[lbo-talk] great movies -- was: "great" "conservative" movies

Mike Beggs mikejbeggs at gmail.com
Sun Feb 15 19:26:53 PST 2009


On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 1:15 PM, Greg Boozell <gboozell at juno.com> wrote:


>
> Chris Marker "The Last Bolshevik" & "The Case Of The Grinning Cat"
>

I was assuming you meant 'A Grin Without a Cat' but in looking it up on YouTube I see Marker has done 'the Case of the Grinning Cat' too - I will have to track that down!

Still, 'A Grin Without a Cat is pretty awesome too- original French title is 'Le fond de l'air est rouge'. The English title isn't a translation of that because the original title is apprarently untranslatable. The 'grin without a cat' line, if I remember rightly, comes from someone in the movie talking about Che Geuvara's adventure in Bolivia - that it was unconnected to the urban working class movements and therefore a flash in the pan. But I guess it's meant as a metaphor for the whole movement the doco covers, the 1968 movements (and it goes right through until the mid-1970s) from Chicago to Paris to Prague.

It's an awesome movie... distinguished from so many 60s docos by taking the movements seriously and really talking politics in far-left terms. Marker assumes people already know the facts and provides two things: a series of incredible vignettes of film (most of the movie is stuff he's edited together from 'found footage' and newsreels), and interviews. For the first see this on YouTube, from the beginning of the film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXIXa-PXGYI&feature=related

I haven't seen a DVD version, but it's torrentable. (Big though at three hours plus.)

Cheers, Mike Beggs



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