(The Air Is Red. Previously shown at PFA in the shortened, English voice-over version, Grin Without a Cat). In 1968, “revolution was in the air” in Paris, Peking, Prague and Peoria. This enormously compelling look at the international left during the decade after 1967 is far-reaching and entirely idiosyncratic; it is witty, satiric, yet committed, as is typical of the screen essayist Chris Marker. Marker drew his material from footage shot by others but rarely, if ever, shown. The one exception is the most familiar revolutionary footage of all, the Odessa Steps sequence from Potemkin-an incident that never existed as anything but an image (a grin without a cat?). Like a (post)modern-day Eisenstein, Marker manipulates found images to his own artistic ends. The subject at hand: How, in the sixties, the “universal standard of civilization” began to collapse. The war in Vietnam was the watershed, and Marker skillfully and hauntingly depicts its effect. He goes on to show the many civilian-police battles throughout Europe; the revolutions within the revolutions in Asia, South America, and Czechoslovakia; the space between the police and union stewards into which the French Left rushed in May ‘68; and those Cheshire Cats commonly known as politicians who try to, but cannot, explain why what was in the air never quite materialized on the ground.