"A Grin Without A Cat" at Othercinema.com

Othercinema strikes again with precision reels of anarchy !! Don't miss the rare opportunity to see the work of one the most prolific and pioneering film and media sleuths. Chris Marker may have utterly revolutionized the documentray genre with Sans Soleil in 1982, and now with a recent re-worked and re-issued " A Grin Without A Cat " (1977/2003) given us a crucial document to inform the social justice movements of today about dilemmas, traps, and cul de sacs that have befallen the Left at previous historical turns.

"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 Dutschke's idea that "we must revolutionize the revolutionaries" was "the key phrase of the political 60s." Thus Fidel and Che and Régis Debray and the Black Panthers and Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Dubcek and Mao and Allende (and, at the very end of the film, the women's 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 enragés, the anarchists."

from:
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/the_moving_image/v003/3.1walsh.html


“One of the most towering and extraordinary
films to grace the screen!
Staggering in its depth and scope….
A monumental political elegy to a not-so-distant era.
An event of major importance.”
- Film Threat

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