Chris Marker
«A Grin Without A Cat»

Chris Marker’s epic documentary about the worldwide Leftist movement from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. Through its collage of recordings, it suggests that media is capable of totally capturing the sentiment of a moment, even when the filmmaker doesn’t necessarily intend it to, as one shaky cameraman’s jittery footage suggests. Marker, like Eisenstein (whose agitprop «Battleship Potemkin» is evoked throughout), also believes in its ability to create a sense of upheaval where there was none before. The fictional images that Eisenstein filmed in the twenties and the documentary images of riots from the sixties that Marker includes look startlingly similar. A feeling of global inertia emerges in the film, as Marker connects the world-spanning events that he opts to show, illustrating how the advance or defeat of one group of socialists usually prodded another to act, creating an extraordinary chain of events.

Jeremy Heilman