The Days of May

What date shall I assign to Chris Marker's magnum opus, A Grin Without a Cat? This rugged oak of an essay-film, whose gnarls trace the growth and withering of decades of leftist politics, is now playing for the first time in the United States, where it's being shown in the form Marker gave it after

the demise of the Soviet Union. I might say it's a film from 1993; and yet the version we now have is the revision of a work completed in 1977, when Communism was still alive, and anti-Communism was more than the hungry zombie it's since become.

Communism was still alive, but even then Marker perceived a change. The last major event he incorporated into his essay was the 1974 election of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to the presidency of France. In the film, this election represents the end of a period of turmoil that had begun in 1967: the year of campus uprisings in the United States against the Vietnam War, increased union militancy in France, bloody student protests in Berlin against the visiting Shah of Iran, the death in Bolivia of Che Guevara. It's fair to say that the main body of A Grin Without a Cat deals with these years, so I might date the film 1967-74.

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