A grinning yellow cat began appearing on walls across Paris in 2001, painted by an anonymous street artist, and nobody knew who was responsible or why. An 80 year old filmmaker decided the cat was as good a guide as any to the state of the world.

THE CASE OF THE GRINNING CAT (2006), originally Chats perches, follows Chris Marker as he wanders Paris tracking the graffiti cats while the city around them convulses.

The 2002 presidential election puts Jean-Marie Le Pen into a runoff against Jacques Chirac. Antiwar marches fill the streets ahead of the Iraq invasion, with George W. Bush a recurring specter on the news. Strikes, protests, and political theater unfold block by block, and the cats keep watching from above, indifferent and grinning.

Marker treats the graffiti as a kind of civic barometer, evidence that ordinary people can still mark the city as their own even as history moves through it. The film has no narrator explaining what any of it means. It simply observes, cutting between demonstrations, election footage, and cats on rooftops and shopfronts.

Running just 59 minutes, made for television, it stands as one of the last works by a director who spent his life recording the twentieth century and then kept going into the twenty-first, still curious, still following whatever caught his eye on the wall.