Chats
Perchés — The Case of the
Grinning Cat
by Chris Marker
First Run Icarus Films, NY; Les Films
de Jeudi, Paris 2004
57 mins., col., Video/DVD, NP
Distributor’s website: http://www.frif.com
Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney
Mike.Leggett@uts.edu.au
Cats and grinning – that’s culture
but where’s the science and technology?
Well, non-feature films can be strange
animals. Chris Marker is a French film-maker,
making 40-odd films since the 50s. He
is famous for the extraordinary film La
Jeteé (1962), a 30-minute sequence
of still photographs with voiceover that
constructed the apocalyptic landscape
of a post-nuclear world – technology
was the bogeyman of the times, the handmaiden
only of kings, princes and despots. Television
and the telephone were part of the electronic
technologies only just beginning to affect
lesser mortals and produce an evident
social impact. Marker’s films ruminate
upon the social impact, not only of machine-importations
of the modern age, but its ideological
baggage, too. The widely seen Sunless
(Sans Soleil 1982), shot mainly
in Japan, considered the complexity of
memory and place. Well before MyPlace.com,
we see MyCity and a society "toppling
into the modern world". Under a relentless
stream of verbal comment, the complexity
of the electronic image reflects the fall:
"I wonder how people remember things
who don’t film, don’t photograph,
don’t tape . . . . How does mankind
remember to remember?"
The image of the cat features in Sunless
as in a film made in 1993 (A Grin Without
a Cat), a reflection on the rise and
fall of the Left in the 60s and 70s. Is
it the symbol of innate independence,
of guile, of cool, the anarchist co-traveller
with humans throughout the ages? In Chats
Perchés, the graffitied images
of the cat with a broad grin appear in
various part of Paris: on rooftops and
gable ends; on trees and railway tunnels;
and later, in media channels and street
demonstrations. The cat images come and
go as the pleasant relaxed voice with
the French accent weaves stories, reports,
comments about what we see, descriptions
of events too big to be seen in anything
other than the symbolic form – this
project began shortly after 9/11 –
from an onward stream of captions and
grabbed images, a la verite, interjections
and diversions: pre-War French cinema;
the Taliban; Russian musicians playing
Bach in the Paris Metro; the genealogy
of le chat through Carroll, manga,
cave painting and Constructivism; AIDS;
Falun Gong . . .
Marker was a central player in the new
cinema of France in the 60s: Godard, Chabrol,
Rivette, Klein et al, admirers of revolutionary
film-makers of another age – Eisenstein
and Vertov. The Kino-Eye is transposed
by Marker into the 21st century
in Chats Perchés as Le Morph-Eye,
the computer eclipsing the kinomatograph
in the world of cinema, here re-animating
the politicians who parade before the
medias’ cameras. It is early 2002
and the French presidential election is
running – Paris comes alive with
exquisitely crafted, voiced and staged
street demonstrations, the parades of
seasonal causes, youth and gorgeous women
to the camera foreground.
The bombing of Bagdad, the looting of
the museums, is the cue for popping into
the Louvre to gaze briefly at mummified
cats from the Pyramids. We track the world
as icon, as the auteur’s imagination
explores the possibilities of the material
arrayed. The links continue with the observation
that searching for le chat on the
Web produces a myriad array of chat-rooms!
And so the video continues, moving here
and there around a clearly beloved Paris,
pulling in occurrences and comment from
Marker, part visual poet, part crafted
writer. Like the author W.G.Sebald and
the film-maker Agnes Varda, this is Place,
where events are distinctly history and
memory, never having the same significance,
but skilfully deployed by these artists,
without moralising, as a means of mapping
our collective and individual identities
. . . and implicitly, our responsibilities.
There is much that is French here, the
discursive and the rhythmic, in language,
music and image. Captions are on the screen
just long enough for a native French reader
to absorb, with the English voiceover
helping with some but often diverging
in the original French as a counterpoint
measure, loosing at times intended effect.
However, the material is rich and resonant,
worthy of repeated viewing and ideal for
collective responsiveness in seminar and
community contexts. It is the work of
a contemporary essayist and poet combining
the tekne of literacy with the
tekne of the digital — video
and sound. The new oral culture, which
potentially, as Marker has observed, is
capable of making poets of us all.
