Cinematic essayist and audio-visual poet Chris Marker has been making and collaborating on work for over fifty years, including such classics as Letters from Siberia, Cuba Si!, La Jetée, and Sans Soleil. In the 1960s and 1970s he was actively involved with SLON, a filmmaking collective dedicated to activist production. Marker reemerged to make films under his own name again in 1977 with Le Fond de l’air est Rouge [A Grin Without A Cat]. Examining the International Left in the decade following 1967, Marker describes this film as "Scenes of the third World War 1967-1977." Using the war in Vietnam as its starting point, the film goes on to look at conflicts between the people and the state throughout Europe, Asia, & South America; Paris in May of 1968; and "those Cheshire cats known as politicians, who cannot explain why what was in the air never quite materialized on the ground."—Pacific Film Archives