HUMORESQUE (1946) . A mocking version of the BODY AND SOUL (1947) is the definitive rendering of FORCE OF EVil (1948). A favorite re-di scovery of film jewish-boy-makes-good-and-then-bad busine ss in the mythic success story of the Lower East Side, before it culti sts, thi s completes the Garfield-New York trilogy. BODY AND SOUL, which mocked it from GOLDEN BOY. moves to become a fJfizefighting melodrama. There is Although thi s time he's been in college and makeshim- This time the boy (Garfield) has to choose between a one of those little corner cand y stores, a long-sufferin g self a nice living as a lawyer for gan gsters and operate s baseball bat and a violin . It's the violin before joan mother, and a son (Garfield) who sidesteps hi s sensitiv- osten sibl y within the law, he ha sstill sold hi ssoul , as an Crawford as a rich and decadent bitch (a Zachary Scott ity to go into boxing. Muscles mean money but money older brother who barel y makes out in the lower Ea st in drag) takes his innocence from him . Goyishka nafka means selling yourself to racketeers (the working cla s- Side ghetto tries to warn him . gets guter boychik . ses have a Mephi stopheles of their own ). There's a message-better to eke out a li ving from the cand y store-which you aren 't reall y led to believe unless you believe the script , which you don't. MILDRED PIERCE (1945) is from a james M . Cain novel THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGSTWICE (1946). Cain's exis- and features a divorced joan Crawford baking pies by tential hitchhiker (John Garfield) is addicted to Whit- night and tablewaiting by day in order to afford luxuries man's Open Road principle, and meets up with a wait- like dancing and piano lessons for her two daughters. ress and former beauty contest winner from the Mid- Waiting on tables leads to her own restaurant, which west (Lana Turner). Lana had been a call-girl before her leads to a second one, which leads to a chain of them , marriage to an older man who owns a roadside cafe. A which leads to sordid sexuality, bankruptcy, and mur- compulsive and self-destructive adultery suggests mur- der. Very good on the short-order restaurant mystique, der to the couple . They succeed with the crime, the with phrases like \" One chic-hold\" threaded through wish comes true, and then somehow turns to disaster. it. When Mildred marries a broke and decadent society They act out their pattern of self-annihilation , ignoring heel, something happens that makes it perverted for escape because they obviousl y deserve what they get. both of them, something having to do with the (\"I'm no good . You ' re no good . We belong together.\" ) working-class sin of rising in the rank s and the leisure- class sin of slumming. MANPOWER (1941) shows what the Blue Angel had to THIEVES' HIGHWAY (1949). a kind of American WAGES CLASH BY NIGHT (1952) is one you can decide tran s- do to make herself palatable to Depression-conscious OF FEAR. Richard Conte encounters disaster upon disas- cends its cliches if you need to patronize. It is directed Americans. Afterdoinga stretch, Marlene Dietrich goes ter to get a truckload of apples to the market. And if the by Fritz Lang and has Barbara Stanwyck returning to her to work in a clip joint (a cinematic euphemism for cat sentimental ending does not leave the impact that hometown , worldweary after a past that is not difficult house). In a typical Working-Class-Film move Clouzol's ironic tragedy does, it is in keeping with the to guess about. She mar,rie s sincere-but-dumb Paul (masochistic and disaster-seeking), she marries the one traditions of the genre not to be intellectual or pro- Dougla s, but then one night at the movies she fall s for of two best friends she doesn 't love (Edward G. Robin- found . the local projectionist, Robert Ryan. Atthis point, some- son), seemingly so she can suffer in her love for the thing wonderful happen s: movies generall y-and more other (George Raft). This lets Raft and Robinson (both specificall y, movies which reinforce the fantasiesofthe high-tension electrical linemen) act out the violent working-class audience (s ince that would be the kind quarrels that are actually fun in the Hollywood version Barbara and the others in CLASH BY NIGHT would migrate of the working-class mystique. One of the linemen (the to)-become a kind of character in the film. And Robert right one) is killed in a lively electric storm, amidst lots Ryan as the projectionist becomes the prophet of movie of boots, belts, wire, and fire. gospel, and against this special quality Paul Douglas does not stand a chance . The projectionist, and the movie theater, and movies themselves become an im- petus for the ensuing adultery; and in a delightful full cycle , recorded on film is the story of how the Working-Cla ss Film has been working on the lives of working-class people . .\"):.
ROME WANTS ANOTHER CAESAR, Miklos ALLPHOTOS:NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL Gyurko which is widely interpreted within Hunga ry as an ap ologia for the \" libera liza- Jancso's most rece nt film before ELECTRA, tion\" p olicies of Janos Kadar at that period: seemed to co nfirm the wo rst fears of even now tha t the grea t tyrant (S talin) is dea d sym p a th e ti c critics th a t hi s work h ad a nd his p oli cies have bee n offi ciall y dis- reached a stage of sel f-parody and empty ow ned , it is inappropria te to take ve n- visual pyro tec hni cs. Th e to tal in co m- gea nce aga inst his fo rmer supporters and p re h e nsibi lity of th e pl o t, th e ai ml ess collaborators. Jancso cha nges this to the sca mpering of the characters fro m place to extent that Orestes kill s the courtier closest place, the sole mn ba nality a nd even child- to Aegisthus as well as the tyrant himself. is hn ess of th e p o litica l d isc u ss io n s - More importantl y, he w idens the w hole together with the mag nifice ntl y perverse scope of the original play into a meditation gesture of bri ngi ng an actor as brillia nt as on the self-destructive element within any Da niel O lbrychski all the way from Pola nd state built on repression and on its inevi ta- to Tunisia and then making absolutely no ble overth row. use o f his ta lents w ha tsoever - a ll ap - peared to point to an impasse or even For most of the film , he s ucceed s bril- breakdown of th e d irector's crea ti ve im- liantly. The exception is the disastrous last agi nation. reel, in which Ja ncso discard ed bo th the original e ncling of G yurko's play and the ELECTRA, however - or at least the first alterna tive e nding provided by Gyula eleven of its twelve shots -indica tes that H ernadi, substituting his own version on the expl ana tion for thi s fai lure must be the last day of film ing. In it, O restes and fo und elsew here. Ei ther Ja ncso's comp ul- Electra take off in a red helicopter and circle sive need to make film s, in a ny circ um - the scen e in which the actio n h as take n sta nces and un der a ny conclitio ns, leads place, while Mari Tbrocsik, as Electra, de- h im so metim es to tackle intrac table or livers offscreen a lyrical m onologue on o nl y half- assimila ted materi al; or, mo re revolution and the final establishment of likely, sepa ration from a H u ngaria n setti ng universal justice and equali ty; the helicop- and subject matter, and from his habitual JANCSO'S 'ELECfRA' by Graham Petrie script w riter Gy ul a H e rna di , ex p oses a ter lands again (a fter sca ttering a loa d of funda me ntal weakness in Ja ncso' s politica l leaflets) and Orestes and Electra the n lead th in kin g th a t s u d d e nl y leaves Ja n os the other characters in a joyful dance. The Ke nde's ca mera condu cting its dazzling obj ecti on to this is n o t so much in th e pirouettes in an intellectual void. anachro nis m involved (Orestes has earlier disposed of Aegisthus by mea ns of a re- Certainl y th e Hunga ri a n-based films, volver) but in the sudden failure of visual fro m MY WAY HOME (1964) to RE D PSALM im agina tio n a nd in ve ntion, co mbin ed (1971), have fo llowed a totally logica l and with the platitudinous nature of the senti- co n siste nt p rocess of d eve lo pm e nt , in ments expressed and the ba nality of the w hich the most stri king ele ment has been symbolism (a red helicopter). the steaclily increasing reliance on ritual - in the endlessly tracking ca mera, th e use of ELECTRA, then, is full of parad oxes. For music and so und, th e move ment and plac- seven-eights of its length it contains some ing of the actors, the symbolic handling of of the very best work Jancso has ever d one, colors, of animals and birds, and the ele- while the last reel lends substance to the ments of fire and wa ter, the d elivery of the charges that, intellectually at least, he has dialogue, and the aban donment of realistic regresse d fr o m th e s ubtl y ambig u o u s ex p ec ta tion s in mu ch of the ac tio n (the study of the relationships between victim m os t obvio us exa mple being the way in and oppressor in TH E ROUN D- UP, SILENCE which characters frequently clie and come AN D CRY, a nd (particularl y) CONFRONTA- to life aga in). ELECTRA, tho ugh no t, o f TION, to the kind of stridently naive glorifi- co urse, originall y a Hungaria n subject, is ca tion of revolutiona ry violence that sim- setin Jancso's familiar flat a nd barren la nd- ply pa nders to the prejuclices of a sizable scape, while the clothing of the characters proportion of his Western auclience. a nd the handful of buildings that sur- ro unds them belo ng to no specifi c time or This, in turn, ra ises several importa nt place. aesthetic questions. Is it possible (given the axiom atic equatio n of form a nd co nte nt The film is based on a versio n of th e that ha s become a commonplace of con- myth, written in the ea rly Six ties by Laszlo temporary criticism) to argue that Jancso's 50 SEPTEMBER-O CTO BE R 1975
visual style has become ever more daz- twilight, a gro up of men round up their being carried into th e building on a zlingly sophisticated at the same time as horses and ride them around the build- stretcher, horse me n circle as us ual in the his political thinking has coarsened or ing that represents Aegisthus's palace; fi- background as the ca mera tracks away and slackened?* Or is the obsession with form nally one man standing on horseback con- the guitar-player who appears throughout and structure-the attempt to create a film trols a tea m of four h o rses in a display the film si ngs a few lines that crystallize the that is virtually one continuous tracking -fa miliar to every tourist in Hungary. Or, in issue at stake here. shot-itself a symptom of creative decay? the sh ot following this, while Aegisthus And in what way can an explicitly political waits passively under the net Orestes has Electra is brought before the assembled argument co-exist with the instinctive and thrown over him , his leading courtier is populace, who are drawn up several lines improvisatory methods of filmmaking for ordered to strip and then to give food to deep in perfect rectangular formation, which Jancs6 is notorious? the doves; to the sound of a drum, he then lying face downward on the grass. She is begins a dance with his female counterpart told that her life will be spared if she re- Certainly the evolution of Jancs6's style in Aegisthus's court (also naked), Electra cants and makes public confession of her had already taken him to a point where he joins them, the woman places one foot on mistakes. Instead sh e wa lks amo ng th e was able to cope almost instinctively with the kneeling, white-robed drummer and is people, accusing them of cowardice, th e ritualistic elements inherent in Greek raised to her full height above him by the lethargy, and treac hery; as she reaches traged y. The horsemen circle endlessly courtier; this shot is held for a moment each row, the characters rise to th eir feet in around the fringes of th e action, often while the head and crest of a peacock fill unison and clasp their hands over their whirling flares of red smoke; characters are the lower right-hand corner of the frame. ea rs. Smugly, Aegisthus speaks to them grouped into rows of men or women who The strange and remote beauty of this instead of the happiness to be attained by fall to the ground and rise again in unison; sequence is enhanced by th e non- obedience to the established laws. The the men twirl batons, crack whips, and naturalistic use of sound: the drumbeat messenger killed by Electra reappears; he show off th e ir skill at swordplay or casts its hypnotic spell throughout, while is of course Orestes himself, and is alive bareback riding; the almost identical- the horsemen circling just beyond the im- once more because the destined liberator looking girls are lined up in white shifts (or mediate area of the action carry out their can never be slain. Aegisthus tries to retain control of the naked), holding lighted candles or caress- maneuvers in utter silence. situation. His soldiers drive the crowd ing doves in their arms; songs and dances Several other shots demonstrate particu- away from him and then back to him with are used as integral parts of the action, the whips; he says that Electra must die and drums throbbing incessantly. All these had larly well Jancs6's ability to create a world they should pray for her; the people pros- previously been exploited in films like distanced from us by the elaborate formal- trate themselves before him and horsemen AGNUS DEI and RED PSALM, but here they ity with which it is organized and filmed , carrying red smoke flares ride around are brought together in a way that exactly and yet shockingly close in the immediacy them. Now the camera moves past a line of matches the sense of strangeness and for- and even barbarity of the emotions rep- girls in white shifts holding lighted torches mality, the paradox of primitive and anar- resented. From the beginning of the film to center on Orestes holding a burning chic emotions and actions being per- Electra makes no secret of her intention to knife in his hand. As the guitarist begins a formed within a rigidly hierarchic social kill Aegisthus as soon as a suitable oppor- song about freedom, a man throws a net framework , that few modern attempts to tunity arises; he replies calmly that, if she over Aegisthus, forcing him to kneel, and cope with Greek tragedy have come even does so, she will have no popular support Orestes thrusts the dagger into the ground close to equaling. as his subjects prefer a ruler like himself at his feet. who makes all their decisions for them and Some of the most effective and mysteri- will resent a \"troublemaker\" who tries to All this, of course, is presented as one ous moments in the film are those that force them to think and choose for them- continuous movement of the camera, with have little connection at all with the osten- selves. occasional brief pauses to focus on particu- sible action. In a brief transition shot (#8) at lar details of the action. Within the scope of This idea is brilliantly brought to life in this one shot Jancs6 has condensed and il- 'Much the same problem is presented by (for shot #6 where Electra, having stabbed the luminated one of the key issues facing any example) Josef von Sternberg, whose critics, with messenger who has brought news of political activist-the degree of support he the exception of Susan Sontag, feel obliged to try to Orestes' death, is brought before Aegis- can expect to achieve from the people he convince themselves that his characters and his so- thus for judgment. Flutes play softly in the intends to liberate-and has succinctly dal and political analysis II1US/ possess a depth and background, the camera tilts ~o a balcony visualized the dilemma in a way that a s ubtlety that matches the brilliance of his visual and above them where one of Aegisthus's more orthodox and naturalistic filmmaker aUTa I techniq ues. mouthpieces pronounces sentence on his could never have equaled. The images are behalf, then tilts down to catch the body FILM COMMENT 51
bizarre, unreal , and yet true to the inner and offers her one of the roses. As he turns shot #5. Similarly the birds and animals reality, the essence of the problem. (In to leave her, she stabs him in the back, that appear in almost every shot both add much the same way, a little later in the though the death scene that follows is pat- to the sense of visual strangeness and often film , Aegisthus's fall from power-his re- pe rform an important symbolic function. jection by the people he had formerl y ently stylized and so prepares us for the oppressed-is given concrete form in the \" resurrection\" in th e following shot. No The most obvious example is that of the sight of him squatting grotesquely on top blood is visible either on knife or body, and peacock. Shot #2 begins with a close-up of of a gigantic ball of animal hide, scrambling the man staggers a few yards to fall on top a peacock' s feather. The bird itself is seen futilely to hold his balance as he is rolled of an already prepared grave mound. in shot #5, together with a dog and some along by a group of naked women, and fi- other birds, as Aegisthus meditates on the nall y tumbling into the jostling, hostil e Here again, one dazzlingly lucid shot problem of fear. In shot #9 the peacock crowd.) has presented an analysis of the hold exer- and a bull are seen close to Aegisthus as he cised by a dictator over his people; of the waits under the net in which Orestes has Shot #5 is an equally successful exa mple illusion of freedom that is allowed to exist trapped him; and later in that shot the of a complex political problem being both as a safety valve and a means of trick- peacock is seen during the dance per- worked through in a vivid and concrete ing opponents into revealing themselves; formed by the courtiers. Finally, in the last manner and the relationship beh\",een ruler and of the ruthlessness with which any shot, the peacock is used as the symbol of and ruled being given a startlingly physical genuine expression of dissent is speedily the new world that (perhaps) may soon be representation . In the previous shot, crushed-since Electra's killing of the established, in the song that the guitarist Aegisthus has talked to his courtiers of his messenger is used as the pretext to punish sings as Orestes and Electra lead the other fears-of his enemies, of his people, and her for her outspokenness. characters in their dance of freedom. of himself-and has condemned Electra as a troublemaker, a force of discontent. The most thoroughl y ritualistic shot in Improvisation, then, seems to have Now, as the camera tilts up the body of a the whole film is probably #3, in which the done little harm to the overall structure of women clothed in a white veil and then reasons for Electra's hatred of Aegisthus the film as a whole and, with the exception surveys the lines of waiting men and wo- are given, and the tensions between them of the last shot, Jancso has created a work men, Aegisthus proclaims a \" Feast of are vividly established. It begins with a which is ruthlessly logical both in its Truth,\" in which everyone will have fres- group of small children dancing, some of analysis of the nature and effects of do m to speak his mind openly on every them holding full-sized swords; then tyranny and in its overall visual movement subject, without fear of retribution. Electra talks to the leading w.omen courtier and patterning. The stylization, the rituals, of Aegisthus's court, vainly trying to per- the symbols, the rejection of conventional Aegisthus turns to his subjects, who are suade her to rise in rebellion against the narrative structures and psychological drawn up as usual in regular geometric tyrant, and the usual horsemen circle in analysis, are not empty formal devices, but formation and invites them to offer their the background during this conversation. the necessary tools by means of which he criticisms of his rule . One by one they re- Next the camera tracks past a group of can penetrate to the essence of his theme. spond with chants of praise and gratitude naked women, a basket of chickens, and for the blessings he has brought them: the the three dwarfs who playa more promi- In every shot except the final one, Janc- ample food and wine and the rich harvest nent part in shot #5. More nude women so's thinking is far from simplistic; he gives for which he is alone responsible; the fertil- stand in a pool of blood, their bodies or- magnificent visual expression to the nature ity that spills over even into procreation so namented with paint, while to the sound of despotic control over the minds and that animals and women breed more of drumbeats a man performs an intricate bodies of its victims and of the problems abundantly thanks to Aegisthus's rule; piece of swordplay on the solid ground be- faced by any liberator whose first task is to \"salt was never so salty, sugar was never side them. free those tha t he wishes to rescue from so sweet,\" they tell him , and all is \"thanks their own worst instincts, their sloth and to you, Sire.\" Aegisthus's leading male courtier enters their cowardice. Yet it is as a collection of the pool and starts to mime the murder of images-of bizarre and striking juxtaposi- Aegisthus is satisfied and turns his at- Electra's father, Agammemnon, in his tions, of geometrical precision mixed with tention now to Electra, the one remaining bath, while a woman narrates these same the utmost fluidity and freedom of the dissenter. Two lines of men and women events; at the moment of the stabbing, the camera, of sounds and silences, of mys- unroll a white sheet and three dwarfs walk courtier falls full-length into the pool while terious and hypnotically alluring actions under it toward Electra, who herself ap- the drumbeats abruptly come to a halt. -that the film is ultimately most memora- proaches, sheltered by a sheet held by some Aegisthus's soldiers appear, cracking their ble . women. Horsemen circle the procession, whips; horsemen ride past; Electra softly which now becomes the preparation for a sings a curse on Aegisthus and all those Given the intelligence and the power mock marriage between Electra and one of who support him; she walks past a line of exerted by the remainder of the film, it is the dwarfs. This humiliation is to be im- hooded , kneeling figures toward a group worth asking once more why the final ten posed on her because she alone still insists of men holding a white sheet at arms' minutes should fail as disastrously as they on speaking her mind and warning Aegis- length between them; the drum starts to do. It is perhaps uncharitable to cite the re- thus that she intends to destroy, not just play once more and a solemn dance be- port current in Hungary that Jancso began him, but the whole system that he repre- gins. As well as establishing and elaborat- the final day's shooting still uncertain as to ing some of the major symbolic motifs in how he wanted to end the film and with a sents. the film , the effect of this shot is to create deadline that same afternoon, when he As the dwarflbridegroom begins to col- an atmosphere of both bloodsoaked bar- was due to catch a plane for Italy, and that barity and moral inertia, and to intensify the combination of helicopter and lect a bouquet of roses from the men pres- the isolation of Electra herself as she insists monologue seemed the easiest solution to ent, a stranger who has dared to cross the on pursuing her quest for justice. the problem . However this may be, the frontier into Aegisthus's kingdom without shot is evidently much less well thought- permission is brought forward; he is As should be clear from even these three out than any of the preceding ones and the searched and questioned (as, in the examples, there is a logical development interplay between dialogue and image background, the guitarist quietly sings a and consistency within the overall struc- here becomes a purely mechanical one. song about freedom) , and then he an- ture of the film , in which the most bizarre nounces that he has brought the news that and apparently arbitrary details are finally Presumably we are meant to see the Orestes is dead. Jubilantly, Aegisthus be- seen to take their place. The three dwarfs, helicopter containing Orestes and Electra gins a rhythmic handclapping and starts to for example, who might seem an unneces- as the \"firebird\" of the latter's monologue, dance, while his subjects obediently follow sarily grotesque intrusion into shot #3, are suit. The messenger approaches Electra shown to have an important role to play in 52 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1975
the sky becomes minimal after the first few minutes, and the dial og ue deserts the more eve nl y balanced tensions of the re- mainder of the film to become a simple ex- pression of wish-fulfillment (acknowl- edged, p ossibly, in th e reiterated \"perhaps\" of the concluding song). H ere the failure is one of both visual a nd political intellige nce sim ultan eously, a nd it wo uld be dangerous to draw too many co nclu sions from it as a resu lt. Despite this, it is possible to arg ue that, since co - FRO TAT ro , Ja ncs6 has moved stead ily toward a more clear-cut distinction be- tween victims and oppressors tha n in his earlier work, ot at least that he has resorted to a more o ne-sided allocation of \"good\" and \" bad\" qualities. Little a tte mpt is made in ELECTRA to understand Aegisthus, a part from his brief ruminations in shot #4; a nd a rather disquieting relish is take n in the cold-blooded humiliations to which he is subjected before his death. He becomes merely the stock figure of the tyra nt who must be destroyed. Paradoxically, he be- comes both less interesting and less sinis- ter tha n the impassive, laconic torturers of THE ROUN D-UP . An d thi s te nd e n cy, of course, has gone ha nd-in-hand with Janc- s6' s obsession with the eternall y moving ca mera as a mea ns of expression . With Jancs6, h owever, it is always wisest to wait for the next one or two film s before making authoritative pro noun ce- ments on the direction his latest work is takin g. At vario u s sta ges of his ca reer a lrea d y - w ith SIL ENCE AN D CRY , w ith AGNUS DEI, with RED PSALM-he has been accused of painting himself into a corner and leavi ng no fruitful creative exit; and yet it is now clea r that each of these films contained, unnoticed at the time, the basis of ractical stylistic and thematic changes. For the moment, then, all that it is safe to say of ELECfRA is that it is a flawed master- piece, but a masterpiece nonetheless. ~!: which travels from East to West every da y bearing the tidings of happiness and lib- erty. Each night it tires and falls to th e ground to ctie, but with the dawn it revives and contin ues its journey. (Orestes and Electra themselves had died in the previ- ous scene, committing double suicide after Electra asks, \" Do we possess the strength for daily death?\" The last shot, however, begins with them alive once more.) If this is so, the scene is certainly better integrated into the film than might appear at first sight; and it continues the pa ttern in which the visual content of a shot picks up and elaborates a statement made in the dialogue of the preceding shot. Neverthe- less, the visual excitement to be obtained from the sight of a red helicopter circling in
by Michael Kerbel In the fifteen yea rs since the death of Frank Mouris A LL PHOTOS : FRANK MOURIS Hollywood's great cartoon studios the upon graduation in 1969, he submitted, in Two things in particular dominate the film , as they do American society: televi- animated short has dwelt in limbo, with lieu of a graphic design thesis, an ambi- sion and food. At the beginning, as Mouris tious animated film containing almost- takes us back to 1944 for his birth, we see a the UNESCO-cutesy filrns from Zagreb pro- seventy experiments. Mouris says that he television screen with a small area of used \"every trick in the book,\" including amorphous color in its corner, almost as if voklllg only spasms ot rigor mortis. ()ut III single-frame filming, which has become the screen itself were carrying the fetus- an important element in his style. an appropriate metaphor for the birth of 1973, Frank Mouris's FRANK FILM gave the someone in the first generation of TV From 1969 to 1972, he taught animation babies. Television is related to his life in genre fresh new signs of life. It was at Harvard, and worked on FRANK FILM, many ways: as an indication of his famil y's which he' d begun at Yale . (Mouris says rising economic status, a catalyst for his perhaps the \"major revelation\" of the 1973 that he spent more than six years on the fantasies about women, an instrument film.) Originally he intended using live- through which politicians created their im- New York Film Festival; it won dozens of action footage to depict his life, but \" it ages for him, a medium which he expects wasn't really me. \" He and his wife, to transmit his animated designs. awards, including an Oscar; it has, deser- Caroline Ahlfors, decided that he should instead utilize his massive collection of Food plays a simi lar role: images of vedl y, become something of a modern magazine photos, which he'd systemati- lunchtime stand out in his early schoo l cally been saving, sorting by category, and years; beer and other drinks characterize classic. sometimes combining into collages, for his college career; a frankfurter passing many years . \"All my life I have been ob- swiftly through a corridor created by two The nine-minute long animated work sessed by magazines ... it was an en- upright slices of bread represents his sex- trancement with the magic world dis- ual daydreams. At the end, a rapid reprise bombards the viewer with an endlessly played in all those colorful photo- of his life is conveyed through the image of graphs ... I couldn' t understand why a garbage can out of which pour many ob- flowing series of photo-collage images, anyone would ever want to throw a jects, most noticeably food. Mouris says magazine away-it wasn' t as if you could that food is so dominant in FRANK FILM be- which, together with an intriguing dual use up or digest all that fantasy and color in cause it pervades much of American ad - just a couple of viewings. So I saved vertising, and \"I was so attracted by it and narration spoken by Mouris himself, tells magazines ... \" He has also remarked, \"In they're easy shapes to cut out.\" It works in a subtle way FRANK FILM is really not the the film satirically as a symbol of America's the story of his life and paints an evocative story of my life but a survey of American general gluttony, its compulsive conspicu- advertising in magazines\"- the perfectly ous consumption, and its childlike insatia- portrait of middle-class America at mid- air-brushed, four-color world in which bility. As Mouris says in his narration, \"everything looks wonderful and splen- \"There just never is enough food to satisfy century. Behind the film lies an extensive did. \" me.\" tradition in art (including dada, sur- Mouris first constructed a complete si- Mouris arrived at the film 's rhythm lent film, organizing thousands of photo- through trial and error rather than fonnu- realism, collage art, found objects, pop art) collages to present his life in chronological lao Once he was certain of his montage pat- order: his infancy, childhood, family life, terns, he set up everything precisely for and cinema (Mouris acknowledges the early schooling, teenage sex fantasies, the animation stand; the entire film was stud y of architecture in college, brief politi- shot in one week of ten-hour days, and influences of Vanderbeek, McLaren, cal interest, pursuit of graphic design and there was no need for editing. The photography in graduate school, decision thousands of collages flash onto the screen Lye, Brakhage, Kubelka, Belson, and to make animated films, and fantasies for at a breathless, staccato pace, sometimes the future (most of which, like the Oscar following each other because of similarities Borowczyk; but one could detect at least and international awards, came true in form and color as well as content; flow- within a year of the film 's release). The im- ing and metamorphosing into each other; the indirect influences of Breer, Conner, ages provide enormous variations on the moving around horizontally, vertically, in themes of each phase, and sometimes take spirals, in kaleidoscopic patterns; occa- and Harry Smith, and, further back, of off on their own through a whimsical pro- sionally appeari ng almost sublimina lly. cess of free association. Throughout, the Mouris wanted to overwhelm the viewer Eisenstein and even Melies). The complex with baroquely cluttered frames, and he recurring imagery of material possessions left as little empty space as possible. Often, soundtrack was created by Tony Schwartz, suggest that their presence, and his preoc- after filling an entire cel, he stacked one cel cupation with them, have been constant whose ideas about aural montage and themes in Mouris' life . sound environments were largely respon- sible for the film's emotional impact. But FRANK FILM is eclectic only in the best sense of the word. Mouris synthesized everything into a completely original work-and I eagerly anticipated his sub- sequent projects. Now that I've seen his two new films (CONEY and SCREENTEST), and talked with him about his work, I'd like to offer some thoughts on Mouris's career thus far, and some speculations on his future. • Actually, Mouris had made several films before FRANK FILM, but he dismisses them as crude student experiments. His interest in film began about 1965, when he saw a program of Stan Vanderbeek's cut-out col- lage animation; Mouris realized that even though he didn't draw well, he could do animated films. Although he subsequently entered gradua te school at Yale to study graphic design, it was there that he made several short Vanderbeek-style films; and 54 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1975
on top of another, creating an extraordinar- We are fascinated by mater ia li sm a nd land film involving ten va ri ed technique, ily complex and dense visual design. There glamorous photography; at the same time each showing a different aspect of the area, is simultaneously an in cred ibl y rapid, we question o ur fascination, because but they didn ' t fit together. He deci d ed in- shotgun montage and an imme nse Mouris questions it in him se lf. The d e- stead to make at leas t three, possibl y as amount of visual information with il1 th e tach ed to ne sugges ts that, despite the many as five , separate fi lm s, of which a ma ssi ng of w ha tever o ne co nsiders CONEY is the first. frame. wea lth , o ne can re m ain emot iona ll y Andrew Sarris, calling the film an \"evo- barren-Charles Foster Kane empty and Mouris describes th e fi ve-minute wo rk alone in the midst o f his pleasure dome of as \"a quick jaunt th rough the Coney Island cation of America's exhilarating every- countless artifacts. area at all times of the day a nd night, and thingness,\" said that \"for once, the super- during all seasons of th e yea r. \" Mouris's saturated style to which shorts are ad- FRA KFI LM incorporates a galaxy of con- fast-motion , ofte n si ngle -frame ph o to- dicted fits the subject perfectly. The profu- tradiction s, re fl ec tin g the confusions grap h y-a lth ough used before in CITY sion of images both satirizes and celebrates SYMPHO Ny -ty pe films-does crea te a n the absurdist abundance of America . .. \" within an artist as well as some of the exhilaratin g successio n of spasmodic One might compare thi s with CITI / EN paradoxes in American life. It is at once tracks a nd pans, rapid movements around KANE; as Warren Ba ss has obse rved, in v igo ra ti n g a nd depressi ng, self- objects, almost s ubli mi nal images, pixila- Mouris s ummation of American life as a congratulatory and self-critical, obsessed ti on, and co nden sed -tim e seque nces of vast accumulation of material artifacts, by money and alienated from it, enchanted rid es, waves, and cloud move me nts. junk, and trivia is paralleled by KANE'S final by advertising and magazines but aware of David Shoemake r's origi nal score com- scene, in the cluttered hall of Xanadu. Of their seductive slickness, oriented towa rd plements th e images with frenetic drum- course, Mouris' own accumulation object-worship and critical of that orienta- beats, a deliberately repetitious the me for (magazine photos) is vicarious, and one tion . Above all is the contradiction e m- mandolin and harpSichord, and the use of thinks here of Godard's LES CARABINIERS, bodied in the film 's very conception: it is an what Mouris says are a Tibetan horn and a whose soldiers bring home all of th e ex trem ely personal (frank) film that ex- Bulgarian drone. world's treasures in the perfect but frozen presses its creator's personality throug h form of picture postcards. the most impersonal photographs. And This is Mouris' least original film, but it is yet, despite this synthetic process, Mouris interesting as a reflection of his collage and To accompany his explosive imagery, has given us a character we can care about; single-frame sensibility. And although he Mouris considered and rejected rock we recognize something of ourselves in his doesn't reall y develop his visual ideas, music, and then sound effects. He had an confusions, failures , successes, and several of them (the fast-motion camera idea to use an abstract narration that would dreams, and in his rea liza tion that he is movements at night, creating abstract pat- relate his life story through the recitation of constantly involved in a love-hate relation- terns of dancing lights; the fragmented words beginning with \"f\" (for Frank). But ship with the overwhelming materialism tracks along the snow-covered boardwalk) he ctidn' t know how to proceed, and \"in of his society. Perhaps this is why-final desperation\" went to Tony Schwartz, the contradictions-the film is both hilarious sound wizard and political consultant, and moving, immed iately accessible but who said that the film was already abstract, ultimately indescribable. that it needed a straightforward chronolog- ical description . Mouris agreed, and spoke The success of FRANK FILM placed his narration in one take, without a script, Mouris in a position where he could have spontaneously in response to the images. lived easy if not free-could have become Because this did not seem sufficient, a s mall animation industry, like Charles Schwartz suggested overlaying a second Braverman-but, he beli eved, it would track, thus incorporating Mouris' original have compromised his integrity, and he re- idea. Mouris began with a countdown sisted the temptation . He turned down an from 1972 to 1944, then steadily recited a list opportunity to do a FRANK FILM-style main of words, most of them beginning with \"f\" title sequence for the TV series Rhoda , or \"ph,\" and ordered by the principles of largely because he disliked the script, in free association and punning, as well as by which Rhoda describes her life in Frank appropriateness to both the picture and fashion. (Braverman did the Rhoda job, in a the first track. Schwartz expertly blended timid imitation of FRANK FILM.) Mouris was the narrations, making it possible for us to also offered $100,000 a year for two years to take in both at once; at times we might be film the one-minute CBS Bicentennial conscious of only certain key words, but all spots, but refused because he thought of the others work on us subliminally-an the pilots were terrible. aural parallel to the effect created by the imagery. Instead , he was determined to expand his filmmaking experience, in very specific The combination of picture and sound ways. Since FRANK FILM had been re- possesses many layers of emotional and stricted to animated collages, he decided to intellectual richness. It is difficult to believe deal, first, with an actual location and, sec- that they did not evolve together, because ond, with actors. The results were CONEY occasionally the collages seem to burst and SCREENTEST, re s pectivel y, both of forth in response to the narrations, rather which were co-directed by his wife, begun than the reverse. The three components in the summer of1973, and completed this have a dynamic relationship, as they take summer. Interestingly, although the films turns fading into each other, and as they do take him in new directions, they retain shift imperceptibly from complementary his fast-motion style; both Coney Island to contrapuntal functions . and SCREENTEST'S actors become animated almost as if they were part of FRANK FILM'S The collages are extravagant and the collages. Mouris, in fact, calls all three films rhythm is exuberant: the narrations (as \"animated documentaries.\" Mouris delivers them) are dry, monoto- nous, almost somnambulant. This imparts Originally he had planned a Coney Is- a playful irony, undercutting what we see. FILM COMMENT 55
are effective. Sometimes his sense of progressively darker, until two elevated graphic arts: in fashion photography and humor emerges, as vvhen a fat woman, trains suddenly slide the frame diagonally illustration, interior decoration, magazine exercising on the beach, is filmed at a fast as they rush ,by in the extreme fore- art direction, fabric desi.s n, and display speed so that h er arms seem to be flapping ground-a frightening vision of our work. Accorcting to Mouris, they are very frenetically-like a dodo's wings-in time mechanical world moving precipitously talented, and when they get together with th e drumbeats. In th e opening, he into the consuming darkness. there's a \"creative explosion,\" manifested gives us what seems a typical tourist's dull in a variety of spontaneous and planned home-movies shot of Na than's, begins to Despite the ominous moments, and the happenings . Besides performing wild ex- pan away, also in home-movie style, and shots of boarded-up buildings, peeled periments in the visual arts, they wear then undercuts our expectations by sud- paint, trash cans, locks, graffiti, and bro- (and often design) flamboyant dresses and denly changing the speed and executing ken windows, the overall impression one costumes, put on extremely colorful two 360-degree pans in extremely fast mo- gets from the \"psychedelic\" montage is makeup, wigs, and masks, act out campy tion (perhaps one or two frames-per- routines, and make silent Super-8 movies second). This creates some amusing pixila- not of a deteriorating Coney Island but of intended only for themselves. tion of passersby, and of teenagers who an exciting, vibrant fantasyland-a New dance and pose in front of the camera as if Yorker's Disney World. The final sequence, Mouris says that they aren't transves- auditioning for SCREENTEST. shot at night, has an overpowering bea uty, tites or \"strange, weird creatures,\" as some as the already frenzied pace accelerates, might expect, but \"just people who take Occasionally the film conveys a forebod- culminating in four superimpositions of their fantasies and make them concrete.\" ing feeling. A sweeping, rapid pan from dancing lights, neon signs, moving shots Immediately upon meeting them in 1972, the ocean to the amusement area and up to taken from elevated trains, and fireworks, he thought they were visually exciting, the sky, accompanied by an ominous and wanted to make a film with them. This theme, is interrupted by a blinding white leading to an explosion of color. It's an ec- idea was confirmed when he saw several light and a shot of the parachute jump, static tribute to a Coney Island that could of their fifty films, which he describes as which looks like a gigantic erector-set toy could exist only through the perception of lavish costume dramas with fantastic sets surrealistically placed in the landscape. A someone like Mouris, who, by refusing to and extravagant visuals. He also liked their dramatic shot of clouds moving switfly in linger on ugliness and decay, almost glos- films' rapid editing; even their cinematic opposite directions gives way to a haunt- ses over their existence-a very pretty sensibilities conformed to his own. ing image of the Wonder Wheel and other Coney Island of the mind's eye. rides, revolving very quickly under a When FRANK FILM was complete and purplish early nighttime sky that becomes • Mouris was trying to obtain grants for further animated films, the American Film SCREENTEST is a twenty-minute-long Institute told him that it was interested in showcase for nine amateur actors, who are \"socially relevant\" documentaries. Argu- all involved , one way or another, in the ing that the actors were socially relevant, he managed to get $8250 from AFI to do a documentary about them. He calls the re- sult a \"stylized documentary\": what the actors ctid in the film is exactly what they normally do as an outlet for their highly charged creative energies, but those ac- tivities are recorded in a style that abstracts their reality. The clever title may refer to Mouris' test- ing both his film ideas and his ability to- work with actors, or even to the sensory- overload test to which the viewer is put, but it is also meant literally: he conceived his work as an actual screentest for the group, and believes that they could easily use it if they decided to become profes- sional actors. The film is divided into nine distinct segments, each of which is de- signed to highlight one of the performers. There was no script; Mouris allowed them to do whatever they wished, and each actor thus determined the content, cos- tumes, makeup, and settings of his sec- tion. Mouris himself decided upon the super-rapid visual style, although the ac- tors were aware of how they were being recorded because during the thirteen months of filming they continually saw rushes, and even contributed some suggestions. Although Mouris sub- sequently did considerable ectiting (over a seven-month period), it approximated the style of the photography. The actors, there- fore, were given few surprises; Mouris says they generally agreed that he accu- rately captured their personalities. As with FRANK FILM, the viewer is as- saulted with images, but while many of Frank Mouris \" on location\" for CONEY.
SCREEN TESTS Pedro Barrios Adolph Garza Philip Haight Richard Hartenstein FILM COMMENT 57
even the briefes t ones in the first film are But SCREENTEST ultimately becomes what the argu men t occurs when one actor memorable, it is difficult to retain more it is satirizing-a garish, superficial, comments that this is the first time Mouris than a general impression of those in \" Harpers Bizarre\" fashion show, obses- is not dealing with inanimate objects, and SCREENTEST. One reason ma y be that sed, as are its stars, with visual extrava- another replies that he treated them like in- FRANK FILM'S chronological underpinning gance. Mouris tries to have it both ways: animate objects. Again Mouris neutralizes imparts a structure to the free-flowing im- because he's fascinated with the perfor- this by including the counter reply: \"What ages, whereas SCREENTEST'S segments are mers (\"I genuinely admire them\"), he is are we? Inanimate objects!\" Still the ques- placed end to end with no apparent logic; swept along by their style; but because he tions remain. If they are objects, why de- they look as if they could be interchanged wants to be critical of that style and there- without severely affecting the film. But a fore of his own attraction to it, he keeps vote a film to them? If they aren't objects more fundamental problem is that there's distancing us from them. This ambiva- but talented artists, why have they been basically little to distinguish one actor from lence works to his advantage in FRANK made to seem so trivial? another. They ma y have different artistic FILM , where it helps to characterize his temperaments and interests, but one gets personality; but in SCREENTEST, he relates A final question: where will Mouris go the feeling only of slight variations on a uncertainly to other people, and one can from here? He has unquestionable tal- single, ultimately monotonous theme. become alienated from the entire experi- ent, and an expert sense of graphics and ence. The tension created just isn't produc- montage. It may be a matter of how best to The group's artistic point of view seems tive. The exuberant but controlled narra- apply it. At the very least he should be to be that anything goes as long as it's tive energy of the earlier film isn't there . credited for his willingness to attempt ex- dazzling, campy, colorful, and over- tremely ambitious projects; whatever else done-a hallucinogenic Hellzapo ppin. The soundtrack, comprised exclusively it may be, SCREENTEST is certainly an au- They spray paint and Silly string, dance of the performers' comments on the film, thentic original. One of his difficulties is ball et and soft-shoe, ea t and rollerskate, presents additional confusions. Mouris that he has to live up to expectations parody silent stars and SUNSET BOULEVARD. encouraged them to say whatever they created by such a masterly first film. Above all there is an emphasis on makeup wanted to, and recorded four-and-a-half Perhaps sensing a need to break away (the more outre the better) , masks (clowns, hours of conversations (as they anticipated from his pattern, Mouris is now trying apes, devils, Jackie Onassis), costumes (in- their first viewing of a rough cut, as they something completely new, and seemingly cluding miniskirts, hot pants, a maid's uni- watched the film twice, and as they dis- alien to his tastes: he has just begun a foml , bathing suits, religious garb, an Arab cussed it after each screening) . He mixed two-year course at the AFI Center for Ad- burnoose, a Nazi uniform, a tuxedo) that the discussions, apparently aiming for a vanced Film Studies in Beverly Hills, are periodically put on and taken off, and \"sound environment\" like that in FRANK where he expects eventually to turn out a elaborate fashion-photography poses. FILM: voices are blended, dialogue is frag- scripted, fictional feature . He also has a mented, and we hear simultaneously t-heir Guggenheim grant, to be used specifically A similar sensibility seems to inform expectations, their reactions to images as for a fictional short. Mouris' style, which consists of fast- we see them , and their recollections. While motion and single-frame filming, rapid this has the interesting effect of placing us Mouris is taking a big step, but he knows (almost strobe) editing, pixilation, Melies- in several time periods at once, the sounds that he can always continue to make his style stop-motion, and the frequent use of are not often perfectly integrated; they are kind of short film. In fact, he's currently slides, which are animated, placed side by in competition when they should be rein- still preparing two additional Coney Island side, turned upside down, and integrated forcing each other. films, one consisting of animated photos, into montages with live-action footage. tracing the history of the once-fashionable The few normal or slow-motion shots only Perhaps Mouris thought that the com- resort; the other involving live-action, emphasize the machine-gun pace of the mentary would undercut what we are see- black-and-white footage, which he has res t of the film . At tim es the actors are ing, as in FRANK FILM, and thus provide an transferred through a Xerox process onto edited to resemble Rorschach designs, auto-critique of his approach . In fact, con- paper. The images, shot at sixty-four combined with objects in a montage so that sidering that the actors are said to have frames-per-second, will be refilmed on an the two are indistinguishable, moved been generally happy with the film, he animation stand, and partially colored in around so mechanically they become seems deliberately to include an unu- with magic markers. robots- eve n in a gourmet bouffe at sually high number of negative remarks. Nathan's that echoes the food-obsession of Sometimes the comments are clever, as Mouris is also excited about his in- FRA NK FILM. Whereas FRANK FILM used when an actor in a religious costume is de- volvement in a fifteen-minute Bicentennial impersonal photogra phs to create a per- scribed, because of the fast motion, as \"a film for the state of Tennessee. He has set it sonality, SCREENTEST takes people who nun in EARTHQUAKE,\" or when they com- up, and will be the editor, but it will be shot supposedly have personalities and turns plain just as the audience might be think- entirely by Tennessee film-makers. The them into impersonal photographs. This ing of the same thing (\"too long,\" \"not idea is to give them the opportunity to be \"objectification\" is reminiscent of films by visually rich enough\"). apprentices to an experienced director, such cartoonists-turned-directors as even as Mouris will work and study under Hitchcock, Fellini, LaCava, Ichikawa , But since their observations are usually industry professionals during his tenure at Whale, and especially Frank Tashlin. banal, they end up reinforcing what the Greystone. And there are several other visuals tell us, that the actors are superfi- unrealized animation projects, which On one level, this is probably intended cial. Even the recurring debate among as a send-up of the very fields in which the them over whether this is a documentary Mouris is setting aside, the better to devote men are employed, with Mouris comment- serves to justify Mouris' presentation, be- himself to the API experience. ing on the gaudy glamour and false face of cause although several of them keep say- advertising, fashion shows, and women's ing that they were manipulated and Mouris will undoubtedly be a strong magazines, turning those worlds inside shown in a one-sided manner, others force in the development of animation, but out by pushing them to grotesque ex- answer with the reminder that they were one awaits with curiosity his first attempts tremes. Occasionally the satire is pointed, allowed to do whatever they wished, and in the totally unfamiliar world of narrative and the Melies disappearances and that in fact they are one-sided. feature filmmaking . At thirty-one, he goes metamorphoses are clever (as when an to Hollywood with enough talent and am- actor keeps removing masks only to reveal Possibly Mouris is only stressing one bition to mirror the promise of the cinema's others underneath; or when another actor side; pOSSibly the actors chose to stress only most notable enfan t terrible - the one is denuded of wig, makeup, and beard, one side of themselves; possibly they have whose first feature FRANK FILM is so often and ends by licking off his mustache). only one side. Whatever the reason, only compared to. Whether or not Mouris one side really emerges. The key part of makes the Seventies equivalent of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, only time and fate can tell.~ 58 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1975
CaonedHrun Blow the lid off your laugh button MAKE MINE MINK Contemporary/McGraw-Hili Films with our thin tins! Our films pack Terry Thomas helps little 01 ' ladies Rate us HE\" for Entertainment. more fun per ounce than the law steal little 01 ' furs for charity. allows. Serve them deviled, spicy or Directed by Robert Asher. With For booking information and free sugar-cured . .. However you slice Athene Seyler, Hattie Jacques and catalog, call or write: it, each one 's a prime rib tickler. For Billie Whitelaw. gourmet guffaws, one's a treat. But Amy Hustedt two are mmm better! QUACKSER FORTUNE HASA Princeton Road Hightstown, New Jersey 08520 THE GOLDEN AGE OF COMEDY COUSIN IN THE BRONX (609) 448-1700 laurel and Hardy, Will Rogers, Jean Gene Wilder loses girl , wins bus Harlow, Carole lombard, Ben company. Directed by Waris Ruth Daniel Turpin, Harry langdon, Charlie Hussein. With Margot Kidder. 828 Custer Avenue Chase, et al. make the twenties roar Evanston, Illinois 60202 again. Produced by Robert Youngson. PLAYTIME (312) 869-5010 Jacques Tati and a cast of THE TWELVE CHAIRS thousands explore the future Robert Magoffin Mel Brooks gives the old borsch a imperfect. Directed by Jacques Tati. 425 Battery Street belt. Directed and written by Mel With Barbara Dennek, Georges San Francisco, California 94111 Brooks. With Ron Moody, Dom Montant and John Abbey. (415) 362-3115 Deluise and Frank langella. U.S. Distribution Only I LOVE YOU ALICE B. TOKLAS Peter Sellers pollinates among the flower children. Directed by Hy Averback. With Jo Van Fleet and leigh Taylor-Young. FILM COMMENT 59
GEORGE volved in the professional film industry. I we did know where we were going. We hasten to say that those people who are on admit to the mistakes and we admit to hav- STEVENS, JR.: our board who serve that function also ing gotten involved in projects we have a very enlightened viewpoint of what shouldn't have, and all of that, but I don't INSIDE an American Film Institute should be. think that's unusual. What's unusual is that it was a project that was really care- THEAFI THE LACK OF FUNDS fully thought out and worked, [compared with] all the other enterprises thft have This interview with George Stevens, Jr. , di- Simply, the funds haven't been there to been started in recent years and have rector of the American Film Institute, was re- do a lot of things that . .. we would like to floundered . corded on 17 July 1975. Although Mr. Stevens do. [Something] . .. and this is a big originally invited me to Washington to correct change, which I don't think people really Let's just say that doing business for basic misunderstandings in an earlier column seven or eight years, you're going to please for this journal, he understood that the inter- have absorbed and understood, is that some people and you're going to displease view was for publication. I have rearranged when AFI started out, the idea was that it some people. Institutions are a focus for his answers to form a fairly logical progres- would have all of the money for film in the dissatisfaction and frustration, and that sion, and I have eliminated extra words to Arts Endowment budget. That idea goes with the territory. We accept that. permit easier reading. Words in brackets are changed in the Nixon administration. I ac- People who are most apoplectic about the the only ones not spoken by Mr. Stevens and cept the change, I don't really quarrel with Film Institute are the people who staked they are included for clarity. Each paragraph it. The idea became that the National En- their reputation on the fact that Greystone is a contiguous answer; sentences have not dowment [for the Arts] would do all grant- was an absolute great boondoggle and po- been rearranged and nothing is out of context. ing and we would do operations. So the tential disaster. The fact that Greystone has All the major topics touched on in the inter- kind of money that people look to that the turned out to be what many people regard view are included here, except for specific fu- AFI might be passing out . . .as we did, in as the best film conservatory in the world is ture programs now being planned. Mr. Ste- some educational work early on, that's not a subject of great comfort to those vens agreed to my stipulation that he could been taken over by the Endowment. Any people. not review or change this interview prior to money that's going to come for educational publication. projects is going to come from the En- GREYSTONE NOW dowment to those educational projects. It's being run [now] by Martin Manulis -Austin Lamont That's the policy of the feqeral govern- ment. who's the producer of Playhouse 90 and The What we are trying to do is to bring to- RELATIONS WITH THE PUBLIC Golden Age of Television. It was not and gether very diverse interests in film into MEDIA PANEL never will be a one-man-band. We've all the American Film Institute. [We are trying become more experienced, I certainly have to bring together] regional interests and in- The American Film Institute has had for become more experienced with a lot of terests which come from different sides of the past four years a general grant or$l.l things. In the last year Greystone has the filmmaking process: from people who million and that stayed <;onstant during a grown another ten or fifteen percent in the do it in kind of mainstream filmmaking, if period when the Arts Endowment budget quality of applicants. It's much more sys- you wish; [to] people who do it in avant- went from around $15 million to $80 mil- garde, independent ... filmmaking. The lion. So we have had to operate with that FILM NOIR Film Institute is kind of going down the static general grant and scrape for what- IS BACK! river and trying to bring people on board ever additional private money we could from both sides and that goes back to our raise. [This] has made it difficult for us to The overwhelming demand for the founding when we had on our board do many of the things that people have November-December 1974 issue on academic people, motion picture industry suggested we might be doing. And we had Film Noir was such that we had to go people . . .. And that's still true today. to raise private money to match that, or a back to press. The second printing of THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS major part of it. Now we're working with this comprehensive and important re- the Public Media Panel [of the National examination is now available at our The AFI Board is a very effective group Endowment]. We'll have a moderate in- back-issue cost of $2.00. of people. I could go down the list one by crease for the coming year. I'm taking a • Students and Film Lovers, get to one and talk about who are the people on positive attitude toward working with it. To take one criticism out in front, that it them. We'll be able to make our case and know more about Film Noir. doesn't represent education or indepen- the funding that's necessary, or at least • Teachers, contact us for special bulk dent filmmakers of the non-theatrical side some of that funding, will be forthcom- of the film profession .... I think I can ing.. ..The detail budget review by the order rates. show you that it does represent that. Public Media Panel of AFI's budget is a rel- • Librarians, check your shelves to People see names that are unfamiliar to atively new process and so there are obvi- them .. . or represent a bad thing, that ous kinks that have to be worked out. make sure this once rare issue is still they're establishment types . AFI last year THE PUBLIC MEDIA PANEL AND there. raised $1.7 million of private money. Now, GREYSTONE • Bookstores, re-order direct for your when people think about that, that's part customers who got there too late. of the function of all of us who are involved Things we would like to do depend on in something like this. So much of the criti- the approval of the Public Media Panel. Lurking in the shadows of its pages are cism [of AFI suggests] we're just sort of sit- The Public Media Panel went to Greystone the following intriguing and informative ting back and taking money and spending [The Center for Advanced Film Studies] in articles: it. There's just an enormous, relentless ef- January and spent the day, and had a very fort to raise money to support the projects elaborate presentation on what the work is • Raymond Durgnafs Family Tree of Film of the Film Institute. For that you need the and how it's conducted. Now it is a project Nair cooperation of the people who are in- which has received the approval of the Public Media Panel and that's an important • Stephen Farber on Film Nair's Women sign of progress. They understand the en- • Alfred Appel Jr. on Fritz Lang's The terprise now and favor it and support it. And that is good . Woman in the Window MISTAKES AT GREYSTONE • Paul Jensen on Raymond Chandler • Mitchell S. Cohen on Film Noir's Villains We made mistakes in creating Grey- stone, I'm not saying it was all roses, but and Victims • Richard T Jameson on Film Nair today Enclose $2.00 per copy with your order in the envelope at the front of this issue -or write for bulk rates. 60 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1975
tematized in a good sense. The faculty is just have to look at the record of what POWER AND THE AFI more experienced, the n umber of seminars we've done and some people, if it is of con- When there is an organization, there are and participants is larger. Jan Kadar is cern, [their dislike] dates back to the time going to devote his en tire next year to we decided we'd start a conservatory for people who are unhappy with it. I would being the filmmaker in residence, working filmmakers. They thought it was a bad like to communicate the Film Institute in a full time at Greystone. It's growing and it's idea, and it was some kind of pipe dream way where enlarging numbers of people solid. of mine and all organized for my personal are pleased with it. To the ques tion THE BILL IN CONGRESS aggrandizement. ... I think that a person whether any central organization is bad who is an activist, who is responsible for an because it has power, I see things from an [The Bill, The Arts, Humanities and Cul- activist viewpoint, and I believe you have tural Afffiirs Act of 1975; 51800 and HR institution, is going to engender some ap- to have organization. I don' t think there's 7216, would, among other things, earmark proval and engender some criticism . much power associated with the American four percent of the funds appropriated for Film Institute. I think there's more burden the Arts Endowment for the American I don't know these people [who dislike in trying to raise the money, and have [the Film Institute.] [The four percent item] is me] so it's hard for me to evaluate the Institute] make its way in a country that an initiative-thatcame-f.roR1-Congress. AFI depth of their feelings. I have to look upon does not have much regard for film among has not taken a position on it\"aR<li in the it that I have a responsibility in terms of the other arts. It's hard to get support for a process of passing it there would have to making things happen for the American film or a film institute in the government, be a whole series of details that would have Film Institute . That's the preservation of and so it's tough going. And I don't believe to be worked out. How the Endowment film, the cataloging of film, the training of there's a great deal of power associated would administer it would be up to the filmmakers, support for independent with that. Endowment. You have to understand the filmmakers, publications, and educational THEFUfURE legislative process. Somebody puts that in programs we conduct. My whole com- and then discussions begin to see if it's a mitment in the seven years I've been run- People do create antipathy in running good idea and if it is decided to be a good ning the Film Institute has been to get organizations . I'd like to create less. idea, how it would work. The Endow- those things done. Now I think you have . .. We've said that the American Film In- ment's asked us to discuss it with them . to take a look at the record and see whether stitute is interested in working with We've had some very preliminary discus- those things have been done, and if there's people. [We' ve said] people on our staff are sions. It could be anywhere from $2 to $3.6 been anything immoral or illegal that's available [who] care to do that. Maybe it's million.. . . I just don't know how they been done on the way. We've done those time [for you] to say, 'Let's take a positive would calculate a percentage. It's at a very things, we've done them legally, and I approach to it,' recognize that there are preliminary stage of discussion. think in many respects, we've done them limits to what the institution can do, those MR. STEVENS' REPUfATION well. Now if some people have been af- limits being its funding, and what our in- fronted by what we've chosen to do, or tentions are. [They are] both open and, I That's such an abstraction. Some people even by the fact that we've done it, I think think, sympathetic to what you want in favor what I do, and some people don't. I they represent the loyal opposition . film .r~' THE FOREMOST AUTHORITY ON Super Deluxe Gold Lined Labels FILM CARE AND REPAIR Only $2.00 SCRATCH REMOVAL. INSPECTION COMPLETE FILM REJUVENATION PEERLESS PROCESS FOR NEW FILM PROTECTION FILMTREAT INTERNATIONAL 730 SALEM ST. GLENDALE CA 91203.2131242-2 181 250 W64 ST • NEW YORK NY 10023. 21 21799-2 500 Monthly lists of scarce cinema Dr. John Leonard books & magazines sent 2545 Walnut Street airmail - $5 .00 yearly. Anywhere, California 94544 A. E. COX, 21 Cecil Road, Itchen, Southhampton S02 7HX, 500 GOLD liNED ENGLAND . RETURN ADDRESS LABELS . . all at most reasonable prices .\" Quick and easy way to put your Name and Return International Film Guide . address on letters, books, records, etc. Any Name, Address and Zip Code up to 4 lines beautifully printed featuring new recordings of complete classic film scores by such composers as Steiner with large Gold Strip. 500 labels only $2.00. Waxman, Herrmann, Friedhofer, Rozsa: available on a membership basis only. Send Dublin Valley Press, 11683 Betlen Drive, Dublin, Calif. this ad to P.O. Box 261, Calabasas, Ca. 91302 94566. for a free copy of Film Music Notebook. - FILM COMMENT 61
BOOKS himself. Some critics write about film, Fifties. Despite his influence on the others about film AND. Durgnat, in- New Left, his emphasis on the au- SEXUAL ALIENATION furiatingly, belongs to both categories. tonomy of literature left an ideological IN THE CINEMA But of all his books, Alienation is most void. After the glamorous student riots BY RAYMOND DURGNAT emphatically film AND; occasionally it's of 1968, this void remained to be filled Studio-Vista, London, 1974; AND film. I would have guessed that by radicalism, structuralism, semiology, hardcover £4.50; 320 pages; illustrations Durgnat was a disciple of Arnold and the raving Francophilia of Screen. REVIEWED BY GREG PALOKANE Hauser who had also become immersed in psychoanalysis.* Some English critics had already This lavishl y illustrated tome sits as begun throwing bridges across the gulf he avily on the mind as on the wrists. Durgnat's heavy interest in Film between literary interpretation and life. The author presents it as his sequel to AND should put him alongside the Christopher Caudwell's tragic death in- Eros in the Cinema . Like its predecessor, Marxists, at the opposite extreme from terrupted his attempt to combine a sci- it bears the marks of production prob- the New Criticism, whose concern entific impulse like the New Criticism lem s. It covers movies from about 1962 would be purely and strictly with Film with a sophisticated Marxism . His to 1972. as Film. Yet in the course of an inter- closest spiritual kin, George Orwell, view with Platinum years ago, Durgnat, adopted an essay style, not an analyti- As a sales package it strikes me as with his usual perversity, named the cal one. Raymond Williams, who came misconceived. No doubt the publishers New Criticism as the formative influ- somewhere between F. R . Leavis and expected that Durgnat's text would ence on his work-at which the blood- George Orwell, but to their left, related satisfy, or at least browbeat, the serious hound slumbering in every literary critic English literature and social history in reader. Meanwhile the pictures would pricks up his ears. Can we produce a four major books whose material re- attract swarms of nostalgia buffs and cultural composite of our mystery man? mained somewhat remote from con- soft-core aficionados. First we must look at some critical his- temporary cinema. They may have in- tory. fluenced Alan Lovell's book on In practice everything has gone documentary and Charles Barr's excel- wrong. There are too few pictures to The New Criticism is now fifty years lent study of Ealing Studios. turn browsers into buyers. Many of the old. It originated at Cambridge in the stills, like those from Losey or Germi Twenties. 1. A. Richards reacted against Durgnat's writing never evokes, or films, have no appeal to the nostalgia the gentlemanly dilettanlism and the acknowledges , Dr. Leavis. He comes trade. Some of the handful of hardcore gourmet aestheticism which had ruled closest to the New Criticism when he stills show Dr. Muehl's commune at the appreciation of literature in Britain. sets about teasing all the shreds of play, and they're likely to offend many He brought a scientific concern for ob- meaning that he can find in a scene or serious readers. The text couldn' t be jectivity to reading the words OR the more ill- suited for a picture book . a style. He does it not only to \"think- Playboy will never commission Durgnat. page. It very successfully defended litera- ers\" like Bufiuel and Hitchcock, but to ture's independence against the Marx- lyrical directors like Renoir and Fellini. He has always given the impression ist tendency to make it a subsection of When he converts lyrical moments into of being a loner. He has never mastered sociology. It rapidly became extremely philosophical arguments, his affinities the art of writing as if he's by the influential in the U .S .A. There, so its with the New Criticism couldn't be reader's side, thinking his thoughts younger critics aver, objectivity became clearer. The strongest influence on him along with him. He probably doesn't withdrawal from reality. The laboratory has to be William Empson. He's cer- realize such a tone is possible . He con- spirit became academic remoteness. tainly familiar with Empson's work, centrates on thinking the thoughts Under the influence of Southern agra- since he quotes Empson's judgment on which his readers have tried to avoid rians, the New Criticism became ur- Grierson in A Mirror for England. thinking, because they must lead to bane, elitist, and conservative. trouble. Some writers are guides, others Throughout his circuitous career, from are adversaries. Durgnat belongs to the In Britain, however, the New Criti- Japan and back to England, Empson latter persuasion. He generally forfeits cism was taken up by F. R. Leavis . remained faithful to another side of the what, in the end, is most persuasive: Like Richards , he stressed the text as New Criticism . Or perhaps he invented our affection. He may score points an autonomous self-explanatory whole. it. At any rate, its scientific objectivity against us, but he's always out there, But he welded this stress to the non- could have led it into his irreverence working on us from the other side of conformist conscience, and so to a toward objectivity considered as a radi- the page. He remains evasive even whole range of moral and social con- cal and militant independence . Emp- when he tries to be personal. His pen- cerns. He made literature central to son's battles with C. S . Lewis and the chant for switching from one style to humanism . Leavis remained a Liberal, Christian apologists over the meanings another only adds to his remoteness . but his influence was enormous on the in Milton and the morality of Milton's He's something of a mystery man, and New Left, as well as on Robin Wood, God betray a forceful humanist urge . not an altogether friendly one. Charles Barr, and the Canadian Peter He's a partisan. And he ventures away Harcourt. All have made their debt to from the text in itself to other sciences: His welter of styles makes it obvious Dr. Leavis quite clear. moral theology and psychoanalysis. why he's so diffident about the auteur theory. He likes auteurs who are also For Dr. Leavis, the microscopic The gap between text analysis and chameleons, probably because he's one analysis of a text was never an end in life continues to bedevil English film itself. His bent was moral rather than criticism. Robin Wood falls back on analytical. Often enough he asserted Leavis's fundamentalism. Movie, which that a text's quality and meanings were sometimes approaches the bland con- self-evident, even where the New Criti- servative version of the New Criticism, cism would have showed exactly the dismissed criticism of a director's opposite. He was uninterested in philosophy as \"impertinent.\" Peter Har- foreign literature, which was his right. court discusses his six European direc- But his influence strengthened the tors finely but in the end seems over- parochialism of English thought in the reluctant to resolve their ambiguities. He fears, and probably rightly, that a •Arnold Hauser is the a uthor of a four-volume Social His- definite answer will blunt our sen- tory of Art, for w hich he was much adm ired by Adorno sibilities to the living texture of the film. and the Frankfurt School.-Ed . 62 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1975 ·
For words on the page often are open- psychoanalysis . In so doing he moves sider a whole genre which we used to laugh at and scorn as \"weepies.\" ended. Harcourt's respect for this is an alongside thinkers in other disciplines, Through the glass darkly of Alienation , abstentionist version of the New Criti- including Jacques Lacan and Charles Durgnat looks like something of a de- bauched and battered uncle to the bright cism. He remains almost the only living Rycroft in psychoanalysis itself. The young American girls . He sees THE PUMPKIN EATER as the story of a woman' s critic never to have been booby-trapped special tensions of Alienation arise from destruction by complacent male chauvinism. He shares Mss. Haskell and by unworthy material. the interpla y of textual ambiguities and Rosen's concern with mainstream middle-class experience. This concern ex- Similar uncertainties permeate Ameri- radical alternatives. Many readers will plains his almost violently unfashionable choice of movies . Would you believe MAR- can criticism . Mandarin liberals grandly find them merel y fuss y, or po sitively TYRS OF LOVE, REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, PETULIA, and De Sica's Sophia Loren appeal to the superiority of their own exhausting. Other readers will find period? tastes. Pauline Kael's irreverent com- them exhilarating, or recognize the In his final chapters, he turns to the Six- ties underground. He dismisses Warhol, mon sense doesn't quite disguise the spirit of current culture shock. but admires Jack Smith, Ron Rice, and Kenneth Anger. To discriminate between moral perspectives of a social worker In his tenser, more pedantic way, them he uses the same moral and esthetic criteria which he brings to Fuller, Losey, (albeit an increasingly permissive one) . Durgnat shares Harcourt's concern for Pasolini, and Eric Rohmer. If the book' s syntheSiS remains uncompleted, and most In Sub-Stance as in Jump-Cut, the young open-endedness. But he comes very woundingly on the level of its style, the sensitivity and sullen violence of its scan the horizons in the hope that help much closer to the structuralists. In *thought make it Durgnat's most disturbing is on its way, from linguistics, semiol- Films and Feelings he had reduced THIS book. ogy, anthropology, or any other -ology. ISLAND EARTH to one controlling Books Durgnat tries to stay with the New metaphor, with a heavy political slant. Ci nema-TV-Old PhotograQhy CatalogCinema-8 $1.00 Criticism while reaching out to radical This anticipated Cahiers ' analysis of Hampton Books developments in social history and YOUNG MR . LINCOLN . Alienation includes Dept. FC psychoanalysis . Small wonder, then, several analyses in the same style. Rte. 1, Box 76 Newberry, S. Carolina 29108 that the style of Alienation groans under In other places, however, he has at- Because ... the strain of all our culture shocks . He tacked the French school for simplifying Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, even makes heavy weather of common- content. In a series of articles entitled Im- Thierry Kuntzel, Michel Marie, Jacques Aumont, Pierre Baudry and places . But when everything is called ages of the Mind, he took issue with Hegel- others are working in Paris, where they are transforming and expanding film into question, who knows what can be ian, and therefore Marxist, concept of the study through their exploration of the interrelationships among semiology, taken for granted? dialectic as a matter of two opposites. In psychoanalysis, history, aesthetics and sociology. The longest passage in Alienation is the Hitchcock book, he indulges in little American and Canadian students have devoted to the FELLINI SATYRICON. cadenzas of theory. They may not always the opportunity to work closely in small, intensive workshops with these Durgnat's treatment of the Oenothea be completely relevant to the matter in leading film scholars at the Centre d'Etudes Universitaires Americain du plot illustrates his peculiar mixture of hand, but he wants to upset the way the Cinema, which offers them a carefully designed program that analyzes film radicalism and originality. The beautiful system-builders make \"objective\" imply and its relation to the other arts. Courses and seminars are held at the Oenothea humiliates an elderly magi- \"without ambiguity.\" University of Paris III and other film departments of the university, and the cian, who takes his revenge by dousing Sometimes he comes very near to using program takes full advantage of the splendid facilities Paris has to offer the all the cooking fires in her village . He a post-structuralist approach, like Gilles student of film. leaves one: a magic flame springing up Deleuze. Deleuze's L'Anti-Oedipe looks to The program is open to advanced undergraduates and graduates profi- beneath Oenothea's legs . Durgnat in- be the next Paris craze, rivaling Levi- cient in French, with a specific inter- est in theory. Dates are September terprets it in the light of psychoanalysis. Strauss and Barthes. He comes very near 1976-June 1977. For details, write: Mary Milton, ClEE, 777 U.N. Plaza, A father-figure punishes female narcis- an atomic view of the mind, seeing it as a New York, NY 10017. sism by forcing the mother to share her \"body without organs. \" It improvises its body with all her children. Then he own temporary, partial structures on an ad suggests that it's one of the ways in hoc basis, depending on stimuli from in- which a woman' s unconscious looks on side and outside alike . the Oedipus complex. Freud did call it Post-structuralist theory isn' t yet com- a complex , which suggests several ways pletely formulated, so far as I know. When of looking at it. But one aspect of the Durgnat turned to montage in Images of the complex was allowed to rout all others: Mind, he suggested that the dialectic em- Freud's Just-So Story centering on the phasis on pairs was merely formalist. fraternal horde conspiring to kill the Syntheses operated in every direction be- father. tween as many factors as happened to When Durgnat proposes Fellini's ver- have interacted. This looks rather like a sion as equally valid, he' s virtually post-structuralist position. Durgnat could using film to rethink orthodox have got to it by crossing the dialectic sense psychoanalysis. He goes on to suggest of interchange with the unfashionable that the story is matriarchal, radical, atomic theory which Bertrand Russell and egalitarian, because the Oedipus elaborated in his Inquiry into Meaning of complex is resolved by a metaphor that Truth . However, Eros and Alienation both presents children as a community' s quote Georges Bataille, a Hegelian-cum- other families . This contrasts with the Surrealist much prized by late and post- conservative-hierarchic bias of Freud's structuralists. narrative. Durgnat's book looks really lumbering Elsewhere Durgnat's prose style is and old hat if you set it alongside a nimble enough. But here it labors under younger crop of writers on film sex. He the weight of double functions. It's hardly mentions Women's Lib, Gay Lib (or doubtful whether film criticism is a even hardcore porn). Yet Molly Haskell, workable framework for such matters. Joan Mellen, and Marjorie Rosen have But it's also doubtful whether it can do briskly set about sweeping away all the any sort of job while remaining aloof macho hang-ups infesting film criticism. from them. Radical in some ways, they also had the Durgnat goes the whole hog, using gritty integrity to resist fashion and estab- movies to further his rethinking of lished wit. They persuaded us all to recon- FILM COMMENT 63
ROUND-UP: FILM journals are listed) . Although 1930-1971 are quickly ascertaining directors of films like BIBLIOGRAPHIES the inclusive dates, in fact only Sight and SHOWOOWN FOR ZATOlOiI (Kenji Misumi) or Sound antedates 1945, so this forty-year NUN AT THE CROSSROADS Gulio Buchs). More By Richard Koszarski claim is somewhat misleading. The one importantly, Bowles also provides reviews surprising entry here is Th e Village Voice, of 1225 film books, about the same number Bibliographic tools for film scholarship, not covered by any of the other indices and of titles as Batty, but again, with more re- long notoriously sketchy, have recently quite useful in tracking down the work of views for each title (e.g. thirteen on Parade's been supplemented by a number of com- Andrew Sarris and others of the early Gone By as against nine ljsted by Batty). peting (and sometimes complementary) American auteur school (articles by Jonas Salem's main strength lies with titles that periodical indices. None of the volumes Mekas seem to have been listed more were never covered by \"serious\" discussed below does the entire job itself, selectively) . Batty divides the work into magazines, and he offers eleven reviews of however, and even the least of them con- three sections, the first dealing with indi- TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT while Bowles can't tains some unique feature . Consequently, vidual film titles and a second with \"film dig up a single line among all his one has to consult all to cover the field, and subjects,\" an alphabetized potpourri specialized journals. As a bare checkhst even then much valuable information is which leaps from Borden Chase to Chase Salem requires no index, but Bowles is left out. For example, too many worth- Sequences without batting an eyelash. Al- well indexed by director, author and while journals have been completely though these are briefly annotated the (book) reviewer. Unfortunately, Salem is avoided by the academics compiling these value of the annotations is questionable. not spare enough to be free of some ag- listings, for what in some other field would For example, in 1960 Sight and Sound ran an gravating inconsistencies seemingly en- be called a \"little magazine\" is in film circles obvious spoof article on a fictitious New demic to Scarecrow Press. In the main a \"fanzine.\" So you won' t find a key to Film Wave filmmaker named Puerilescu; not these are problems of cross-referencing Fan Monthly here, or Screen Facts or Photon, only is he listed here, but cross-indexed which tighter editing could have elimi- despite the fact that these magazines have under the name of his \"film,\" DEATH OF A nated. THEY UVE BY NIGHT, TWISTED ROAD, and often published material whose scholar- GIRL. None of the other indices fell into this YOUR RED WAGON (all the same Nicholas Ray ship should be the envy of some of their obvious trap . The third section is the most more visible cousins. And while everyone useful, a fifty-page index of book reviews film) are listed in three separate places, but has been busy indexing magazines, a key that enables us to get at a relatively untap- cross-referenced. Fine. On the other hand, to information stuffed into the recent tor- ped critical and historical fode. But even 1HE PIT AND 1HE P£NDULUM, POEs ll'J..ES OF TER- rent of film books is s till unavailable this is not as useful as a similar segment in ROR, and 1HE PREMATIJRE BURIAL (three cIifrerent (Harold Leonard made a stab at this in the Bowles's index, and Th e Retrospective Index Roger Corman films) are apparently con- original Film Index of 1941). It is not difficult is the most lightweight of all the volumes sidered to be the same film, while POE' S to pull citations out of the Readers Guide reviewed here. TALES OF TERROR is considered as distinct and other standard works, but how long from TALES OF TERROR, which it is not. Fi- are we going to have to wait for an index to INDEX TO CRITICAL FILM REVIEWS. nally, Bowles is unique in including a Na- Variety, I thought as I paged through these Edited by Stephen E. Bowles (Burt tional Union List for the serials he covers, somewhat redundant volumes. Some Franklin, New York 1975) Two volumes, saving us a few steps to another set of vol- years ago I tried to compile an index of my hardcover $26.50; 782 pages. umes. Or does it? Could it be true that the own film periodical holdings, but after New York Public Library does not receive about two feet of index cards I quit in A GUIDE TO CRITICAL REVIEWS, Film Quarterly? exasperation. Now that job has largely PART IV: THE SCREENPLAY. Edited by been done, and several times over. But the James M. Salem (Scarecrow Press, THE CRITICAL INDEX. Edited by John field is still far from covered, and if any film Metuchen , N .J. 1971) Two volumes, and Lana Gerlach. (Teachers College bibliographers reading this are in need of hardcover $32.50; 1420 pages. Press, New York 1974) hardcover $15.00; the basis for a new grant proposal, the paperback $6.50; 726 pages. above suggestions are a good place to start. These two works are largely com- (In the following reviews our statement of plementary. Dealing with basically the This work was produced with the aid of the number of journals covered by each same time period (Bowles, 1930-72; Salem, computer technology, and here lie most of index often differs from the claim of the 1927-64) they each focus on film reviews its strengths and weaknesses. Misplaced editors. This is because a number of jour- alone to the exclusion of other subject citations and computerspeak grammar nals have gone through various incarna- categories. But Bowles deals with plague the entries, but this is our trade off tions during their careers, and some index twenty-nine selected film journals while for low cost: at $6.50 in paperback this is editors have attempted to pass off the Salem lists only non-specialized publica- the only index within the reach of students same magazine under two or three differ- tions dug out of the Readers Guide and and underpaid teachers and historians. ent titles as two or three different other general works. Thus, between the The index covers twenty-two specialized magazines, thus boosting the number of two one can find two dozen reviews of LA journals of the 1946-73 period, and so is their \"journals indexed.\" Our count cor- OOLCE VITA or DR. SfRANGELOVE. The Majority similar to Batty's work, but with the addi- rects such inflation.) will always be trom Salem, but these often tion of a few dead journals like Moviegoer. It include Senior Scholastic, National Parent- is unfortunately lacking many small British RETROSPECTIVE INDEX TO FILM Teach er, Good Hous ekeeping and other journals like Screen, Sequence and Th e Silent PERIODICALS, 1930-1971, Edited by sources of dubious value. Of course, Th e Picture, but does selectively index Amerit;nn Linda Batty. (Bowker, New York 1975) New Republic, Th e Nation, and other more Cinematographer, an invaluable source 1I\\- hardcover $24.50; 425 pages. serious journals are also listed, a prize credibly omitted by the more opulent being the Sunday feature reviews of the MacCannJPerry volume. Films in Review is Although not a FlAF project, this vol- New York Times -not included in the mas- also missing, apparently because it has its ume is intended to be uniform with the sive collection of Tim es daily reviews . own cumulative index-but logic like this annual FIAF periodical index, also pub- Salem's listings are more of a checklist, forces the user to seek out more and more lis hed by Bowker, and the information lacking even author information. Bowles volumes and seems self-defeating. Some provided in the citations is similar. But provides author and approximate length have complained about the difficulty of only fifteen journals are covered here (the of review, plus the director of the film reading the computer print-outs, but it is smallest number of any of the indices re- (Batty also lists directors, but of fewer the computer syntax which bothers me. viewed) limiting the volume to those films) a feature which makes this an inter- We have biographical listings on a man (or periodicals most likely to be currently re- national supplement to Leonard Maltin for woman?) named Willis, but even though ceived by American libraries (no dead 64 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1975
the entry is annotated there is no way of here. A glance at the list of magazines in- written about, say, CITIZEN KANE, while the knowing if this is Gordon Willis, Ted dexed would indicate Cinema Arts and Willis, Jack Willis, or whoever; no first Cinema Quarterly to be among the missing, Gerlachs can quickly give us seven cita- names are used! While I generally find this yet they do seem to tum up on the inside tions culled from their much smaller total volume very handy and easy to use, with a (indeed Cinema Quarterly citations are ab- number of listings. more accessible subject heading system breviated as CQ, but there is no accounting than Batty or MacCann/Perry, it does seem for these initials in the key to abbreviations That a volume of such ambition-and to be a bit too selectively assembled. Al- -it has been completely overlooked, and ultimately, such value-should be though FILM COMMENT is said to be com- one must guess their identity). MacCann hamstrung by impossible subject headings and Perry have purposely avoided \"strictly and crippled by the lack of a proper index pletely covered, such important pieces as technical subjects,\" book reviews, and film is unconscionable. The material is in here William K. Everson on A WOMAN OF PARIS reviews (they do include \"analyses\" of somewhere, and for this reason The New and Raymond Durgnat on King Vidor are films, but when a review turns into an Film Index deserves a place on library not to be found here. Despite this, its low analysis is not explained). Consequently it shelves-but the money spent on the ad- cost and relative ease of handling make is almost impossible to find something dition of extraneous illustration might this the only volume suitable for most have better been devoted to devising a home libraries. It is indexed by author and film title, and appendices include useful workable system of locating information.•y. guides to supplementary material and computer technology, as well as an \"essay on criticism\" which seems completely be- side the point in a reference book. THE NEW FILM INDEX. Edited by \"A brilliant book about artists who happen to be film writers Richard Dyer MacCann and Edward S. .... sharp, witty, cynical and Perry (Dutton, New York, 1975) hardcover sensitive\" $35.00; 522 pages. -Bulletin of the Academy of 771e New Film Index is the big kid on the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences block, not only in size, number of entries and journals covered, but in cost as well, Screenwriters the $35 price tag making it almost of neces- in the American Cinema sity a library tool only. This is doubly un- fortunate, since it is the only index I find Richard Corliss/Preface by Andrew Sarris congenial to browsing, and the book seems more easy chair reading than refer- At good bookstores, $4.95 ence room stuff. Indeed, that's part of the problem here; while paging through 7b (4) and don't forget Violence in Film [See also 3b(2), 4k(2), 4k(10).] one soaks up much interesting de- From Reverence to Rape tail, but retrieving specifically required in- formation is almost impossible. The byzan- The Treatment of Women In the Movies tine subject headings resist decipherment and a look in the back of the book is no help Molly Haskell at all, since for all effective purposes this book has no index! One can find the authors Illustrated with photographs of articles (including such odd sports as At good bookstores, $3.95 Andre Brazin and John Kniper!) but no film titles, directors, or anything else. I'm sure PENGUIN BOOKS INC the editors would feel that their subject heading system obviates this, but in fact I am unable to locate material here without a brain-teasing search, a fact which mater- ially cuts the value of the whole work, no matter how many entries it has. The main strength, of course, lies in the depth of the material covered. Blanket coverage of Readers Guide, Art Index and Humanities Index has been supplemented with that of thirty-five specialized journals, including such titles as Motion, Sequence, Moviegoer, Image, Screen , Cinema Studies, Film, Th e Si- lent Picture and numerous others generally not covered elsewhere. Among those ap- parently not to be found are American Cinematographer (although Action! is in- cluded) Stage, Cinema Progress, New Theatre and Film, Seventh Art and Cinemages (the lat- ter two covered by the Gerlachs), all de- serving of coverage in a volume of this scope. I say \"apparently\" since it is difficult to tell what journals actually are covered FILM COMMENT 65
KULESHOV ON FILM with nostalgic pleas for its regrouping . Meyerhold' s system of biomechanical SELECTED, TRANSLATED, AND Appearing at a moment when the first training exercises and points to their com- EDITED WITH AN INTRODUC- TION BY RONALD LEVACO. ominous signs of Thermidorian reaction mon source in Delsart's writings . It is also University of California Press, Ber- were beginning to dim the future of Soviet interesting to consider how the theatrical keley, 1975; hardcover $10 .00; 226 pages; bibliography, filmography, in- cinema, the book is also partly a defense etudes Kuleshov was forced to devise be- dex. and partly an apology for past achieve- cause of the lack of film stock parallel ·and REVIEWED BY STUART LIEBMAN ments which anticipate the too familiar in some cases predict contemporary per- \"Consider [the 'bricoleur' ] at work and excited by his project. His first practical litany of all Soviet filmmakers in the dec- formances in Meyerhold's workshop . Sig- step is retrospective. He has to tum back to an already existent set made up of tools ades of Socialist realism's supremacy. nificantly, however, Kuleshov resisted the and materials, to consider or reconsider what it contains, and, finally and above all, It had been Kuleshov's original aspira- importation of esthetic strategies from to engage in a sort of dialogue with it and, before choosing between them, to index tion to elevate cinematography into a prac- other art forms, even those he had prac- the possible answers which the whole set can offer to his problem.\"l Revolutionary tical science and to create a filmic style of ticed himself, which would in any way periods augur the appearance of the mod- ern bricoleur-mythmaker as well as the rad- greater subtlety and impact. Considered to undermine the specificity of the cinema ical innovator. Both are formalists during a time when old forms and methods are be- be explosive \"Futurist\" suggestions in the (hence his summary criticisms of theatrical coming inadequate and each in a different way is a Janus-faced bridge between past conservative Russian studios of1916-17, his elements in STRIKE) . As has already been and future . Yet rarely are the two historical types joined in a single person. The earliest proposals to break down dramatic suggested, that specificity could be re- bricoleur's essential task is to survey and codify the past, soliciting from his retro- scenes into short multiple-shot phrases ac- duced to several essentials: cinematic per- spective cataloging a foundation to ac- commodate the new. The innovator is tually were mere recapitulations and for- formances in close-up, the \"metric net,\" chiefly concerned with exploiting and ex- tending new discoveries . malizations of current American montage, and a circumscribed notion of The most important revolution affecting practice-above all that of Griffith. In the · psychological narrative which served as film history has been, of course, the Bol- shevik assumption of power in Russia in turbulent period of the Bolshevik takeover the ultimate limit and justification for the 1917, and Lev Kuleshov was simultane- ously the cinema's principal bricoleur and and the civil war, however, his dynamic construction of each shot and sequence. its first important innovator. Despite the accessibility of his masterwork BY THE LAW model of cinematic organization quickly Such commitments also led Kuleshov to (1926), Kuleshov has been more of a rumor than a force in American film studies dur- assumed a role as a figural manifestation of reject reflections on or reminders of the ing the intervening half century. His theories, especially his accounts of decisive the revolutionary upheaval itself. In vari- filmmaking process in a film, reflections early experiments and teaching methods, have been known only second hand ous transformations, this idea of montage that were readily acknowledged by the through the writings of his illustrious pupils Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Ronald as revolutionary praxis wa§ to serve as a more resolute modernists and Marxists Levaco's translations now permit a belated but direct confrontation with Kuleshov's polemical rallying point for all significant Eisenstein and Vertov. seminal oeuvre. thinking about film in the Soviet silent Practical experience in propaganda pro- More a practical handbook filled with tips and prescriptions than a work of period. duction and the mixing of documentary theory, Art of the Cinema is the principal text induded and provides a good introduction The theories presented in Art of the and acted footage (ON THE RED FRONT, 1920) to Kuleshov's thought. Published in 1929 Cinema clearly reflect their origin in the few had expanded Kuleshov's initial concern after the appearance of major articles by Vertov, Eisenstein, and Pudovkin, the simple but fundamental principles with a more flexible deployment of shots book's perspective now seems backward- looking, a summation of a decade of work Kuleshov had deduced from American into an incisive theory of montage effects and teaching, rather than the useful primer its author hoped it would become. Thus, films, principles which had been exploited and their consequences for filmic significa- two years after the coming of sound, Kuleshov completely ignores the pos- and surpassed during the decade preced- tion. In his own words, \"If one has an sibilities of sound (certainly because of his lack of experience with its use) and fills the ing publication. Much as in Epstein's early idea-phrase, a fragment of the story, a link pages instead with an anecdotal history of the disbanded Kuleshov collective mixed essays from 1920-21, the pivot of this dus- in the entire dramatic chain, then this idea 'Claude Levi-Strauss, Th e Savage Mind . ter of concepts was the close-up, whose is expressed, laid out in shot-signs, like ramifications were broad and immediate. bricks ... shots, like conventionalized The dose-up's analytical intensity neces- meanings, like the ideograms in Chinese sarily eliminated all \"theatrical\" artifices of writing, produce images and concepts. gesture, makeup and decor from filmic The montage of shots is the construction of construction. The dose-up pointed as well whole phrases. Content is derived from to a novel conception of film acting as a shots .... The director expresses the con- form of labor, an idea later radicalized by ception of the scenarist by montage of shot Eisenstein and Vertov in their notions of signs.\" (Art of the Cinema, p. 91.) Driving a typage and cinema-eye documentary. Ges- wedge between a story and its filmic narra- tures were to be considered as precisely de- tion , Kuleshov's notion of montage fined tasks limited in scope and duration dynamized the creation of meaning in and which were to exploit natural physical by the edited sequence. Such a conception capabilities. A cinematic performance was implied the essential semantic instability of to be constituted by the addition of a series the cinematic image which was strikingly of such acts to each other. demonstrated if not proved in the well- At least from 1920, the year in which he known Mozhukin experiment (although first assumed what was to be a life-long Kuleshov claims that original proofs had role as a teacher, Kuleshov also insisted been achieved as early as 1916-17 in tests that performances be rigorously organized with the matinee idol Polonsky). From within the frame by means of a geomet- these seminal premises it was but a short ricized plan of mise-en-scene. This \"metric step to their radicalization in creating artifi- net\" conception signals Kuleshov's persis- cial landscapes and composite women tent concern with the crucial articulative (both also constructed independently by dialectic in the shot of narrative actions and Vertov's collective), to notions of montage the illusionary three-dimensional space in as a method for social engineering, and ul- which they occur. The rationalization of timately to Eisenstein's erection of \"mon- spatial relationships and the anti- tage as conflict,\" the concept he dialecti- psychological performance strategies were cally opposed to Kuleshov's \"brick by all finally directed toward the shot's narra- brick\" ideas, as a grand metaphor for the tive darity, logic, and impact. epistemological process itself. Kuleshov's performance theories im- Our awareness of what was to emerge mediately recall similar ideas in CONTINUED ON PAGE 68 66 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1975
G£HE FILMeOERS eOMPANIONS . Just published in paperback! CINEMA BOREALIS: Ingmar Bergman and the Swedish Ethos THE FlLMGOERS COMPANION: Fourth Edition Vernon Young Leslie Halliwell Revised and expanded to include a complete film- by-film analysis through SCENES FROM A The first paperback printing of the revised, MARRIAGE. Vernon Young provides a detailed expanded and enlarged fourth edition. A complete critique of the beliefs and disbeliefs upon which one volume encyclopedic reference guide to the art director Bergman's work is based. Stills, photo-. and craft of cinema with over 10,000 alphabetized graphs, filmography, bibliography, index. $4.95,m entries about films , directors, writers, composers, Canada $5.45. actors, cameramen, designers, and technical terms. Emphasis on American and British films . Foreword Two New Additions to the by Alfred Hitchcock . Now for the first time over 600 Film Classics Library Series illustrations including film stills and posters . $6.95. Edited by Richard Anobile Coming in March: Buster Keaton's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN: THE GENERAL The Biography of the Greatest Film of all Time Keaton's original comedy-adventure story with a train as co-hero. The complete 1927 film is Edited by Herbert Marshall, official English reconstructed in over 1,800 frame blowups translator of Sergei Eisenstein's work including all the original title cards. $5.95, in This collection of over 100 articles covers every Canada $6.45. aspect of the conception, reception, and inter- national criticism of Sergei Eisenstein's film Rouben Mamoulian's classic. It includes the first English translation of the 1965 Soviet text BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, DR_ JEKYLL & MR. HYDE edited by Naum Kleiman and K.B. Levinia, the anthology that Eisenstein worked on and wanted Mamoulian's 1931 version with Frederic March in published as early as 1935. Abundantly illustrated his Academy Award winning performance. Over with film stills. $7.95. 1,500 frame blowups coupled with every word of the soundtrack. $5.95, in Canada $6.45. HORRORS! FROM SCREEN TO SCREAM Other film books in the series: An Encyclopedic Guide to Horror and Fantasy Films JamesVJhales FRANKENSTEIN, John Huston 's MALTESE FALCON, Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO, MichaelCurtiz' CASABLANCA, John Ford's Ed Naha STAGECOACH, Ernst Lu bitsch's NINOTCHKA. The first comprehensive sourcebook on the horror/ HORRAY FOR CAPTAIN SPAULDING! fantasy genre. Beautifully illustrated with hundreds Verbal and Visual Gems from of stills this title offers information on the films , ANIMAL CRACKERS actors,'directors, and production people from Edison's 1910 one-reel version of FRANKENSTEIN Edited by Richard Anobile to the present. 8Yz\" x 11\" format. $4.95, in Canada $5.45. A new addition to the Avon Film Comedy Library. The funniest scenes from the Marx Brothers' 1930 classic are recreated here in frame blowups coupled with dialogue. $4.95, in Canada $5.45. Other books in the series include Anobile's WHY A DUCK?, A FLASK OF FIELDS, and WHO'S ON FIRST. For a complete list of Avon titles write to: I~AVOM Education Departme nt, Box F, 959 8th Avenue, New York, New York 10019
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 66 L.A.-CONTINUED FROM PAGE 2 films that are mainly trivial, and even at fear that they won't keep their jobs if they best deeply flawed? Every critic has oc- from Kuleshov's writings and teaching is, don't resort to a little exaggeration. I'm not casional doubts about the value of his pro- in fact, the chief obstacle in reconsidering talking about pressure from advertisers, fession; writing extravagant reviews that his contribution today. His professed de- which has relatively little influence today. I compare a filmmaker to Whitman or sire to establish Soviet cinematography on Simply mean that critics are afraid no one Faulkner, Joyce or Mozart is one way of a par with the American has lost its will read them if they don't take an ex- silencing those doubts. Movies are not get- urgency with the devaluation of the treme position. The only way they can be- ting better. On the contrary, 1975 is the American standard. The advent of his come celebrities is to oversell or overkill. worst year for commercial American pupils into production and publication They suspect that if they write reserved, movies that I can remember. The critics only highlights Kuleshov's failure to ex- tentative reviews, they won't be able to aren't giving any sense of what is wrong tend his initial insights and to provide compete with the critics who write more with American movies; their cheerful, ex- them with substantive support in high-powered prose. Critics may not be travagant reviews are appallingly hollow. psychological theory or materialist fully conscious of this pressure when they philosophy. It was precisely the marshal- write, but their insecurity about their jobs I myself have been guilty of overpraising ling of such support in the arts, psycholo- encourages them to temper their reserva- movies, and I'm sure I will commit the gy, and linguistics that enabled Eisenstein tions and continue writing in bold face crime again. Every critic worth reading has to dismiss Kuleshov's montage ideas in the type. a few idiosyncratic enthusiasms. The prob- very year of Art af the Cinema' s publication. lem arises when hyperbole begins to be- Their continued susceptibility to theoreti- It is also possible that critics want to con- come the critic's normal style of writing. cal and political attack eventually rendered vince themselves of the importance of their Right now it is necessary to lower the them anachronistic and chiefly serviceable work; they overpraise films in order to in- temperature of critical prose. That is the as academic instruction vehicles. It is even flate themselves. Could they admit that only hope for sustaining a meaningful questionable to what extend his proposals they are spending their lives reviewing dialogue on film.~· from the mid-1930s for the design of a re- hearsal theater (co-authored with Eisens- Roll your own. tein, then his colleague at the VGIK) and for organizing the rhythm of performance MOVIE MAKING is the_place to begin, a primer in in the shot are his own. It is difficult not to filmmaking-in both Super 8 and 16mm formats- discern in them echoes of Eisenstein's forthe intelligent adult. In simple step-by-step youthful theatrical production experiences process the authors take you through the art of film as well as the \"mise-en -shat\" concepts (writing a treatment, a storyboard, a script, the Eisenstein was currently teaching in his problems of continuity, directing, editing) and the own lectures. craft of film (the principles of photography, sound recording, lighting, lab procedures, animation, etc.) . I If the substance of Kuleshov's ideas re- With this book and a modest amount of vealed by these translated texts is only of equipment you will soon produce historical interest today, it would be wrong professional looking, artistically to underestimate their importance for film satisfying films. history. Kuleshov's attention to filmic con- struction transformed thinking and writ- MOVIE ing about film from pragmatic and critical MAKING modes to the level of theoretical reflection. As the father of film theory, he was the first A Guide to Film Production to draw theoretical conclusions from his- torical cinematic examples, and the first to SUMNER GLiMCHER propose, however primitively, the idea of a cinematic grammar akin to articulative sys- and tems of language for which \"content\" prac- tically ceased to exist. Lastly, the availabil- WARREN JOHNSON ity of his writings to English-speaking au- Illustrated $9.95 diences fills a page in their knowledge of what now seems a near-mythical period in film history. They will usefully serve as a kind of measuring device for the road traveled by theorists such as Eisenstein and Vertov who will continue to solicit our critical attention. ~; ANNECY-CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8 da tions divided; there weren't even name-tags to encourage and enable people to meet each other. In sum, the Annecy festival fulfilled its purpose in presenting a survey of the year's animated films, from twenty-two countries. But unfortunately, this year's crop was somewhat less than grade-A, and that plus various external factors kept the Festival atmosphere from becoming terribly festive .$ 68 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1975
A ~hoto, fact, and fun-filled panorama of the movies' . {f ' } most exhilarating decade '.\", <' Sandwiched between the silent 20s and the somber 40s were Hollywood 's most scintil- ) lating, freewheeling years-the fabulous 30s. This was the heyday of such unique stars as Cagney, Lombard, Astaire, and Harlow .. .the golden era of such great directors as Lu- bitsch , Sternberg, Cukor, and Borzage .. .the decade of such immortal films as Grand Ho- te', It Happened One Night, Gone with the Wind, Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Wizard of Oz. Now there is a special new book devoted exclusively to those wonderful years . Brimming with more than 500 photos fully covering all the great films in color and black and white , THOSE FABULOUS MOVIE YEARS: THE 30s contains scores of infor- mative sections on the period's top stars, direc- tors, films, and genres. \"Movies are better than ever,\" boasted ads in the 50s, but for true film lovers nothing has ever matched the fabulous 30s - and no book has ever captured Hollywood's most glamorous, glittering decade better than this one. A Vineyard Book published by Barre. Size 8V2 \" x 11 \". author of The Image Makers. $14 .95 , now at yo ur boo kstore , or send check or money order to the distributors, Crown Publishers , 419 Park Ave . South , New York , N.Y. 10016 FILM COMMENT 69
LONDON -CONTINUED FROM PACE 4 ni's assistant' and all these other things SOUND that no one could possibly do in an entire tual infinity of editing possibilities that it lifetime, but who has done them. I think TRACKS revels in, all of which are brought to bear she was English, or else pretending to be on how we value and evaluate what we English. The BESTin ITALIAN FILM see and hear-a question which relates to MUSIC RECORDS are now Welles' rhetoric no less than the forgeries \"We went to Bob's house in Nashville of Clifford Irving and Elmyr de Hory (not for a meeting. We thought it was maybe for available DIRECTfrom to mention the rumblings of film critics and a reading, so we all brought our script&-I LONDON 'S LEADING DEALER other \"experts\" ). By continually under- was shaking, I was so nervous-and he mining and displacing the illusionist trap- said, 'Okay, you can throwaway your ORDERS processed and pings of his own arguments, Welles is able script if you want. If you want to keep DISPATCHED within 5 DAYS to exercise his intelligence on matters great them and stick to the dialogue, you stick to and small until it becomes a disembodied it. The only thing I'm going to tell you is of receipt of order presence of its own, weaving through a that none of you can go wrong-the only mosaic of image and sound like a flighty person who can go wrong is me, because ALL records BRAND NEW and moth that refuses to be pinned into place; you're all acting out parts which are basi- at EXTREMELY FAIR PRICES in keeping with the darker strategies of cally yourselves. So don't come and ask Arkadin, it remains perpetually six steps me how to react. . ..If you want to write The following titles and ahead of the game while simultaneously dialogue, fine; if you want to invent it, in- MANY MORE available NOW defying and cajoling us to keep the chase vent it.' and pursuit going. People who find the ENNIO MORRICONE RECORDS film 's ideas glib or banal are more than \"I was supposed to be a great snob about Fotogramma per Fotogramma likely taking them only at face value, i.e., places-not a name dropper but a place Great Italian Westerns as the \"argument\" itself, independent of Spasmo its expression, rather than as the remarka- dropper. Every place was supposed to re- Libera Amore Mio bl y energetic and multi-faceted demon- mind me of somewhere else. Bob started The Secret stration that accompanies its bald expo- that: in one scene that was improvised Un Film una Musica sition. with Lily Tomlin, when I was interviewing Grand Slam her, she asked me at one point, 'You have L'Anticristo Once again , it's a matter of process rather such nice jewelry, where does that come Fear In the City than postuJate--form as a verb and not as a from?' And I said, 'This is the symbol of the The Infernal Trio noun. Wisdom in its conventional forms is English empire, it's a Victorian jewel that generally thought of in terms of stasis, like was given to me'-which in fact was SPAGHETII WESTERN RECORDS Altman's American flag or a motto to hang true--'and these are turquoise that I got in Alive But Preferably Dead on the wall; Welles' version takes the form Lebanon.' Afterwards, Bob thought that They Call Me Trinity of tracing his postulate through a series of was so funny he said, 'I want you to do Trinity Is Still My Name sea changes so rapid that our acceptance that every time you have an interview- Di rty Story Of The West and our refusal of his ground rules are name a place where you ' ve been .' He Death Sentence being challenged at every juncture. Even if picked that out. I wouldn't have remem- Follow Me Boys you disagree, I hope you can see it, ride on bered it. The Kid From The West Welles' whirligig, and judge for yourself. Valdez The Half Breed \" .. .I hated seeing NASHVILLE in Eng- June 29, St. Cast, Britanny. While visit- ITALIAN RELEASED RECORDS ing the shooting of LE VENGEUR, the second land because my accent in it really isn't an Rota's Music To Fellini of four projected average-length features English accent at all. \" being directed by Jacques Rivette under Commissioner of Venice the general title ofLES FlLLES DU FEU, I have I cite a problem alluded to earlier. \" Some Garibaldi a chance to talk to Geraldine Chaplin---one people, including myself, have had some Zorro of the three lead actresses, along with Ber- trouble believing that a character like that Fury nadette Lafont and Kika Markham. Bear- would work for the BBe.\" ing the glad tidings of Newsweek's en- The Night Porter thusiastic feature story on NASHVILLE, She laughs. \" But Opal doesn 't work for which she is avid to read, I discover that the BBe. She couldn't possibly! That's one Dozens and Dozens of she saw the film herself at the same March of the things that was cut out---one of the Morricone-Nicolai- 19 screening in London: Altman had millions of things. There was a moment phoned her in Madrid to tell her about it, with Michael Murphy, when she said, Ferrio-Picionni- she flew all the way to London to see it, 'Well, uh, I'm, I'm not, I don't really, uh, Rota etc etc and wound up being asked to play Annie work for the BBC-I mean they're interested Oakley in Altman's BUFFALO BILL AND THE in the film I'm going to do, but I'm not SEND SELF ADDRESSED INDIANS, which starts shooting in Canada under contract with them. ENVELOPE for COMPLETE in August. \" . .. We used to see the rushes-two DETAILED LISTINGS Rather than attempt to reproduce our hours every day, and everyone came, had a drink, had a joint, and watched the SOUNDTRACK lengthy conversation here in extenso, I rushes. It was like seeing a movie because AND GENERAL thougI\"t it might be useful to transcribe just everyone would laugh and applaud. And 406 BROCKLEY ROAD a few of her comments as a sort of practical Bob would sit at the back like a great pasha LONDON SE4-England follow-up to some of my meanderings and Big Daddy and watch over above: everyone ...There were so many good things that got cut out! \" When I went into NASHVILLE, I already knew Joan Tewksbury, so she wrote the \"I've never worked on a happier film, character thinking a little bit about me, but ever. Karen Black was the only person also about a person Joan had met in who wasn't there the whole time because Nashville--this horrible snob who'd say, she was making another film , so she only 'Oh, that reminds me of when I was Felli- came for three or four days in August. After her three days she was crying, she didn't want to leave. And she said, 'Gee, Bob, you sure throw a good movie.' \"~t;, 70 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1975
CANNES-CONTINUED FROM PAGE 6 orifice left unfulfilled, no object considered COMING ATfRACTIONS Roger Greenspun on Fassbinder; James Jancso is reported to be preparing his too bulky or inappropriate to have sex McCourt on Douglas Sirk; Tony Rayn s on first erotic film (a Sadean romance). One Kenneth Anger; Robin Wood and George looks forward to its appearance at Cannes with. Morris on Leo McCarey; Jan Dawson in- next year, if only as a welcome respite from On the flip side of the record was Jean- terviews Marguerite Duras. the X-rated, Z-quality celluloid that is fast giving pornography a bad name. Probably Franr;:ois Davy's EXHIBITION, a two-hour If you haven 't seen the a third of the four hundred films shown documentary on the life of a sex-film ac- during the fortnight are hard-core sex tress. The film examines not only her pro- TH films . Long before film censorship was fessional but also her private life-in an at- abolished in France, local moviemakers tempt, no doubt, at adding a splash of col- International were dropping hard-core sequences into orful realism to an incredibly banal charac- Tournee their soft-core erotica. This year even Max ter. Ironically, she reveals more of her self of ftnimation Pecas, whose glossy and elegant DICfION- when performing as a sex object than ARY OF EROTICISM was a highlight of Can- when talking solemnly about her mother, you haven't seen a program of the finest animated nes '74, provided some crudely-done \"in- her boyfri end, her delinquent childhood films from all over the world serts\" to be added to foreign versions of his (everything but her politics!). The film 's la test effort, SEXU ALLY YOURS . Some climax is a ten-minute take of her mastur- OIAMOND HEIGHTS BOX 31348 member of the crew might at least have bating, a scene so jarring to the film's tone SAN FRANCISCO. CALIF. 94131 noticed that the hard-core \"stand-in\" was that one could justifiably question Davy's wearing bright red nail polish, while the intent, and ask where exhibition ends and PHONE : '''lSI 863· 6100 actress whose part she was taking did not. exploitation begins. Much more interesting, and provoca- Cannes itself is the meeting place of tive, was the French DEMOISELLES DE PEAGE (HIGHWAY HOOKERS), which was every- exhibitionism and voyeurism. Sitting in thing American sex films are not: light- the Franr;:ais Theatre, behind a glass parti- hearted without being frivolous , attrac- tion that separates smokers from tively photographed, varied but not freaky nonsmokers, one could see through the in its \"spedalty numbers,\" and cast with glass an arty sex film called DEHORS DE- performers who looked like beautiful DANS (OUTSIDE IN), in which actress Parisiennes rather than Seventh Avenue Catherine Jourdan expresses her political professionals. Other films seemed to be malaise by performing various bizarre sex- reaching, sometimes desperately, for the ual rituals on her body. But reflected in the outre. Armando Ferro's SENSATIONS was a glass was the thin, orange-haired Mlle. veritable three-ring sideshow, with no Jourdan herself, fondly gazing at her screen image-except on those occassions when she would attempt to silence a fellow moviegoer's derisive laughter. At Cannes, the window of industry is the mirror of art. ':;:, FISHERMEN IMPORTANT FILM REFERENCE BOOK BE READY TO CATCH THE BIG FISH! ANYTIME! ANYWHERE! Stephen Dwoskin is an internationally FILM IS recognized, independent film-maker. The International NEW FISHING ROD FITS IN YOUR POCKET! TELESCOPES TO A FULL 6 FEET! He discusses over 700 films and notes Free Cinema many experimental film-makers , You 'lI never miss a chance to fish again! 6 foot Fishing Rod Stephen Dwoskin telescopes down to only 15 'li' . Stows away in glove compart- among them Buiiuel , Cocteau, Truffaut, ment. back pack , travel bag or pocket. Great for casting, spin- Fassbinder, Warhol, Van der Beek, o ning or spin-cast use. Tubular glass rod, rugged . Positive grip Riefenstahl, Brakhage, Emshwiller, Ray cork handle Complete With it's own vi ny l case. You would ex- and Jim Smith. The \"underground\" film $14.95 pect to pay more than $25 .00 for thiS fantastic Rod-Yours for as a pioneering cinematic statement, a only personal creative expression. FILM IS Illustrated provides a unique and invaluable refer- 99~ ence work for all those interested in the frontiers of film consciousness. introductory offer l Please send _ _ _ _ _ copies of FILM IS Mail orders Approved by Name ________________________ add $2 .00 Dr. Trikie- Address _ __ ______________ for tax and Used on his City _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ postage big fishing State _ _ ____ _ _ _ _ Zip____ expedition! Please add 75¢ postage plus tax where applica- L. D. PARSONS ble. Enclosed is my check or money order for _ _ 18592 MADISON AVENUE The Overlook Press CASTRO VALLEY, CALIF. PO. Box 58 Dept. Fe Woodstock, New York 12498 94546 FILM COMMENT 71
BACK The Washington National Student Film Gene S. Weiss, University of Maryland, PAGE Festival, sponsored by the University of College Park, Maryland 20742. Maryland and the AFI, will honor student prize winners for the fifth straight year on The tenth annual film festival, Hemis- November 22, 1975. A selection of entries film '76, will take place in San Antonio, will be aired on PBS as part of a series de- Texas on February 9, 10, and 11,1976. Dead- voted to the festival. Deadline is line for entries is January 28. For further in- November 1. For applications, contact: formation, contact: IFACS, 2700 Cincinnati Avenue, San AntorUo, Texas 78284.t1;· The Definitive Film Bookshop is....... The American Film Institute will make The Motion Picture Book'hop at the National Film Theatre. South Bank London SEI8XT Tel , 01918351 7 $300,000 available in filmmaking grants in January 1976 under its Independent UK DI STRIB UTOR OF : AFTERIMAGE.THE VELV ET L1GHTTRAP. TAKEONE. CINEASTE, WOMEN AND FILM Filmmaker Program. Applications may be obtained from: Independent Filmmaker WORLD WIDE MAIL ORDER SERVICE Program E, American Film Institute, 501 Doheny Road, Beverly Hills, California CATALOGUE ON REQUEST 90210. Scenes From CONTRIBUTORS A Marriage ~ry Corliss is in charge of the Film SAlYAJIT RAYS Stills Archive at the Museum of Modern Art. Renee Epstein is a Los Angeles-based distant free-lance. Patricia Erens has written for thunder The Velvet Light Trap. Tag Gallagher, who is completing a study of John Ford's films, Now available in 16 mm from has written for Sight and Sound, The Village Voice, and Artforum . William Johnson is Cinema 5 • 16 mm the New York editor of Film Quarterly. Michael Kerbel teaches film at the Univer- 595 Madison Avenue. New York 10022 sity of Bridgeport, and is the author of (212) 421-5555 Henry Fonda in the Pyramid series. Richard Koszarski co-authored the article on Stroheim's WALKING DOWN BROADWAY in the May-June FILM COMMEN1: Andrew Meyer is a filmmaker and film journalist who has written for Sight and Sound . Charles Michener is arts editor of News- week. Greg Palokane teaches English and film at DePummelon College in Menupoy, S.D . Graham Petrie teaches at MacMasters University in Hamilton, Ontario. Tom Reck teaches at Chino State College in California, and has written for December. Alain Silver's book on the postwar samurai film will be published late next year by Tantivy Press. In the last issue, James McCourt's re- view of PROMISED LANDS failed to mention that the film was Susan Sontag's; FILM COMMENT regrets having overlooked the forest for the trees. In Raymond Durgnat's article of the same issue, the phrase \"black sin\" in footnote eight on page 26 should read \"black skin.\" In the same article, on page 21, column two, the last sentence of the first paragraph was garbled and should read: \"The representative of social poise in BRINGING UP BABY is Katharine Hepburn, but in DUCK SOUP is Margaret Dumont; in BRINGING UP BABY chaos is merely a leopard (and Katharine Hepburn's willfulness in- teracting with Cary Grant's absent- mindedness), whereas DUCK SOUP it is Groucho, Chico, and Harpo (another dumb animal) as well as the polite in- sanities.\" 72 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1975
\"SUCH A THOROUGH DELIGHT IT LEFT ME FEELING HIGH. DON'T MISS IT!\" -Vincent Canby, THE NEW YORK TIMES \"BRILLIANT, WITTY, HARD-HITTING- ALREADY A CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC!\" -Amos Vogel, FILM COMMENT \"SEE THIS FILM. SEE IT MORE THAN ONCE. THEN SHOW IT TO OTHERS.\" -Ralph Gleason, ROLLING STONE Superb! CD A Rare Achievement! @ A Joy to Watch! Q) Delightful! @ Remarkable! ® Marvelous! ® Wonderful!0 Funny, Absolutely Riveting!® Lively, Witty Entertainment!® I Jay Cocks, TIME MAGAZINE 2 Maureen Orth, NEWSWEEK 3 Robert Hatch, THE NATION 4 Bruce Williamson, PLAYBOY S Nat HentoU, THE VILLAGE VOICE 6 Jon Landau, ROLLING STONE 7 Penelope Gilliatt, THE NEW YORKER 8 Michael Kernan, THE WASHINGTON POST 9 Charles Champlain, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES \"Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.\" A fUm by Jerry Bruc:k Jr. 1.1'. STONE'S WEEKLY ~ Distributed by Open Circle Cinema, P.O. Box )IS, Franklin Lakes, N.J. 0741, Tel (201) 891-8240
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