A Grin Without A Cat

Marker is certainly aware of the greatest irony at the heart of his narrative. The Marxist-influenced left was convinced that history was governed by laws whose provisions were elucidated by Karl Marx. According to them, history was moving inexorably along a certain line of development. It was coming their way, with red banners flying. But as Marker says through a voiceover, history “always seems to have more imagination than we do.”

Some of the images collected by Marker have lost none of their resonance. The grinning American pilot, chatting enthusiastically to the camera as he ignites the Vietnamese jungles below with napalm, is reminiscent of “shock and awe” episodes from a more recent war. Rare footage of American soldiers torturing Vietnamese suspects casts a familiar chill.
Most of A Grin will be unfamiliar to those whose notions of the ’60s are defined by selected images of war protests and Woodstock. He goes deep into the street battles of Paris and Berlin, where he found the “revolutionary vanguard” biting off its own tail, squabbling with itself as much as its “imperialist” enemies. Marker recorded the director of the avant-garde Living Theatre being shouted down as “bourgeois” by student radicals, and French Communist Party thugs hurling the word fascist, followed by their fists, at Trotskyite protestors. The Maoists of Western Europe appear especially delusional when juxtaposed against the Hitlerian devotion lavished on Chairman Mao at a Beijing party congress.

History will continue to remember as well as forget the many conflicting impulses and meanings of the ’60s. The masses never rose in rebellion but, Marker seems to imply, the axis of the history tilted a little from the weight of events in 1967 and ’68.