“Political or critical or academic subcultures and avant-gardes—with their armatures of highly localized and professionalized expertise, their demand that we laboriously teach ourselves to gaze askance—are pretty often choked up with panics about self-justification, the fear that curiosity and the free play of the imagination will somehow lure us haplessly away from our supposed higher goals.

“This is where I connect with Chris Marker: he isn’t afraid of curiosity. His is an avant-garde that goes out into the world, open to the unexpected encounter.” — Mark Sinker, Film Quarterly

Narrated by, among others, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, LE FOND DE L’AIR EST ROUGE (1977)—Chris Marker’s essay film on the rise and disintegration in the 1960s and ’70s of the New Left in Europe, Asia, and the Americas—will screen in 35mm this weekend in an American Cinematheque presentation in Santa Monica.

“LE FOND DE L’AIR EST ROUGE never substitutes anti-establishment piety for Establishment piety. Marker’s commitment is of a fiercely independent, insubordinate, individualistic kind… There is, I think, a fellow-travelling dilemma constantly in play in this film (notwithstanding its worn-on-the-sleeve sympathy for left unity): How to speak out against tyranny without the dull and heavy jargon of, for example, post-structuralist theories of ideology whose language is nearly as alienating and infuriating—and as inaccessible to a nonspecialist audience—as the awful, monotonous management-speak we hear being born in the mouth of a Citroën technocrat?” — Rob White, Film Quarterly

LE FOND DE L’AIR EST ROUGE

(A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT)

Sunday, October 7, at 7:30.

Aero Theatre

1328 Montana Avenue.

Scenes from Le Fond de l’air est rouge/A Grin without a Cat.