Por que as imagens se põem a tremer?: militância e montagem em O fundo do ar é vermelho, de Chris Marker

Abstract

As a result of an intense political engagement, Chris Marker produces, in 1977, the first version of A Grin Without a Cat (Le fond de l´air est rouge), which he retakes three more times, in 1988, 1993 and 1998, in a total of four versions. The film gathers a vast assemble of archival images from the sixties and the seventies, since the Vietnam War until the military coup in Chile, in 1973, also going through students and workers movements, the Prague Spring in 1968, the guerrilla in Latin America, amongst other events. Taking A Grin Without a Cat as the central object of this thesis, we propose an investigation about the way the cinematographic work of Chris Marker is pervaded, at the same time, by his political engagement and by a thorough work of montage of the archival images. In a first approach to the film we seek to compare the first and the most recent versions, not only to apprehend the alterations in montage and in the commentaries, but also the main characteristics of Markers work that are shown in the other films made between 1977 and 1998. Then, it becomes crucial to understand the wider context of militant cinematographic production, from which Markers nourishes and dialogues with, as well as the theoretical formulations around what is known as militant cinema, engaged cinema and counter-information cinema. In our second approach to the film, we propose a detailed analysis of some extracts from two axis: the take and the retake. Our aim is to unfold these axes, identifying the origin of the images, characterizing its genetic and situational factors and, at the same time, naming the operations of montage made by Chris Marker. In our third and last approach, we have elaborated a map with the structural elements of A Grin Without a Cat, so that we could reveal how they demonstrate the relations between militancy and montage.