In 1968, "revolution was in the air" in Paris, Peking, Prague and Peoria. This enormously compelling look at the international left during the decade since 1967 (for things began to foment before May '68) is at once almost impossibly far reaching yet entirely idiosyncratic; witty, satiric, yet committed, as is typical of Chris Marker, still the best screen essayist around. He prepared this English-language version of his seminal 1977 compilation film, Le Fond de l'Air est Rouge, idiomatically, "Revolution Is in the Air," for Britain's Channel 4. Marker drew his material from footage shot by others and rarely, if ever, shown. The one exception is the most familiar revolutionary footage of all, the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's Potemkin-an incident that, significantly, never existed as anything but an image (a grin without a cat?). But what an image. Like a (post)modern-day Eisenstein, Marker manipulates found images to his own artistic ends. How, in the sixties, the "universal standard of civilization" assumed from the fifties began to collapse is the subject at hand. The war in Vietnam-that "nation placed at the convergence of the world's contradictions"-was the watershed, and Marker skillfully and hauntingly depicts its effect. He goes on to show the many civilian-police battles throughout Europe; the revolution within the revolution in Asia, in South America, in 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 commonly known as politicians-even of the left-who try to but cannot explain how what was in the air never quite materialized on the ground.