Smiling Cats As a Prism To the World

The latest creation by the 85-year-old French filmmaker Chris Marker investigates some Paris graffiti drawings of a smiling cat and the state of French electoral politics. If that sounds like subject matter with limited appeal, keep in mind that the same director packed Film Forum a few years back with a three-hour history of the international Left (“Grin Without a Cat”). His latest collection of work, opening today, presents at least one more sure-handed example of his sly, astute brand of essayistic film.Mr. Marker remains best known to American audiences as the creator of “La Jetée,” a blindingly original 1962 science fiction short composed exclusively of photo stills. For more than 50 years, he has made essential essay films with the same rhetorical elegance, forging archival and newly shot footage into his distinctive observational and philosophical cinema like a one-man new wave movement. (Highlights include 1983’s “Sans Soleil” and 1992’s rarely screened “The Last Bolshevik.”) His cultural and political commentary is poetic, engaged, playful, reflective, and deeply invested with a sense of the shifting currents of 20th-century history.Mr. Marker also likes cats. They’re a personal mascot, even a talisman, representing wisdom and a certain artfully heightened engagement, and they figure prominently in “The Case of the Grinning Cat.” In the fall of 2001, childlike street art depicting Cheshire Cats sprouted all over Paris: tucked on building walls just below roofs, emblazoned on pavement, even tattooed on a tree. The idea of a free-spirited secret movement painting cats everywhere proved irresistible to Mr. Marker, not least because of two ruder surprises from the same year: the springtime electoral successes of the neo-fascist National Front, and the September 11 terrorist attacks in America.Taking the pulse of his country, Mr. Marker traces a thread through the year’s flood of protests against the Front (and for other causes, like Tibet and Muslim headscarves), the equally proliferating cats, and the generally fragile political tenor. He’s fascinated by the cats as a symbol of an awakening consciousness and likewise by the simultaneous clichés and enigmas of political engagement and street theater. There’s also a tough love for the grand leftist tradition that has long been an abiding concern in his work.Shot on digital video, “Grinning Cat” merges the personal and political under Mr. Marker’s thoughtfully wry voiceover. A movement between the global and the local, or between the grand and the seemingly minor, occurs throughout. News of marching throngs, for example, might be followed by a visit with a cat named Bolero who lives in the Metro. The trail of insights may feel random at times, and may recall a line from the director’s early masterpiece, “Joli Mai”: The narrator’s promise to investigate Paris “like a detective with a telescope and a microphone.”But a signature quality of Mr. Marker’s approach is a highly developed, patient sense of flow and irony that invokes a literary essay but is threaded tight with agile editing. And despite the director’s somewhat fetishized status among the cognoscenti, he takes care not to get too comfortable through little tonal and polemical change-ups. This isn’t his best work, but it’s a civilized and civilizing experience.Five older shorts from the early ’90s are packaged with “The Case of the Grinning Cat” (which runs just shy of an hour).They all share Mr. Marker’s almost animist investment in the secret world of animals. True to its title, “Cat Listening to Music” captures a play of gazes and perceptions involving Mr. Marker’s cat, who may not even care who Ravel is.After the deliberate trains of thought in the longer film, these sketches and bagatelles can seem vanishingly brief. “Bullfight in Okinawa,” a riveting record of one of Okinawa’s famous ceremonial fights between two bulls, is the exception. As their handlers holler them on, the two beasts grapple powerfully but stymie one another into a near standstill. At a mere four minutes, the film plunges you into a timeless, almost meditative moment of epic struggle that renders the rest of the world a sideshow.Through January 2 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).

Smiling Cats As a Prism To the World

Smiling Cats As a Prism To the World

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