A Grin Without a Cat is Marker's English version of Le Fond de l'air est rouge. This is the first East Bay screening of the film in its long-awaited theatrical release.

In 1968, “revolution was in the air” in Paris, Peking, Prague, and Peoria. This enormously compelling look at the international Left in the decade following 1967 is far reaching, idiosyncratic, satiric, committed-typical of Chris Marker. Marker drew his material from rare footage shot by others. The subject is how, in the sixties, the “universal standard of civilization” assumed from the fifties began to collapse. The war in Vietnam was the watershed, and Marker hauntingly depicts its effect. He goes on to show the many civilian-police battles throughout Europe; the revolution within the revolution in Asia, South America, Czechoslovakia; the space between the police lines and the union stewards into which the French Left rushed in May ‘68; the assassination of princes (Che Guevara) and the deposing of kings (Richard Nixon); and those Cheshire cats known as politicians, who cannot explain why what was in the air never quite materialized on the ground.