Chris Marker’s witty, incisive, and incisive made-for-television film essay The Case of the Grinning Cat uses the wry instigator and thematic arch of playful, reoccurring graffiti of the titular carton cat to tie together thoughts on political public demonstrations and more pensive observations about Parisian life in which they take place. Marker—or, in any case, Marker’s stand-in narrator Gérard Rinaldi—first spies one of the grinning cartoon cats on a Paris rooftop during an flash mob assembly. This phenomena—the public gathering of anonymous people through shared internet messages—is the staging point for Marker to trace the cat through current political demonstrations in Paris—a multitude and various, from global ones like anti-Iraq protests to various “demos” about the general elections in France, Tibet, Bush, pro-this, anti-that—making his subject not so much the particular politics or ideology of the age but rather characterizing the continuing presence (Marker briefly notes the Popular Front and May ‘68 movements), myriad of, and perhaps grossly ineffective existence of public protests in Paris.

The image of the cat—two parts playful, one part serious—pops in and out of the urban setting, prompting wonder, questions, curiosity, and desire from Marker, the cat evoking a myriad of meanings, from a sort of Rivettian unifying political or populous conspiracy, to a malleable cipher for recurring events, to evidence of public expression, art and mystery. The cat—an actual graffiti existence in Paris—is fictitiously spread through the world via Photoshoped images Marker flashes on screen, calling to mind the “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” phenomena, which appropriated previously taken images and spaces with an internet in-joke image/text plastered on them. That the “All Your Base” mantra inadvertently sounded like an imperial militarist credo connects a more sinister side of the Marker’s fictitious proliferation of the mysterious cat through images and space. Marker’s camera captures the cat, but so does news footage, internet websites, and, more fictitiously, on stamps, artwork through the ages, and other media, suggesting the power—or at least the possibility—of the spread of public expression through media. When the cat soon fades from view in Paris, Marker grows worried and again plunges into the midst of demonstrations, whether in order to actually find the cat’s grinning face (which he does, strangely) or its analog expression simply in some sort of link between people or between their demonstrations in the Parisian streets.

Intercutting this hunt for the cat with musings on the street demonstrations (the footage and commentary of which are a combination of the very general and the very specific that renders them both of-the-times and also somewhat vague and pensive), Maker also finds time in this concise essay to spend time in Paris proper. Much of this time is taken in the Metro, either on trains looking out windows, on platforms looking through trains at advertisements, or on stairways and automated walkways looking at people. Marker creates a subtle dichotomy between the mass gatherings above ground and the separation, automation, and isolation below ground, delineating a sphere of space that the cat magically travels between (indeed, one of Marker’s favorite inclusions in the film is a beautiful black and white cat that lives in the subway but that sadly goes missing by the film’s end). Eventually, after so many images of people frustrated, ecstatic, or otherwise energized in their public expression of their political beliefs that seems to have no concrete result in the film or in society, Marker’s grinning cat emerges as a hopeful image that promises the comfort and security simply in the knowledge and recognition of its appearance, of a shared pubic expresson keep alive through time and through images of media.