Chris Marker - Grin Without A Cat

[Bobby Beksinski]

6/10

I feel my score may have been affected by my lack of endurance in the
face of a political documentary of this magnitude. It is separated
into 2 parts : 1. The Fragile Hands and 2. The Severed Hands. Due to a
time restraint in my schedule I attempted to cram this 3 hour monster
into one evening which I certainly know was not the best choice to do.
I honestly think watching the two parts separately would be more
beneficial and that's what I will plan to do in a re-watch.

In the beginning, mainly the entire first part I was genuinely glued
to the screen. The vivid images of our history and past being
presented to us in raw form in such a way that it was able to bring
the past to us now. I was not alive during this era of the 60's and
70's in our world but Chris Marker's film presented such a honest
portrayal of the period, a guerrilla style approach using stock
footage and recordings that I felt like I was. It begins immediately
with a woman discussing the film "Battleship Potemkin" with scenes
from the film juxtaposed with real life footage replicating similar
chaos and revolt as the movie. The scenes from "Battleship Potemkin"
then play a symbolic role in the rest of the film being edited in the
middle of certain segments that help demonstrate the message of the
image. It then moves on to a subject, I being American, am more
familiar with and that is the Vietnam war. It moves on to many other
different political upheavals and overall party struggles in the world
that I am less accustomed to. The one thing that kept my attention
were the images that no matter where in the world the riots, protests
and violence took place it was a universal horror that could be felt
by anyone on a human level.

The film is composed in a sort of free-form documentary style and does
not always tie together the sections in history it is examining. It
sometimes moves directly onto something completely different and
perhaps irrelevant than the one before but it also may revisit earlier
sections later on in the film. This does propose some confusion
especially to viewers like me who may be younger and not fully
educated at least not in depth on all of these points in history the
film examines. Some key points in "Grin Without a Cat" include Fidel
Castro and the art of guerrilla warfare, the death of Che Guevara, the
overthrow of Salvador Allende, the Watergate hearings, and the Soviet
invasion of Prague.

Towards the end of Chris Marker's colossal documentary my interest did
begin to wane tremendously only catching bits here and there. I
usually have no issues whatsoever with long run times and 3 hour plus
films but here I think it just has to do with the amount of content on
display and how it is too much to process all at once. So again I
blame my lack of interest mostly on trying to fit the entire film into
one tiresome night. So my advice for anyone who may watch this, well
first off I do recommend to watch "Grin Without a Cat" as it is
certainly a important film not only in cinema but to be able to see
different side of the history of the world during the 1960's and the
70's. But I recommend watching it in the separate parts in two
different sittings to fully appreciate the movie.