(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
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 eyes-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 seems to be jacking into the media mainframe that recorded and incited these events, and letting us relive them at arm’s length. As poetic as it is political, his voiceover doesn’t interpret what we are seeing in the film as much as it registers the same reaction that we are having, and gives a human voice to Marker’s project. Somewhere along the way Marker mentions that history “always seem to have more imagination than we do.” Perhaps in the more human and ironical 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 significance of these film clips themselves to make such questions worth asking.
The literal translation of the virtually 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 accidence of history, these images rolling in predictable waves towards their conclusion. 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 ironical connections he makes as a signal of his presence.