashion a chilling science fiction, his documentary work, at its best, works such magic on the historical and cultural detritus of celluloid.  His Sans Soleil (available on an essential Criterion DVD with La Jetee) is the pinnacle of this form, with layers of image and narrative that transcend the ordinary documentary to create a multi-faceted dreamscape of fact.

There may not be a more thorough document of the international student uprisings of 1968 than Marker's A Grin Without a Cat (aka Le Fond de L'air est Rouge). The director/essayist weaves a celluloid tapestry juxtaposing footage of explosives instruction with a television ad where an elderly couple boasts, "Now we're a TWO-set family." Copious tinted stock footage of army training films, pilot's-eye footage of a napalm attack on a village in Vietnam, and of course Eisenstein's The Battelship Potemkin battle for semiotic significance. But the talking heads (which include the likes of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, natch) and onslaught of revolutionaries fail to incite the fervor of this non-student of the revolution.  For the large part (Grin originally ran at what Marker himself admits was a megalomaniacal four hours—the released print is merely three hours) the film lacks the cross-disciplinary layering that makes Sans Soleil so fascinating. While essential classroom viewing, A Grin Without A Cat probably won't interest many outside the academy. But for those who were there in 1968, there's probably plenty of fodder for both sides of the political spectrum.

Article Author: Pat Padua

Pat Padua bridges high-brow and low-brow to form a distinctive American pan-browism. He hears the voices cry out from the Western Canon to Justin Timberlake, and, with an arsenal of optical tools ranging from disposable message cameras to the sharpest …

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