ChrisMarkerAGrinWithoutaCat-WhitechapelGallery.PDFVIP

Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat 16 April 2014 – 22 June 2014 Large print labels and interpretation Gallery 8 Marker was politically engaged in the historic upheavals of his time, from the end of colonialism to the Iraq war, chronicling the global uprisings which took place throughout May 1968 to the popular struggles of the early 21st century. The events addressed in the final section of the show, When the Century Took Shape: War and Revolution, were formative experiences for Marker as for many others. Born between the two world wars in 1921, he joined the Resistance in World War II, and was a participant in the leftist and collectivist politics throughout his life. This section opens with the faces of Paris citizens in the 1960s and the early 2000s contrasted across a pair of large-screen sequences from two films portraying periods of social and political transformation. The crisp black-and-white images of Le Joli Mai (1962) confront the digital-video street footage of Chats Perchés (The Case of the Grinning Cat) (2004). Two multimedia works made almost thirty years apart offer equally contrasting treatments of images of the First World War and its revolutionary aftermath. The installation Quand le siècle a pris forme: Guerre et Révolution (When the Century Took Shape: War and Revolution) (1978) and the eight-channel Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (2005), inspired by TS Eliot’s poem of the same name. The exhibition culminates in a large-screen projection of the newly restored version of Marker’s epic documentary Le Fond de l’air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat) (1977). This remarkable collage of archival footage rescued from the ‘dustbin of hist