Chris Marker's A Grin without a Cat (1993, France) (review)

Michael Walsh

The Moving Image, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2003, pp. 167-170 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota Press DOI: 10.1353/mov.2003.0018

For additional information about this article

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effect that comes across in other works that attempt to use consumer-grade video sources (i.e., access television, some Paper Tiger videos, or even Mark Rappaports important 1992 video essay Rock Hudsons Home Movies). As an archivist-artist, however, Leslie has created a new work that forces us to think about issues other than aesthetics. By plundering from so many movies and broadcast sources, The Cedar Bar raises questions about access and ownership. When pressed on this point during an audience question-and-answer session at the New York Video Festival, Leslie argued that copyright did not matter. He made the piece for himself as an independent artist, with the intention of showing it at such festivals, museums, galleries, and schools as he could. If he had intended to make money on the film, he said, he would have made a more conventional work. Leslie went on to say that if a distributor wanted to try to market The Cedar Bar, he would be glad to let them undertake all of the clearance works for the many underlying copyrights in his videotape. But that, he conceded, will not happen. And yet The Cedar Bar exists as an artwork, and is there to be screened not only at New Yorks Lincoln Center and Anthology Film Archive, but also the Tate Modern in London and the Chicago Underground Film Festival (which honored Leslie with a lifetime achievement award in 2002). Whether your library will be authorized to acquire or purchase a copy of The Cedar Bar remains unanswered. In 2002, Alfred Leslie embarked on a new animated motion picture, another piece that he started before the 1966 fire destroyed so much of his work. That he continues to work in this hyperindependent vein no doubt inspires continuing generations of artists and filmmakers who lack access to mainstream media industries. The risk in plowing ones own field, however, is unmerited obscurity. Much as Leslie was often forgotten by the critics after he abandoned the fashionable abstract exressionist style, even contemporary New York film culture doesnt quite appreciate its own. The New York Times, in two reviews of The Cedar Bar, missed some basic facts (calling Pull My Daisy Leslies first film, rather than his fourth, and referring to the opening footage of Barnett Newman from Painters Painting as gleaned from a black-

and-white television interview of unspecified vintage).2 Perhaps Leslies own dogged work to make himself his own archivist after 1966 and his continued brave experimentation will be better served with the further exposure of The Cedar Bar.
Notes 1. J. Hoberman, Private Eyes, Village Voice, July 2, 2001, 117. See also Teri Tynes, Multiplying Perspectives: Alfred Leslie and The Cedar Bar, Art Papers July/August 2002, 17. 2. Dave Kehr, On the Rocks: Over Drinks Its Artists versus Critic, New York Times, June 27, 2002, E4; A. O. Scott, In the Flux of Reality Recomposed, New York Times, July 13, 2001, E1.

Chris Markers A Grin without a Cat (1993, France)

Reedited from Le fond de lair est rouge, 1977 Michael Walsh Chris Marker, who turned eighty in July 2001, belongs with Jean-Luc Godard and Agns Varda on the very short list of French New Wave filmmakers who not only have remained continuously productive since the 1950s, but in recent years have produced some of their most important work. Yet Marker is much less known than these others, both because he has always worked on the margin between documentary and fiction and because his work only sometimes takes the form of a conventional feature film. During the 1990s, Markers multimedia installations, films for television, videos, and CD-ROMs have been shown in the most presti-

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gious modern museums and alternative cinema showcases, yet the general public is still most likely to hear of him as the maker of La jete (1962), the film that inspired Terry Gilliams 12 Monkeys (1994). This speaks not only of the cost of feature filmmaking and of the drift away from celluloid film exhibition, but also of a filmmaker for whom features have never been really typical; Markers filmography includes many shorts and a number of films that considerably exceed the standard running time of a feature. Among the latter is Le fond de lair est rouge, an extraordinary 230-minute montage of New Left struggles from 1967 to 1973, ranging from Paris to Prague to Belfast, from San Francisco to Washington to New York, from Havana to Mexico City to La Paz, from Tokyo to Peking to Reunion Island. The title means The Bottom of the Air Is Red; more idiomatically, this could be rendered as Deep Down the Air Is Red or At Bottom the Air Is Red. Le fond de lair est rouge was first released in France in 1978, and was at the time criticized as too populist by the militants of Cahiers du Cinma. Marker responded amusingly by taking a sentence from Cahiers that characterizes the film as typical of the mindset of Editions Maspero, and placing it as an epigram at the beginning of the films script, published in 1978 by Editions Maspero. The film was also shown on French television in two parts, an edit that can still be seen at the Forum des Images (formerly the Videothque de Paris). In 1993, Marker reworked the film for English-speaking audiences. He cut a total of fifty minutes, changed some of the voice-overs, and introduced a concluding commentary on terms unknown in the 1960s, like AIDS, Ayatollah, Occupied Territories, and glasnost. The result, still in two parts, was given a new title, A Grin without a Cat, and was shown on Channel 4 in Britain. Since 1994, this version has had occasional video screenings at such venues as Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archives, and Harvard Film Archive. The original title is redolent of the revolutionary euphoria of the late 1960s, even if the second half of the film is quite hardheaded about the dashing of those hopes. The later title concedes that this fervor has vanished into air, but also suggests that something still

remains. Such wryness is typical of Marker, as is the reference to the most totemic of his many totemic animals, the cat, which the film tells us is never on the side of power. The specific context of the title is a segment in the film discussing a split between the Venezuelan Communist party and the guerrillas of Douglas Bravo that left the latter like a spearhead without a spear, a grin without a cat. Note that Marker spent the last year of the Second World War fighting fascism with a detachment of American paratroops, and is thus quite capable of wordplays in English, such as the pseudonym Marker itself. Often said to have been taken from the brand name Magic Marker, the term is also reminiscent of the shout marker that accompanies the clapperboard, and thus refers to sound as well as image. A Grin without a Cat has not been the most fugitive of Markers films (the five-minute LAmbassade from 1970 has recently been restored by Dust Films of Los Angeles after more than thirty years out of circulation), but it has been fugitive nonetheless. So its North American theatrical release in the spring of 2002 is most welcome; First Run/Icarus Films is to be congratulated for retrieving it from what Markers introduction to the script calls notre refoul en images [our repressed images, or the image-unconscious]. The film is of particular interest to readers of The Moving Image because it contains a wealth of archival, activist, and amateur footage. Some of this is familiar (e.g., the priest waving the white handkerchief on Bloody Sunday in Derry), but some of it is much less known (super 8 material shot by militants at French factory gates, 16mm footage of a 1967 attack by security forces on a Berlin demonstration against the Shah of Iran, guerrillas on their bellies in the jungles of Venezuela). Some of the footage is Markers own (interviews with Fidel Castro, with Jorge Semprun, and with Elena, the Intourist guide to the Odessa steps), and some of it is gathered from films by other filmmakers (Eisenstein, CostaGavras, Miguel Littin, Leni Riefenstahl, the Berwick Street Collective, the U.S. Army and Air Force, the French Communist party, various television news organizations). The closing credits name half a dozen fellow documentarians and twenty newsreel sources, including Markers own SLON collective. It seems reason-

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able to assume that Le fond de lair est rouge was itself drawn from a considerable stockpile of footage, and thus that A Grin without a Cat represents a culling of a culling. Markers signature is visible in the selection and correlation of materials, in the decision to tone many sequences, and in the electronic music of the soundtrack. Also strongly shaping the film is a voice-over written for numerous different voices, both male and female. Yet this polyphony does not prevent the voice-over from speaking in the first and second persons, no doubt as a conscious alternative to the voice of god traditional in documentary. Marker is one of the great film editors, and it is a deliberate strategy of his film to mix and match materials from different places and sources. He begins with the Odessa Steps sequence from Potemkin, intercutting it with actualities of marches and baton charges and injured demonstrators from the 1960s. This establishes a spiralling dialectic between fiction and reality, soon furthered by a chilling sequence in which a U.S. pilot on a bombing mission against the Vietcong plays enthusiastically to the camera beside him in the cockpit, and by a sequence intercutting U.S. Army counterinsurgency training with scenes of actual tortures. In both cases, the element of performance within the actuality complicates the traditionally definite distinction between the two. At the other end of the film, the theme is resumed when the commentary gives the academy award for theatricality in demonstration to the Japanese, and when images of the march on the Pentagon are accompanied by a voiceover wondering how many of the victories of the 1960s were essentially symbolic. Montage Marker is associational. The funeral of the Maoist militant Pierre Overney is followed by the funeral of Charles de Gaulle. The little red book of Chairman Mao is waved by Black Panthers in San Francisco, by militant students in Paris, and then by Lin Piao, who is seated on a dais next to Mao. In rapid succession, demonstrators confront police in London, Belfast, Berkeley, New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Mexico City. Propaganda footage of Soviet workers waterskiing is followed by actuality footage of striking French workers dancing and playing darts. Tears dripping from a womans chin are followed by drinking water dripping from an-

other womans face, and then by drool dripping from the face of a victim of the Minimata mercury poisoning. A street festival with a statue of a cat is followed by another street festival with a marching band in cat costumes, and then by black-and-white footage of a mad cat, also a mercury victim. For a detailed study of the film, the script is an invaluable resource. For example, since it is a principal tactic of Marker to cut across the continents from Paris to Prague to Santiago de Chile, the viewer is not always sure where she or he is; thus the script is helpful in simply identifying the locations, some of which are indistinguishable to the nonspecialist, e.g., the numerous French factories (Saint-Florentin, Lip, Rhodiaceta, Renault-Billancourt, Citroen, and so on) where striking workers are interviewed. The script also clarifies some meanings; for example, a long shot of some demonstrators on an abutment comes from a site in Prague where a statue of Stalin has been demolished, and a shot from 1977 of a gutter with water flowing is on the Rue Gay-Lussac, scene of the barricades in May 1968. Given that, the viewer is in a better position to appreciate the irony that the street torn up in 1968 by demonstrators is in 1977 torn up by road works. Similarly, one thinks differently about some shots of Salvador Allende after learning that they are the very first and the very last television news pictures of him. The script does contain some errors and oversights. For example, a Belfast woman facing the British troops is said to brandish a cricket bat, quite unlikely in nationalist Ireland. In fact, she brandishes a hurley, a stick used in the Gaelic sport of hurling, and thus a definite signifier of nationalism. Elsewhere, the summary of images from a Communist party cultural festival mentions a pop group, but does not identify it as The Who. But such problems are few, and the script also helps to clarify what was cut in 1993; Marker seems mainly to have reduced the time given to some of the many talking heads, though he also sacrificed some super 8mm footage by activists, some shots of Jean-Luc Godard filming the Paris events of May 1968, and a quotation from The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Mary Jane Walsh is responsible for the English subtitles and does a generally excellent

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job, though a popular front against the bourgeoisie is misleadingly rendered as a popular front against the middle class (popular fronts normally include the middle class), and Markers Letter to Some Comrades, which begins hilariously by asking who will wash the dishes of this revolution that is not a dinner party, becomes the puzzling Letter to Someone. Markers work has been global in compass since the beginning; he has made films in Finland, Siberia, China, Cuba, Israel, Chile, Mexico, Japan, and Guinea-Bissau. Yet he has also made a series of films set in or about France (Toute la mmoire du monde, La jete, Le joli mai, a good part of A Grin without a Cat). In this shuttling between metropolis and periphery, A Grin without a Cat reminds us that Markers metropolis is quite particularly French. In the United States, in Britain, and in Germany, the New Left had more to do with causes (civil rights, peace, the student movement) and with identities (black power, womens liberation, gay liberation) than with party. In France, with its huge Communist party (which, for all its Stalinism, still commanded the loyalty of the working class) the case was quite different. During World War II, Marker fought with the substantially Communist French resistance, and subsequently remained close to such noted Communists as Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, and Franois Maspero. So A Grin without a Cat is dedicated to the New Left, but conceives it as a series of questions posed by rank-and-file workers, by popular movements, by students, and by guerrillas to official Communism. As the voice-over puts it early on, Rudi Dutschkes idea that we must revolutionize the revolutionaries was the key phrase of the political 60s. Thus Fidel and Che and Rgis Debray and the Black Panthers and Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Dubcek and Mao and Allende (and, at the very end of the film, the womens movement) are all seen as alternatives to a sclerotic Soviet Communism incapable of true de-Stalinization. Meanwhile, the established voices of French Communism question the discipline of those who chant in the streets about Ho and Che, and we cut to a confrontation at a factory gate between a group of Trotskyist militants and a group of Communist workers, for whom anybody not loyal to

the party is a fascist and/or provocateur. This idea of revolution within the revolution is memorably visualized in an overhead of a demonstration in which the police hold their line while the union stewards hold theirs; into the space between these two ideas of order step the young, the students, the enrags, the anarchists. More than in any comparable film from the English-speaking world, the talking heads of A Grin without a Cat are Communist party leaders and thinkers. This reaches a kind of apotheosis in a sequence toward the end of the film, in which the commentary notes that Fidel Castro always adjusts the position of the microphone as he speaks. We see half a dozen examples, with the voice-over remarking that this gesture is really part of the rhetoric of Fidel, allowing for emphasis or applause. Then we cut to the one place in the world in which Fidel encounters a mike that cannot be adjusted Moscow. I will not spell out the symbolism. Instead, I will suggest that this tragicomic sequence is in itself reason enough to see the film.