Le fond de l'air est rouge (1977)

User Rating:

8.5/10   

Director:

Chris Marker

Writer:

Chris Marker (writer)

Release Date:

23 November 1977 (France)

Genre:

Documentary

Plot Keywords:

Color In Title

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Laurence Guvillier	...	Récitante (voice)
Davos Hanich	...	Récitant (voice)
François Maspero	...	Récitant (voice)
Yves Montand	...	Récitant (voice)
François Périer	...	Récitant (voice)
Sandra Scarnati	...	Récitante (voice)
Jorge Semprún	...	Récitant (voice)
Simone Signoret	...	Récitante (voice)
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Jim Broadbent	...	Speaker (voice)
Cyril Cusack	...	Speaker (voice)

Also Known As:

Grin Without a Cat (USA)
The Base of the Air Is Red (International: English title)

Runtime:

240 min | 177 min (1993 version)

Country:

France

Language:

French | Spanish | English | German | Vietnamese

Color:

Black and White | Color (Eastmancolor)

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Brazil:18 | France:U

Company:

Dovidis

Trivia:

The untranslatable French title is a play on words suggesting that revolution was in the air but not on the ground. The English title, "A Grin without a Cat", has a similar meaning. Director Chris Marker has given it the subtitle "Scenes from the Third World War 1967-1977".

Marker's multicolor manifesto

It is little surprising to me to check on this film here on IMDb & find out that with merely 2 comments in total & zero attention it stands like some pale thirdrate piece of work.

This film is interesting if not important. Actually it is an extremely profound & sophisticated anthology of the 60s events conducted by one of the most unique masters of cinema. All the events are well known to us, fundamentally studied & analyzed by each of us, so Marker has to be totally frank, & he is by that matter; he never imposes his points literally, never judges nor justifies, what he does is that he constructs the sequence of the events in such manner that the facts talk for themselves & there's no place left for accusing Marker in subjectivity. By just choosing the correct array of the documented materials, Marker manages to show the true nature of the 2 different reigning social systems of that time, the failure of both on the ideological as well as on practical levels. This film is a great achievement as it represents the document with a very high historical accuracy. Just imagine the global events of that time which took place in the various countries at the same time: Vietnam, Soviet Union, USA, France, Cuba, China, Venezuela, Czech rep., Chile etc, the events so different yet so tightly connected to each other. Marker manages to put the whole late 60s + 70s in 200 minutes & creates an exact model of the world of that time.

Besides all this, I am a huge fan & collector of the mass riot shots. This film contains some of the greatest classics of the mass riots of the 20th century, which has a very different & some kind of vintage sense. They have a tendency to fill my body with puissant emotions. No aesthetics can be more powerful than that found in the chaos.

I am one of the biggest Marker fans & I must say that the creative work he has done in this film is amazing.