May 01, 2007
A Grin Without a Cat
A Space to be Filled
Publicity for the 2003 activist film The Fourth World War reads "a film that would have been unimaginable at any other moment in history." FWW is certainly a remarkable film, combining footage of contemporary struggles around the world into one global activist narrative - but it is not as unprecedented as it claims. Chris Marker did the same "unimaginable" feat for the New Left with his 1977 documentary, Le Fond de l'air est rouge, re-released in English in 1993 as A Grin Without A Cat.
Three hours long and covering over a dozen countries1, A Grin Without A Cat is absolutely epic. If any of its segments must stand as a summary of the film as a whole, it is most certainly its opening moments. "I didn't see Potemkin when it first came out, I was too young" a womans' voice intones, as images of Battleship Potemkin pepper the screen. "I was too young... but I remember the moment with the sailor with the big mustache, who shouts a word that then spreads itself all over the screen... Brothers!" Music commences - it's a march, and images quickly flash across the screen as if there really was a dialectical motor behind this whole mess of History. Triumph! Crowds in Potemkin are intercut with image of the militant crowds of the Sixties. Tragedy! The army strikes, repression ensues, and May Day parades become funeral processions.
Within minutes, the song ends, the sequence is over. The rest of the film is details. Yet Chris Marker clearly understands: that's where the truth lies, in the details. Thus A Grin Without a Cat trudges ahead with lesser narrative clarity, but greater historical truth. The case Marker makes is complex. Watching the film is the equivalent of reading a comprehensive book, but more taxing, because its citations are visual.2 Armed only with terse, poetic and ironic (in a positive sense) narration that punctuates the film now and again, Marker's method is to let the images largely speak for themselves. The experience is hard, but ultimately very rewarding, because Marker leaves margins for us to shade in our own interpretations.
To simplify greatly, A Grin Without a Cat is a film about fissures. In the first half, "Fragile Hands," Marker defines the most important fissure of all: a demonstration on the streets of Paris (for what purpose is not said), the police lining one side of the street, and trade union stewards - the organized old Left - line the other. This creates a space between the two lines in the street, "A space," the narrator notes, "that needed to be filled." The New Left takes that space, and a new struggle is defined. According to Marker, Che Guevera belonged to this space, as did his credo of "One, two, many Vietnams!" It was a guerrilla's stance of no compromise that dared to dream - a desire to "revolutionize the revolutionaries" - but ultimately left the Left without a base, like, he says, "a grin without a cat."
The second part of the film, "Severed Hands," is as grim as the title suggests. It introduces a central villain that had, until this segment, only hovered on the margins: the Soviet Union, Stalinism, and the State machinery that allowed it all to go terribly wrong, particularly in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Fidel Castro in Cuba, once the firm defender of Che's legacy, turns further towards the Soviet bloc for support. But the capitalist States are never excused of their crimes either - as in the story of Salvador Allende, the democratically-elected socialist president of Chile: a dream of peaceful revolution violently overthrown by U.S.-backed fascists.
As history told through footage, A Cat Without a Cat is more than a little ambiguous - and often times the meaning of things is unclear, even confusing, as when it discusses French politics as if the viewer should be aware of what is taking place. Yet that's exactly what history is, a mess of events we impose our own order upon. Still, Marker's anti-authoritarian sense doesn't prevent him from every error. For instance, the women's movement is lacking completely from Marker's story, except for a brief clip at the end.
For all his allegiances to the male Left, Marker never lets it keep him from minimizing the meaning of bloodshed: he understands that inordinate violence occurs when order is imposed. "Cats are never on the side of power," Marker's narration explains, and A Grin Without a Cat, is, in the end cat-like itself. It keep a cat's eye firmly on new struggles ahead, and on the future. It is Chris Marker's unique gift for telling stories of the past that simultaneously project, in Walt Whitman words, "the history of the future."
NOTES:
1: I was able to count thirteen off the top of my head: France, Vietnam, Japan, Venezuela, Cuba, the United States, China, Chile, West Germany, Northern Ireland, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and South Africa.
2: The only book that compares, as far as I can think of, is George Katsiaficas's The Imagination of the New Left.
