VOLUME 06 - NUMBER 01 SPRING 1970

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STAFF VOLUME 6 NUMBER 1 editor - SPRING 1970 GORDON HITCHENS CONTENTS School of Visual Arts Arthur Barron, The Self-Discovery of a Documentary Filmmaker contributing editor Interviewed by Bernard Rosenberg and AARON STEINBERG F. William Howton Jersey City State College page 6 Network Television and the Personal Documentary managing editor by Arthur Barron AUSTIN LAMONT page 16 The Intensification of Reality book editor by Arthur Barron DONALD STAPLES page 20 Arthur Barron Filmography New York University page 24 graphic designer Enslaved by the Queen of the Night PATIENCE BUNDSCHUH The Relationship of Ingmar Bergman to E.T.A. Hoffman Butera School of Art by Robert Rosen page 26 advertising manager NAOMI WEISS Young German Film reprinted from Der Spiegel editorial assistant page 32 DIANA MACBETH Boris Karloff-The Man Behind the Myth assistants by Lillian Gerard design CONNIE JENSEN page 46 subscriptions EDITH WEINBERGER Cornel Wilde, Producer / Director The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT by John Cohen are those of the individual authors and page 52 do not necessarily represent the opinions Ernst Lubitsch, of the editor, staff or publisher. A Parallel to George Feydeau by Herman G. Weinberg FILM COMMENT. volume 6 number 1. page 62 Spring 1970, price $1 .50 . FILM COMMENT is published quarterly by Film Comment Publishing Book Reviews Corporation . Copyright @ 1970 Film Comment page 64 Publishing Corporation . -II. Subscription rates in North America : $6 for four numbers, $12 for eight numbers; I- elsewhere $7 for four numbers, 2w $14 for eight numbers. ~ Application to mail at second class postage rates ~ is pending at Boston , Massachusetts. o Please include your present address with u zip code when writing about subscriptions. ~ Single copies of most back issues are in stock at $2 each , write for list. -..I Please address all editorial, II. subscription and back issue correspondence to FILM COMMENT 100 Walnut Place Brookline Massachusetts 02146. Back volumes of FILM COMMENT are being reprinted by Johnson Reprint Corporation 111 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10003. Microfilm editions are being published by University Microfilms Ann Arbor Michigan 48106. Please write to these companies for complete sales information . Type set by Rochester Monotype Composition Company, printed in USA by Willis McDonald and Company. National newsstand distribution by B DeBoer, 188 High Street Nulley New Jersey 07110. Library of Congress card number: 76-498.

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SOME RECENT ISSUES Of TDR: FILM AND THEATRE RETURN OF THE LIVING THEATRE Susan Sontag on Film and Theatre-Stan Vanderbeek : a manifesto on expanding cinema-Michael Kirby on film in An interview with Judith Malina and Julian Beck-Stefan the new theater-Ingmar Bergman, \" Each Film is My Last\" Brecht, Irwin Silber, Patrick McDermott on the Living -interviews with Vilgot Sjoman , Peter Weiss, Roger Blin , Theatre-the Li ving Th ea tre 's notes for Paradise Now- Peter Brook, Lindsay Anderson, Barbet Schroeder, Roger three essays on Transactional Analysis-O 'Horgan begin- Planchon , Vito Pandolfi , Pavel Hobl-Alain Virmaux , \" Artaud nings-an interview with Joe Chaikin-Colin Blakely and and Film \" -documents: scenarios and arguments by An- Margaret Croyden on Peter Brook-a photo study by Max tonin Artaud-articles by Milton Cohen , Josef Svoboda- Waldman of Manuel Alum 's The Cellar (T43) two lectures by Vsevolod Meyerhold-Viet Rock, a play by Megan Terry (T33) NATURALISM REVISITED r------------------------ Martin Esslin , \" Naturalism in Context\" '-Evert Sprinchorn I Nam. _ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ __ _ __ _ _ on Strindberg-Andrew Sarris , \" Film: the Illusion of Nat- II Address uralism \" -Lee Baxandall , \" The Revolutionary Moment\"- I City _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ 5tat. _ _ _ _ _--\"Zip - - - - two major essays by Rolf Fjelde-John Lahr on Pinter and Chekhov-Georgii To vs tonogov on Three Sisters-Simon I Politics and Performance issue only ...... . . .. . 52 .00 0 Trussler, \" British Neo-Naturalism \" -Brian Johnston on Ibsen and Hegel-a portfolio of Naturalist scene design lOne year subscription ........... 56 .00 0 1876-1965-plus previo usly untranslated works by Ibsen and Strindberg (T42) I Two year subscription ... S11 .00 0 LIBERATION/VIOLATION I Back issues, each (specify) S2 .00 0 An interview with Jerzy Grotowski-Marc Fumaroli on I Five back issues ... S8 .00 0 Barba 's Kaspariana-Eric Bentley on Pirandello-an auto- interview and three plays by Fernando Arrabal-Jean- I Ten back issues .... S15 .00 0 Jacques Lebel on the necessity of violation-Stefan Brecht and Dan Isaac on The Ridiculous Theatre-interviews with I T33 0 T34 0 T35 0 T36 0 T37 0 T38 0 T390 T40 0 T41 0 Charles Ludlam and John Vaccaro-Jan Kot! on his I T42 0 T43 0 \" Politics and Pertorman ce\" 0 Orestes-Ann Halprin 's Myths (T41) I (Foreign postage, except Canada and Mexico, 50 cents per year) I PREPAYMENT APPRECIATED Allow six weeks for delivery I Total payment enclosed $_ _ __ I The Drama Review , Oept. e, 32 Washington Place , New York , N.V. 100CJ ~-----------------------~

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The The following intArview with Dr. Arthur Barron , Self- holder of a Ph .D. in sociology from Columbia Uni- Discovery versity, was taped by two fellow-sociologists, Prof. ofj( Bernard Rosenberg of City University, New York, Documentary and Prof. F. William Howton, Chairman , Sociology Department, City College, New York. The interview Filmmaker was part of a study of the film maker in terms of his family background, education, career develop- Interviewed ment, work attitudes and assessment of his own role by as a film professional. BernarCI Rosenberg earlier had published a book, The Van- Rosenber guard Artist, based on a similar study of 40 painters. He has written and edited a dozen other books on an sociological topics, including Mass Society in Crisis , F.Wiliiam Macmillan, 1964, in collaboration with Howton . It is being re-issued in a new edition . Howton 's The Howton Fu nctionaries was published in 1969 by Quadrangle Books, Chicago. Earlier, he co-authored Work , Self and Society. Before teaching sociology, Howton did research work for the Institute of Industrial Relations at Berkeley and for the System Development Cor- poration. His article on John Henry Faulk, the blacklisted radio and television personality, ap- peared in FILM COMMENT, Volume 3, number 4. QUESTION: Will you tell us where you were born , and when? BARRON : In Boston , Massachusetts, 1929. That makes me 40, going on 50. I spent a long time thinking I wanted to be a sociologist and took a doctorate at Columbia and ... QUESTION: Not so soon after you were born . . . ? BARRON : Oh no, no-you want to go through the whole . .. ? QUESTION: Sure. BARRON: I guess some of the important roots to my life and personality-where I grew up we were one of the only Jewish families in Somerville, Mass.-which is mostly an Irish-Catholic slum. So there was a whole sense of alienation , of feeling an outsider and of feeling prejudice in school and in the community . And running home after school-over fences, over yards-so I wouldn 't have to go in the streets and see Pat Rooney and all those kids. QUESTION: What were your parents doing there? BARRON: My father was a butcher. I don 't know why the hell he moved there. To this day I don't understand why he moved to this community. QUESTION: Never asked? BARRON : No, I never asked him , I never really was able to talk straight or level with my father. QUESTION: Where did he come from? BARRON : He was the son of a carpenter who fled the Czar's army. My grandfather came to Boston to work , settled in Boston , where my father left school in the second or third grade. My father was born here , as was my mother. My grandparents on both sides were born in Russia and Poland . And came here with the great dream. QUESTION: Were your grandparents important to you? BARRON : Not so much in the sense that I saw them that frequently, but my grandparents were important SPRING 1970 7

to me because I never found such boundless love all night, when I was just a little boy-in a dark and acceptance in my entire life as from them . With closet . One Christmas, my sister and I hung stock- my parents there was this kind of typical neurotic ings and I came down and they were all presents middle-class Jewish pattern of success, achieve- for my sister-and in my stocking was just black ment, intellectuality ... I was raised entirely by my coal. parents and by a succession of maids. My mother worked in the store . She was a great chicken- QUESTION: What had you done to warrant such cleaner and butcheress . She worked in the store punishment? with my father, and they worked very , very hard to give me piano lessons, Hebrew lessons, a good BARRON: I hadn 't practiced the piano or I had education . It was a small retail store. spoken back to my sister. She thought I had to eat at a certain time , go to the bathroom at a certain QUESTION: Did you help out by and by? time-but I don't think out of any kind of sadism or anything, I really believe there was such a des- BARRON : I-my parents were very mi xed about it. perate , desperate, hunger in her for respectability My mother didn 't want my to-be neuro-surgeon and success and for me to make it. You know , she hands soiled with chicken blood. But my father was was ashamed of being a butcher and she was a ve ry eager that I would come to the store and see- very bright\" woman and very ambitious. Unfulfilled , you know-why education is so important and why totally unfulfilled, both intellectually and emotionally. you must know where all of this came from. And And she was just going to make sure that I was so occasionally I would go into the store on Satur- a splendid success in every way . days and school vacations and work, waiting on trade and helping out. QUESTION: Her ambition was for you to become a medical doctor? Did your father agree with your QUESTION: You weren 't the only child, were you? mother in planning your ... ? BARRON : No, I had a sister five years older who BARRON : No, no , he didn 't. He was , in many ways . was killed , with her husband , at age 21 in an auto- ... You know, my feelings are unresolved about mobile accident. my father, so I don 't know how accurate I am , but he was less hysterical than her and less pushy and QUESTION: Were you close to her? less ambitious . He didn 't want to be all that suc- cessful and, for example, she would complain that BARRON : No, unfortunately. I was very envious of I didn 't practice the piano and tle would say, \" Well, her and felt that my mother preferred her to me . okay, he doesn 't want it.\" Another favorite expres- She was very pretty and I suspect seductive towards sion was , \" What they don 't got, they don 't need. \" me. I was always very much smarter than her. I think Of course , my mother loathed him for this and was that 's fair to say. contemptuous of him and communicated this con- tempt and loathing to us. QUESTION: The parents must have been very nice towards the boy. QUESTION: Was she better educated than he was? BARRON : No , no , not at all. My sister was the real BARRON: Yes, as a matter of fact, I think she went darling of the household . It was a real matriarchy through at least grammar school and maybe in the sense that the mother really rules my fa- had some high school. But not only that, she was ther-there 's an interesting slip , I was going to say also interested . She would go to lectures and join rules supreme . My father is about a head shorter the sisterhood of the temple. She at least had pre- than my mother. And that really summed up their tentions. relationsh ip . There was at some considerable distance from us I SAID THAT BEING JEWISH was one terribly im- a temple that I traveled to a great deal. I lived in portant thing . Another terribly important thing was Somerville , but I traveled all the way to high school the loneliness and unhappiness in the household . to Brookline , Massachusetts, which is like an hour It was a terribly unhappy household. and a half or two hours each way . Because my mother thought that that was a better school- QUESTION: They didn 't get along? which, of course, it was. So there was that kind of rootless feeling . BARRON : Oh no, I remember my father punching my mother and blooding her nose. QUESTION: Did you have friends? QUESTION: Then he wasn 't such a mouse? BARRON : Yeh, there was some amelioration and assuagement in all of this . In the first place , they BARRON : Well , yes, he was. It was the kind of sent me to camp each summer, and that was a very mousiness of deception and withdrawal, and very good experience. I mean there were relatively good brief and violent outbursts of rage but no confron- counselors and a pleasant atmosphere and swim- tation in the real sense, in a deep way-working ming and sports. That was very helpful. I kind of things out and talking about it. He would just hit idolized a couple of my counselors in camp and her and run and I'd have to go beg him to come had a pretty good relationship with them. The other home. He'd disappear for months at a time. area of surcease for me in all of this was my mind- the world of reading and fantasy. QUESTION: Did he ever give you a licking? QUESTION: You got to be a bookish boy? BARRON : My father was very gentle with me. My mother was ... well, I loved my mother very dearly. BARRON : Oh, enormously. I remember I was read- She was very cruel and inflicted great bodily pun- ing the Book of Knowledge before I went to kinder- ishment on me. For example, one of the punish- garten . I really mean that. I was really reading . ments would be that she would lock me in the closet 8 FILM COMMENT

QUESTION: They were pleased with that? went to the public school and the rich Catholic kids went to St. Clements. BARRON : Oh , yes. Although I could sense my sis- ter's jealousy and apprehension . QUESTION. Were there gangs? QUESTION: How did you get started with this inter- BARRON: No , it wasn 't the acting-out delinquent est in reading? kind of thing . Just rough kids. I remember some really demeaning , horrifying experiences as a kid . BARRON : I just don 't know how it began . My mother I had a very bizarre academic career. Like I might and father never read . I don 't think either of them one semester get all A 's and the ne xt semester get ever read a book. all F's . And in high school I became a terrible prob- lem . They put me in something called the basal class QUESTION: Where did the books come from? at Brookline High School , which was for kids who had aphasia , palsy and god knows what else. BARRON : My father used to buy them for me . Yes, he felt it was important. With my mother, educa- One of the reasons they put me in the basal class tion was prestige and achievement. But with my was that at the beginning of one semester I stole father it was power and economics . I remember him a blank report-card and I would go to the Kenmore saying to me , time and time again , \" Look , my job Hotel and in a public typewriter I would type in all is a butcher , you r job is a student. I want you to A 's and B's and bring that home and then sign it. put your 8 hours a day in-you punch a clock , too . And if you do a good job with your job , you won 't And I must say that at a terribly early age I began have to work as hard as me. And the reason I want to know that I had to lie to survive in my household . you in the store is to show you what a man without I had to really fake it all the way and never show an education has to do to make a living .\" And he my feelings, never be straight or serious about any- would bring me books. I remember one of the first thing , and never show that I was hurt or afraid . I books he ever got me, I just adored , I' ll never forget would never dream of telling my parents that kids it. It was the biography of Ulysses Grant, a child 's were beaten up like me, or share any of my feelings biography. He was one of my childhood heroes with anybody. [laughing] . Anyway, my mother called Brookline High School QUESTION: Were your grandparents fairly mO'bile and said , \" Well , Arthur's about ready to go to Har- in status? vard-I think I should come in .\" And they said , \" Wait a minute, Arthur Barron?, are you kidding , lady? BARRON : No, from what I can gather they were He 's barely going to graduate.\" So after that they poor over there and they were poor over here. If put me in the basal class and each teacher had anything they moved upward over here: he was a to sign that I was there and what my comportment carpenter and my mother's father did much bet- was . ter-he owned a store. I should point out that my father did fairly well . We were , I would say, extremely There's a wonderful event that I think I should write comfortable. up some day forCommentary magazine. Which was, they hired a getter-in-to-college . In those days it was QUESTION: He really couldn 't show you the hardship very hard to get into college because all the veter- that is suffered if you didn 't get an education? ans were coming back from the war, so there was this man who for a fee would help you get into BARRON : Except by taking me to the store and college. Marvelous. I remember-it's really worth making me work hard and telling me stories about relating to Commentary-I remember sitting down his childhood , which was horrifying . with him , working on my application , I think it was for Pace College or B. U .-Syracuse was another QUESTION: And the home was pretty secular. You one. And for \"father's occupation \" he said , \" No , mention Christmas stockings ... don 't put down 'butcher,' put 'provisionary! \" And my parents paid like a few hundred dollars to him . BARRON: Well , my father was an atheist. I re- His fee was higher for getting into medical school member once the elders of the synagogue coming and so forth. Yeh, that's marvelous. What 's My Line, to the house to collect money and him throwing television . them out. Laughing at them . But my mother had taught me prayers. Her religion was two things. It QUESTION: Where did you get in? was a dressing up on Yom Kippur in new clothes and being a mavin in the community . It was also BARRON: I didn't get in anywhere that year . They a rather childlike calling on God when she was in wouldn 't take me anywhere. My record was unbe- trouble and fearful and so forth . And she lit a Jahr- lievable. So they sent me away to prep school for seit light for her father and her brother. a year. And that was a really incredibly fine step. I mean , there were ten kids in the class and the AS A CHILD I suspected that her religion had noth- teachers were brilliant and it was disciplined , and ing to do with a sense of mystery or true spirituality. every night I remember they 'd march us into the It was mostly social. I thought it was all pretty silly. main hall. And a proctor would walk up and down Getting Bar Mitzvahed was making a speech and every single desk and he had a thing and he would getting a lot of presents. I went to Hebrew School knock-make sure you were doing your work. for a little while , which is rote memorization-we not knowing a single thing of what any of those words QUESTION: You liked that system? meant. Just going through the process. BARRON: I liked it, I really liked it. Because it wasn't QUESTION: Did the Catholic kids of your area go senseless and it wasn 't capricious and it was on to parochial school? everybody equally. And I also respected them-they were good people. BARRON : That came later. The poorer Catholic kids SPRING 1970 9

I HAD BEEN GOING THROUGH all kinds of rebel- than the music-I was intensely, deeply interested lions as a kid in high school-I mean , I was ticking in dramatics. I was in all the school productions and madly, you know, and twitching-I could barely sit I acted , and I remember at camp I was the dramatic still. My mouth would fly open and my eyeballs counselor. And I was the star of all the plays . I loved would pop out of my head . You know, I was forging that, I really loved that. I remember one of the very report cards and getting lousy grades and I played happiest and earliest memories of my life is when the basketball team . I was in kindergarten , the school , on St. Patrick 's Day, that time of year when they gave a thing for QUESTION: You didn 't mind submitting to this au- the PTA , and I dressed in top hat and tails-I must thority in prep school? How old were you? have been 6 or so-I sang Top of the Morning, Bridget McQue and Did your Mother Come from BARRON: No , no , I liked it. I was si xteen . And it Ireland, both in brogue. And I remember loving the was kind of strange, because even though I had applause. I remember that applause was so impor- been in the basal class and everything , I won the tant-the acceptance. debating prize . And it was qt Boston Latin High School and my father came-he just broke down QUESTION: Did you go to the theater? and wept. I remember it was very touching-we had gone to a diner and he ordered coffee and he just BARRON: No, never went to theater, but I went to began to weep. And I said , \" What's the matter, movies-adored movies. Saturday afternoons were Dad? \" He said , \" In all my life I couldn't have done just the happiest time of my life-because I went that. I' m so proud of you \" It was very touching . every Saturday afternoon-and then every Sunday the family used to go to the movies. Went to the QUESTION: Had you given up piano? How long did movies twice a week religiously , for years and years that last? and years and years. I loved them. BARRON : Oh , years and years. I used to give con- QUESTION: You didn 't play hookey? certs. I was very good at it. It broke my teacher's heart when I quit. She wanted to teach me free. BARRON: No, I didn 't play hookey. Esther Hughes-a wonderful woman . She's still teaching . I went back to see her not long ago. QUESTION: Did you read plays, or instead novels, or. .. ? QUESTION: Were your parents musical at all? BARRON : I read everything, everything , everything BARRON: Not at all , they hated it. They never lis- I could lay my hands on . Everything , I mean it. tened to a song-but again , my mother thought that this was one of the accomplishments. QUESTION: Was there a library around? QUESTION: Did they take you to concerts? BARRON : Yes , lots of libraries around. BARRON: No. QUESTION: Were you much interested in pictures outside of the movies, that is, paintings and draw- QUESTION: Were you exposed to recordings? ings? BARRON : No. You see it was all empty of any con- BARRON: No. tent. But I will tell you what I got out of music. What I got out of music-and it was terribly important to QUESTION: Well, now-there you are, a pretty iso- me, I don 't know what I would have done without it, maybe I would 've just flipped out-but music lated boy, about to enter what college? enabled me to feel , to get rid of emotion . My tech- nique wasn't very good , but Boy!-they say I played BARRON: Then I went to Tulane University and got with feeling! I really did-I really felt all that stuff. a BA and an MA there in 4 years . And again I felt very out of it-you know, all those guys were having QUESTION: But at the same time you were hating fun. And then I went through a crazy Zionist period the lessons and the practicing? around this time, 1947-1950. BARRON: I didn 't like the discipline of having to At Tulane, I first of all I had it in my head that I do an hour every single day and then before a was going to fulfill my parents' dreams and become concert having to do hours and hours and hours. a doctor. It had a very good med school. It was And I hated harmony, I hated theory, I hated the also-with my extremely spotty record-it was about craft of it-arpeggios and Czerny and all of those the only fairly decent place I could get into. But things. it was a horrible school. Jesus, all those dumb prej- udiced Southerners-all those schmucks. I really QUESTION: Did you try jazz at all? hated it. BARRON : No , never. I remember I just loved the QUESTION: What did you do with your leisure time? feeling-the feeling of music , of playing it. Any drinking? QUESTION: Did you keep up the reading that you BARRON : I do it a lot now-but then , no, I never drank or took drugs. I didn 't smoke marijuana until started at a very early age? I went to Berkeley and filmed THE BERKELEY REBELS there. And I smoked it three times and then gave BARRON : Yes, I read just for amelioration , and I it up and never did it again . Because I think now still do. That's what I spent all my time doing. it's basically destructive. QUESTION: Do you see any relation between (a) I'LL TELL YOU what my revolt at Tulane was. I wrote your reading and your musical achievements, and a column for the Hullabaloo, the campus newspa- (b) your later filmmaking? per, called \" One Small Voice,\" and I would write things like this- \" Mardi Gras is the vast orgasm of BARRON: I' ll tell you what was terribly important to me-I guess as important or even more important 10 FILM COMMENT

the city brought about by the stimulation of the or something . So I went to the Russian Institute-it commercialized prostate.\" And \" Who is this fascist was like-insane! It was sleep-walking . So I came swagger-sticking Major of the ROTC, demanding up here to New York and I learned Russian and that we wear uniforms all day during ROTC day?! Russian law and Russian history and wrote a thesis Someone should tell him this is not VMI. \" and got my PhD. and it was like-what was it? I didn 't know what the hell I was doing . QUESTION: You got political? AND I COULDN 'T UNDERSTAND why all these BARRON : Oh , I got extremely political. I began to people were having trouble getting their degrees. get thrown out of school for those articles. I got I never in my whole education [pounding on desk] thrown out of the ROTC. I had to apologize to the except that one year in prep school was ever chal - ROTC. I also worked in the Henry Wallace move- lenged. It was just too easy and thus meaningless! ment, which was extremely unpopular. So I was No one ever turned me on , no one ever excited me. calling attention to myself and saying \" Here I am! \" I wished the hell I'd gone to the Yale School of Drama. I wish the hell I'd gone to film school or QUESTION: Were you a good student? drama school or something . I really wish I had . But in any event, I . .. BARRON : When I worked at it I was the best they had . I remember the first two semesters-I was tops QUESTION: You got married and unmarried? of the whole school-all A's-and then I just didn 't give a shit-you know-I discovered that I hated BARRON : I got married , but it was my marriage that science. I was taking organic chemistry and zoology got me into film. In a funny kind of way , because and physics , and I just hated all that jazz. So I didn 't I married David Susskind 's sister. See how life do too well. I didn 't find my thing . I didn 't really works? find my thing until films . She was older and she was working and she agreed QUESTION: That 's what we 're getting at. But first to pay for my last year at Columbia while I was at you should tell us . .. the Russian Institute. It was in my second year in the Russian Institute. I was finishing up my course BARRON : Film turned me on. Once I discovered work for the doctorate. that, man, I knew that that's where everything was gonna work out . . . So I went to work at a place called the Research Institute of America. I was designing and conduct- QUESTION: But that didn 't come to you until after ing opinion-surveys for foremen in factories . For you had the PhD. Ford Motor Company. Why Vvere their foreman happy or unhappy. Insane. BARRON : Oh , sure. But meanwhile , the other form of rebellion I had was bizarre behaviour. Like there QUESTION: Like all sociology. was a fraternity party, formal , at the Hotel Roosevelt in New Orleans , and I came dressed in a sheet like BARRON: It was like Catch 22 or something . Okay, a Roman Senator. then Dorothy began to say , \" Look , why don't you go see David?\" So I went to see him and he said , So when I fin ished there , I came to sociology! Why \" I' ll tell you what I' ll do . How would you like to earn the hell was I in sociology? I didn 't have the faintest a thousand dollars?\" I said, \" What kind of thousand idea why I was in sociology . Except my sister and dollars?\" He said , ''I'm making a movie on the life I thought maybe that was a good idea. It was a way of of Evita Peron , go write me a research project. Just staying in school and not having to go to work or everything about her life.\" And not only did I write something. the biography but I got kind of swept away-I wrote a complete scenario . And I just loved it. And Suss- QUESTION: And your parents approved of that? kind loved it. BARRON : No, they didn 't like that-they didn 't see QUESTION: Never tried anything like this before? how I'd earn a living . BARRON: Never tried anything like this before. QUESTION: They didn 't know what the hell sociolo- When I was a kid I used to write poetry, and I was gy was? dramatics counselor at camp and so forth , but never had I tried anyth.ing like this before. And so I wrote BARRON : No , they didn 't know what it was . this script and liked it very much . QUESTION: We all had that problem. Bldt did you And then I began to notice some television docu- have any really sustained interest in sociology? mentaries, one of which made an extraordinary im- pression on me. It was almost a mystical experience. BARRON : I didn 't. I want to tell you , I didn 't. I really It was brilliant, a film that AI Wasserman did called didn 't. But it was easy and I was getting good OUT OF DARKNESS, about mental health. And it real- grades . By that time I got my MA and I was making ly-I said to myself-\" Gee whiz , I'd really like to do all A 's and getting grants and things-but it was like that very much! That's really very exciting.\" sleepwalking . That's all I can say-it was sleepwalk- ing. I was still trying to please my parents and get This was about 3 years after I'd finished my doctor- good grades, and I didn't know what the hell I want- ate, in the mid-1950's . I decided , \" Well , I' m going ed . to get into television .\" And I did. But I hadn 't really discovered film yet as a possibility for me. Because QUESTION: Finally they could call you some sort I began as a writer, on taped studio shows , and of doctor ... so forth . BARRON: Yeh , that may well have something to do with it. I also took Russian-you see , in all of Tulane there were like 3 kids that took Russian . That was another thing to make me different. I thought- maybe I' ll join the CIA or go into the Foreign Service SPRING 1970 11

BUT THEN I FINALLY DID , I remember making my visual feeling and to poetry and to things like that, first film . It was called THE REBIRTH OF JONNY. It was which you cannot learn . about an autistic child , and I just loved it, just loved it. And it just knocked me out. QUESTION: Could you please give us a little ac- QUESTION: How did you happen to make it? What count of the films you 've made? were the circumstances? BARRON : Let me first of all say that most of docu- BARRON: Very early in my first television job a very mentary film is informational and appeals to cogni- important person in the industry got interested in tion and information and so forth and is reportorial me and made me his assistant, Irving Gitlin . He and journalistic-that is the mainstream of American wouldn 't let me go. I would write his letters and go documentaries. But that is not my stream. to editing rooms with him and function as his assis- tant. But never getting a project of my own . Finally, I' LL GIVE YOU THE CLUE-the picture I most I decided I was just going to quit. And I got myself admire in the entire world is Fellini 's BV, . That , to a job at ChannelS , WNEW-TV , in New York, and me , is an absolute masterpiece : Fellini is my hero , became a producer there in my own right. It was not Ed Murrow or Fred Friendly or anyone like that. so frightening to me to leave this authority-figure So I find myself a sort of maverick in television-very in power that I wound up in the Long Island Jewish much so . The films I've made-they all follow more Hospital for about three weeks, with colitis. It was or less of a pattern . THE REBIRTH OF JONNY , which a very difficult thing for me to do. But I did , and that I've mentioned , was the first film . It was about the was my first film . It was a very beautiful film . improvement of an autistic child under the guidance of an extremely good and warm , understanding QUESTION: You didn 't know film technique when therapist. That's a very tender and fragile story. A you started? story of a boy lost. As a matter of fact-Myra, the therapist-said that Jonny reminded her of the Frog BARRON : Very, very, very little. But I was learning Prince. And so this film is a story of how this thera- as I went along . Film for me is this constant working pist found the Prince in the frog . And then I did out-in highly emotionally charged terms-of my a film called THE RISE OF LABOR , about the emer- longings and yearnings. gence of the American labor movement, for WNEW. I was what they called the Director of Creative Proj- But you know, you really don 't need to know tech- ects . So I had a wonderful job-I could do as many nique. I mean I don 't know how to shoot, I don't or as few films as I wanted , with relatively little inter- know how to light, I don't know how to take sound , ference . The only problem was severe budgetary and I don't know how to edit. I'm a produc- limitations. er-writer-director. I conceive it, I feel it, I find the people , I shape it, I have long talks with the camera- The third film I did for them I'm very proud of, called man, \" This is what I want to achieve , this is how MY CHILDHOOD. It evoked, and contrasted , the child- we should do it. \" I find that more and more and hoods of Hubert Humphrey in South Dakota and more, I can make specific suggestions about things. James Baldwin in Harlem . Again , yearning child- I mean I'm really learning-I mean I'm really learning hood , poetic film making. It won every award in the technique-and I find myself more and more want- book, every Single award . It got raves. As a matter ing to be my own cameraman . of fact , for that film Jack Gould ran my picture in The New York Times. He ' d never done that before , QUESTION: You say you 're sorry you didn't get to or since. film school .. . ? QUESTION: Did that cause your employers to be BARRON : Yes , I wish I had . I wish I knew how to proud of you? shoot and take sound. For example, if I were my own cameraman like Bill Jersey or Ricky Leacock BARRON : No , they were very angry at me. Because or the Maysles, I could get much closer to what the budget was for $13 ,000, but I spent $50,000. I want to say. And they didn 't know it because I hid the bills in my drawer until after the film was made. So they QUESTION: But meanwhile, you have to work with were really pissed off at me and I was going to get hired technicians ... ? fired . But Fred Friendly called me on the phone from CBS and said , \" You got to come to work over here, BARRON: I have to work through other people, that's a hell of a picture you made.\" which is not ... Maybe I'm a fraud , and not even a filmmaker , in your terms , since I don't go out and THE REBIRTH OF JONNY also won several awards. So shoot the picture or take the sound . I just sort of made it with my first film. But I'm not telling you about all kinds of other things I did which QUESTION: 00 you expect to be able to do that were not film . I did a musical show called SONGS soon? OF FREEDOM, and I did a weekly series for NBC called THE NATION'S FUTURE. A whole bunch of things. BARRON : I think I might, I don't know . I really don 't know. I think-I don 't know-I think that more and QUESTION: You started right off making good more I'd like to . Whether I ever will or not. I don 't money? know . But you know-these matters are not, in my terms, the crucial thing in film making . BARRON : Well , not really. I began at the Research Institute at $85 a week, and when I went to television QUESTION: Anybody can do these mechanical as a writer-when I got my first TV job-I got a $25 things? raise . But then it just went up. Just went up and up ... BARRON: I think anyone can take sound. I don't think it's the technique that is the important thing . QUESTION: Were you in touch with your family I think the technique is the tool. What is important about a/l these developments in your career? is a sensitivity to emotion and to imagery and to 12 FILM COMMENT

BARRON : No, no, when I got married, my mother QUESTION: But you didn 't get really embittered just about broke her relations with me, and I saw about this? her very few times after that. BARRON: When they took out one particular scene QUESTION: But you had married a nice Jewish girl. that I really loved , I found myself crying . I just sat down and cried . It just made me feel so bad . BARRON: No , she still objected enormously be- cause she-first of all , she didn 't want her little son , QUESTION: Did your experiences in shooting THE whom she wanted for herself, to get married at all. BERKELEY REBELS at the University of California relate in any way to your earlier ·period as a student at QUESTION At all? Tulane University, when you wrote rebellious col- umns and supported Henry Wallace? BARRON : At all. Secondly, she didn 't want her son married until he finished his education . Third, she BARRON : Yes, I think so . Again , being rebellious didn 't want her little son to marry a poor girl , as and idealistic and different from the other kids and Dorothy was. brighter and smarter and more socially conscious Q1JESTlON: A nurse . .. and all of that stuff-none of which , of course, was very internal or dependent upon a sense of real BARRON : A nurse. Dorothy hadn 't even been to com mitment. college . And so forth and so forth. BUT LET ME CONTINUE . After THE BERKELEY QUESTION: They didn 't know about your success REBELS , I made a film called SIXTEEN IN WEBSTER in television . GROVES . It was about teen-agers in America . And that was kind of interesting because I worked with BARRON : Not really . the University of Chicago and Johnny Johnston, a good sociologist there. And we designed this survey QUESTION: Do they know now? and gave it to every sixteen-year-old kid in Webster Groves, Missouri . Every single sixteen-year-old kid BARRON : Well , my mother's dead . My father-it's in that community [banging on table] took that sur- very interesting-I haven 't seen my father for about vey . 6 years , and he is retired from selling . He 's seen my ·programs . In the meantime , I've published two QUESTION: Total population? books and a major study and produced an Off- Broadway play and done a lot of things other than BARRON : Total population . And then I just did them film . One book was about \" Where should we take in. It's a savage, savage, critique of middle-class the kid who can't see sights in New York City ,\" and American values. You know, kids saying , \" Well , the other was called The Questions Children Ask. when I grow up I want two cars and high status You see , all this is children, children , children . with my friends .\" And the parents , I mean it lays bare the utter materialism and hypocrisy of that QUESTION · What does it all mean? community , an upper middle-class suburb . Educa- tion and success, and , you know, prejudice. It was BARRON : I don 't know what it means. I guess I'm strong, very strong . getting older now. QUESTION: Any censorship with this film? QUESTION: Did you ever go to a psychoanalyst? BARRON : No , you know why? Because they said BARRON: I' m in treatment now. You want to know it was science. about more things? I then went to CBS and did a film called THE BIRTH AND THE GLORY OF JOHN F. QUESTION: So you didn 't entirely waste those years KENNEDY. Then I did a film called THE BERKELE Y of studying sociology? REBELS , which was extremely-I got into great difficulties-something unprecedented happened BARRON : No , no , it was very helpful. It was really with it-Paley and Stanton , who never see these very , very helpful. Such a tumult did this film create things on the air , asked for an advance screening that CBS had me do another film called WEBSTER of it, before it went on the air . And it was very GROVES REVISTED. SO I went back and gave the severely censored. So the picture that went on the people an opportunity to say what they hated about air bears very little resemblance to the picture I SIXTEEN IN WEBSTER GROVES , why it was wrong and made. I do , however, have a print of the original distorted and cock-eyed . The night that SIXTEEN IN picture that I made, and at the Slightest encourage- WEBSTER GROVES was broadcast , we were there with ment I show it-like last week-when I went up to our cameras recording for the second film the reac- Swarthmore. I lectured up there and showed it. tion of the people as they watched the first film . So it was a kind of marvelous experiment in com- QUESTION: What kind of distortion resulted from munications. the CBS interference in your film? That's my way-I have the luck to have done many BARRON : The picture squared . You know, it was films . I did another film called TUBERCULOSIS , AGAIN made square and the attitude towards the kids was A THREAT? which was kind of a bomb . I did another made \" This is just a youthful excess , which they'll film called CHINA AND THE BOMB . get over.\" A very patronizing , condescending atti- tude . QUESTION: That was not at all your prejudice? BARRON : That wasn't my point of view . Also Clark Kerr was inserted and made to look like Jesus crucified. QUESTION: Did you protest? BARRON : A little bit-as much as I could. SPRING 1970 13

QUESTION: Have you done anything that might be called THE TURK COMES FOR MCGARRITY . The Turk called hack work? is the term that professional footoall players use to describe the man who comes every year, at spring BARRON : No , I don 't think so . I've been very lucky. training , to fire five or si x guys off the squad . So I think , in part, I've really had to swim up-stream the Turk comes for McGarrity . It's the story of an at the network. To do the kind of thing I want to aging ball-player who 's hung up in lots of ways . I do is so hard here it's beyond belief. haven 't read the Plimpton book but I'm told that he deals with that subject. But anyway, of all people, QUESTION: Well, what 's your reputation-you 're a Marty Ritt is interested and has told me that if I sent trouble maker, talented guy, or what? him a five or si x page presentation then he might be able to raise money for me to write a script on BARRON : My reputation is-I ' m known as their luna- it. So I've got that in the works . And I've got another tic fringe. movie that I've just gotten the rights to , a crime movie that also is a serious movie . Then I have some QUESTION: But it sounds as if you had a greater other television specials-I have Re x Harrison doing George Bernard Shaw. And I want to do a film about freedom in network documentary than people the first day of flight at Kitty Hawk, in wh ich we working for industry or government, dOing docu- would rebuild that same plane and fly it, and have mentaries. How is it that this mass medium of net- Jimmy Stewart narrate it. So I' m just-this whole work television exercises less control over the film- entrepreneurial rush-I 'm working very hard. maker than do industry and government in their films ? QUESTION: How do you relate to work? Do you feel over-worked sometimes? ExplOited? Used? BARRON : I think part of it is the competi- tiveness-there are three networks in competition BARRON : When I love the subject and I'm free to here and they ' re kind of hoping that you know do it the way I want , then I just adore it. I don 't someth ing will be a little different and will get some hate it. I work around the clock and don 't feel over- attention and be a special. But if you must do pro- worked . But when I feel that I'm doing a lot of paganda for the State Department there's nowhere projects because I've got to make money and else to turn . They' re not competing with anybody they ' re shit and it 's a way of getting into the busi- else, except the Russians. At present, I have several ness, or when I feel that CBS is telling me how to projects in the works. I'm very eager to go into make the film and narrowing my horizons and inter- business for myself because I've just about had it fering with the beauty or meaning of it-then I, then here in television , in the sense of being free to do I . .. what I want to do. Secondly, I want to make fea- tures-I want to make BV, or THE LONELINESS OF THE QUESTION: How would you describe film-as an art LONG DISTANCE RUNNER or WOMAN IN THE DUNES- form ? Is it too pretentious to talk about film in aes- that's what I want to do. thetic terms? AND SO I'VE DEVELOPED three projects now-the BARRON : I never think about it in those terms, Kennedy film first, evoking the childhood of Ken- ex cept that one thing I like about film is that it can nedy in Boston , which I have permission from the do anything-I think it is the most fluid of all art family to do, and I will have my money from Xerox forms. very shortly , and United Artists will distribute it. QUESTION: Do you spend much time looking at QUESTION: In these projects, what role will you pictures in museums and art galleries? have? BARRON : I do a fair amount. I love it and I get very BARRON: I'm going to be producer-director-writer. excited about it. Then I have a feature film written called THE CLAW, which is taken from a science-fiction novel , which QUESTION: Is it valuable for you in your filmmaking ? I have some very optimistic thoughts about getting financed . And then The Prince Valiant series-but BARRON: Yes , yes , yes. Incidentally, I never could Prince Valiant not done in the classical style but draw. Never. I can 't draw at all . But I find it valuable done as a kind of Jimmy Dean-Prince Valiant with to look at pictures, paintings. Because it seems to Rock 'n Roll, with the Beatles doing the background me that film , when it's at its best , is very non-literal. music. Bergman calls it a magic box . Film communicates on many levels of feeling and space, rather than For the Prince Valiant project, I approached King just on bits of information and exhibition. I love the Features, who own it. They want to do it first as a freedom about it. feature. They've gone to Elliot Hyman of Seven Arts, and he 's very interested in doing it because he's QUESTION: Do you go to so-called underground made CAMELOT and because they have all those sets films much? and costumes. So then we would use the feature as the pilot for a television series . BARRON : No. I was a member of the committee for New Cinema, a committee designed to encour- So those are the three projects. Then I have other age these kinds of films , with Jonas Mekas and all things in progress-a much more serious-a terribly those people, but I don 't care much for those films . serious project in which I'm very interested. I' m not I think they ' re boring. There has to be a discipline terribly interested in the science-fiction movie or the with them-like the most beautiful thing I've ever Prince Valiant things. Those are attempts to get into seen in my life: I was in Russia a couple of months this feature business and to make money. But I don't ago to do the 50th ann iversary of the Bolshevik have any particular devotion to the subject matter. Revolution. While I was over there , in Red Square, But the Kennedy film I care a great deal about. I saw St. Basil 's Church , which is a cuckoo . I mean it's all colors and all shapes . But within this there Also , I have in progress now-I'm writing a feature 14 FILM COMMENT

is such a discipline of form. So I think that while Barron during shooting of BIRTH AND DEATH. for Public experimentation and freedom are terribly important, Broadcast Laboratory. Photo courtesy of Richard Gold- still there has to be discipline and a terribly well- thought-out plan-not just a bravu ra film flexing its ~ berg. muscles for its own sake but very organically related to scripts, to characterizations, to your message, to everything . QUESTION: Do you read intelligent film reviewers. like Pauline Kael? BARRqN : No, no. QUESTION: Are you a film buff? Do you look at old films? BARRON : Not usually. But I'm now teaching at Co- lumbia so I've become more systematic about it and now I really look at old movies. I'm getting more and more that way now. I go to movies more now and may see the same movies three or four times- the first time just as an audience and the second and third and fourth time just to study it. I learn a great deal that way. QUESTION: Will you mention an example of a recent film that you learned something from? BARRON: Recently? Well , of course, I keep coming back to Fellini 's BV, . But I've learned from every picture. I just saw a very bad picture, a dreadful picture, called THE DEFECTOR . For a long time now I've been thinking-wouldn't it be extraordinary if you could put one piece of color in an all black- and-white picture. In other words , the film didn 't have to be all black and white or all in color. How extraordinary-and what emphaSis you could get in drama . And in THE DEFECTOR they did a very interesting th ing : there was one scene where every- thing was black and grey, except for one red traffic light. Very effective. And I saw an underground film recently that just knocked me out. And so I'm sure that a lot has come out of the underground. And God knows, God knows, God knows that something has got to break the terrible mould that documenta- ry film is in . The biggest factor for documentary is television , and Christ, it's awful. It's just so bad, so backward and so old-fashioned and rigid and un- imaginative. It's a hangover from radio . Most of these people came out of radio . Horrible people. It's also fear, it's also that they ' re old , it 's also that they ' re interested in conveying information . ONE TROUBLE WITH THE NETWORKS is that they are afraid to experiment with techniques. I had the God-damndest time keeping one sequence in WEB- STER GROVES , I had to fight my ass off to keep it in the picture. But something very much more inhib- iting than conservative technique is the networks' sense that the mission of the television documentary is to explore the news and to provide information . It is not to reveal the human condition in the same way that the novelist and the poet and the artist do. If you do a film about mental retardation for them , you do it with a whole survey-you don 't find one lovely little boy and tell it in just human terms . The networks want anthropology out of the te xtbook rather than Oscar Sanchez. They don 't understand that there are other ways of communicating without telling people things , that with film you can commu- nicate through the pores.

Introduction by Frank Nulf Or Nulf is now Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts University of Saskatchewan, Regina. As a former producer-director for CBS, NBC, Na- tional Educational Television, Public Broadcast Lab- oratory and Metromedia , Inc ., Arthur Barron is acute- ly aware of the problems and conflicts faced by the film maker employed by network television , both commercial and non-commercial. Barron recently was invited to Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, to show some of his films and to discuss documentary within the mass media. In his comments that follow, Barron addresses himself to the limitations imposed on the film maker by network requirements, and he explores the nature and present state of the per- sonal documentary. EVERY TUESDAY NIGHT from 10 to 11 p.m., East- ern Standard Time, the Columbia Broadcasting System television network presents a series of broadcasts called THE CBS NEWSHOUR . This program is a direct descendant of SEE IT NOW and CBS REPORTS, the remarkable documentary series of the late 1950's and the early 1960's, produced by the team of Ed Murrow and Fred Friendly. They gave us HARVEST OF SHAME, THE POPULATION EXPLO- SION and many other documentaries of distinction . Like its predecessors, the Tuesday night CBS NEWS- HOUR presents weekly documentaries , of an hour in length , bearing on the pressing issues of today . It is an hour of blessed reality in an otherwise dreary schedule of fantasy and escapism . CBS is proud of this weekly series, and , in some respects , it should be. It is the only regularly scheduled night- time, prime-time, documentary series on the air today. CBS spends an average of $120,000 for each of these documentary films, and the producers are given as much time as they need to finish them . I have been working on THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL series of three films for a little over a year. That is a. lush working schedule . These films, al- though they attract shamefully small audiences by I LOVE LUCY standards , nevertheless are an im- portant factor in mass-media communication be- cause, though small by advertising standards, the audiences are vast. 7% million people, on an average , see these films. 4 V2 million people saw the least popular of last season 's CBS NEWSHOUR broadcasts, a dog of a show called THE G.O.P. GOVERNORS, but 15% million people viewed the most popular of last season's offerings, THE WARREN REPORT, an examination of the Kennedy assassi- nation. Some of the films are quite worthy-because of their inventiveness, as in THE ITALIANS , the film based on the Barzini book ; for their candor, as in Morley Safer 's VIETNAM ; for their beauty , as in GAUGUIN IN TAHITI ; for their balance and objectivity , as in THE HOMOSEXUALS ; or for their cinematic technique , as in THE ANDERSON PLATOON , a very beautiful film made in Vietnam which , happily, won the Oscar for docu- mentary films this year. These films of distinction, however, are rarely ever noteworthy for their boldness. No matter how news- worthy or important, certain subjects never seem

to get done on the CBS NEWSHOUR ; nor on any But if the networks explore controversy , it must be other network for that matter. To the best of my balanced . If Mario Savio speaks , well then , let Clark knowledge , network television has never presented Kerr speak . If a film is about Naziism and they have a film on the FBI , or on the military-industrial com- an anti-Nazi speaking , then they must have Martin plex, or on Congressional ethics, or on any of a Borman speak. You can see Clark Ke rr in my film , number of other lurid subjects and sacred cows. THE BER KELEY REBELS. He is there because CBS put But the timidity of television in its role as a pillar him there. If I were to make a film with Anne Frank , of the establishment is another subject , and for presumably Adolf Hitler would have to have his say , another time. too. INSTEAD , CONSIDER , IF YOU WILL , the list of programs that actually did make it on the air during So the news documentaries are balanced , and they the 1966-67 season on the CBS NEWSHOUR. There tend to be objective too , not merely in the sense were 48 films in all. Of that number, 11 , the largest of being fa ir, but cinematically objective . One is single category , dealt with Vietnam-films like THE qu ite awa re in watch ing these films that the film LETTERS OF HO CHI MIHN and WESTMORELAND ON maker, in this case CBS ,is not inside the film , not VIETNAM . 6 of the films dealt with other foreign affairs really in it and with it , but is outside , observing and issues-How ISRAEL WON THE WAR , INSIDE RED CHINA recording the events, not living th rough them . CBS and HARVEST OF MERCY , a film about famine in India. is using these films as a fo rum for the presentation 8 of the films dealt w ith domestic social problems of ideas-always, always keeping its cool , always other than race-problems like air pollution , the keeping order, always ready to evaluate, instruct Hippies, prison , labor and so forth . 4 films dealt and interpret . CBS is not grooving with the film . It specifically with race-films like THE TENEMENT and is, as I have said , objective and somehow above CAN WE PREVENT TOMORROW 'S RIOTS TODA Y? 6 films it all. dealt with politics-YOUNG MR . EISENHOWER , THE WARREN REPORT , ROBERT F. KENNEDY and an incredi- And , finally , all these films have a common purpose : bly moldy fig called WHAT HAPPENED TO ALF LANDON? to inform , to instruct. It is a purpose that sees films Two films , INSIDE POT-THE ROCK REVOLUTION and as politically useful , and it is based on political GAUGUIN IN TAHITI , dealt with the arts. 4 films persist- theory-the Jeffersonian idea of the market place ed in following the test format , with diminishing of ideas , and the role of an informed electorate . The returns . We had THE NATIONAL DRIVER 'S TEST , THE Walter Lippmann notion that events are moving so NATIONAL SCIENCE TEST , THE NATIONAL CURRENT rapidly , and the issues are so comple x, that Democ- EVENTS TEST and THE NATIONAL SPORTS AND PHYSICAL racy is doomed unless the public is informed. In FITNESS TEST, which I flunked . Finally, there were the ICBM age , what you don 't know can kill you . 7 films on miscellaneous subjects-Scotland , Billy Our job is to see that you know . So films are knowl- Graham , the \" brain drain ,\" to name a few. edge , and knowledge is the cement of soc iety. Lenin 's notion , too , was that film is the most power- Now , something that strikes me immediately about ful weapon in the hands of the masses because it this list is that virtually all of the films represent only can create a revolutionary consciousness and rip one tradition of documentary films-the tradition of the veil from the face of fantasy. Film can become reportage , of journalism . If you examine this list of an instrument of class struggle. films you will find that, almost without exception , all are news documentaries . This emphasis on news, THIS , THEN , IS THE THEORY underlying the news on reportage , is not exclus ive to CBS . It is true of documentary: the belief that the documentary film 's all the commercial networks. It is true also of Na- supreme function is in energizing , motivating and tional Educational Television . It is also true of the informing the masses by rendering the complex new Public Broadcast Laboratory , and it is true of issues of the day understandable and meaningful. the local and independent stations around the If anyone wanted to, they could trace the history country . In television , the documentary of reportage of the news documentary and clearly demonstrate dominates. the continuity of that doctrine in this conte xt. One could see the progression of names and titles: Lu- Now, you have all seen such films-some are better, miere, Pudovkin , Eisenstein , Grierson and the Brit- some worse-but they share the same character- ish school , the MARCH OF TIME , Pathe News, the istics: they are all about war, peace, drug-addiction Office of War Information , SEE IT NOW, CBS RE- issues . They are all topical , they are all filled with PORTS , NBC WHITE PAPER , NET JOURNAL and facts , and they are all peopled with experts and ABC 's recent four-hour special on Africa. Onwards authorities , suitably identified with tele-identifica- and upwards. tions like \" Leroi Jones, poet and militant. \" They are word-logic issues. Play the soundtrack without the But there is another great tradition in documentary pi cture and you will still understand the point of the films , a different tradition . The fact that it is so ne- film. Indeed , the pictures are often there merely to glected in television is strange-since its first great illustrate the words. They are very often radio scripts exponent, its first supreme originator, was an Amer- with pictures. \" How can we make that complex ican . I mean , of course, Robert Flaherty, and I mean though visual,\" the producer ponders. Sometimes his unforgettable characters of NANOOK OF THE these films are partisan , and there is a narrator to NORTH , MAN OF ARAN and LOUISIANA STORY . I mean read the words-usually a network correspondent. the tradition of human revelations, the personal Controversy is often aired in these films , and con- documentary. In Flaherty 's work we see the distin- troversy often surrounds them when they are guishing characteristics of this kind of documenta- shown . If any of you saw my films , SI XTEEN IN WEB- ry-not great issues, but human events in human STER GROVES and its sequel WEBSTER GROVES scale , a man trying to catch a seal through the ice; REVISITED , you know what I mean . Webster is one not topicality but timelessness , the eternal struggle of eight American cities I can no longer enter. of man against nature; not fact and information but emotion , drama , a boy shrinking in fright at his first view of an oil derrick ; not expertise and authority, SPRING 1970 17

but ordinary human beings swept up in the current is something relatively new. Fast film , the shoulder- of life; not objectivity but a sense of the guts of brace and the hand-held camera, the quiet 16mm people, a deep involvement; not a forum for the Eclair, the Nagra, the radio mike, the camera and presentation of ideas, but life itself; not journalism sound operating independently, without a cord to but art; not education but drama; not words but connect them but still in synch-all this , and espe- pictures; not logic but sentiment; not rationality but cially the filmmakers' sensibilities that accompany tears, rage and tenderness; not the reporter, but the equipment, is fairly new. Call it Cinema Verite , a poet. Direct Cinema, the Underground Film or what you will. The network establishment has not caught up In all personal documentaries-Flaherty's and those with it yet. They are still amortizing a lot of 35mm of his successors today, Pennebaker, Leacock and equipment and a lot of fairly ancient cameramen Bill Jersey-a similar pattern is followed : a person who are entrenched and impervious to change. The whom we get to know and care about is confronted union hang-up is part of this . Try making a personal with a problem . It is a problem we can all identify film with the grotesque kind of crew that the net- with personally. He surmounts th is problem , or fails work-union contract sticks you with-cameramen , to surmount it, but we live through it with him . The assistant cameramen , lighting men , sound men , problem is not irreleva\"rl-t...to the great issues of our assistant sound men , grips; sometimes 10 or 12 time . In the great personal'documentaries the issues men . A TIME FOR BURNING was made with two film- are there, but they are not the starting point; the makers. human being is the starting point. The social issue is the backdrop against which the human drama THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION , unfolds itself. I suppose , is another reason why personal films are not made . There it is in black and white. To keep Jersey ' s A TIME FOR BURNING is an example . Race your license to broadcast, the FCC regulations say relations provide a backdrop for the film , but we you must \" inform the public on the vital issues of are really involved with the minister of a Lutheran the day. \" Network politics is a factor, too . There is church in Omaha. He wants to take a very small bad blood in every network between the program- step forward . He wants his parishioners, on a vol- ming department, the people who provide the en- untary basis, to exchange home visits with the tertainment,and the news department. There is members of Omaha's black Lutheran church . The competition for money and air time, and since they, Reverend is caught between the militant Black Na- the program people , make money, and we in news tionalists , who scorn this step as too tentative- lose it, the programmers usually win the fight. That's \" Your Christ is a phony,\" they say-and the elders why Fred Friendly quit CBS . He lost the fight. He of his own church , who see this step as too revolu- wanted to put on George Kennan's testimony be- tionary. The Reverend is ground down under the fore the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; they pressures and is forced to resign from his church . wanted to put on a re-run of I LOVE LUCY, and they But the film grips like a good novel ; the plot sweeps did. us along , man 's humanity and inhumanity are re- vealed. Not only does programming want us to be on the air as little as possible but they also want us to stick A TIME FOR BURNING was offered to CBS but was to \"our own thing .\" Our \" own thing \" is news; infor- turned down , and in a list of last season 's films you mation . Vietnam? O.K. A film about a broken will not find anything like it . Where on that list is marriage? Why that's not news, our soap operas a film about a young man who flees to Canada to take care of that. No. repudiate the draft? Where o n that list is a film about a man whose marriage is breaking up ; or a film So the news department is careful about sticking about a middle-aged man , mortgaged to the hilt and to journalism . laid off from his job at an ad agency ; or the film about the lonely g irl searching for a man through But, beyond all this, there seems to me to be a an endless procession of \" singles \" weekends at deeper underlying reason why the personal docu- Grossingers? Where is the story of the teeny-bopper mentary is notable chiefly for its absence. I think who leaves home for Haight-Asbury; or the story that reason is that we are living in an up-tight soci- of the man suffering his first coronary; or the story ety. I think we are afraid of honest emotion . I think of the factory worker, scraping the money together we dig all those facts and figures' because they are to marry his daughter and satisfy his wife 's social- so very remote. We can be detached . I think we climbing ambitions? These films are not on the list, are afraid in this America of tenderness ; afraid of not on the air , and not even in the planning stage . anger, afraid of laying our guts on the table. I think They have taken the life out of the film . Why they we feel that we have to keep the lid on very tight, have done it is something to wonder about. because if we don 't, our kids are going to turn-on , Part of the problem is that the people in charge- the blacks are going to kill us, the poor are going pres idents and vice-presidents in charge of news to bust right into our living-rooms and slash up all for the network-come out of the tradition of report- that nice new furniture with machetes, our bank age . Many of them worked for newspapers or mag- accounts are going down the drain , we are going azines before television ; or for radio . They are word to walk out on our marriages and our jobs and people . They worked through World War II , many ball-it-up: the whole mess is going to come unglued . of them , on films like WHY WE FIGHT or THE M-I RIFLE Fear exists, so we would rather keep it nice and or YOUR OFFICE OF PRI C E ADMINISTRATION or HOW TO cerebral. DIG A SANITAR Y DITC H. They are newsmen . They pride themselves on being reporters. So they are working on next year's list of films at the networks . I have a friend who is doing one on These network newsman are not hip to the new the legal profession, and another is doing one on film-that is important to realize. The kind of equip- Japan , another on the urban crisis, another on the ment that makes it really possible to get inside your affluent Negro, and another on tax-exempt founda- subjects, to follow them quietly with a minimum of tions. Happy viewing . interference and direction, to reveal their essence, 18 FILM COMMENT

Arthur Barron and his wife , Evelyn , produced the highly successful new JOHNNY CASH-THE MAN , HIS WORLD , HIS MUSIC . Shot and directed by the Swedish ci nematographer, Robert Elfstrom, JOHNNY CASH in its theatrical release by Continental is expanded with additional footage , having first been commissioned and broadcast by National Educational Tel evision in the spring of 1969.

Arthur Barron Discusses His Film Trilogy- THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS Introduction by Frank Nulf Arthur Barron worked for more than a year on three films for CBS that were shown recently under the series title, THE GREA T AMERICAN NOVEL . That film trilogy BABBITT, THE GRAPES OF WRATH and MOBY DICK-was based on the epic American novels of, respectively, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck and Herman Melville . The trilogy attracted considerable attention by ex amining, with documentary tech - niques, the possibility that the situations, attitudes and characters that served these three American novelists in the past can still be found rooted in our American society today. Shortly after completion of the films , Barron was invited to Ohio University to show and to discuss them informally. The comments that follow are taken from a tape of that discussion. AUDIENCE: Now that the trilogy is completed, what are your feelings about the technique of applying documentary methods to fiction? BARRON : I am aware that some people think it is a little contrived. In our MOBY DICK , for example , some think that the scenes where the fishermen discuss God, life and the drama of the fish, are a little forced ; that our structuring of them shows through . I think that is probably true to a certain extent. At times I thought I would like to do the film just about the voyage-straight documentary, with- out the book. On the other hand , whether they articulate it or not, every human being does think about those things . Why am I here? Is there an afterlife? So I don 't think the film was so totally out of line. But I do think there is a certain air of artificiality about it. That may be a basic weakness of this kind of format. The problem is much more serious in our BABBITT. I don 't really know if I like this technique very much , even though I invented it. I do know that many others are very excited about it though . Educators, for example , in high school and college literature courses, were very excited by the films. AUDIENCE: How much are real people, the ones you selected, really like literary heroes-like Babbitt or like Ahab, who is so much larger than life? BARRON : This is a great problem , particularly in regard to our captain , when compared to Ahab . He really is not Ahab . He is simply a kind of unusual captain who uses scientific methods for fishing . With our BABBITT there was less of a problem be- cause I think these people really are Babbitts. But remember-Sinclair Lewis did not just poke fun at these people ; he felt for their plight. We tried to do

the same thing in the film . We were trying to create than simply, \" Do they catch fish or don 't they? Do the sense, the mood and the attitudes of Lewis's they make money or don 't they?\" We knew we character named Babbitt, rather than an individual wanted the picture to deal with some ultimate ques- character. That may have been a mistake, but that tions-Is there a God? What is fate? Is man evil? was the first film we shot, and we were feeling our way. What we may have done, in retrospect, is to We didn 't know what form all this would take. But, impose a feeling on the scene through the narration knowing that we wanted them to talk about these that was not inherent in the scene as we shot It. questions, we gathered the crew together at one One trouble with our BABBITT is that we don 't really point on the trip and begari to question them- \" Oo demonstrate what we say . There are scenes in you believe in God? Do you believe in free will? \" which the meaning was imposed by us, and that's We had the damnedest time getting the crew to talk not right. about those things . They kept saying \" I don 't talk about religion or politics.\" We had to work hard to One of the best reviews of our BABBITT and GRAPES get it out of them. What the particular conflict would OF wRATH-also one of the most critical-said that be we didn 't know. we had done a very unfair, even unethical thing , because of the fact that literary characters are larger But then we discovered a captain who was very than life, dramatic and exaggerated , and that we unique in the fishery-he believed in science . He had taken very ordinary people and stripped them is the only fisherman who takes the temperature of of their individuality and complex humanity and the fish. He believes that there is a correlation be- made symbols of them . But in our GRAPES I think tween the temperature of the water and the temper- there is almost a perfect match ing of identity be- ature of the fish , and that your chances of catching tween the documentary and the fiction , between fish are much greater when certain temperature Tom Joad and the man we show. conditions exist. He is an atheist. When we learned these things about him we were very interested. AUDIENCE: In stylistic terms, you take many liber- Fishermen are usually very Simple, superstitious ties. For example, you make use of the privileged guys, and yet here is a captain who is not like that at all. When you consider that Ahab 's sin , if you camera a great deal in your GRAPES OF WRATH and can call it that, was to believe in the pre-eminence of man, it is easy to see that the modern form of MOB Y DICK. Again in GRAPES, not only does one char- that heresy is science. We were very lucky to find our captain . acter wear a microphone but you use a rock-and- We had been in Alaska for two or three weeks roll soundtrack at times rather than an environ- search ing but couldn 't find an interesting captain mental one. In documentary terms how do you jus- and crew . One day I was in a bar having drinks tify this? with some fishermen , and I said , as innocently as I could , \" Have any of you ever read MOBY DICK , or BARRON : This raises a terrifically complex problem . seen the movie? \" And they said \" Yeah , and do you You can be very purist about it all. On the other know that there's a captain up here we call Ahab?\" hand , the fact that you edit and compress time, that As cool as I could , I said \" That 's very interesting . you elect to shoot some things and not others, Why do you call him Ahab?\" They said \" Because seems to me to make manipulation inescapable. I he 's a nut. He 's scientific and he drives and pushes think that the people who say that you have to be his crew , you know. \" He sounded like the right guy, completely objective, that you must just record the so I made a few calls, found out his name and that, scene, that you must not intrude, are talking about among other things , he is an M . A. in American something that is impossible. Literature and has written short stories. So we met him and there we were. Bergman says that film is a magic lantern . It 's a trick anyway , because of the way the eye works. I think Then it was a process of working back and forth . that 's very true . But where you draw the line is a We knew we wanted some things, and so we filmed very tricky problem. What is art? , and what is for those; other things we just let happen. Then , artifice? Every film maker has his own set of values. when we got back , w.e looked at the rushes and I have seen anthropological films that were very just went back and forth , you know, from Melville's untouched ; the kind of film wh ere the anthropol- book to the film , and from the film to the book. ogists just go out and shoot, with no dissolves, no fades and not even any cutting . I personally don 't The really exciting thing about documentary, the think that is documentary. It's boring as hell. best thing about it, is that you never know what the story will do. We have a saying , the editors use AUDIENCE: You had a very special problem in it- \" Oo you have the elephant yet? \" It refers to the working from a fictional base. In your MOB Y DICK, parable about the blind men feeling an ele- for example, how did you approach the matter of phant-you know, one of them feels the trunk and juxtaposition of the narrative with the events and says that it's a tree, another feels something else dialogue on the ship Seattle? and says that it's a different object, and so forth . In making a documentary film you do a lot of stum- BARRON: It was a question of working back and bling, groping and feeling , before you really decide forth . For example: before we began the film we you have found your story. You really have to create knew we wanted to use the Melville's passage the story out of the material and you don 't know \" .. . Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my what that is until (a) you begin filming the footage , soul ... I get to sea .. .\" So we knew we wanted to and (b) until you begin editing it. That is why we get the crew walking around on shore before they shoot at a ratio of about 30 or 40 to 1. We came boarded the boat. We made certain we filmed that back with about 35 hours of footage to make this footage. We also knew that , in general , we wanted one film . But that's what is so exciting about film . to deal with the same issues that Melville dealt with. He believed that you could look at the ordinary , tangible things of life and discover behind those things a deeper, impenetrable mystery. So we knew that we wanted to see this voyage in terms other SPRING 1970 21

You come back and struggle and grope with the thought-wow , this will make a very obscene se- footage until the story says \" Here I am .\" quence, devastating' I asked the club for permission to film , and they asked why I wanted to do it. I AUDIENCE_ How long did it take to establish a rap- couldn 't , in good consc ience , say to them , \" Be- cause it will be a very obscene sequence .\" So I port with the ship 's crew and begin to break through said it was because they were so young in spirit , the embarrassment and tension? and because they could dance just like their kids and that was why there was such good rapport BARRON : It takes quite awhile with this kind of between the kids and their parents. You always have shooting . But rapport is very essential , of course , to know more than your subject; know what there and not merely because of embarrassment and reti- is in a scene and what you want to get out of it. cence . You know , there is the opposite problem of You always want people to be very honest and say \" showboating \" sometimes: \" Look Ma, I'm on tele- things which , if they shut up and thought about it, vision \" is one thing , but a very dangerous symptom they would never say before a camera. is when you finish filming a sequence and the sub- ject says to you , \"Hey, was that O.K.? \" After awhile AUDIENCE_ What about WEB STER GROVES REVISITW ... ? the guy is liable to say \" You 'd better talk to my Did you have any trouble getting cooperation for agent. \" the sequel when you went back for the second time? The way to get around this is to live with the people, BARRON : Well , you see, we hadn 't shown SIXTEEN personally encourage them , you know, and try to IN WEBSTER GROVES to these people ahead of time . avoid giving them direction. You spend a lot of time They still felt pretty well towards us. We had told doing \" French\" filming : just let the tape go around everybody that we wanted to make SIXTEEN to show and have the cameraman keep a camera to his face. the true story of what kids were really like; that the mass media had maligned teenagers by showing What you really want to happen is for the people them as hoods, or rough kids or empty-headed to forget that you ' re there . If you wait long enough Gidgets. So that we had come there to show these they really do begin to forget. Then you also hope nice kids and the other side of teenagers. But when for dramatic moments of such intensity that the we returned for REVISITED we happened to arrive people are so swept up in what is happening that there the night the first film , SIXTEEN , was being you are forgotten . shown on television . We were filming REVISITED all over town while SI XTEEN was on the air. We had no When we filmed GRAPES OF WRATH we wanted to problems that night but the next morning we make the whole trip with the family from Louisville, couldn 't buy a subway token , you know. We had Kentucky to Chicago . But, because of the union a very hard time that next day. Many people who problem , we couldn 't afford to . So we filmed them had already agreed to help backed out. It was very leaving , and then we hopped a plane and flew icy. ahead . I wanted to stay with them for the whole trip but when you ' re shooting with a union crew you AUDIENCE What did you do to prepare the Duluth have to pay them time-and-a-half after eight hours; Lion 's Club for the shooting of BABBITT? after twelve hours it goes to double-time, and after that it goes into a time so incalculable that they give BARRON : You will remember that in the film the them stock in the company because they can 't president of the Lion 's Club announces to the figure out how to pay them . So we went ahead and meeting that CBS is there to do BABBITT ; to see if were waiting when we got a phone call from the he lives in Duluth today. That's exactly what we did . guy saying that his car has broken down , and he We went there and said that we were making a film asks me \" Now what am I going to do?\" It was very about American literature to see if it's relevant tempting to say \" Just don 't worry , we 'll wire you today , and we said that we had chosen Duluth be- the money , or we ' ll do something ,\" but instead we cause many people felt that Sinclair Lewis had been said \" Well , you ' ll just have to handle it yourself. \" writing about that city. We were perfectly straight. It's important to let the life of the people happen , as much as possible , as it would normally happen AUDIENCE_ What sort of response did you get from if we weren 't filming them . So after we told him that the Lion 's Club after BABBITT was shown ? we hopped on a plane and flew all the way back and filmed that scene in the garage ; we were filming BARRON : Well , actually the picture kind of got lost it before they even knew we were there. I remember because of the Martin Luther King assassination . we came up to the garage and parked across the Showing it at that time was like dropping it into the street, and we nearly got killed running across the Grand Canyon. As a result I really didn't hear very super-highway because we didn't want them to see much from Duluth . One nice thing that happened us . As much as possible we try to do that. In docu- was that the two men-Frank and George in the film , mentary , the less a film is staged the better it is . the two who were discussing their mistresses-loved the film and wrote me a letter saying , \" you really AUDIENCE' What kind of advance work , in setting told it like it is .\" There was a lot of pressure before up the situations , do you do prior to the filming ? the film was aired to let the Lion 's Club see it, How completely do you reveal your intentions to because they had heard that we made them look the people involved? pretty bad . We didn 't show it , of course . But since the showing I haven 't heard a word officially from BARRON : I remember when we did SI XTEEN IN WEB- Duluth . I think that is another city I can forget about STER GROVES , we wanted to film an exclusive and going back to. snobbish club where adults dance. I had heard that there was to be a party and that people were going AUDIENCE_ What ethical problems are involved in to go in their heels and gowns and tu xes and do the recording of people 's lives? the Frug , the Watutsi and the Mashed Potato . I BARRON: There are tremendous ethical problems. First of all , you know , it is an exaggeration to say 22 FILM COMMENT

Barron, ce nter, stands behind cam eraman Walter Dombrow, during test shooling for MOBY DI CK. Photo courtesy Walter Do mb row . that you ' re just recording , that you don 't interfere . think they have any right to make demands on me, The simple fact that you are there distorts the whole take my wife and family ... I'm not going to dance situation . There are documentary people who be- a jig to their tune .\" But we lifted that middle part lieve, in an almost sacred way , that you shouldn 't of it out, to make it look as though he was making interfere, that you should really do noth ing-people a comment about the crew with regard to the ten- like Pennebaker and Leacock. I take a more mid- sions developing between the crew and himself. If dle-ground position-that the film maker should act you noticed , there was a jump cut in that sequence. as a catalyst. For example , in Bill Jersey 's A TIME The reason I felt it ethically right to do that is be- FOR BURNING , one of the greatest scenes is when cause I knew this man felt exactly that way about the white minister goes to the barber shop of a his crew. On many occasions he said just those Negro militant and the black man really chews him same things to me. On camera , and in other se- out. \" Your Christ is a phony and you ' re a fraud ,\" quences, we have him saying , \" There can be no he says. Now that scene would never have hap- democracy on a ship ,\" and \" There can be only one pened ordinarily , but the film maker brought the leader. \" people together and then just let it develop . I like to put th ings together and , in a sense , make things This is only one example of the ethical problems happen ; to act as a catalyst. arising because of the fact that you are dealing not with figments of a screenwriter's imagination but There is also the problem of what happens after with real people. the film maker leaves. A friend of mine, AI Wasser- man , a few years ago made HOFFA AND THE TEAM- AUDIENCE: Do you think that this artistic license STERS. It was about insurgence in Hoffa's union . in compatible with the documentary approach ? Two of the insurgents appear in the film and after- wards one of them had both legs broken and the BARRON : Grierson , in his principles of documenta- second lost his job and couldn 't get work for months ry , talks about one of its purposes-an intensifica- and months. This is an ethical problem : what obli- tion of reality . I believe in that. I believe that I can gation do you have to protect people? take a shot from one place and use it someplace else to accomplish that purpose. The soundtrack, In general , I have one basic rule of eth ics that I too , should be treated as creatively , as plastically, try to follow in film making : you can do almost as the film . Many purists will disagree with me. Ricky anything , in terms of shaping and structuring the Leacock says that if he were to shoot a mountain scene , provided that the person 's real nature is not he would shoot it in synch sound . I must admit that betrayed . In other words , so long as you do not the absolute, shocking , un-anticipated reality of misrepresent. documentary, when it is good , is something that nothing else can ever equal. But my favorite film For example , in our MOBY DICK , the captain says , makers are probably Fellini and Bergman , which is after an argument with the crew in the galley , \" I obviously the other end of the scale. I believe in don 't think they have any right to interfere with what using everything in the bag of tricks that the film I want to do . I'm not going to dance a jig to their maker has, in order to create that intensification of tune.\" Now, at that point, he had really been talking reality . about his family. What he actually said was \" I don 't SPRING 1970 23

Prepared by Jonathan Hoops filmography KEY: T : Theme; R: Released in the USA by; P: Producer ; D: Director; S: Script; C: Camera; B / W : black and white; M: Music; F: Festivals. 1960 THE U2 AFFAIR T : A historical evaluation of the U2 Affair, the downing of a U .S. spy plane in Soviet territory, and its repercussions ; R: NBC (an NBC White Paper) ; P: AI Wasserman ; Exec . P: Irving Gitlin ; Assoc P: Arthur Barron ; D : AI Wasserman ; S: AI Wasserman and Arthur Barron ; C: Joseph Vadalla ; Narrated by Chet Huntley; B / W (tape and film), 60 minutes. Arthur Barron 's cameraman grinds off a shot of teen-agers in their sports-cars, part television series of th e affluent environment of Webster Groves , Missouri , shown in the CBS documentary. The Great Game of Politics, CBS, 1960 A weekly series on American political life, Eric Sevareid, Host. Behind the News, CBS, 1961 Weekly in-depth analysis of background to the major news stories of the week, Howard K. Smith , host. The Nation's Future, NBC, 1962 Weekly debate on current vital issues before a live partici- patory audience, Ed Newman , moderator. The American Experience, Metromedia, 1963 Series began with a four-hour program , followed by two-hour programs telecast for seven successive weeks. Richard Hefner, moderator. 1963 THE REBIRTH OF JONNY T: Childhood mental illness; R: Metropolitan Broadcasting Television , Division of Metromedia, Inc.; P: Harold Mantell ; Exec P: Arthur Barron ; D: Don Horan ; S: Harold Mantell and Arthur Barron (based on an article by Mira Rothenberg) ; C: Ernest Neutranen ; M: Tony Mottola; Narrated by David Wayne; B / W tape, 60 minutes; Nominated for New York Emmy (Best Program, documentary category). 1963 CHINA AND THE BOMB T: First in-depth study on U.S. television of the Chinese People 's Republic as a nuclear power; R: Metropolitan Broadcasting Television, Division of Metromedia, Inc.; P: Arthur Barron; D: Don Horan; S: Arthur Barron; B / W , 2 parts 60 minutes each . 1963 SONGS OF FREEDOM WITH BOB DYLAN T: Folk music as a tool in the civil rights struggle; R: Metro- politan Broadcasting Television , Division of Metromedia, Inc.; P: Arthur Barron ; D: Don Horan; Shot in a television studio ; M: Bob Dylan , Odetta , The Freedom Singers; Host: Alan Edward ; B / W , 30 minutes. 24 FILM COMMENT

1963 1968 THE RISE OF LABOR BIRTH AND DEATH T: The struggles and growth of the American labor movement T: A study of the emotional experiences surrounding birth after World War I; R: Metropolitan Broadcasting Television , and death; R:'Public Broadcast Laboratory (Verite Produc- Division of Metromedia, Inc.; P: Arthur Barron ; D: Don Horan; tions); P: Arthur and Evelyn Barr.on ; D: Gene Marner; S: Arthur Barron ; C: Ernest Neutranen ; Narrated by Arthur sound : Carol Marner; actors: Real people, not actors are Kennedy; B / W , 60 minutes. in the film ; Debbie and Bruce North ; Albro Pearsall ; B / W , 2 hours; Nominated for Emmy as Best Cultural Documen- 1964 tary, 1969. TUBERCULOSIS: AGAIN A THREAT T : An examination of the controversy about BCG , the anti- 1968 TB vac c ine used allover the world except in the United THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: BABBITT and THE States until New York City decided to use it to fight the GRAPES OF WRATH new epidemic; R: Metropolitan Broadcasting Television , T: Focus on the contemporary relevance of two socially Division of Metromedia, Inc .; P: Helen Winston ; Exec P: and politically sign ificant novels; R: CBS REPORTS ; P: Arthur Barron ; D: Don Horan ; S: Arthur Barron ; C: Ross Arthur Barron; Exec P: Perry Wolff; Assoc P: Barbara Con- Lowell ; Narrated by Earl Ubell ; B / W , 60 minutes . nell ; D: Arthur Barron; S: Based on Steinbeck and Lewis; C: Walter Dumbrow and Jerry Sims ; Narrated by Eric Se- 1964 vareid, Pat Hingle, and Richard Boone; Color, 60 minutes; MY CHILDHOOD: HUBERT HUMPHREY'S SOUTH National Emmy (Best Social Documentary) 1969. DAKOTA AND JAMES BALDWIN'S HARLEM T : Two unique Americans recall their ch ildhoods as 1969 voice-over to contemporary footage ; R: Metropolitan THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: MOBY DICK Broadcasting Television , Division of Metromedia, Inc .; P: T: Life-style at sea today compared with Melville classic ; Arthur Barron ; D: Don Horan ; S: Arthur Barron ; C: Ross R: CBS Television ; P: Arthur Barron ; Exec P: Perry Wolff; Lowell and Ernest Neutranen ; M: Tony Mottola; B / W , 60 D: Arthur Barron; S: Based on Melville; C: Jerry Sims; minutes; Emmy, 1965; National Conference of Christians Narrated by George C. Scott; Reporter, Charles Kuralt; and Jews Award , 1965; Superior Merit Brotherhood Award B / W , 60 minutes. in Television , 1965; Annual National Mass Media Brother- hood Award , 1965. 1969 JOHNNY CASH! 1964 T: A cinema verite profile of country-western singer, Johnny THE BURDEN AND THE GLORY OF JOHN F. KEN- Cash; R: Public Broadcast Laboratory; theatrical released NEDY by Continental for Walter Reade Organization ; P: Arthur T: A dedication to the late President and his quest for and Evelyn Barron ; D: Robert Elfstrom ; C: Robert Elfstrom ; peace; R: CBS Television ; P: Arthur Barron ; Assoc P: Bea- M: Johnny Cash , June Carter, The Carter Family, Bob trice Cunningham ; D: Arthur Barron; S: Arthur Barron; C: Dylan, Carl Perkins, The Tennessee Three ; Color, 96 min- Ross Lowell (JFK photos by Jacques Lowe); M: Tony Mot- utes (theatrical version); F: Spoleto, 1969. tola; B / W, 60 minutes. 1969 1965 THE WORKER THE BERKELEY REBELS T : A film currently in production , this is a cinema verite T: The story of four students at the University of California, study of an Ame rican factory worker-his fears , frustra- who with others focussed national attention on the resur- tions, hatreds-using a real worker and his family and gence of political activism on campuses across the United circle; P: National Educational Television (scheduled for States; R: CBS REPORTS ; P: Arthur Barron ; Assoc P: Peter broadcast in spring , 1970); D: Arthur Barron ; C: Mark Davis; D: Arthur Barron ; S: Peter Davis; C: Walter Dum- Obenhaus; B / W , 90 minutes. brow; Narrated by Harry Reasoner; B / W , 60 minutes. 1969 1966 ERIK SIXTEEN IN WEBSTER GROVES T: The identity crisis of youth today; R: Universal Pictures; T : The attitudes of 16-years olds in a wealthy SI. Louis P: Fred Weintraub; D: Arthur Barron ; S: Arthur Barron ; suburb toward their parents, education , marriage and their Barron writes : \" The film has been scripted . It is now in futures ; R: CBS REPORTS ; P: Arthur Barron ; Asst to P: pre-production-budgetting, planning, etc. However, Uni- Paula Kaplan ; Assoc P: Paul Assel in and Barbara Connell ; versal has not yet finally decided to go ahead with it,\" D: Arthur Barron ; S: Charles Kuralt; Color , 60 minutes; Ohio State Award (Social Sciences category) , 1967; Ninth An - 1969-70 (in production) nual American Film Festival Blue Ribbon for Best Social Documentary, 1967. LEAH 1966 T : A lonely single woman in New York City, 36 years old , WEBSTER GROVES REVISITED T : An examination of the reaction to and impact upon searching for a man to love and marry; D: Arthur Barron; teenagers, parents and teachers in Webster Groves, Mo ., to the previous month 's nationwide telecast SIXTEEN IN S: Arthur Barron (based on a novel by Seymour Epstein); WEBSTER GROVES: R: CBS REPORTS ; P: Arthur Barron ; D: Arthur Barron ; S: Charles Kuralt; Narrated by Actors: Rae Allen , Robert Hogan ; Barron writers; \" This film Charles Kuralt; Color, 60 minutes; Ohio State Award (Social Sciences category), 1967. is not yet in production. It is being scripted now by Arthur Barron under a grant from the American Film Institute. When the script is approved , the film will be produced by the American Film Institute. \" 11111111 SPRING 1970 25



The Re ationship There is, to begin with , the matter of names: an important aspect in any Bergman film . Bergman ' s of ngmar method of making the names of characters in one Bergmanto film the same as those in previous films has been commented upon elsewhere2-it is a means of ETA. Hoffmann achieving continuity in a medium where such conti- nuity is usually lacking . THE HOUR OF THE WOLF is by Robert Rosen no exception . Linkage to earlier films is for that matter established as well by the setting , which is familiar Bergman territory . There is once again the deserted island with its isolated cottage by the sea, where in THE HOUR OF THE WOLF a celebrated painter , Johan Borg , and his wife are shown spending their last summer together just prior to his disappear- ance. The last name of the painter (to return to the question of names) is the same as that of the old doctor in WILD STRAWBERRIES ; his wife , Alma , bears the name of the nurse in PERSONA ; and the last name of the mistress, Veronika Vogler, had been used both for the actress in PERSONA and the magnetizer in THE MAGICIAN. Mr. Rosen is an Assistant Professor of German and Other names derive, however, sig nificantly from humanities at City College of the City University of New Hoffmann. Most easily recognizable of all is the York. His dissertation on E. T. A. Hoffmann will be name of Johannes Kreisler, a figure so central to published in the spring , 1970, by H. Bouvier Verlag , Hoffmann 's work that it is regarded quite justifiably Bonn . A frequent reviewer of books for leading Ameri- as Hoffmann 's alter ego . In THE HOUR OF THE WOLF can periodicals, Prof. Rosen also translated into English Kreisler is shown playing the piano for a small group the Manfred Gregor novel , The Bridge, from which the in a sequence near the end of the film that has Wicki film was made. Johan Borg searching for his beloved in the castle. On being introduced by the Baron 's wife, Kreisler inclines towards the approaching Johan across the piano and glances at him in a most meaningful manner, as if at a kindred spirit. The \" old lady with the hat,\" who is part of this group , adds that Kapell- meister Kreisler is a master of his instrument. In his foreword to the manuscript of VARGTlMMEN, An interesting side-play, straight out of Hoffmann , Bergman writes: \" The hour of the wolf\" is the time grows oLit of this scene . The old lady proceeds to between night and dawn . It is the hour when most take her hat off, in order to hear better. Her face people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares comes off as well, like a mask , and the eyes de- are most palpable. It is the hour when the sleepless tach-in the film they are dropped into a glass-re- are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when vea!ing two empty sockets. In Hoffmann's tale The ghosts and demons hold sway. Sand-Man, it will be remembered , Olympia's eyes roll onto the floor as she is revealed to be a mere The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most inanimate puppet, Professor Spalanzani 's most children are born. skillful automaton . Bergman 's lady with the hat is also lifeless . In an encounter between her and Alma , At a recent viewing of Ingmar Bergman 's THE HOUR she asks Alma to feel her hand and see how cold OF THE WOLF , I was struck by the strong influence it is, a condition she attributes to her age , which exerted on this film by the works of E.T.A she gives as 216 years . Her age alone would indeed Hoffmann-a fact almost entirely overlooked by the make her a contemporary of Hoffmann 's figures. As reviewers .' The point is raised here not in order to in Hoffmann 's The Sand-Man-where the progres- establish yet another literary source in Bergman 's sive insanity of the hero is traced to his childhood work, but to make possible a better understanding fear of a figure , who in the words of a nurse \" comes of this highly complex film , which has been dismiss- ed too readily as one of the Swedish film -maker 's 'One exception-to which my attention was drawn only less successful efforts. What interests us finally- after completion of the present artic le-is John Simon 's beyond the mere fact, to be proved here, that the review , The New Leader (April 22, 1968), in which some inspiration for the film derives to a significant extent borrowings from E.T .A. Hoffmann are traced , although from from E.T.A. Hoffmann (as his earlier films have been a different perspective. Hoffmann 's name also crops up in shown to derive from C .J.C. Almquist, Hjalmar the joint review by Richard Corliss and Jonathan Hoops Bergman and Strindberg)-is the manner in which in Film Quarterly (Summer 1968), vol. XXI, No . 4, pp 33-40 , literary source material has been utilized and trans- but no attempt is made either to detail the nature of his in- formed for purposes of the film . fluence or to assess its relevance . ' In Stanley Kauffmann 's review \" Opus 28 \" in The New Republic (April 20 , 1968), fo r one . 3The Best Tale s of Hoffmann, ed . by E. F. Bleiler (New York, 1967) p. 185. SPR ING 1970 27

to little children when they won 't go to bed and Tamino sings as the curtain opens on Arkivarie throws handfuls of sand in their eyes , so that they Lindhorst's puppet stage . It is surely no coincidence jump out of their heads all bloody ; and he puts them that Hoffmann himself had been plagued by this in a bag and takes them to the half-moon as food dread of the night and would frequently , as the for his little ones ; and they sit there in the nest and biographies te'lI us, awaken his wife and make her have hooked beaks like owls, and they pick naughty stay up with him when his overwrought imagination little boys ' and girls' eyes out with them ... , \" 3_ S0 filled him with an unspeakable fear . Johan Borg ' s fears in THE HOUR OF THE WOLF can in part be traced to the childhood episode he recalls Let us now consider the views on art that develop one sleepless night. He had been punished once in the exchange between Lindhorst and Johan at by being locked in a closet , in which , he was told , the end of the puppet show . In describing the effect there was a little man who gnaws off children 's toes, produced by the unusual, the illogical but brilliant and he was terrified when he heard a stirring noise separation of the name Pami-na in the answer of in the closet. the invisible chorus to Tamino's question whether Pam ina still lives , (Pami-na , Pami-na lebt noch). Several of the characters in THE HOUR OF THE WOLF Lindhorst shows how a mere name is, as if by magic, are derived from \" The Golden Pot, \" Hoffmann 's transformed into a formula , an incantation . Art is Fairy Tale for Moderns . There is the figure of Arki- just this kind of magic transformation-a conjuring varie Lindhorst, whom Johan describes to Alma act-a view expressed by Bergman himself on pre- as a Bird-Man, related to Papageno in Mozart 's vious occasions. Johan Borg , asked for his opinion , The Magic Flute. The Archivarius Lindhorst in speaks of the artist as one who is looked upon as Hoffmann 's tale appears to its hero once as a hawk an oddity , a monster, who in spite of lapses into and once as a grey parrot. Like Hoffmann 's Lind- megalomania is yet aware of the utter unimportance horst, Bergman 's too is both charlatan and wise of art in the lives of men , but who nonetheless is man . It is he who mounts the puppet show in THE HOUR OF THE WOLF , for which Bergman has chosen compelled to create: \" Nothing is implicit but com- a scene from The Magic Flute . This is quite reveal- pulsion .\" This is a view of the artist that is also ing, as Hoffmann 's admiration for Mozart was so central to Hoffmann 's work. The figure of Kreisler great that he changed his middle name from Wil- (who shares a first name with Bergman's painter helm to Amadeus. And in the scattered writings of in the film) in particular is the prototype of the artist Hoffmann 's Kapellmeister Kreisler-which were in conflict with society, seemingly insane, but es- found after Kreisler had, like Johan Borg, disap- sentially in the grip of a compulsion to create . peared-there are many references to Mozart. The Bergman has even taken the prototype of the philis- first of these is to an aria sung by the Queen of tine, Kurator Heerbrand (the man who pursues the Night in The Magic Flute . Also , one of Johan Borg with his inane prattle until silenced with Hoffmann 's earliest tales , Don Juan , is built entirely a slap) , intact from Hoffmann's tale where , as Reg- around the imagined performance of Mozart's opera istrator Heerbrand (the same name, but a slightly by that name . The narrator's feelings, as he listens different title), he marries the heroine, whose name to the overture of the opera, convey a mood very is Veronika . Yes , even that name-the first name like that conveyed by Bergman 's THE HOUR OF THE of Johan Borg 's mistress Veronika Vogler-is from WOLF: \" ... in the Andante I was seized by sh udders \"The Golden Pot. \" of the awesome subterranean regno al pianto; my whole being was filled with terrifying presentiments Another aspect of THE HOUR OF THE WOLF is the thin of horror. The jubilant fanfare in the seventh beat line between dream and reality, between the imag- of the Allegro sounded to me like a screaming sac- ined and the actual-a phenomenon familiar to rilege; I saw demons out of the deep night stretch- readers of Hoffmann . It applies to \"The Golden ing forth their glowing claws after the lives of happy Pot,\" as indeed to most of his work . Similarly, we people dancing on the thin layer of the bottomless are led by Bergman to an awareness that what THE pit. The conflict of a human being surrounded by HOUR OF THE WOLF represents is fiction-e.g ., the unknown terrible forces waiting for his destruction background noises during the credits, just before opened clear before my mind 's eye. At last the storm the film begins, indicating the preparation of a movie subsides, the curtain opens. In the darkness of the set-and at the same time we are made to feel that what is being told is absolutely real. For THE HOUR night Leporello , draped in his coat , paces in front OF THE WOLF begins with written words on the screen of the pavillion , chilly and disgruntled: 'Notte e by way of an introduction-Bergman , like Hoffmann , giorno faticar ' . . .\" 5 Soon after, the narrator of presenting himself merely as editor of another man's Hoffmann's tale comments on the thinness of the story-informing us that the artist Johan Borg had story and finds it hard to understand how Mozart disappeared from the island of Baltrum , leaving could have created such music for it. In a similar behind his diary. The diary, and what the artist's vein Arkivarie Lindhorst comments at the end of his wife , Alma , is able to add to it, form the basis of presentation : A \" naive text\" really , a \" commis- the story that is then unfolded . It is a story in which , sioned work \" and yet at the same time \" the highest from the very beginning, the lines are blurred , for revelation of art,\" the \" great example,\" the \" love- what we learn about the artist is derived in part from liest, most disturbing music ever written .\" And how very subjective entries in the diary and in part well Bergman has chosen his passage-which filtered through the not altogether reliable percep- not only opens up a consideration of art, central tions of Alma. to the film-but relates directly to the immediate · problem of the artist Johan Borg who , tormented ' Under the heading \" Kreisleriana ,\" these writings are in- by his demons, cannot fall asleep until the dreaded cluded in Hoffmann's first publish ed volume Fanta sies- night has passed . \" 0 ewige Nacht, wann wirst du tue c ke in Callats Manier. schwinden? (Eternal night, when will you vanish?) ,\" ' Fantasiestuecke (Muenc hen ; Winkler Verlag , 1960) pp. 67 / 68 . 28 FILM COMMENT

Max von Sydow plays the tortured artist, Johan Borg, who sketches liv Ullmann, playing his wife in Bergman 's HOUR OF THE WOLF, released in the US by Lopert Pictures Corp. Ma x von Sydow , as the obsessed artist Johan Borg, alternately grieves and comforts his confused wife , played by Liv Ullmann , in the Bergman film , HOUR OF THE WOLF.

What does emerge in THE HOUR OF THE WOLF is a I have tried to show some of the ways in which picture of an artist trying to free himself from the Bergman was inspired by both the life and the works oppressive weight of archaic forces. There is indeed of Hoffmann and in particular by \"The Golden Pot. \" ample justification for viewing all the characters in It is worthy of note here that this tale of Hoffmann 's the film as symbolic representations, as projections has received an extensive interpretation by Aniela of the artist Johan Borg . THE HOUR OF THE WOLF Jaffe that was incorporated and published in a vol- offers hints to that effect, as in the early scene in ume along with C . G . Jung 's own writings .' Aniela which Johan shows Alma his sketches of the various Jaffe justifies her use of Jung 's technique of dream people in the castle (before any of them are actually interpretation-which regards the dream as an inner introduced in the film) : sketches of the lady with drama and seeks to unlock the meaning of various the hat, the schoolmaster, the Bird-Man and the dream contents out of the life-situation of the chattering women as hard as nails. The first ap- dreamer, and with the aid of amplifications-in in- pearance of Veronika has an archetypal quality terpreting Hoffmann 's tale , by pointing out that once about it, as she comes upon Johan while he is we have accepted its symbolic nature , nothing is working , or rather trying to work: an anima figure, irrelevant but \" even the least detail tells us some- revealing a scar on her breast and bad news. Awful things can happen , she tells Johan , dreams can be thing and announces in its frequently simple , fre- made known . It was all in a letter she had received quently intensive language a thought, an insight, the day before. This and more, about springs drying a truth .\"7 up and the end being near. All the omens are bad , and almost immediately after the encounter with About Hoffmann , we learn from Aniela Jaffe that he Veronika, Kurator Heerbrand appears, running be- \" was driven between dream and reality; his life was hind Johan like a shadow as he seeks to establish filled with restlessness and anxiety, and his work their common bond. Heerbrand tells Johan that he, is an expression of his suffering . With an heroic too, can turn souls inside out. Finding Johan 's pace expenditure of energy he fought as it were on two too fast , he asks him to slow down as caution is fronts; outwardly the battle with reality, for a liveli- advisable at their age . Johan will not acknowledge hood ; and his defeats were: poverty, hunger and Heerbrand , and in an outburst of temper slaps him disease. Inwardly he had to fight against the surging so hard that he falls down whimpering , though later forces of the unconscious, that drove him to the he is to have his revenge on Johan . brink of his own abyss and into a tortured fear of insanity. His work and his diaries give affecting The baron who lives in the castle at the other end testimony to that. \"· of the island appears at first to be a rather controlled person , but is eventually revealed to be insanely No attempt has been made here to examine every jealous-like Johan . We learn of this jealousy from the baron 's wife, Corinne, and later from the baron last symbol in Bergman 's THE HOUR OF THE WOLF or himself when he discloses to Johan that Veronika had been his mistress , too. An identification exists to trace every parallel to Hoffman that suggests not only between the baron and Johan , but curiously also between Veronika and the baron 's itself. What does emerge, even from a cursory exam- wife, Corinne, who has Johan's portrait of Veronika ination of Hoffmann's life and works , is that Bergman hanging in her bedroom . This portrait , Corinne tells us , is part of her lonely life . \" I love her,\" she con- -who in previous movies , particularly in PERSONA , fesses to Alma. has shown a passionate interest in.the problems of Two aspects of the anima figure , Veronika, become apparent in the beautiful scene towards the end of emerging consciousness-saturated himself in Hoff- THE HOUR OF THE WOLF , when Johan runs his hand over the seemingly dead , seemingly transfigured mann , one of the most interesting of all German form of his beloved , only to find her devilishly alive and in league with his demons. For this final meet- writers , when conceiving his own THE HOUR OF THE ing with Veronika, Johan was made up by Lindhorst, whose dressing gown he also wears (an ideal situ- WOLF . • ation for a lover's meeting : you are yourself, yet not yourself, Lindhorst tells him as he applies the VARGTIMMEN make-up). Lindhorst's final words to Johan as he (THE HOUR OF THE WOLF) sends him off to his meeting with Veronika are: \" You see what you want to see. \" Director and Scenarist: Ingmar Bergman Director of Photography: Sven Nykvist, f.s.f. The meeting with Veronika turns into a final humili- Set Designer: Mark Vos ation : the ultimate is reached . \" The glass has been Costumer: Mago shattered , but what do the splinters reflect?\" What Cast: Liv Ullmann , Max von Sydow, Ingrid Thulin , they reflect in THE HOUR OF THE WOLF at this point is the boy drowning , the boy looking very much like Gertrude Fridh , Georg Rydeberg , Naima Wif- Johan whom in a frightening earlier episode Johan strand, Erland Josephson had killed and dropped into the sea-had to kill , Producer: AB Svensk Filmindustri perhaps , so that another could be born in his place . World-wide Distributor (outside Scandinavia): For Alma , who had lived with Johan for seven years United Artists before his disappearance , is in her seventh month . ' Aniela Jaffe, \" Bilder und Symbole aus E.T.A. Hoffmanns Maerchen 'Der goldene Topf ', in C. G . Jung , Gestaltungen des Unbewussten . (Zurich , 1950), pp. 239-616. 'Ibid, P 284. ' Ibid, P 244. 30 FILM COMMENT

Liv Ullmann plays the wife , and last link to sanity, of the deranged artist, Johan Borg , played by Ma x von Sydow , in Bergman 's film , HOUR OF THE WOLF. The anima figure, Veron ika , is played by Ingrid Thulin , in private life the wife of Harry Schein, director of the Swedish Film Institute.

GET TO THE POINT, HONEY, and epitomizes the busy exploits of a handsome young lecher. Full of untranslatable German puns, the story was adapted to the screen and directed by May Spils, above, who reviews her script on location, as producer Peter Schamoni crouches behind the camera. Insiders in German cinema state that Schamoni actually directed the film but that pUblicity was created by crediting the attractive young fraulein Spils as director.

~~l two 0' th,., y,.n;, th, G\"man dn\" And in Franz-Josef Spieker's satire WILDER REITER GMBH [WILD HORSEMAN , LTD .], the Federal Republic ma will be at the top of international film art.\" This of West Germany comes off as an Americanized petty prediction was made by Italy's master film maker, principality, in which song and gangster plays can Luchino Visconti, 61. Hollywood-actor Maximilian bring success to any idiot. Schell, 37, feels that \"it will take the German film five years at the most to achieve worldwide impor- All these movie greenhorns, most of them thirty tance. \" years old and living in Munich, have broken with venerable traditions. Totally uninterested in Hawai- This happy prospect may have been inspired by a ian hulas and white slavery in Morocco, these new good dozen maiden efforts that have been reaching directors are inspired more by the stuffy and the screen during the last year-and-a-half and are confining world around them; and they are guided known collectively as Junger Deutscher Film less by a concern for the box-office than for art and (Young German Cinema). commitment. This coming-out party, the likes of which have never The cinema is a \" universal form of intelligence\" (Kluge), as well as \"scholarly labor\" (Reitz); it been witnessed in the history of German movies, has should \"mirror social reality\" (Peter Schamoni), and it should be handled \"seriously and professionally\" improved the condition of the ailing German cinema (Schlondorff). during the last two decades-with films critical of With its portraits of a dismal landscape, the German film , for the first time in twenty -five years, has won Germany. a trophy at the festival of Cannes and a Lion at Venice; and at home, German cinema earned nearly 1 AI\"and\" Klug,', AaSCHOED VON all the West German film awards of the past two years : GEST~RN [called YESTERDAY GIRL at the 1967 New Alexander Kluge's ABSCHIED VON GESTERN: York Film Festival], Anita G. goes a-wandering \" like the Silver Lion at Venice (1966) and seven other awards. a seismograph\" (Kluge) through a bourgeois and Volker Schlondorffs YOUNG TORLESS : the Fi- presci Prize at Cannes (1966) and seven other inhospitable West Germany; she robs, becomes preg- awards. Edgar Reitz 's MAHLZEITEN: \"Award for the nant, and has a baby in prison. best first film\" at Venice (1967) . Peter Schamoni's SCHONZEIT FUR FUCHSE: the In Peter Schamoni's SCHON ZEIT FUR FUCHSE Silver Bear at Berlin (1966) and two other [CLOSED SEASON ON FOXES] , and in Haro Senft's prizes. SANFTEM LAUF [GENTLE RUN], two melancholy Ulrich Schamoni's ES : five West German young men rail against the surviving old businessmen awards. of the West German Restoration and mumble sulki- ly: \"You've got a mountain of shit in your heads.\" And the box-office was also favorable. During the 1966-67 season, ES had the highest receipts of an y Marriages break up, because of the wife's middle- film except for DER BUCKLIGE VON SOHO [THE class notion of happiness-Edgar Rei tz's MAHLZEITEN HUNCHBACK OF SOHO]: 1,800,000 marks or $450,000 [MEALs]-or because of the husband 's aversion to (with production costs totalling 260,000 marks, or female emancipation-Christian Rischert's KOPF- $65,000). ES was followed by Spieker's WILD HORSE- STAND, MADAME [ON YOUR HEAD, MADAME]. And MAN , LTD. Waldfried Barthel of Constantin Distrib- career-women refuse to bear children, and so ES [IT], utors says about ABSCHIED VON GESTERN : \"Kluge's by Ulrich Schamoni, is gotten rid of via abortion . film has already become a classic-we can play it anytime we like.\" An adolescent leaves reform-school and ultimately shoots his foster-father , who is trying to teach him The kids have been producing better, and now more, \"what property is\" (Johannes Schaaf's TATO- films than their elders. Their Arbeitgemeinschaft WIERUNG) ; the cadets in a pre-1914 Austrian military neuer deutscher Spiel{ilmproduzenten (Organization school-Volker Schli:indorff's screen version of Robert of Modern German Feature-Film Producers, with Musil's Young Torless-terrorize an outsider, and the film director clarifies the \"prophetic parable\" into ' Pohland's KATZ UND MAUS created co ntroversy in German y the model of a fascist state. for using as ac tors Chancellor Willy Bra ndt 's two sons, Lars Hansjilrgen Pohland 's KATZ UND MAUS [CAT AND MOUSE], based on the short novel by Gunther Grass, and Peter. The film was shown in New York on 3 December switched back to Nazi days and insulted the present: Willy Brandt's son Lars, wearing only bathing 1969 at Hunter College. - Variety, 26 November 1969. trunks, did a bizarre little dance with a Maltese Cross, thereby giving rise to protests from military organiza tions~ SPRING 1970 33

fifteen members) ca me out with twenty-two film s in inhale the marvelous air of the woods . . . the first nine months of 1967 alone, as opposed to Sissi, lost in thought, smiles, and says almost fifteen pure German movi es of the senior Verband to h erself: \" If you ever feel any sort of sorrow Deutscher Spielfilmproduzenten (Society of German Feature-Film Producers). then just walk through the woods with ope~ The most potent of the yo ung produ cers, Rob \" Pop\" eyes, and in every tree, every bush, and every Houwer; 30, finan ced fi ve color film s in 1967 for flower you will feel the almighty presence of 4,500,000 marks ($1,125,000). Like the m ost powerful God and it will give you solace and strength.\" senior producer, Horst Wendlandt, 45, (WINNETOU), Franz Joseph, listening attentively: \"Did you who produ ced eight film s for 30 million marks read that so mewhere?\" ($7,500,000) , Houwer wears a beard as a sign of su c- Sissi, ;,miliI1R: \"No, my Papa told me so .\" cess. Franz Joseph, smilinf?: \" Ach! Your Papa.\" Moreover, Houwer drives a midnight-blue Jaguar E The next series of movies helped forge a father image. as a status symbol (Houwer: \" Phallus on wheels\"), SAUERBRUCH offered as mu ch humor and security screens his films in a violet-tinted room with fi ve as the Chancellor of Rhdndorf; and when the deficit black-leather lounge chairs, and it has an intercom guarantee ran out in 1955, the Bundestag granted system that is also plugged into his bathroom, right a special credit of 1,600,000 marks ($400,000) for the above the toilet paper. political epic STRESEMANN, which became known in the industry as \"Stresenauer.\" The break-through of the debutantes and the suc- cesses of their second film s have instigated a cine- When Germany began to re-arm, the producers mania in Germany. Some twenty novices are rattling reacted a:; loyal citizens-by making grade-B military away at their movie cameras. In January 1968 alone movies in which spruce officers keep the standard half a dozen tyro films are premiered; and by the of military honor aloft even in the midst of total end of 1968, a total of fifty young German movies co llapse . reach the screen. The few critical films-Thiele 's MA.DCHEN ROSEMARIE \"Let's welcome the German miracle,\" said Cinema or Staudte's ROSEN FUR DEN STAATSANWALT-were 66, the French cineaste 's periodical: \" It's been a long either cabaret or blatant polemics. \" The West Ger- time since Germany has had such a wealth of talent man movie industry,\" wrote Peter Pleyer in 1965, and temperament.\" The Swedish film magazine \" never came up with a :;ingle a cute and lucid analysis Chaplin is amazed at the \"aesthetic and ethical of politi cs and society.\" maturity\" of the new films ; England's Films and Filming has granted them an \"aura of respect- By the end of the fifties, the number of motion-pic- ability.\" ture theaters had risen from 4,000 (in 1950) to 7,000, and the movie industry was living the life of Riley. Kluge's ABSCHIED VON GESTERN and Schldndorff's But then, the artistic cop-out and sell-out was fol- second opus MORD UND TOTSCHLAG [MURDER AND lowed by a financial regression: the man in the street MANSLAUGHTER] are (according to L 'Express) \" for got what he wanted on television, and the more the German cinema what Godard's BREATHLESS and discriminating viewers had long since scorned the Chabrol's THE COUSINS were for the French cinema.\" movies as proletarian entertainment. And the Polish magazine Kino co ncludes: \"Truly impressive .\" In 1958, 98 films were produced ; distributors made 172,800,000 marks (about $43,000,000). In 1962, there The German cinema has not reaped such compli- were only 43 new German movies, and distributors ments sin ce the 1920's, when \"a single German movie made only 77,800,000 marks (about $20,000,000). in London counterbalanced the premieres of twenty American mammoth productions\" (film-historian In the co urse of five years, the film audience dimin- Paul R otha). With the \"awful West German film \" ished by 40%; after 1960, 300 theaters shut down (Cahiers du Cinema), the Federal Republic of the annually; half of all movie companies went out of 1950's had degenerated into \"cinematic barbarity\" business; and distributors vanished by the dozen . The only thing that rose was the cost of making a (K1Uge)l film : thus, Wicki 's WUNDER DES MALACHIAS [MIRA- CLE OF MALACHIAS-1961] cost 4 million marks N order to enliven Germany 's film in- ($1,000,000) . dustry , the Bundestag had decided in March 1950 to guarantee defi cit-sec urity; the first bloom of this Moreover, German producers had lost a large portion subvention policy was the Heimatfilm: it was apolit- of the domestic market to foreign films, while their ical, it maintained custo ms and morals, and it own wood-and-meadow movies attracted few fans offered the best possible chances for the reduced abroad. In 1960, Italy exported $30,000,000 worth of domestic market-because it was saleable to the very motion pi ctures; whereas Germany could manage last village. only about $7,000,000 worth. That sa me year, Ameri- ca n movies too k in $12 ,500,000 in German y alone. In the mid-fifties, these forest romances and sylvan destinies were reiterated in an aristocratic milieu: M a V I E \"iti, Wilf,·i,d B\"ghahn ex· the incomparable Ernst Marischka wrote and direct- plained in early 1961 that Germany's motion-pi cture ed the Sissi series. To wit (a selection from a screen- industry had co me upon hard times \" not only be- play) : cause it can't add, but becaus8 scriptwriters and directors have nothing to say.\" They were merely Sissi (Romy Schneider) and Franz J oseph continuing the work they had done for Hitler's movie (Karlheinz Bdhm) com e walking through the industry. forest like two siITLple fairy tale children and 34 FILM COMMENT

Vo lker S choend orf'f's YO UNG T OERL ESS was seen in the 1967 New York Film Festi va l. In this scene, Barba ra Steele ex plains some bi tte r fa cts of life to student M atthieu Ca rriere. Directo r-producer Peter Scha moni sla tes a shot for his first feature fi lm, SCHONZEIT F U R F UC HSE. One of four brothers with distin guished ca reers in Germa n cinema - their father was a n ava nt -garde film a rt ist, killed in World Wa r II - Peter Scha moni ea rlier directed documenta ries a nd a rt shorts-incl udin g pri ze fi lms on Nazi a rchitecture, BRUT ALI T AT I N ST E I N ( BR UTALITY I N STONE ), a nd on pa in te r Max Ernst . .' \\

J{oger Fritz Dr. Alexander K lu !(e Hans JUrgen Pohland Peter Schamoni The \"real catastrophe,\" according to Joe Hembus in The son of a doctor in Halberstadt, Kluge wanted his squib Der deutsche Film kann gar nicht besser to \"get out of law\" as early as 1958. Theodore W. sein [This Is The Best of All Possible Cinemas, 1961], Adorno wrote him a note recommending him to the was the fact that \"most German movie producers old master, Fritz Lang, who at that time was making have a lower sense of quality than any automobile THE INDIAN TOMB for Arthur Brauner. (Die Welt 's manufacturer.\" Alexander Grilter, for example, comment was \" Here lies Fritz Lang, R.I.P.\") current president of the senior producer's guild, ad- ministered Silesian concrete before he turned to the Kluge wanted to be an apprentice, but he preferred film industry; and producer Wolf Hartwig (\"No more to sit in the canteen and write stories based on art, I want sex\") came from the iron industry. real-life incidents. The collection was published under the title Lebenslcwfe (American title: Attend- During the presentation of West German film awards ance-List for a Funeral). The tale of Anita G. was in June 1961 , there was, for the first time, no award the basis for Kluge 's film ABSCHIED VON GESTERN. for a German feature-film. George Ramseger la- mented that \"in Germany there isn 't even a failure The following year, Kluge settled in Munich and of an admirable film.\" In August, the directors of became part of the short-subject clique in Schwa- the Venice Festival rejected all five movies from bing, the Latin Quarter of Munich: Reitz, Spieker, West Germany. Peter Schamoni and the Dutch organist, Houwer, had studied dramatic arts in Munich and had made At the end of the year, the Suddeutsche Zeitung their way to the cinema as assistant stage-directors announced: \"Papa's cinema is dead .\" and by writing movie reviews and acting; Hal'O Senft had attended the Film Academy of Wiesbaden, and Two months later, at the annual festival of short together with Kluge he organized the storming of films in Oberhausen, the junior film makers entered the Oberhausen Bastille. the lists with pomp and kettle-drums. Their mani- festo proclaimed : \"The co llapse of the conventional However, the thunder and lightning were not fol- German movie finall y removes the economic basis lowed by a torrent of money; the Federal govern- of a mentality that we have always rejected . Now ment wanted to be coaxed. It was Kluge who gra- the new cinema has chance to come alive.\" ciously dan ced attendance. \"Our tactics,\" he said, \"are to turn theory into practice.\" Meanwhile, the And the two dozen unknowns promised to deliver Oberhausen ers kept on making short-subjects and ten new movies for 5 million marks, or $1,250,000. industrial films ; they did well for themselves and The sponsoring agency was to be called Stiftung bought cutting-tables and cameras. Junger deutscher Film Gmbh (Foundation for The Young German Cinema, Ltd.). It was on ly in February 1965, three years after the Oberhausen event, that Bonn established the Kura- The project was subscribed to by Alexander Kluge, torium Junger deutscher Film (a board of trustees Haro Senft, Peter Schamoni, Rob P. Houwer, Edgar for the young German cinema). This was a source Reitz, HansjUrgen Pohland, Franz-Joseph Spie- of funds and a kind of driving-gear for the new cine- ker-the current masters of the young cinema. matic art. The Oberhauseners, as t.hey have since been dubhed , The Kuratorium received 5 million marks had learned their craft by making short suhjects; ($1,250,000) from the Ministry of the Interior, the the old film industry had not given them the chance funds heing destined for promising beginners; the to make full-length movies, and the Federal Govern- proper se lection was entrusted to a co mmission of ment had refused to give them the necessary funds. government officia ls, churchmell and critics. The Alexander Kluge, a lawyer, soon became known as grants (amounting up to 300,000 marks, or $75,000 the first of this class and as t.he mainstay of the per project) were dist. ributed as interest-free loans, young cinema. with the Kuratorium as a co -producer sharing in the 36 FILM COMMENT

Edgar Reitz Artur Brauner Dr. Alexander Gruter Dr. Berthold Martin profits; the returns were to provide subsidies for gets paid 10,000 or 15,000 marks (about $3,000 or subsequent beginners. $4,000), while the supporting cast is made up of inex- pensive friends, laymen and film critics; studio ex- The first fruits of the cornucopia devolved upon: penses (10,000 marks, or $2,500 per day) are non-exis- Alex;mder Kluge for ABSCHIED VON GESTERN tent because the movies were filmed out in the open (100,000 marks, or $25,000); Haro Senft for SANFTEM or else in the homes of the people involved. LAUF (300,000 marks, or $75,000) ; Vlado Kristl for DER BRIEF (300,000 marks, or $75,000); Edgar Reitz ZSE low-budg\" Ru,k,a,kfilm, \" for MAHLZEITEN (300,000 marks, or $75,000); and Hansjilrgen Pohland, for his movie based on Gunther Knapsack films (German movie jargon) worked a Grass's short novel, Cat and Mouse (300,000 marks, \"German movie miracle\"-at least in comparison or $75,000). with the bleakness of the established motion-picture. Measured by international film standards, however, And as for the awards that the Federal Ministry of not every young German film maker can be regarded the Interior had been presenting to projected or as possessing supernatural energy. completed films (usually awful ones) since 1961 , for the first time an award was given to ambitious tyros They made German movies imitative of the New in 1965: 200,000 marks ($50,000) each to Alexander Waves in France, England, Poland and Czechoslova- Kluge, Volker Schlondorff and Peter Schamoni. kia : a realistic portrait of the land and the people. That year a total of 2 million marks ($500,000) was The styles and the techniques of the young German granted to the young German cinema. With this cinema are not uniform . Refined, intricate cutting starting capital, the youngsters created a new film results in sensitive sociograms (ABSCHIED VON GES- form for Germany, a cinema d'auteur. TERN); filmic elegance recalls French examples (YOUNG TORLESS); ahd the themes alone shed a glow The author-scriptwriter and director in one-uses of yo uth on co nventional solidity (SANFTEM LAUF , a small team that \"has to unfold the sensitivity of the author\" (Kluge) : \"This is the only way to express SCHONZEIT FUR FuclIsE). human spirit and intellect.\" To have complete artis- tic elbow-room, the young film makers made them- The kids have used mainly biographical material, and selves financially independent: instead of taking the dissatisfied young men in these movies advise their money to established producers, they founded their rich fathers: \"What you really need is a smid- their own companies. gen of humor\" (SANFTEM LAUF). Thus, the ending often remains open; Senft says about a protagonist: Commercial producers can no longer put out movies \"Faced with the alternatives of surrender or rebel- for less than 1,300,000 to 1,500,000 marks ($300,000 lion, he chooses irony.\" or $400,000). \" Our films,\" says Haro Senft, \"cost about 600,000 or 700,000 marks,\" about $150,000. ES, What these youthful works have in common is a set so far the most successful movie by the yo unger of mannerisms: young couples dashing across mead- generation, was financed by Horst Manfred Adloff, ows or through shrubbery, steam-shovels and grav- 40, a Munich sculptor, plastic manufacturer, short- el-pits come into view, the camera can rotate in a subject maker, and real-estate broker; he also ap- jerky beat, but it remains static during detailed pears in the film-as a real-est.ate broker. scenes in bed. The youngsters were, and still are, a thrifty bunch. \"I've been in the business long enough to know,\" says The stars of the German film establishment-for the established producer Artur Brauner, 49, (THE example, O. W. Fischer and Maria Schell-usually NlBELUNGEN) : \" these movie's are so popular because get half a million marks ($125,000) per film; but in they profit from their sex-sequences.\" the young German cinema, the leading actor usually SPRING 1970 37

All these sequences depict the girls as top banana. intellectually at least , it is way above the popular Their bare breasts are crowned by obstinate faces. sociology of other young film makers.\" And with a good head on their shoulders, the girls have become the true heroes of the young German Kluge, who is hung up on Wagner music and Italian film . horror-westerns, films according to theories of his own fabrication; since 1962, he and his cameraman, Anita Pallen berg, 22, the heroine of Schlondorff's Edgar Reitz, have been teaching at the Film Acad- comely teenage-crime movie MORD UND TOTSCHLAG emy in Ulm. [MURDER AND MANSLAUGHTER] was the \"real discov- ery of the festival of Cannes\" (L'Aurore); the part To reproduce reality in a movie, Kluge recommends she played was her first contact with dramatic art. a \"continual shifting of the plot into documentary reportage\"-authentic scenes and ' played-scenes After studying graphic design in Munich, she lived merge into a collage. \" Stylistically, my film is a series with beatniks and hippies in New York, posed for of deliberate breaks in styles.\" the male magazine Lui in Paris, and hung out with Rolling Stone Brian Jones in London. Anita G.'s work as a maid in a hotel in ABSCHIED VON GESTERN is mixed with a bit of shop-talk by Schlondorff was skeptical at first-he was afraid she'd a real-life hotel-manager; the Hessian district at- be \" up to her neck in cocaine.\" And the Stone sweet- torney Bauer,. whom Anita would like to rr.8et, actu- heart didn't exactly present herself as a great beauty: ally appears in the flesh and discourses i~ his own \" I've got crooked legs.\" words about the degrading treatment of the accused in court. And the Hessian woman 's house of deten- For 13,000 marks (about $3,000), the \"cute chick\" tion , in which the historical Anita G. served time, (Schlondorff) mumbled her way through a highly is a locale in the film. realistic portrayal of a boorish arch-beatnik. \"Anita,\" said Schlondorff, \"was made for the screen. \" Edgar Reitz's MAHLZEITEN is a sensual counterpart Later, in Roger Vadim 's BARBARELLA, she plays a to Kluge's more intellectual work. Reitz based his black-tressed queen with horns on her head. film dialogue on tape-recordings of conversations spoken by the real-life people from whom his film Heidi Stroh, 26, a nightclub chorine in Rome, tried -characters derive. To achieve spontaneity, Reitz to talk film maker Edgar Reitz into letting her star made the film without rehearsing, and he en- in his marital drama , MAHLZEITEN. To decide couraged the actors to infuse their own ideas and whether she was right for the part, he tested her v,iews. with questions such as \"What makes you happy besides lovemaking?\" Reitz shares Kluge's sense of a film mission: \"How can society be changed so that the individual can Heidi admitted her deficiencies (\"crooked legs,\" take fullest advantage of his chances for happiness?\" \" oversized chest\" ), but Reitz said she had the \"barbed face\" and the \"voracious look\" of a woman This lofty aesthetics elicits scorn from former bud- who regards life as a \"cornucopia of meals. \" In a dies. \"Typical films for students who can't have projected film , Strobel! Tichawsky 's EHESCHEIDUNG female visitors after 10 p.m. ,\" says Oberhausener (DIVORCE) , she continues playing the part of a Houwer. \"The moment the student curfew is married woman. changed , Kluge's and Reitz 's films will go the way of all flesh films .\" Houwer's alternative: \"Make Dr. Alexandra Karen Kluge, 30, the sister of Alex- movies with your genitals.\" ander Kluge, was given a prize at the 1966 Venice Biennale: she got the Premio Cinema Nuova as best Z old oliqu, h., di,int\",.«d; actress for her performance in ABSCHIED VON GES- TERN. Actually , this was no reward for artistry; now, rivals sit behind the cutting-tables in Schwa- director Kluge explained: \"My actress didn't have to play anything, she just did whatever her imagina- bing. Every so often they meet for breakfast in the tion told her to. \" Europa-Espresso in Leopoldstrasse-Hauwer, Adloff, Alexandra Kluge (of whom an earlier film maker, Will Tremper, says: \"Her breasts are prominently ab- Senft, the four Schamoni brothers, Spieker-but the sent\") integrated her taste for Verdi operas in the movie, decided upon the kaffeehaus music that re- old esprit de corps is gone. minded her of past eras, and made up her own dia- logue. Kluge refers to her as his \"co-author.\" Volker Schlondorff was an ou tsider from the very first. A quick thinker like Kluge, he is much happier Meanwhile, his sister, who got her MD. by writing about his money; his Mercedes cars get bigger all the a dissertation on \"Public Emaciation,\" has bidden time-the last one is a 250 SE. farewell to the screen: She doesn't wan t to be \" ruined by the big apparatus.\" The son of a physician in Wiesbaden, he attended the renowned Lydie Henri Quatre in Paris. Two Kluge's second film , starring the Stuttgart actress, years later he was runner-up for the National French Hannelore Hoger, 26, is still untitled. It shows Frau- High-School Philosophy Prize. lein Hoger as directress of a \"reform circus\": she wants to present the wild animals, not as caricatures \"Anyone who practices a vocation voluntarily but of human beings, but rather in their natural bestiali- miserably is immoral,\" says Schlondorff. He learned ty. Kluge makes her fail miserably. his trade as an appren tice for Louis Malle; an assist- ant director for VIVA MARIA, he was so feared be- Kluge's maiden effort, ABSCHIED VON GESTERN, was cause of his exactness that Mexicans in the film crew classified by Enno Patalas, a film critic and a close began to plan his assassination. friend of the director, as \" the best film since 1933; In contrast with the success OfTORLESS, Schlondorff's second effort, MORD UND TOTSCHLAG, did less well; 38 FILM COMMENT

Matthieu Carriere, as a studen t, has his fi rst ex perience with a prostitute, Barbara Steele, in the Schl oe nd orff film , YOUNG TOERLESS. Helmut Foernbacher plays the nameless \" he\" in Peter Sc hamo ni 's SC HO NZE IT FUR FUCHSE. He is a popu lar stage, screen a nd television star. Co nservative in sty le, emphasizin g i n t r os pe c t i v e dua logues, the film centers on two yo ung men, the \"foxes\" of English title, LET THE FOXES RUN . Not ope nl y rebellious, they yet find themselves uni ted by a strong if ina rticul ate discontent and frustra tion, co mpound ed by a basic estra ngement from their elders. Thei r un ease in ex pressed at times in misdirected aggression, at other times in cy ni cism-knowing tha t they lack the co urage of their a nger. At the end they capitu late to society .

in Germany, the expem;es (900,000 ma rks, or and founded the family which, starting with Ulrich's $225,000) were not met. H ouwer, the producer, did father Viktor, an ava nt- garde filmmaker, is tota lly make money, however: he so ld the film to Universal devoted to the screen. in America for $185,000, and the American company gave Schlondorff a six-year contract. Peter, 3:3, one of the most suc cessful makers of short-subjects in Germany, is now co ncentrating \"In my next film,\" says Schlondorff, \"I really have more and more on the production of stra nge fi Ims to start devoting some time to the actors, even and fi 1m policies. In co n trast to Ulrich, a jovial and though I really prefer the rails\"-on which a track- easy-going guy , Peter is an extremely seriou s type: Ing camera moves. \"Ulrich has champagne in his cutting-room ,\" says cutter H eide Rente, who edits the movies of both Schlondorff's next project is the screen version of brothers,\" and Peter has grape-juice.\" Kleist's tale Michael Kohlhaas. A French-Czech- German co-production, financed by American dol- Trn int,lI\"tu.1 Klug', th' ' hi' lars, to be shot in Czechoslovakia, its new title is MAN ON HORSEBACK . Schlondorff, and the rather bourgeois Schamonis are the representative figures in the Young German cine- In Munich 's internecine climate, blood is thicker ma. The clowns and eccentrics come from abroad: the than deve loping-fluid: the four Schamoni brothers Yugoslav Vlado Kristl, 44; the America n George (Ulrich, Thomas, Peter, Viktor) are the Warner Mom'se, 31; the Fren chman Jean-Mari e Straub, 34. Brothers of the young German cinema. Houwer says Their effect on the you ng German film has been of them sarcastically: \"They warm the cockles of described by Kluge as \"getting rid of the cra mps.\" the German heart.\" Kristl, marked by deep pessimism , makes his movies Ulrich, 28, the yo ungest, wrote a novel that was for a \" home of the blind.\" Whenever a distributor published in 1962; entitled Your Son Sends His R e- shows inte rest in his work, Kristl becomes suspicious : gards (Dein Sohn liisst griissen), it was declared \" An yt hin g those horse-traders like must be awful. \" unfit for juveniles by the government censorship office. A few of the reasons: For the screen-play of his first full-length movie, DER BRIEF, Kristl received a government subsidy . The \"As modern girls, there are almost exclusively such plot concerns a man named T ., who finds a letter as allow themselves to be used uninhibitedly as sex- and brings it to the addressee. \"There he discovers ual objects ... they simply ' lie down' ... they sleep that he has delivered his own death sentence. He with 'perverse rakes,' i.e., they 'have their Persians' is dul y executed.\" and go to parties with only one thing in mind ... to do 'it' . . .\" Kristl made the film in two weeks (\"It could have been done even sooner\"); ordered the cameraman to ES, or IT, the title of Ulrich's agile maiden-effort and pan constantly (\"He's supposed to destroy whatever the first venture of the Young Wave, refers to some- I do\"), and Kristl did whatever happened to occur thing else-a baby that never sees the light of day: to him. the yo ung married couple gets rid of it. The performers were his friends in Munich 's film This first film by Ulrich is, like most of the young clique, because they \"acted for nothing\"; but he films, strongly autobiographical. Only the ending would have preferred to use \"real workers,\" who differs from real life. \"It,\" says Ulrich's brother, \" peer into the camera with tiny pig's eyes.\" Peter, \"is running around today.\" It is Ulrich's son. Kristl then abandoned the relatively intelligible Ulrich 's second effort, ALLE JAHRE WIEDER [EVERY product to his passion for cutting (Kluge: \"He's got YEAR AGAIN], tells about a separated couple in Mun- a castration drive \"), and the result is a tottering ster and is also based on real-life events: the biogra- cascade of images; during a screening in Berlin, the phy of Michael Lentz, 41, a film critic and a friend daughter of critic Karena Niehoff developed eye- of the Schamonis; Lentz himself wrote the screen- trouble and threw up. play. A more moderate film maker is George Mom'se, who Lentz inserted original locales-such as his wife's made a modern-dress version of Kleist's short story ballet-school-and original dialogue into the film ; his The Foundling for Bavarian television; his burlesqu'e close friends performed in it, as did his own son- pop-film, KUCKUCKSJAHRE [CUCKOO YEARS], recently playing the son of the movie-Lentz. hit the screen. Lentz and Schamoni met when the director was Moorse, an American, comes from the Underground looking for som\\lone to play in a short-subject, some- Cinema of his native land, he writes poetry and one \"to simply stand around and look stupid.\" They novels, spent some time in Greece and Rome, and then proceeded to see a great deal of each other, chanced into the hands of Walter Hollerer, who first to drink vodka and play dice, and Lentz claims that sponsored him in Berlin's Literary Colloquium. he has seldom dined with anyone \"who can drink so speedily and lose so quickly without falling from Jean-Marie Straub is the headstrong sectarian of the his chair.\" new cinema, the messiah of vanguard cineaste seances, and an irritable Gauloise-smoker. There are even people who pray for the cinema brothers: seven times a year for three hundred years His Munich domicile contains a photograph of Lenin now , a mass is read for the Schamonis in the Swiss and a portrait of a .priest of Ars, his namesake. mountain village, Campi Vallemaggia. This is where Straub's files include a French arrest warrant: in the Schamonis' ancestors come from. A certain Caspari Scamoni (spelled differently), painter and stucco-er, migrated from there to Munster in 1728 40 FILM COMMENT

Edger Reitz's MAHLZEITEN was the 1967 winner at Veni ce for Best First Film. H eidi Stroh and Georg Hauke appear in film , which exa mines German famil y life. Alexandra Kluge- pregnant and impriso ned - i n ABSCHIED VON GESTERN , directed by her brother, Alexander Kluge.

1958, he fl ed Fran ce rather than be assigned active \" My greatest nausea,\" says Herbert Rimbach , 31, I duty in Algeria. His files also contain a certifi cate \"came from ES. The movie reeks ofivory-snow undies.\" from the bishop of his hometown, Metz, stating that Rimbach is starting a film with the subject: two Straub is a \"good Catholic.\" murderous girls. Title: LEBEN UM JEDEN PREIS [LIFE BILLIARDS AT HALF-PAST NINE, his film version of AT ANY PRICE]' Boll's novel, has won international awards but thus far ·has attracted no distributor in Germany. Straub \"The young German cinema,\" says Hans Peter features 84 characters in 44 locales, their voices are Kaufmann, 27, \" usually depicts awful conditions- monotonous and the plot is rather oblique. Peter Germans down at the mouth, their frustrating situ- Schamoni feels the film is a \"catastrophe,\" but ation dripping out of their eyes.\" Kaufmann is start- Jean-Luc Godard disagrees: \"extremely interesting, ing a film of \"expensive radiance\" about an aging marvelous.\" French playboy. Title: ZURUCK AUS BADEN-BADEN Straub spent eight years trying to get his second [BACK FROM BADEN-BADEN]. movie done : DIE CHRONIK DER ANNA MAGDALENA BACH. A collection, vaguely resembling the sale of The \"playful\" directors don't give two hoots about war bonds, brought in about 35,000 marks ($9,000), workaday life in Germany. The generation gap and and the Kuratorium did its bit, so that Straub was outsider problems are Hecuba to them. \"Movies are finally able to complete his project. a circus,\" says Maran Gosov; \"politics is beyond our pale and our ken,\" says Eckhardt Schmidt; and May Tus \"g,nmtion of fight\",\" (P,\"', Spils has absolutely no \"conceptions of revolution or ideology.\" Schamoni) is going to be followed, according to Schamoni, by a \"generation of playfulness,\" and the May Spils is one of the few lady directors since cinema d'auteur will be replaced by a cinema de Naziminion Leni Riefenstahl. A native of Bremen, naivete. she has worked as an office clerk and a photogra- pher's model, she digs violet boots and miniskirts and The fighters pointed their cameras at their own or is a chain-smoker. Her maiden effort was finan ced Germany's afflictions and brooded cinematically; the and produced by Peter Schamoni. playful film makers, however, have started off with two dozen maiden efforts full of fun and luxury. Her film was a labor of love-love for the leading They are already mocking the pioneers: \"I don't actor Werner Enke, whose Schwabing hippy-life is want to be involved in any way,\" says Maran Gosov, reflected \"a uthentically.\" As is his way of speaking: 34, \" with these tortured student filmers. \" Gosov's \"Let's have one more little match,\" he says to his debut (begun in 1967), shows a light-headed girl from bedmate. the provinces, who comes to Munich because she is \"nineteen and still a virgin.\" The film 's title: UNTER- \"I'm in great form, come over for a groovy fifteen minutes,\" says a Schwabing bohemien on the tele- NEHMEN ENGELCHEN [PROJECT-LITTLE ANGEL]' phone to a girl. This conversation takes place .in Maran Gosov's Schwabing comedy UNTERNEHMEN \"It's about time that we drove dreariness out of the ENGELCHEN, which also shows a naked couple movies,\" says May Spils, 25, \"and up till now the scurrying through the English Garden in Munich. young German cinema hasn't managed to do it.\" May Spils's first film presents the diverting love-life Gosov, a Bulgarian officer in exile, who learned Ger- of two Schwabing bohemians. Title: ZUR SACHE, man by copying out Thomas Mann's voluminous novel, Buddenbrooks, offered his movie idea (about SCHATZCHEN [LET'S GET TO THE POINT, HONEY]' a girl who wants to lose her innocence in Munich) to producer Houwer during a trip from Oberhausen \"These movies,\" says Eckhardt Schmidt, 29, \"are to Munich. By the time they arrived, the deal had reactionary and sophomoric.\" Schmidt's first effort been made. Houwer, gleefully: \"A movie against the is a thriller about a fashion photographer, \"An at- family. \" For a monthly salary of 8,000 marks ($2,000), tractive film about attractive people in an attractive Gosov will now be in Houwer's hands for three years. milieu.\" Its title, in German and English: JET GEN- Similarly quick decisions led to the action movie 48 ERATION . HOURS TO ACAPULCO. TV actor and Alfa-Romeo driver Dieter Geissler, 28, told his friend Lemke over \"I've never gotten into any terrible revolutionary a glass of whiskey that he had savings of 40,000 mood,\" says Horst Manfred Adloff, 40, \"while watch- marks ($10,000). Wouldn't Lemke like to make a ing a product of the young German cinema.\" Adloff, movie? Lemke : \" We'll start shooting on May 5.\" who produced ES and WILDER REITER, GMBH, is starting his maiden effort as a director, a movie They hurried off to see the Munich gastronomist about adolescents and the pill. The Church has al- Peps Kommer, 40, (\"Scotch-Casino\"). Lemke ad- ready protested. Title: DIE GOLDENE PILLE [THE libbed a movie plot on the spot: an amateur gangster travels from Upper Bavaria to Acapulco, where he GOLDEN PILL]. is rubbed out. And an hour later, the trio shook hands, founding a production firm with an English \"They're only using the film, \" says Klaus Lemke , name, \"Seven Star.\" Starting capital: 260,000 marks 27 \"as a vehicle of literature.\" Lemke's first movie, ($65 ,000). an' action-film called 48 STUNDEN BIS ACAPULCO [48 HOURS TO ACAPULCO], has already reached the 48 HOURS TO ACAPULCO, containing \"the lengthiest screen; his second film, a thriller about a fashion passages of nudity in German movie-history\" (Geiss- photographer, is almost ready. Title : WENIGER ALS ler)-critic Enno Patalas : \"Nothing is shown that NICHTS [LESS THAN NOTHING]' 42 FILM COMMENT

Werner Enke and Uschi Glas, a bove, bed down for a scene in ZU R SACH E, SC H AT ZC HE N, as director May Spils stands by to fluff up their pillows. The film was a long-runnin g hi t of West Berlin 's KurfUrstendamm , a nd 3 million West Germa ns saw it in t he first weeks of its release. It won the Kritiker-Preis der 15 in 1968. Sabine Sinj en and - Brun o Dietric h in E S, directed by U lrich Sc h a m o ni

we haven 't seen before ; but it's shown in such a way Toussaint (whom Kluge calls the \"gravedigger of the that we feel we really have n 't seen it before\"-is the yo ung German film \") and Grliter operated more first yo ung German film modeled after American efficiently than Martin : I} Movie-house owners in action and gangster movies. exchange for 10 pfennig (2 1/2 cents) from every tidket so ld , were promised a third of the expected annual Lemke, once t h e assistant of Fri tz Kortner, learned total (26 million marks, or $6,500,000) to be used for how to make film s by going to the movies, a nd with renovating theaters; they were also promised a tax his poker face and dark glasses he personally apes rebate of 30 million marks ($7,500,000). 2} The the tough guy of the American screen. He casts churches were given a voice and a vote in the ad- prominent acto rs in leading parts. ministrative board of the office (other representa- tives : Members of Parliament and the Federal For ACAPULCO , he got hold of Teddy Stauffer, a Council, people in the film industry and in television) . German-Mexican luxury-hotel keeper (Lemke: \"He was filled to the brim with hash \" ); for his second The young film makers objected particularly to the movie WENIGER ALS NICHTS [LESS THAN NOTHING] , success-clause; subsidies are allotted only according he paid 200,000 marks ($50,000) for Betsy von Fur- to box-office receipts : money (250,000 marks, or stenberg (\"She's always been a hard worker\"); his about $60,000) is granted to a produ cer only if he projected third film , a \" melancholy western,\" will can offer a \"reference-film\" that has brought in at feature Orso n Welles. least 300,000 marks ($75,000) on the German market. Oscar-winner Maximillian Schell is also appearing The yo ung film makers-even though nearly all their now in the young German cinema. In Rudolf N oelte's productions in the first wave have brought in enough first film , based on Kafka 's The Castle, Schell plays to be eligible for subsidies- regard the laws as \"anti- Joseph K. The film , \"reduced to a level of universal cultural and economically backward.\" They also ob- comprehension \" (Schell), will be financed by Kura- ject to the morals clause: \"There shall be no spon- torium funds and Schell's savings and will be shot sorship of films that are co ntrary to the constitution in the Austrian snows surrounding Bertholdstein or to moral or religious sentiments.\" Castle. The Guild of Young Produ cers was offered two seats W n . E 'h, young Goeman dno- on the administrative board of the Sponsorship ma has been storming the movie bastions with van- Office, but decided not to join the \"Grade B trust\" guard pioneers, solid infantry, and a picturesque (Kluge). cavalry, the established film-industry has been offered a cure for what ails it: on January 1, 1968, Bonn Meanwhile, the other sources of subsidy are threat- passed a federal law concerning \"measures to be ening to run dry. The Federal Ministry of the In- taken for helping the German cinema.\" Most young terior has refused further aid to the Kuratorium (of cineastes regard it as a restoration of the old-time the young German cinema), and has centralized movie and a stifling of the younger film. within itself the distribution of other awards and prizes. \"The law was being prepared,\" says Kluge, \"while we were making movies.\" Ever since the Oberhausen Beginners, says Kluge, are now once more \"at the revolt, the movie moguls have been lobbying in mercy of producers. But anyone working for Herr Bonn for federal aid. Brauner will not be making new , worthwhile films. \" The basis of their plan: Movie-house owners are to Young producer Herbert Rimbach, who was about siphon off a certain percentage of box-office receipts to try a debut project with an Established mogul, and add them to a fund, which will be distributed learned the conditions for his future work. The pro- by a federal office to movie produ cers. ducer asked him to include: \"three or four homosex- ual relations, a suppressed homophile one, and a This artificial respiration was first formulated in a narcissistic one.\" bill sponsored by Berthold Martin; but the \"Martin Plan \" foundered in 1965 because of resistapce by \"The uproar will come,\" says Alexander Kluge, movie-house owners, who didn 't want to part with mouthpiece for the disowned, \"like an amen in the money, and the churches, who were not repre- church.\" sented in the projected federal board. FILM COMMENT wishes to express its gratitude Hans Toussaint, 65, tried it in his way. He was helped to Der Spiegel, the distinguished independent-mino- by German film producer Alexander Grliter, 60. The ed weekly of Hamburg, and to Kurt J . Bachrach- Establishment movie-mogul, Grliter, had been in the Baker of Der Spiegel in New York, for permission Silesian cement-business until 1939; after the war, to reprint the preceding article, Nr. 5311967, on Ger- he went into movie-making; his two companies, Na- man cinema. Translation is by Joachim Neugroschel. tionalfilmuerleih and Filmfinanzierungs GmbH, went AU photographs accompanying text were acquired bankrupt in 1952. separately and captioned by FILM COMMENT. 44 FILM COMMENT

Excerpts /rom Screenplays ofthe Young German Film Isiter Jungs is one of many beauties in JET GENERATION . ABSCHIED VON make sure that there's a resem- Barbara: And this? GESTERN blance.' 'Of the draft to the per- Martin: That 's pretty mu ch it. by Alexander Kluge son?' 'No, of the person to the [Barbara caresses Martin's knee. draft.' Suddenly she jerks her hand [Camera pans: Pichota in profile; Anita [breaking in]: Of the person away.] behind him , Anita, close but hazy. to the draft. Barbara: Gosh darn it, I very They are sitting. He is reading Pichota: That's right, the person clearly felt up. something to her .] to the-[breaks off] Martin : No question about it. Pichota [reading]: 'What do you Anita, laughing: That's what I do,' Ml:' K. was asked, 'when you said, wasn't it? [Camera concen- DER BRIEF love a person?' ' I do a draft of trates on Pichota again, Anita by Vlado Kristl him ,' said Mr. K. , 'and then I turns hazy. ] The person looks like make sure that there's a resem- thp picture. [Street fight. Shots whip through blance.' 'Of the draft to the per- son?' 'No, of the person to the ZUR SACHE SCHATZ· the streets. Armed figures occa- d r a f t .' CHEN Anita: The person to the draft ... by May Spils sionally dash across the gutter. T. Pichota: That's right. Do you un- derstand? [Barbara and Martin in a street- stands in the middle of the fight- Anita: Sure. car. Two seats before them, a pair Pichota: Then explain it to me. of young lovers.] ing and pulls his letter out of his Anita: It's simple. You 've got a Martin: They 're feeling up, down picture, you've got a person. You front. pocket. He checks the address and do a picture of the person , a Barbara: Feeling up? What's drawing ... that? gazes at the street scene. Pichota: And what's supposed to Martin: Well, when I do this ... resemble what? [he touches her throat] ... that's Armed people crawl across a Anita: . .. And now you want the not feeling up yet ... [then more picture to look like the person. intensely] ... but this is definitely square. T. leans over and asks one Pichota: The picture like the per- feeling up ... [then decreasing] son? ... that's not quite feeling up. [He of them, showing him the enve- Anita: The picture gets to look ca resses her throat. Barbara ob- like the person. viously doesn 't mind. Martin lope .] Pichota: No , no, the person gets draws back his hand.] Gosh darn to look like the picture. it, I very clearly felt up' T. : Excuse me, sir, can you tell Anita: You do a picture of a per- Barbara: You're a feeler-upper. son that you've seen ... [The Martin : It happens to the best of. me where this street is? [The man camera now moves to a close-up Everyone feels up. of Anita, Pichota 's profile is ha- [Barbara puts her hand on Mar- pauses, looks at the envelope and zy] ... and you make sure that tin 's knee.] the picture looks like the person. Barbara: Is that feeling up? gets up.] Pichota: No, the person gets to Martin: Not yet . It could be ... look like the picture. the eye sweeps into the unlimit- Man: Yes, just go straight ahead Anita: Read it to me again. ed . .. but it might have been un- Pichota reads: 'I do a draft of intentional, just an absentminded for three blocks .. . now to the him ,' said Mr. K. , 'and then I motion. Barbara: What about this? right and then to the left, and Martin: You're getting close. then straight ahead until you get to a square with a coffeehouse. [He accompanies T. for a few paces to the beginning of the s t r e e t .] Man: It's much easier from here. Just straight ahead to the next corner, and then turn. T : Left or right? Man: Naturally! And then straight ahead, until yo u don't bump into it anymore. T: Thank yo u. [The man dashes off in double time back to the place where T. stopped him, gets down on all fours and goes crawling after his buddies.] 11111111 SPRING 1970 45

BORIS OFF Karloff The classic horror tale, FRANKENSTEIN, will be re- with Van Heflin and Karloff, and the three became a triumvirate who attempted at first to buck the made in the near future in England, in a new screen convention and then joined it. I wasn 't there , so I was inclined to be suspicious of such good humor version , and at the same time, in this country the and camaraderie, perhaps out of pique for being producer of Hair plans a musical version of the left out and at home with the children . Mary Shelley story. But no matter how many future remakes there may be of FRANKENSTEIN. it is unlikely But my turn came when Boris and Evie came to that any actor will create a reputation as universal visit us in the country . We lived in a rented house , and enduring as that of the creator of the monster and because the guest room was in the basement , in the original Hollywood film-Boris Karloff. Karloff I asked my Wilton neighbors across the road to put the monster was known to countless film audiences, up my guests , Mr. and Mrs. Karloff . The Victor Knauths were not in the least put off; they offered but Karloff the man was known only to a few friends. an early American bedroom in their pre-Revolution- ary War house, and then I learned how gracious The author of the following tribute to Karloff-Lillian the Karloffs really were. They could accept the hos- Gerard, associated with the Department of Film at pitality of others. the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and film instructor at Columbia University-was among Later we met the Raymond Masseys , friends of the. Karloff's friends, and she writes here about the man Karloffs , who entertained us in their Wilton frame behind the legend. house, and the weekend passed amid the demands of the children , the need to cross the road dozens Every time I remarked to someone that Boris Karloff of times-our neighbors invited us and our guests was my friend , I would add \"He's a lovely man . Very to dinner-the sudden shortage of water because intelligent, very special, very.... \" \" Oh, really?\" the well had dried , and other unexpected discom- some people replied . \" Yes, I've heard,\" others said . forts, like the humid weather. \" Oh , yes , indeed,\" I would add, \"Boris is the most wonderful person I've ever known ; and his wife, Still, we went antiquing on Route 7, and Evie Evie-she's lovely, too.\" stopped at every ramshackle antique-stand , junk- heap and fancy New England emporium, searching How could I make others know what Boris and Evie for a certain black jet button she had in mind. It meant to us-my husband and me. I can't even was then I learned of their English determination recall the first time I met the Karloffs. It was at least and precision. Boris sat in the car , tolerating our twenty years ago, and I certainly didn 't expect a expedition , our gossip, the children 's impatience. monster, because I had never seen James Whale's All the while he looked at the Connecticut country- 1931 horror classic , FRANKENSTEIN . Nor did I expect side, which was , he said, the closest thing to En- the dark-skinned, gray-haired, slightly bent-over gland . gentleman I met and came to know , whose eyes had such a soft focus you never knew if they were It was the first hint I had that England meant that looking at you. much to him , and eventually, after forty years of self-exile (he was born William Henry Pratt of a \"You have to meet Boris Karloff,\" my husband had said, after the 1948 Democratic Convention in Phil- adelphia. My husband had been sent there by his film company to tout a picture called TAP ROOTS, 46 FILM COMMENT

THE MAN BEHIND THE MYTH byLillian6eranl Karloff as the monster in FRANKENSTEIN , 1931 . \" proper\" English family , with a member in diplo- and ... ?\" \" No,\" he said , \" though it is true , we have matic circles), he would return to end his life there no choice . This is a small isle, and there are so in Sussex , in the countryside he so loved . many of us.\" Often I have thought of that conversation , and now, Although California was their home, the Karloffs, years later, I agree. Without manners there are no shortly after we met, acquired a New York apartment morals, and morals without manners, in any case at Central Park West and 72nd Street, in the fabled would be meaningless. Dakota (long before ROSEMARY'S BABY made it a house of horrors). Here, among the lovely memen- So I frequently speak of Boris' words to my grown- toes of his career, the high back plaid-cushioned up children , but it takes years of maturity to under- chairs and sofa, the old English prints on the wall , stand these words-the kind of maturity Boris had, Boris was host to his friends at small , intimate dinner although at 81 his mental agility , let alone his parties. Evie did the cooking-and a good cook indifference to physical pain , gave no evidence of she was, though nothing fancy, just well prepared his years. and seasoned , and nourishing . Only six months before his death I received a letter The two of them constantly bantered, putting one from Evie Karloff. Boris, she said , was making a another down so gracefully, so naturally , with such picture, TARGETS , with a young film maker, Peter good humor, that you smiled your way through the Bogdanovich , and they were shooting when rain meal and the conversation , at times deadly serious, started . Neither of them, she wrote, had the sense at times hilarious. to stop , so Boris caught a cold that developed into bronchitis. Boris was a good conversationalist, mostly because he didn 't monopolize the conversation. He said what The incident typified Boris. Manners came first, then he had to say and left it at that. He was right of possibly duty, and no hardship ever got in the way . left , left of right , and while he believed in the liberal If it did , it was merely ignored . So he ignored the point of view, he was not for popular causes but growing pain of his increasing arthritis that eventu- for just ones. ally made him limp so badly. In his younger days , Karloff had been an officer of ''I'm afraid ,\" I said to Evie on a trip to London , the Screen Actors Guild , and he was naturally op- \" Boris is suffering and our visit may be too much posed to the McCarthy trials and the hysteria of that for him .\" \" On the contrary,\" she assured me , \" he period. Just the same, I do not think he would sym- forgets his pain when you are here. When we are pathize with the student riots of today, for a reason alone and I know that he is suffering badly , I some- he once explained to me. times ask if he is in pain . 'No , not at all ,' he insists .\" \"What do you think is the most important thing in Evie 's understanding was infinite. There was noth- life?\" I had asked . \" Manners,\" he answered unhes- ing she and Boris did not share-his plans, his likes itatingly. \" Manners! \" I repeated , aghast. \" Yes, and dislikes, his wit, and even his fame , though she manners.\" \" Don't you think morals .. . ?\" \" No,\" he had never seen him in FRANKENSTEIN and it never said , \" manners. You can't live without them .\" seemed to occur to her that the name Karloff had \" Maybe ,\" I suggested , \" because you ' re English , the connotation of a monster. SPRING 1970 47

JKaacrkloPffieforcrethPereroplaereosf the monster in FRANKENSTEIN , 1931 . Evie . and Bon.s Karloff In a recent photo Photo courtesy oi Lillian Gerard.