A Grin Without A Cat (2002)

Depending on your mood and your familiarity with international politics from 30 to 40 years ago, A Grin Without a Cat can be either talky and esoteric or haunting and prophetic.

It recreates the feel of the period, but in the end its obscurity undercuts its power.

A Grin Without a Cat plays more like a creative mix tape than a standard hunk of journalism.

Just to take in Grin’s first few moments, a mash-up of Battleship Potemkin and police whacking May ’68 protesters, is to see a mind sifting through chaos and making beautiful, critical sense of it.

A masterpiece among masterpieces, the two-part, three-hour A Grin Without a Cat is Chris Marker's most ambitious, clear-headed string of cinematic clauses and ideological couplets, and also his most impenetrable.

massive, towering, and impassioned

This slapdash documentary about left wing political movements is probably best understood in the original French and was a lot more relevant in 1977 when it was first made.

No review available.

While it regards 1967 as the key turning point of the 20th century, and returns again and again to images of dissidents in the streets, it's alarmingly current.

An exhaustive investigation into the roots and after-effects of the revolutions and counter-revolutions that rocked France, the U.S., China, Latin America and Czechoslovakia in 1967 and 1968.