Chris Marker - Le Fond de l'air est rouge aka Grin without a cat (1977)

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Director's Statement

Scenes of the third World War 1967-1977

Some think the third World War will be set off by a nuclear missile. For me, that's the way it will end. In the meantime, the figures of an intricate game are developing, a game whosede-coding will give historians of the future - if they are still around - a very hard time.

A weird game. Its rules change as the match evolves. To start with, the super powers' rivalry transforms itself not only into a Holy Alliance of the Rich against the Poor, but also into a selective co-elimination of Revolutionary Vanguards, wherever bombs would endanger sources of raw materials. As well as into the manipulation of these vanguards to pursue goals that are not their own.

During the last ten years, some groups of forces (often more instinctive than organized) have been trying to play the game themselves - even if they knocked over the pieces. Wherever they tried, they failed. Nevertheless, it's been their being that has the most profoundly transformed politics in our time. This film intends to show some of the steps of this transformation.

- Chris Marker

What the Press Said - Then and Now

"Much more than a weapon, more than a history lesson intended to provoke our revolutionary consciousness, this feature film is the result of lucid reflection and profound honesty." -- Michel Perez, Le Matin, November 25, 1977

"A beautiful poem in red, luminous with sensitivity and intelligence." -- Serge Richard, L'Unité, December 9, 1977

"This film is a mirror held up to each of us, a mirror that wanders through all the paths that we have taken or crossed (Vietnam war protests, pro-Latin America movement, May of '68, the rise and fall of the Left) and encourages us to reflect along with it about the journey and its goal." -- Regis Debray, Rouge, December 28, 1977

"Image, imaginary, imagination, imagery... and revolution. Chris Marker delves into his enormous reservoir of images from the past ten years, both official and candid, sorts, selects, puts them into perspective, in context, into opposition, and by allowing us to re-see, to re-read our recent past, attempts to imagine the future." -- Alain Remond, Telerama, December 3/9, 1977

"A trial for the viewer: One cannot absorb four hours of so much history, kneaded, tormented, perpetually reexamined, without wondering if the end of the world is not near. To interpret the film in that way would be to betray its meaning, and that is where Chris Marker's work becomes somewhat like a mirror held up to our awareness: not a traditional humanist awareness, but an active awareness. That is where progressivism regains meaning. And especially, that is where film now asserts itself as the possible and practically indispensable tool of awareness, to put back into perspective so many dashed hopes, so many betrayals." -- Louis Marcorelles, Le Monde, November 5, 1977

"Fifteen years later, his work as a filmmaker has the density of a Pierre Bourdieu sociological survey or a Fernand Braudel historical opus... In this thoughtful exercise in style, A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT, teems with lost illusions, but no errors. Finally, Chris Marker's film is being used rather than abused. The reason undoubtedly resides in this little phrase slipped into the second episode: 'You never know what you're filming. Until years later.'

"In 1993, A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT accomplishes the tour de force of avoiding three potential pitfalls. It is not a likable witness to times past; it is not a summation, and still less the act of contrition of a lost generation. It is all about memory and social anthropology." -- Michel Chemin, Libération, April 1993

"...And it is there, in these unanticipated tremblings, that Marker regains the meaning of militant cinema: cinema that does not survey memory as an "exercise," that evokes revolution not only as a mystique that has deteriorated into politics, but as a still living source of poetry." -- Noël Herpe, Libération, May 12, 1998

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Monday, June 14, 2010

Chris Marker - Le Fond de l'air est rouge aka Grin without a cat (1977)

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