A Grin Without a Cat [1977]

 While Chris Marker is best known for his bravura post-apocalyptic photo-roman La Jetée, celebrated travelogue Sans Soleil and enthralling Paris symphony Le Joli Mai (in that order), A Grin Without A Cat arguably remains the magnum opus and most monumental achievement of this maverick, trailblazing and enigmatic poet, essayist, Marxist and avant-garde artist. Discursive, ambitious, bristling with stunning topical breadth, nuanced, exquisitely subversive, moving, profoundly meditative and unavowedly personal, this complex, oftentimes daunting and multi-faceted masterwork provided for an engrossing examination, interpretation, reflection and lamentation on the myriad leftist, socialist and communist movements across the globe over the 60s and 70s. Suffice it to say – and this is applicable for most of his best works, albeit more than most in this case – this presupposes political consciousness, understanding and awareness of its viewers, along with a fair degree of mental faculty and acuity too. The sprawling, kaleidoscopic film began with a powerful montage where the iconic Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin were brilliantly juxtaposed with actual shots of political protests, resistance, turmoils and crackdowns from across countries and periods. Thereon, through formal playfulness, historical evocations, political dialectics and personal impressions, and using documentary footage shot by himself and found artefacts, he cut across a stunning breadth of events – May’68 Paris, Vietnam War, Washington March, anti-war movements, Castro and Cuba, Allende and Chile, Mao and China, Japan and Minamata, Watergate Trials, Che’s assassination in Bolivia, Prague Spring, and a lot more. As ironically alluded to by its title, it was suffused with undercurrents of melancholy, despair and disillusionment – a sense of what could’ve been and the eventual loss of dream – evoked through dry, ironic, weary and sardonic multi-hued voiceovers.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Chris Marker

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History/Avant-Garde

Language: French

Country: France

If I Had Four Dromedaries [1966]

Marker began his dazzling photo-montage If I Had Four Dromedaries with a truism on photography – not just as an artform, but as a philosophy too – in that it’s similar to hunting, albeit with the intent to eternalize the subjects being “shot” rather than to kill them. And, thereon, he crafted something that vibrantly informed the diverse shades that defined his oeuvre – his indefatigable wanderlust, stirring left-wing politics, striking photographic prowess, love for the essay form and profoundly personal voice laced with candour, wit, existentialism and avant garde spirit. At its most elemental, this essay – in the way Vertov did with Man with A Movie Camera, Varda with Salut Les Cubains and Marker himself with La Jetée earlier, and what Reggio would do with Koyaanisqatsi – was composed entirely of still images. He sifted through possibly thousands of photos taken during his breathtaking sojourns across cities, towns and locales – Moscow, Peking, Seoul, Havana, Oslo, Stockholm, Tokyo, etc., and of course his very own Paris – staggeringly cutting across 26 countries; and he used around 750 remarkable B/W ones – accompanying them with a voiceover that was alternately meditative, sardonic, mock-serious and playful – for composing this exhilarating piece. The result was wry, mordant, melancholic, poetic, incisive, and perhaps most importantly – in a myriad subtle measures – richly political. Throbbing urbanscapes, monuments, art galleries, energetic mass of people, candid faces, profiles, narrow alleys, graffiti, billboards, lonely spaces, decisive moments, silhouettes, tranquil landscapes and whatnot were combined into a collage that was euphoric and mournful, freewheeling and self-conscious, trenchant and lyrical. Further, he juxtaposed all these with sudden zoom-ins, abrupt cuts, gradual fade-ins and fade-outs, gentle pans and an idiosyncratic score with some slow jazz thrown in.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Chris Marker

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: French

Country: France 

Le Joli Mai [1963]

 Marker’s magnificently composed, freestyle, structurally innovative and formally fluid “city symphony” Le Joli Mai achieved a startlingly chiselled display of tonal and thematic balance – between meditative and documentation, direct and discursive, playful and agitational, disarming and radical, ironic and edgy, humorous and combative, and poetic and political. Like its illustrious predecessor Chronicle of a Summer from two years back – with a shot of Morin and Rouch to make its influence eminently clear – it was foregrounded on Parisians, in the way they think, interact and exist; however, while the latter had a relatively tighter scope recorded over a longer timeframe, this had a dizzyingly wide arc, albeit within a shorter horizon. He, along with co-director and cameraperson Pierre Lhomme, made this at a delicate juncture for France, with the bloody Algerian War finally coming to an end, thus marking the collapse of French colonialism, while the French society was simultaneously experiencing a consumerist boom. Broken into two halves – personal and impish “A Prayer from the Eiffel Tower” and defiantly political and serious “The Return of Fantomas” – it explored diverse complex themes, including the Algerian war, the French army’s use of torture, racism, exploitation of workers, hubris, housing resettlement, middle-class ennui, etc.; and, on a fascinating note, each idea casually raised in one vignette became the defining leitmotif in the next, thus building an exquisite inter-connectedness. Further – akin to a collection of essays with a prologue and an afterword – this exuberantly began with a lyrical yet sardonic elegy on Paris, and ended with deadpan, discomfiting statistics. And, not least of all, it was gorgeously photographed in high-contrast, intoxicating B/W which captured the immediacy, zeitgeist, malaise and disaffection through its dazzling images.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Chris Marker & Pierre L'homme

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: French

Country: France

Letter from Siberia [1957]

 Chris Marker’s distinctive voice as a ciné-essayist, visual artist, sociopolitical commentator, globetrotter and ethnographer was already identiable in his first solo feature-length film Letter from Siberia. Therefore, if morning shows the day, then the forecast was bright and clear! In this alternately playful and perceptive epistolary travelogue, he joyously blended multifarious stylistic, formal, thematic and even meta-narrative elements – dry documentation, idiosyncratic musings, zany animations, satirical infusion of advertising elements, deadpan observations, and mock-serious examination of how a documentarian’s subjectivity laces different political colours to their depictions – while capturing the spread, complexities and oddities of Siberia, a place that represents the edge of the world for many. Marker covered it through different angles, and that certainly included its vast expanse, its austere and rugged beauty, its geographic isolation, its prohibitive weather, and interspersed these with glimpses of its working-class people, their habitats, the renowned trans-Siberian railways and massive Soviet infrastructure projects that were underway. But, he counterpointed these conventional elements with quirky facets and interludes – the history of gold rush and how that spirit is still alive among a solitary few; the story of a pet bear; the locale’s unique folk culture; a rather curious animated section on the woolly mammoth that were said to have walked this land in prehistoric times; and, on a hilarious if sardonic note, a faux commercial – aimed at Europeans and Americans – on the consumerist value of a reindeer which form an integral part of life there. And, in its most memorably self-reflexive touch, he showed a couple of scenes thrice – one involving a bus and a car, and another involving construction men – wherein he wryly imbued the same visuals with dramatically different political interpretations.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Chris Marker

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Travelogue

Language: French

Country: France

United Red Army [2007]

 Kōji Wakamatsu’s epic, operatic and ambitious magnum opus United Red Army – which was such a passion project for the maverick filmmaker that he didn’t just mortgage his house for financing it, he even destroyed it at the end of its climactic sequence – was crafted through intermingling of documentation and dramatization. And, this bold interweaving of the objective and the subjective – wherein, the news reel footage were accompanied by a meditative voiceover, while the enacted parts were kept deadpan to retain flavours of poetic realism – made this such a fascinating work. Clocking at over 3 hours and covering a broad temporal arc, this thrilling work chronicled in incredible details the rise and fall of the titular militant Marxist-Lenist-Maoist organization – formed through the merger of the Red Army Faction and the Japanese Communist Party – with considerable formal elan. Wakamatsu, on one hand, captured the idealism, revolutionary fervor and utopian dream borne out of student political movements, desire for societal reformation, fearless defiance of the authorities and staunch opposition of Japanese and American imperialism; while, on the other, he also covered the despotic attitudes among the power centers in the group, their acts of dogmatic violence, the growing disillusionment and paranoia, and their eventual collapse. The hyperkinetic first act made terrific use of archival footage – interspersed with short enacted bursts – that established the context and depicted the group’s formation; the middle section, set in makeshift training camps in the Japanese Alps, focused on the brutal heavy-handedness of its leaders that broke the group’s backbone; and the elaborate final episode followed the last-ditch escape attempt of 5 of its members which ended with the Asama-Sansō incident and an infamous media circus.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Koji Wakamatsu

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Docufiction/Historical Epic

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan