Chris Marker's "A Grin Without A Cat"

podp — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 08:53:12 GMT

Salut, For anyone in the SF Bay Area, I thought this would be a good tribe to alert you to a RAre screening of Chris Marker's film The Grin Without A Cat , this Saturday at www.Othercinema.com at ATA - www.Atasite.org ( 8:30pm... small theater, recommend coming early ). And just read that Marker was a student of Sartre, and would be an interesting thread to start, to see what experiences people have had of his pioneering cinema, and, in particular, any impresssions about this controversial perspective/remix of the New Left dilemmas in France... then and now. here's a txt/blurb i've written for indybay.org. respex, podp fwd> memory left ajar by Chris Marker's celluloid dissolves topic posted Today, 10:51 PM by podp delete entire topic Advertisement 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 blue moon they unbox jarring realizations some day in another decade, where they further unfurl their meanings and reignite their deconstructions. While I can't remember Exactly what ecstatic voodoo spirits CHRIS MARKER'S SANS SOLEIL possesed me with many years ago... i can always see as crystal clear that one cathartic scene of a giraffe on the African plains shot in 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 it would jog the memory ... 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 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 timebomb, and for anyone who just likes to have their minds blown by a new language... 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 your memory ajar for the long ride ahead. salut! podp

skadi_lupa — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 02:19:54 GMT

skadi_lupa — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 02:19:15 GMT

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French Philosophy Photo Album