"Qu'est-ce que c'est un film documentaire?" or some such. This weekend I began re-reading Sartre's Nausea: boy, howdy, could that one-eyed French philosopher write. "Hell is other people." In the introduction I gleaned two factoids: Sartre's mother was Albert Schweitzer's first cousin and Ireland had an existential philosopher, Percy Arland Ussher. "Humor is despair that doesn't take itself seriously," quotha. In keeping with all the angst, I went to see the new-old documentary about the French New Left's disintegration between 1967 and 1977: Chris Marker's Grin Without a Cat. Three hours of Fidel fidgeting with his microphones until stopped dead in a snow-caked Moscow with unmovable Soviet microphone technology.

"What is a documentary film?" Parts of Grin were engaging, but I guess I was just a tad bit too tired to sit through it all. I liked the strange de(con)structed Eistensteinian montage at the beginning with the Odessa steps sequence from Potemkin and shots of various state aparatuses and their henchmen police teargassing, clubbing, kicking, high pressure waterhosing, etc., demonstrators. The moral of the story? Something happened, the New Left never recovered, and the Old Right may have been envolved in the whole thing. Old politicos turn to conspiracy theory in their old, coupon-clipping, age.

Rhetoric and montage is all that's left to any filmmaker after the film has been exposed. Cinema Verite was neither. (I guess I'm just getting cranky in my dotage.) I enjoyed Marker's La Jetee and Letter from Siberia and found parts of Battle for Chile engaging, but Grin is my least favorite flick from this important director / bricoleur.