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"A Grin Without A Cat" at Othercinema.com
Screening of Chris Marker's "A Grin Without A Cat"
THis Saturday ((3.25.06)) at the ATA
THis Saturday ((3.25.06)) at the ATA
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
...
http://www.atasite.org
Artists' Television Access
992 Valencia Street (at 21st)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415)824-3890
ata [at] atasite.org
...
"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
...
http://www.atasite.org
Artists' Television Access
992 Valencia Street (at 21st)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415)824-3890
ata [at] atasite.org
...
For more information:
http://www.othercinema.com
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Memory and History Left Ajar : Chris Marker's celluloid dissolves
Has anyone ever been de-linearized by a cathartic poetic event?
Ever had an artist's anarchic and ingenious fury leave you momentarily without a foothold, and suddenly flying phat over the 2-dimensional flatlands ?
Film can be a rather far removed experience that is a bit like lending out yur head to the clockwork of some Other's mental gears. 2-to-3 hours later yur ship's masthead is returned to you and these ideas more often than not dissipate like the taste of a dinner mint or they integrate themselves into your walk home that night, and/or your discussions into the next week. OR maybe once in a beastly blue moon they unbox jarring realizations some day in another decade, where they further unfurl their meanings and re-ignite their deconstructions.
While I can't remember Exactly, nor do I have time here to tell a fuller tale of what ecstatic voodoo spirits CHRIS MARKER'S SANS SOLEIL possesed me some years ago, I can always see as crystal clear that one cathartic scene : a giraffe on the African plains shot in at the nape of the neck and ever so slowly collapsing to the ground, juxtaposed to the soft narrator's voice reading a traveller's mysterious letters... I recently looked up the text to see if deeper memories could be jogged ... perhaps these were the words that synched to the inexplicable murder:
"One would like to believe in a world before the fall: inaccessible to the complications of a Puritanism whose phony shadow has been imposed on it by American occupation. Where people who gather laughing around the votive fountain, the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture, share in the same cosmic innocence."
"...The second part of the museum—with its couples of stuffed animals—would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it. Not so sure... animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship, but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation."
“Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound... disembodied.”
...
This weekend is a rare screening of a recently re-edited re-released Chris Marker film at http://www.othercinema.com in SF. "A Grin Without a Cat" ( original from 1993 ... and reworked in 2002 ).
For anyone who senses the profound historical loops and the throes of the new left in the Vietnam era, this film should be an appropriate analytical timebomb, and for anyone who just likes to have their minds blown by a new language... don't miss this film !
I have no expectations of repeating that first Marker moment, but then there's a formula here from The pioneer of "personal docs" that seems to have all the right ingredients to keep memory and history ajar for review, jamming , and reappropriating in the long ride ahead.
salut!
podp
Also posted at the "French Philosophy" and "Friday Night at The Abbatoir" Tribes
http://frenchphilo.tribe.net/
Has anyone ever been de-linearized by a cathartic poetic event?
Ever had an artist's anarchic and ingenious fury leave you momentarily without a foothold, and suddenly flying phat over the 2-dimensional flatlands ?
Film can be a rather far removed experience that is a bit like lending out yur head to the clockwork of some Other's mental gears. 2-to-3 hours later yur ship's masthead is returned to you and these ideas more often than not dissipate like the taste of a dinner mint or they integrate themselves into your walk home that night, and/or your discussions into the next week. OR maybe once in a beastly blue moon they unbox jarring realizations some day in another decade, where they further unfurl their meanings and re-ignite their deconstructions.
While I can't remember Exactly, nor do I have time here to tell a fuller tale of what ecstatic voodoo spirits CHRIS MARKER'S SANS SOLEIL possesed me some years ago, I can always see as crystal clear that one cathartic scene : a giraffe on the African plains shot in at the nape of the neck and ever so slowly collapsing to the ground, juxtaposed to the soft narrator's voice reading a traveller's mysterious letters... I recently looked up the text to see if deeper memories could be jogged ... perhaps these were the words that synched to the inexplicable murder:
"One would like to believe in a world before the fall: inaccessible to the complications of a Puritanism whose phony shadow has been imposed on it by American occupation. Where people who gather laughing around the votive fountain, the woman who touches it with a friendly gesture, share in the same cosmic innocence."
"...The second part of the museum—with its couples of stuffed animals—would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it. Not so sure... animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship, but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation."
“Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound... disembodied.”
...
This weekend is a rare screening of a recently re-edited re-released Chris Marker film at http://www.othercinema.com in SF. "A Grin Without a Cat" ( original from 1993 ... and reworked in 2002 ).
For anyone who senses the profound historical loops and the throes of the new left in the Vietnam era, this film should be an appropriate analytical timebomb, and for anyone who just likes to have their minds blown by a new language... don't miss this film !
I have no expectations of repeating that first Marker moment, but then there's a formula here from The pioneer of "personal docs" that seems to have all the right ingredients to keep memory and history ajar for review, jamming , and reappropriating in the long ride ahead.
salut!
podp
Also posted at the "French Philosophy" and "Friday Night at The Abbatoir" Tribes
http://frenchphilo.tribe.net/
For more information:
http://www.atasite.org
Actually, it looks like the film Saturday night is not Marker's 'Grin Without a Cat' but a new film by Marker called 'Case of the Grinning Cat'. From the Other Cinema calendar: In the second session of our two-week suite on War and Peace, here’s the latest from master French film essayist Chris Marker. Shot on the streets of Paris over the course of mounting European resistance to American imperial aims, this hour-long lyric plays out Marker’s very personal fascination with the enigmatic appearance of the cat, in this case appearing on the walls and placards of French anti-war activists. This preview screening is facilitated by a live translation by Colleen Silva. Supporting the feature is an ensemble of short subjects that also address this global horror-show through artists’ eyes, including poignant pieces by Jacob Bricca, James Schneider, and Edouard Salier. Free red wine. See you there.
and damn how could i forget the free red wine factor !?
btw , words out on a few lists , recommended to arrive early...
( 8:30pm film rolls )
btw , words out on a few lists , recommended to arrive early...
( 8:30pm film rolls )
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