Monday | October 21, 2013 7:00 pm

A Grin Without a Cat
(Le fond de l’air est rouge)

Screening on Film

Directed by Chris Marker.
France, 1978, 35mm, color, 180 min.
French with English subtitles.

Marker’s incomparable editing skills attained a new level of sublimity and subtlety in his epic chronicle of the international New Left’s spectacular rise and fall. At turns mordant and mournful, A Grin Without a Cat uses an extraordinary range of source material – newsreels, propaganda films and Marker’s own footage – to construct a polyphonic, immersive and critical history of political struggle. “I am not boasting that I made a dialectical film. But I have tried for once (having in my time frequently abused the power of the directive commentary) to give back to the spectator, through the montage, “his” commentary, that is, his power.” – C.M.