A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT

Full Title: "A Grin Without a Cat: Scenes from the Third World War, 19671977" 

Chris Marker’s (Sans Soleil, La Jettee) epic threehour elegy to the “New Left” which captivated the world’s revolutionary imagination from the late 1960s is a rarelyscreened but legendary work of European political cinema. The director wrote at the time of its release that: “During the last ten years, some groups of forces (often more instinctive than organized) have been trying to play the game [of politics] themselves even if they knocked over the pieces. Wherever they tried, they failed. Nevertheless, it's been their being that has most profoundly transformed politics in our time. This film intends to show some of the steps of this transformation.” Beginning with Vietnam and ending with Allende, the films brings together startling footage of the most momentous events in the struggles of the global Left from 1967 to 1977, and asks what it was that led so much promise and energy to achieve so little. On the 40th anniversary of the May 1968 events in France, the PFF is delighted to be able to screen this important essay on the global Left and its waning fortunes. 

"…it is there, in these unanticipated tremblings, that Marker regains the meaning of militant cinema: cinema that does not survey memory as an "exercise," that evokes revolution not only as a mystique that has deteriorated into politics, but as a still living source of poetry." Noël Herpe, Libération

Director: Chirs Marker

Release Date: 1977

Duration: 180mins