VOLUME 08 - NUMBER 03 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1972

These are the ponderings of a leading structural SOUP ETUDE. filmmaker . How he seeks after the keys to his own by Donald Skolier dis-illusionment-a way out of the entrapment of cultural premises that force their wavelengths of ordering upon a consciousness weary of the result- ing deceptions. To free phenomena from these established matrices, to spring object and action loose from systems and events enveloping them. \" 'Passages' then , wherein or post facto or in anticipation , I may note revelatory unities and disparities . What's interesting is not codifying but experiencing and understanding the nature of pas- sages from one state to another without acknowl- edging ' beginning ' as having any more importance in the incident than 'importance ' has in this sen- tence. \"Or than 'ending' in this . . .\" 3 What happens when \" one thing leads to an- other\" ? How does one thing lead to another? Does one thing lead to another? These questions are raised by Snow, but he resolves them only in terms of his own policy, his own adopted attitude toward liberating himself from the centrifuge of proliferating experiences. I think , here, it would be of consider- able value to follow the course of an event or action , of one thing leading to another. Visualize , for the moment, an extreme close-up of a potful of tomato soup. In fact, wondering about this I shot a short etude film with this problem as scenario. So there's no need to speculate how it might look or what a viewer might experience. What I'll report are my responses and observations along with the responses and observations of others who have seen it. I emptied the contents of a can of Campbell 's tomato soup (metawarhol?) into a pot, added the water and heated it just this side of boiling . Then the soup was allowed to cool to the point of no longer sending up visible vapor. A 16mm Beaulieu with zoom lens was placed on a tripod above the stove. Lens was focused on the surface of the soup and zoomed in so that the visual field consisted of nothing but the redness of the soup. Sides of the pot were not in the field . Lighting was flat and camera angle was as flat as low ceiling would allow , at about an 8S-degree angle to the surface of the soup . Camera and stove were turned on at just about the same time . Then , the zoom lens was gradually pulled back-not continually but in stops and goes of varying length-through three rather distinct zones of spatial relationship to the soup. This took place over a period of 2 minutes and 47 seconds , the running time of 100 feet of 16mm film at 24 frames-per-second . The zoom was held , at first, on the surface of the soup until heat began to produce motion and first bubbling . The field was slightly increased by slight pullback of the zoom but still not taking in even the sides of the pot. The boiling progressed until the surface of the soup began to swirl , break, and rush in upon itself. At this pOint the zoom pulled back further to reveal the sides of the pot and then, gradually, the whole pot on the stove with the

simmering soup (flame had been reduced , off cam- ex ist in three rather distinct states of relationship era). This was held for about twenty seconds, the to the consciousness of the perceiver, as received visual field consisting of soup, pot, and the one through the unaided eye . burner area of a four-burner stove. It might be of value to add , here , that \" unaided Then a man enters the frame-shoulders , back, eye\" is consistent with the relative non-manipulation arms and hands in view-and he proceeds to ladle of the visual field in the soup film . There is no the soup into a bowl. The zoom has progressed distortion or manipulation of real surfaces, no es- upward to its furthest point , which is about a medium sential capabilities added to supplement ocular shot of the stove and the portion of the man de- deficiency , as an x-ray might do , or montage that scribed above. It holds from this po int until the end created a filmic continuum on screen that overcame of the film , and during the remaining moments the certain time / space factors that impinge upon the man finish f! s ladling the soup and then , from a small eye 's grasp of phenomena geographically or tem- but sinister-looking bottle, pours some black sub- porally out of its normal range . True , even in the stance into the bowl , mi xes it in and walks out of soup film certain \" aids \" are given to the eye: the frame leaving the pot and stove alone in the field limiting frame , flatness , the zoom lens' capacity to until the film runs out. close in on the surface of a hot object and to graduate its degrees of motion toward and away When this is projected on screen , the first per- from the objects. But this seems more a matter of ception is of a red field. The red field is held for \" mediation \" than of \" manipulation \" and , I strongly a full half-minute before there is any suggestion that believe, promotes a totally different tone and tense it has even the potential for motion. Viewers have of consciousness in the viewer. regularly referred to a \" glowering \" quality that the red rectangle on-screen takes on. They have also 4 In general film viewing over a period of time , I regularly commented on the intensity of this first had begun to notice three distinctly different states part of the film. When the first bubble produces a of consciousness-and even sensations of being- highlight in a corner of the field , there is a slight evoked by th ree different modes of presenting an break in this intensity; and when the caloric / kinetic object. First, an object within the context of a movie , action sets in and the red reveals itself as a liquid , a movie seen at a commercial theatre (even at an there is regularly a lightening of mood in the room art house), occurs in relationship with many other and a certain sense of surprise and delight in the objects that come and go as part of the story being discovery. When the zoom up begins to reveal the told . To the degree that these objects are \" carried sides of the pot , there is a radical change in the away\" with the momentum of the unfolding story, kind of consciousness filling the screening room. they lose a certain perceptual integrity or impact of The slight lightening of mood becomes almost gaiety, their own . (Perhaps it is more accurate to say that and there is usually chuckling and \" the shock of they establish a movement of consciousness that recognition \" more along the lines of the viewer expends itself on horizontality across surfaces. having experienced a quick cut that has juxtaposed More on this later.) two disparate images that set each other off in some In densely plotted or narrativized films , this mo- unique way . But there hasn't been a cut at all and mentum is usually built to such a pitch that even the viewer knows this and it tones his response . fairly regular close-ups of individual objects, isolated When the man enters, everyone seems to settle back from the other details of the unfolding situation , to see what 's going to happen next-how this one fail to break the momentum , to redirect the locus thing , now that they are back in the world of of consciousness from \" across\" to \" into.\" Further- \" things, \" is going to lead to another. And , if any- more , during the general course of such films all thing , the mood lightens further as the \" protago- of the details and objects have been so stickily nist\" does his thing with soup, ladle, bowl and small pressed into a conceptual wad that they cannot pull sinister bottle. away from this cerebral (though shallow) implanta- tion readily enough to become percepts, even when Although this film etude was made before reading they are closed in upon . The energy generated in Snow's \" Passage\" piece (though not before having this mode of presentation is highly conceptual. The seen his WAVELENGTH and ~ ), it is interesting to whole pitch of the field in which these objects apply some of the questions raised in \" Passage \" appear is in the direction of their relationship to one to the soup etude . And the film is an etude fully-in another. Even an exertion of will toward fully grasp- the sense of being \"a composition built upon a ing or sensing qualities of individual objects cannot single technical motive but played for its artistic quite overcome implicit matrices of overriding in- value \" -because the \" feel \" of the experience is a teractions and conceptual linkages of meaning. And dimension of its meaning that can only be alluded when such fields occur within the overriding matrix to by these words . of \" a story ,\" the dilution of objecthood is geometri- cally increased . Snow seems to reflect on this as part of the When an object stands alone-or when , though attitude that one might best bring to participating to a lesser degree, groups of objects occur within in exercises in perception such as the ones we have a field around which the conceptual premise has been referring to : \"What's interesting is not codify- been thinned or somehow suspended-the tend- ing but experiencing and understanding the nature ency toward perceiving , rather than conceiving , is of passages from one state to another.\" The soup etude grew out of a developing sense and belief that a given object could exist and necessarily did 46 SEPTEMBER 1972

increased . This accounts for the heightening of to move and organize consciousness toward its object \" presence \" in certain suspense films and most concentrated state. I submit that this \" effect\" also certain \" B \" flicks of the Monogram strain , in is dependent upon a number of elements or condi- which the conceptual elements may be described tions. I believe they are myriad , variable in an almost as transcendentally ludicrous. This is not to propose infi nite way , and that in any gi ven instance the degree of \" presence\" can alter-be increased or decreased a kind of aesthetic nihilism in which any attempt -in any number of ways. at creating balances between \" story \" and object- hood is seen as a subversion of the perceptual by But let's consider two specifics of the soup etude: the conceptual. But it takes a Dreyer or a Bresson if one tries to grasp the progressive loss of \" pres- to strike just such a balance, wherein matri x and ence\" that occurs between the plastic , graphic and matter reflect and inflect to mutual advantage. narrative phases of presentation , they seem strongly traceable to diffusion \" opportunities \" that arise as Subjectively, \" presence \" can almost be seen as verbalization becomes more accessible. At first , we a concentration or accrual of perceptual energies encounter a quality that resists nameability in any focused on an object or event. The tendencies other way than a Single, rather inviolable: red . Then toward and opportunities for verbalization increase a simple, recognizable object/ event, involved with between graphic and narrative planes of con- nothing but itself: the pot of soup. Finally: involve- sciousness ; one can follow this experientially in the ment in an action that suggests further action and soup etude . But first it is necessary to introduce consequences beyond itself or any of its compo- a third plane of perception : the plastic-not in the nents. The \" red \" -before any suggestion has oc- sculptural sense but in the sense of \" generative curred that it is anything but just \" red \" -makes no forces in nature ,\" its much earlier etymological allusions to anything (but itself) . We cannot or meaning. In the soup film the journey is from the should not tend to ask of it: what is it for? what plastic (pure red on the screen) to the graphic (the will be done with it? When it becomes a liqu id , the emerging recognizability of liquid into soup-in-pot) questions start . When it becomes a pot on a stove , evolving finally into man doing something to the the questioning may even tend to abate but its soup with sinister foreshadowing . It is with the last nameability increases. This nameability diffuses the that the threshold into the narrative is crossed . unification of consciousness, the concentration of perceptual energies accumulating with regard to the But it is useful to notice how the possibilities and original red field. inclinations toward verbalization increase and how the concentration of perceptual energy and con- S We got onto this by following through on a line sciousness itself diffuses. In the pure-red state there of thought and questioning very much on the mind is little more that can be grasped , much less \" said .\" of the film artist who made WAVELENGTH , Michael The sense of the ominous seems to relate to just Snow: \" How does one thing lead to another? \" We that verbal helplessness, as though we were ren- came to Snow through Hitchcock and Resnais and dered deaf and mute simply by watching . \"Relief\" an unpardonable impulse to see a triple feature comes with the first recognizable event-a highlight conSisting of VERTIGO, MARIENBAD and WAVELENGTH. on the red field 's surface that next becomes a We came to that right after reflecting briefly on the bubble, opening up the whole realm of \" the liquid.\" relationship between the current structural film The first appearance of that bubble adds enormous- movement and the ongoing revaluations of the ly to the literary potentialities of the \" image \" on question of illusionism. The intense reconsideration screen: light, motion, bubble, liquid, whole concep- of illusory aesthetic experience that has been taking tual constellations, primitive but \" rich \" in compari- place during the past decade with such central son to what it has just succeeded . relationship to all art has revolved around other matters like \" presence,\" \" objecthood ,\" \" flatness .\" With the appearance of the rim of the pot , as Is there some essential issue or human concern to the zoom continues to draw back, and then- be found at the heart of ai L of these matters? Can startlingly discreet-the hold on the full picture of they not all be seen as an effort at the re-concentra- the pot and soup boiling , a radical change occurs tion or redirection of human consciousness toward in the consciousness of the viewer . He is suddenly a mode of most intense engagement in a material in the presence of a representation of an object: here and now? what had been red and just red a moment before It is a reconditioning of the modes of con- is now the picture of an object taCitly (but with sciousness along a broad front that has been taking unavoidable inSistence) asking to be accepted as place . This in itself is not news. But the specific really there . Here the metaphor of consciousness elements of this reconditioning seem to elude any as a \" stream \" becomes especially apt and together coherent general response. How delighted we once with the idea of \"degrees\" or \" indices\" of illusion were to learn that our participation in the theatrical begins to suggest the nature of the energy pro- event called for a willing suspension of disbelief! cesses involved in this exercise of perception . I wish , Isn 't the central realization of all anti-illusionistic at this point, to bring two other concepts face to impulse that willing suspension of disbelief unavoid- face-one old, the other rather new: the \" willing ably anaesthetizes consciousness? And that so suspension of disbelief\" on the one hand , and many willing suspensions of disbelief have accumu- \"presence\" on the other. I submit that the experi- lated over the centuries that we now find ourselves ence of \" presence\" depends upon the unification of the energies of consciousness that takes place through perception of an object or event tending FILM COMMENT 47

living in truly unbelievable circumstances and re- tioning of consciousness that the entertainment quired to accept them will ingly? It is either his moral public is subjected to through exposure to the sense or his visceral overload that makes the con- popular arts. Adm ittedly , Hitchcock is a master of temporary artist allergic to the illusionistic in any the form and not intent upon subverting the sensi- medium. bilities of his audience. His traditional brief personal appearance in each film he directs places perspec- These words are loaded with the history, the tive on th is, but generically he is firmly entrenched etymology of human misery: in Middle English , de- in the narrative mode, and its dynamic-its manipu- scended from the Latin , \" illusion \" meant \" mocked , lation of the energ ies of consciousness-predomi - ridiculed .\" Some dictionaries claim that \" the study nates throughout each of his films. of the nature of sensation \" is an archaic definition of \" aesthetic. \" Is this so? Only , perhaps , in an age When we move from VERTIGO to MAR lEN BAD (and of anaesthesia. Perhaps the artist has sensed his then on to WAVELENGTH) , this becomes clearer still. task to be reaesthesia , his task and filial atonement for the illusions of the past. His specific problem 6 Our interest here is not in solving \" the riddle \" and paradox seems to be the reunification of a badly of MARIENBAD. Rather , we are interested in taking diffused and diluted consciousness at a moment soundings of the index of illusion that this film when a non-linear gestalt seems to be the evolution- represents as a perceptual experience , the manipu- al direction he should be riding herd toward . The lation and conditioning of the viewer's con- resolution of this parado x is not the issue at hand sciousness . But in an important way , the question in this article. A more immediate task is ex posure of a riddle-what MARIENBAD is all about-is relevant of the modes of diffusion and dilution. The three to our concern . If one were able to \" reorganize \" dynamics-narrative, graphic and plastic-exi st in the graphic phenomena Resnais and Robbe-Grillet hierarchical relationship to one another. The narra- have provided into more familiar montage syntax, tive , as managed in the conventional story film , if one were able to restore dominance to the usurped contains the broadest inclinations toward both narrative dynamic , then MARIENBAD could be put in diffusion and dilution of consciousness within the its place as a kind of jig-sawed cinematic puzzle solved . But this doesn 't happen that readily. Years aesthetic experience. A radical division of con- of \" puzzling through \" lead the investigator in cir- sciousness occurs when there is a willing suspen - cles; finally , he just doesn't want to dope it out neatly, sion of disbelief, when energ ies are deliberately, even if he could . habitually, or autonomically made to divide into And I don 't think he can . For instance: a lot zones of acceptance. depends on the final sequence, the departure from the mansion by \" X\" and \" A. \" But by this time it Of the films referred to so far , VERTIGO precipitates is virtually impossible to determine the relationality the widest range of illusionistic transport in terms of the action to what has apparently led up to it. of the actual situation in which the viewer en- The more one tries to fi x it, the stronger the gestural counters it: seated in a darkened room , looking at values of the action assert themselves into a trope the movie screen. Everything on screen represents of absolute going-away. And the final image of the itself as real. Even when an object or simple event exterior of the mansion repeats a scene viewed occurs, every effort of the production and its director earlier in the film more than once , maintaining the is to maintain the cooperation of the viewer in temporal ambiguity of the film 's \" ending. \" It is quite accepting it as real. The plastic imagination of the startling to notice how this all coincides with Michael viewer-his very consciousness-is kept in continual Snow 's ruminations in \" Passage \" : \" how one thing motion across an un pausing sequence of events. leads to another . .. What 's interesting is not co- Under the momentum of the narrative dynamic, difying but experiencing and understanding the consciousness is moved tropistically across an un - nature of passage from one state to another without rem itting surface of graphic action firmly gripped acknowledging 'beginning ' as having any more im- by the story's premises. When the action slows portance in the incident than 'importance ' has in down, the possibilities of tropistic redirection to the this sentence . .. or than 'ending ' in this ... \" penetrative mode natural to the more static graphic What is of greater interest and more immediate dynamic-middleground within the triadic hierar- concern is that MARIENBAD does tend to tease the chy-is overwhelmed by the trompe l'oeil ambiance viewer's consciousness into speculating about its of the film 's overriding representationality. possible meaning . It suggests this game, it presents a \" game \" kind of mode ; within itself, even as a None of this is meant to berate Hitchcock, or closed system , it is continually allusive. What it VERTIGO as an artistic or entertainment achievement. forgoes of illusion it takes back by allusion . For What is at issue , in an absolute sense , is the manip- purposes of achieving \" presence\" both illusion and ulation and conditioning of consciousness engaged allusion (rooted in the Latin ludere, to play) are by such ex perience or quasi-experience . (It is in- debilitative. To be \" rich with allusion\" is a proper teresting that Coleridge, who originated the notion literary value and theatrical value in a theatre of of willing suspension , also advanced the belief that words. Literary allusiveness works through syn- thought and consciousness were corporeal.) Here aesthesia, conjuring perceptual tendencies from indeed both medium and mode are the massage, conceptual moorings, spinning off sensory echoes a radical condition ing of basic perceptual sets oc- am id silent abstraction . (Proliferating parado xes!) curring through the most seemingly innocuous events. In this sense , the Hitchcock film archetypally demonstrates the longstanding, continual condi- 48 SEPTEMBER 1972

But in terms of an image, trafficking in illusion or in an illusionistic context . Both techniques (flash allusion will necessarily weaken the beam or \" col- and freeze) , occurring in otherwise conventional umn \" of massing perceptual energies.And where the story films , regularly surprise us with the strength society's conditioning has produced the tendency of their effect. The flash frame seems to \" short toward diffusion to the extent that it is to be found circuit\" the narrative line, refreshing consciousness in the industrio-corporate cultural dynamic , a pri- itself with a reverberative change of dynamic. And mary motive of aesthesia must necessarily be almost the freeze frame suddenly allows a 90-degree ritual reconcentration , centripetal actions of con- change of direction of consciousness from \" across- sciousness, before this very function itself falls into and-following \" to \" in-and-immersing.\" Warhol atrophy from disuse. seems incredibly right in some of the earlier films which concern themselves with graphic elements In terms of such an exercise , MARIEN BAD is then within a relatively static situation undergoing gradu- seen as middleground , transitional between the al change (SLEEP , EMPIRE and , easiest to take , EAT) . dominant narrative ambience , as exemplified here But, as we shall see later, it is possible to suggest by VERTIGO , and the verging toward plasticity found that films like Warhol 's, while not ahead of their time in WAVELENGTH. For all of its undermining of narrative or their maker's time , are ahead of film 's time in coherency and linear logicality, MARIENBAD is still terms of the education of literary and theatrical pinned to graphic representationalism. It works to consciousness into cinematic consciousness. neutralize this with generous amounts of parody and self-parody through both audio and visual compo- 71f comparison of VERTIGO and MARIENBAD sets off nents of the cinema: the posturings, the heavy in relief the disruptions of illusion that occur in the music , the equally heavy narrating voice, and Resnais movie-alogical storyline resisting concep- touches like the cardboard Hitchcock-all of which tual absorption , and erosion of the graphic surface make it a funkier movie than most viewers are willing to let it be. But with the exception of a handful of by image transformations inconsistent with real ex- moments , the subversion of illusion occurs in the periences of the unaided eye-comparison between narrative and graphic modalities of the film 's pre- MARIENBAD and WAVELENGTH takes us even more sentation . It achieves greater \" presence ,\" shot for deeply into the nature of the cinematic process and shot , than one finds in Hitchcock 's film . The story the questions of \" presence,\" illusionism , and sus- dynamic is not as intact in MARIENBAD. There is a pense. pseudo-narrative momentum generated (something that Hollis Frampton works with more d irectly in his If we go back to our conceit of \" masters of PALINDROME) but, since it is virtually devoid of the suspense \" for a moment and look at MARIENBAD that usual satisfactions of cause-and-effect resolution , it way , the first thing noticed is how Resnais and operates inversely and sets up psychic resistance Robbe-Grillet deprive us of the normal coherencies to the normally ingratiating function of story-flow. of the genre. MARIENBAD is not only something of In the face of confusion , it dreams of impedance: a suspense film , it is a suspense film in suspension \"stop the film , I want to figure out what 's been (which , incidentally, is precisely the image of Hitch- happening \" as opposed to \" keep going , I want to cock that appears in the film : feet off the ground find out how it's all gonna end! \" in mid-air against an elevator shaft-saturation!) Fragmented as it is, actions that ordinarily fall into To this extent, MARIEN BAD does not partake of a pattern of mystery and discovery in the typical the ritual annihilation of the present that we so fondly thriller never are resolved and remain adrift in our call \" story. \" Once a story takes hold it is just that: consciousness as gestural rather than plot or even an innocent little ceremony in which everything that character elements. And yet , as noted earlier , there happens is-at the moment that it happens-a unit is the persistent sense of all of this belonging to standing between a reservoir of past information and something familiar, a kind of movie we have seen the promise of further information to come. On before , a generic deja vu . Not so in WAVELENGTH . screen an image in a story relates to the images that preceded it and to those that follow. The \" bet- WAVELENGTH 'S strong affinity with the suspense ter\" the story , the less discrete as a unitary percept film lies in its concern with the reduction of an the image tends to be. The annihilation of the illusion , the elimination of false impressions. In the present (and the \" presence\" of the present) de- conventional suspense film-epitomized by Hitch- prives cinema of one of its strongest properties. The cock-th is takes place predominantly at the narra- graphic dynamic is a legitimate cinematic dynamic tive level of the film's life. This is not to suggest when it is not vitiated by any gratuitous illusionistic that these conventional films do not operate on device. The determination of boundaries between graphic or plastic levels as well. But the heaviest what is gratuitous and what is essential here is burdens of \"working things out\" occur in the story virtually identical to asking \" what is cinema? \" premise, the plot unfolding, and, though usually to a much lesser degree, the presentation and revela- In legitimate cinematic graphicism , the image is tion of character. These plot and character compo- not subordinate to a concept rushing through and nents , as they are conceived and ex ecuted for the past it. This is not necessarily a function of the screen , are carry-overs from time-tested theatrical duration of an image on the screen either , although and literary modes of development and repre- duration tends to play an important part. A flash sentation . Hitchcock's films from the very earliest frame , undiluted by other illusionistic elements can have always been ceremonies of the deception of have greater presence than a freeze frame moored appearances: a music hall memory wizard who is FILM COMMENT 49

WAVELENGTH really the instrument of a monumental espionage coup ; a windmill that isn 't a windmill at all (only the ph o tos: Mic hael Sn o w. hero notices that its blades are turning the wrong way!) ; the cymbal crash that will hide a gunshot in the concert hall ; the docile young man who runs a motel and lives with the taxidermized remains of his mother. All of these provide opportunity for startlingly graphic moments; but they are moments firmly implanted in the moving narrative line of the film , and they are rendered through traditional rep- resentational methods of the smoothest kind . MARIENBAD disrupts both narrative and graphic homogeneities, erodes these surfaces, and so au- thoritatively gives the resulting gestural elements a life of their own that the very idea of more logical alternatives-that there is a definite answer to ques- tions raised-becomes irrelevant to the experience provided by the film . This is the kind of false impres- sion that MARIENBAD works to eliminate , the illusion it reduces , and , as such , MARIENBAD does indeed occupy middleground between the conventional suspense film and WAVELENGTH. WAVELENGTH is concerned with the false impres- sions of the screen image itself. Preoccupations with narrative, graphic and plastiC dynamics are re- versed . Whereas the conventional suspense film is dominated by concerns generated by the story it tells and works graphically only to support and en chance its tale (and plastically hardly at all) , WAVELENGTH reduces this element to a fleeting epi- sode-the death of an intruder-that occurs almost in the manner of a parodistic hommage to the thriller. I will only outline the film here , drawing from Snow's own description: A gradual zoom over a period of 45 minutes from one end of an 80-foot loft to the bank of windows looking out on the street at the furthest side of this loft. Passing through the space of the loft, leaving objects and four abrupt and concise human events behind it, coming to the panel between the windows at the farthest end and moving directly into a still shot of the sea tacked to that wall below two other \" still \" graphic hangings tacked on the same panel. The grand deception that Snow reduces in WAVE- LENGTH is one of cinema 's historical givens, one of its near absolutes: illusionistic depth of field . In ~ Snow uses the mounted camera as a kinetic pump through which mass is converted into energy in an exercise almost literally demonstrating the Eistein- ian formula , E = mc2 ; but in WAVELENGTH Snow uses camera and lens to siphon illusionistic depth from his space . While many things happen in WAVE- LENGTH , they are secondary and tertiary \"subplots \" to the main action . It is true that Snow works assiduously to erode the graphic surface of his film in a number of ways. Color filters in front of the lens selectively and obviously fragment the apparently homogeneous light into its many individual chro- matic wavelengths . Consciousness is spared the effort of willing suspension of disbelief in the objec- tive \" reality\" of the film's \" content\" through this device in itself. And since it is a color film , whose graphic reality is totally dependent upon the rela- tionship of these spectral elements to the two di-

mensional surface of the frame and screen them- the wall below the other two \" pictures \" is the still selves , it is a subversion of the illusionistic base of shot of the sea-waves (I believe this is a blow-up the film at a most essential level. The dimension from a single frame seen in another film by Snow). of \" real time \" is also disrupted occasionally by Above this still , to the left and flush with the molding superimposition of chrono-alogicalities playing of the panel , is a shot of the white-on-black silhouette against the linear trajectory of the zoom . (One of \" The Walking Woman ,\" Snow's earlier icon of should note that this is one .of MARIENBAD ' S most flatness in a world of three-dimensional depth . This concerted efforts and that , regressively , it occurs is tacked to the wall ; and tacked onto it is another in Hitchcock as a clearly indicated flashback. In MARIENBAD , of course , it operates as part of the white on black silhouette of the same Walking programmatic subjective naturalism that is the basic Woman , but larger than the basic one to which it motif of the film as it mi xes time present with time is tacked . It is a perfect device for creating the past and future and also speculative time from illusion of two Walking Women, one much closer multi-person aged points of view.) than the other, though of course they are no more distant than the thickness of the sheet of paper 8 The most profound occurrence in WAVELENGTH involved . Yet Snow deliberately separates them with is the reduction of illusionistic depth of field . It goes a thin white border, calling attention to the mecha- beyond the narrative and graphic dynamics with nism of the depth-generating illusion . This , of which the viewer has some familiarity through liter- course , is his articulation , graphically, of the basic ary and theatrical experiences . Even Snow's delib- truth of the zoom lens' generation of depth-illusion : erately self-conscious manipulations of color and the zoom lens does not create any spatial depth his time-space displacements are not totally unfa- that does not exist; it renders the impression of miliar . But something else is, and in an uncannily depth through divergencies of object size and plan- elusive way . As the zoom lens increases its focal ar distortion. Finally, without extending the descrip- length and compresses and flattens the field as tion as far as its interest might take us , I should viewed on the screen , an entirely different event is taking place, a \" dramatically\" different realm is add that the third picture on the wall is a front-and- entered . It is filled with ironies accessible only back composite of what looks to be a photograph through visceral discernment. As the zoom slowly of a nude girl in the street. The photo contains much progresses , it reduces the degree of illusionistic illusionistic perspective and sets off in relief the flat , depth of field presented to the viewer. cut-out silhouette of the Walking Woman below it. It is not just the \" reduction of the frame \" and its contents , as Annette Michelson has suggested The overall panel with its three picture set-ups in an essay on Snow in Artforum . This would ac- seems to be an articulation of elements but , even count for the quantitative elimination of objects and more so , a field of options . \" Which picture will the events occurring during the earlier, shorter-focal camera end up in? \" is one way of describing those length phases of WAVELENGTH , when the full depth options. This is where the sense of tragic irony of the loft's space is illusionistically represented and comes from , for of all the pictures on that wall the the suggestion of some impliCit narrative is at its one of the sea is the most highly illusionistic . Each strongest. But at a more essential level of the expe- of the pictures embodies a truth that the film we rience there is a liberation of illusioned energy, a are watching when we view WAVELENGTH does not release from willing suspension of perceptual dis- contain : the truth of revealing itself as a single image belief occurring to the viewer 's consciousness as unit (a truth in direct opposition to the cinematic depth-illusion itself is reduced . It should be recalled effect), the illusion of motion generated by 24 that WAVELENGTH begins with a shot of the loft from frames-per-second in conjunction with the persis- deepest illusionistic perspective and ends with the tence of vision and phi phenomenon . frame filled with a close-up of a two-dimensional photograph (its final irony being the assimilation of The selection of the sea-wave shot is classical the photo into yet another illusioned depth of peripety or reversal of intention rendered through space). This is the central tension of WAVELENGTH , a plastic trope. Crossing the eighty-foot room on the condition from which it draws its uncanny a paradoxical course of progressively flattening tautness , an almost erective pride of consciousness perspective but deepening perceptual truth , vitiating freed from dutiful perceptual duplicity. one illusionistic element or dimension after another, It is a tension beyond words , a total visceral the camera ends up on the sea-wave still , and then , response not beyond discernment. The refreshment with both visual and aural crescendo (an electronic and invigoration that many viewers feel after seeing sine wave that goes from 50 cycles-per-second to WAVELENGTH results from the resociation of sensibil- 12,000 cycles-per-second during forty min utes of ity that follows the gradual deactivation of the the film , but which takes its greatest leap at the point \" willing-suspension\" mechanism . And there is of superimposition of extreme close-up of the sea- something else that gives WAVELENGTH the quality wave shot on top of itself as the zoom moves into of true tragedy of an Aristotelian sort but translated its frame) , enters the sea-wave photo , filling the into plastiC elements or terminology . I have felt it entire film frame on screen , forfeiting the \" truth \" each time I've viewed this film. The zoom closes of its discreteness as a single frame , absorbing and in on the wall and the three hangings. Centered on assimilating its illusionistic depth as its own . Thus , the film ends up where it began , caught in an illusion-but, this time , an illusion within an illusion with allusion to cosmic scale. It holds this in its field until , closing in so near , it obliterates everything. 11111111 FILM COMMENT 51

.1...1 \\\\\\\\\\TII~ '1}\\1.4I~S '1'111.;8 an interview by Joe Mcinerney Joe Mcinerney is a PhD candidate at UCLA. He so intrigued by him as a director that I left school recorded this interview at Warner Brothers studio and came over striving to be a director. I went back in June 1971 . to propping with him so I could get more experience . JOE MCINERNEY : The general impress ion is MCINERNEY: Did you do any directing? your career began with STAGECOACH , but I don 't WAYNE: When I wasn 't propping with Ford , I was think it really began until RED RIVER . . . with Ewing Scott as an assistant director. He used to hire me on the George O ' Brien pictures as an JOHN WAYNE : That's not a question , it's a actor because he was forced to take someone 's theory. You want me to sit here like a dummy and cousin along as his second assistant who didn 't nod my head while you put words in my mouth . know anything about pictures. He 'd take me along as an actor and have me as his second assistant MCINERNEY: It was a leading question . When director. Then I got into acting because they made you made STAGECOACH .. a big thing of THE BIG TRAIL, and naturally I was complimented. Then they made me take a dim view WA YN E: Start somewhere else. of acting after that because the next picture I did MCINERNEY : How did you get into films in the was called GIRLS DEMAND EXCITEMENT in which I was late Twenties ? The most popular story is after you a college boy-you know, I had been on a national broke an arm you lost your scholarship at USC. championship football team , and I'm now playing WAYNE : I wrecked a shoulder. I was going back at girl 's basketball to see whether they ' ll win and to school for my junior year, but I had borrowed get to stay in school. I can 't picture myself not money to go to school the year before. The scholar- wanting the girls in school , and playing them bas- ship only took care of your entrance fees. I had other ketball is just damn ridiculous. It was just so ridicu- expenses . As a consequence , when I paid them all lous I couldn 't believe it, and I was walking along back, I didn 't have any money to go back to school , and half mumbling to myself and old Will Rogers and my shoulder was hurting so I figured what the came by and said , \" Hi , Duke, what's the matter? \" hell , I'll layout this one year so I won 't lose my I said, \" Christ, they 've got me playing basketball eligibility for that year and I' ll catch up on some against girls.\" Then he said , \" Are you working?\" money. I got so interested in pictures that I never I said, \" Yeah .\" and he said , \" Keep working .\" So went back. I quit worrying about it. MCINERNEY: While you were working with John MCINERNEY : When I was small, I used to watch Ford at Fox, did you intend to be an actor? WAYNE : Well , Pappy Ford I worked for as a prop man . He 's almost a big brother to me , and I was

s your westerns on television every Saturday morning. WA Y NE: That's because it's a great story and From left : They used to run Hoot Gibson 's, Ken Maynard 's, its treatment allowed for exciting situations. Those Bob Steele 's and yours. I remember you always are the things that make for good pictures. THE QUIET MAN shared the credits with your horse. MCINERNE Y: THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS was Wayne and WAYNE: Well you know, the first series that I did made about the same time. What do you think of it? Maureen O·Hara. at Warner Brothers under Leon Schlesinger. They used to let him use the old Ken Maynard action WAYNE : When Mr. Hathaway finished it, it was JOHN WAYNE. shots, stock shots of cattle and everything , so I had one of the finest pictures I've ever seen . Then the HONDO to wear those phony rodeo clothes to match the studio heads decided to get in on it. They took all shots . the suspense out of the picture by having me told Stuntman that Harry Carey was my father. Yakima Canutt. MCINERNEY: All the stories say that you and Yakima Canutt worked out the basic techniques of MCINERNEY: Henry Hathaway has directed your RED RIVER screen fighting in these early westerns. films off and on for over twenty years. What do you think of him as a director? Montgo mery Cl ift WAYNE: Let's see. Allen Pomeroy, a fellow and Wayne. named Eddie Parker, and Bob Steele's dad [Robert WAYNE : Well , Henry Hathaway is a fine techn i- N. Bradbury]-we started fighting this way , and Yak cian , a craftsman . He was .. . not quite a story HONDO. came over to do a heavy in one of them , and he doctor, but one who takes over a picture that's sick. took to this like a duck to water. From then on , you All photos: know, every place he went Yak taught people this Whenever there was a picture that couldn 't get off Museum of way of fighting . All stunt men , everybody 's been the ground , Darryl Zanuck used to call Hathaway fighting like that ever since. and con him into doing the picture. But Darryl paid Modern Art/ him back because, when Henry had cancer and was MCINERNEY: Joseph Kane directed some of sick for months-he had his whole stomach out on Film Stills your westerns in the late Thirties and, after you a table for three months-when he got back, Zanuck became a star in STAGECOACH , he continued to direct was the first one to see him and say that you 've Archive. and he functioned as an associate producer on films got a job , come on in and go to work. But for the like LADY FROM LOUISIANA and DAKOTA at Republic. relationship , Henry used to do all the dirty work . What do you think of him as a director? He used to take pictures that other good directors had turned down saying they ' re too much trouble , WAYNE : Joe was a cutter, but Paul Malvern and or this or that is wrong . But the studio would have I were making these quickie westerns and we decid- a contract with some star and it'd have to pay the ed to give him a chance to direct. He did a good star anyway , so old Henry had to come in and do it. job. Then he did second-unit stuff and Republic decided to put him on bigger pictures. He was a MCINERNEY: I suppose the reason why some hell of a cutter but I just don 't think he was good of your films like WAR OF THE WILDCATS or DAKOTA enough on story. seem so strange is I 'm expecting you to be the star yet you seem to be just one of three people starring MCINERNEY: As a star in the Forties, you 're in the film. At times, you 're more of a bystander playing a romantic lead or you 're involved in roman- than a star. tic triangles. THE SPOILERS is an early ex ample but, WAYNE: As far as being a bystander-if you have unlike some of the others, its use of romance and a script where you ' re a bystander, you have a class action is nicely balanced. \" A\" script. Because, if you have all the dialogue ,

you say , \" Well they ' re going up to Red Gulch Pass. John Ford who established you as an actor? Even Let's head them off. \" Then you get up to Red Gulch in Ford 's film s, you 're one of two or three main Pass and you say , \" Here they co me!\" You ' re telling characters .. the whole goddamn story in the dialogue . The best script to have is a script where you ' re a bystander , WAYNE : My problem after STAGECOACH was I had where you 're reacting to what other people are to go back to Republic and make more of those doing . series for them . Then all the critics and the know-it- ails jumped on my back and sa id Wayne 's no god- MCINERNE Y: A lot of the articles say that you damn good without Ford . So it had to be someone and James Edward Grant worked out this concept else. Hawks told me he couldn 't have made the film of how you 'd react to the other actors. Is that right? without me. Then pappy Ford came along and had me play an older man as Captain Brittles in SHE WORE WA YNE : That's a misconception . Actually I was A YELLOW RIBBON . in so many qu ickie pictures that it became quite obvious to me when I got in bigger pictures when MCINERNEY : I 've two questions on that. I could use true reactions . I tried to ex plain it to WAYNE : Well , you ' re gain ' to have to ask them one writer and he said that I said I'm not an actor, one at a time. I'm a reactor. That's not what I said. I was trying MCINERNEY: O.K. Did Hawks mean he needed to get over the difference between an \" A \" picture you as the star so he could do RED RIVER? and the \" C \" pictures that I was forced to work in . WAYNE : Hawks didn 't need RED RIVER . He was I had to keep going . pretty well established. The way that I was helpful was in getting the Russell and Remington pictures MCINERNE Y : What does reacting mean to you? to him and talking to him about different levels of WAYNE : Let me explain it to you . Three heavies movement where you have the cattle and you see are going after the man in the picture . You show the heads of some and the backs of others, the the three heavies come into town , you show them background action. get off their horses, you show them walking along. MCINERNEY: It seems in some of your best films , A cat goes by and one pretty near shoots the cat. you 're playing an older man. Then you cut to the other guy, and he doesn 't say WAYNE: I don 't know . THE SANDS OF IWO JIMA \" There are three bad men coming in town and when and HONDO are good films and I wasn 't an older they get near me, I'm going to dive off my feet and man . Another theory? shoot three times with this rifle and kill them .\" You MCINERNEY: Just a thought. What about the set up the situation for him to walk into. The bad other westerns that you made with Howard Hawks? guys say to each other , \" You get over behind the Take RIO LOBO . . . table, you get over there. \" Now we cut to Innocent WAYNE: I'd prefer not to comment on it. There Jack coming along , and he doesn 't know that any were some scenes in it that are too familiar to me . of them are there . So , you have to show how smart MCINERNEY : In other films that you made with he is and what he does to get out of that hole. That 's Hawks . .. reaction. WAYNE : If you want to talk about them , go on . MCINERNEY: James Edward Grant wrote and I' ll just sit here and listen to you . directed THE ANGEL AND THE BADMAN , which you MCINERNEY: After RED RIVER , there 's a transition produced. What do you think of Grant? from you as a romantic lead to a man of action . WA YNE: He was a dear friend of mine. He had WA YNE : I went from chasing girls to chasing a great talent as a writer . Jimmy was a short story cows, huh? writer. Now a short story writer doesn 't have all the MCINERNEY: I'm glad you said that, not me. volum ino us language that dulls a scene. He had to make the dialogue give character to a person and You 're no longer a part of a group, you 're the star progress the story, and that's practically what Ford as a director d id all the time . Ford cut through the and you 're carrying the film . nuance and all that crap and got down to the basic WAYNE: That's because I was starting to make story. He put the nuance in with the camera . Jimmy was a writer of the same type. Jimmy's first picture more money and they didn 't want to pay to put stars when he came out here was a Gable-Tracy picture, in with me. And , luckily, my pictures would carry BOOM TOWN . He had written that and he was brought without the other people. That was no desire of out from Chicago to work on it. MCINERNEY: Besides Grant, who are your favor- mine . ite writers? MCINERNEY : You liked working with , say, Robert WA YNE : I knew Jimmy Grant for twenty yea rs. It's very handy to have somebody like that . You know Montgomery, or Henry Fonda? with writers, you don 't have enough contact with WAYNE: Oh , it's wonderful to work with other them. MCINERNE Y: I' ve worked my way up to RED people who are competent. Now half the time I had RIVER . Ho w do you compare it with STAGECOACH? good actors with me . And when they're competent, WAYNE : STAGECOACH established me as a star ; you don 't care if they ' re a star or not. But the RED RIVER established me as an actor. chances are, some important part is given to a MCINERNE Y: I 've always wondered why it wasn 't weaker actor and he doesn 't come up. That's bad for the picture. For a while there, they were just trying to use my name-particularly at Republic- and not think of the future . MCINERNEY : What do you think of THE QUIET MAN? 54 SEPTEMBER 1972

WAYNE: That was a goddamn hard script. For WAYNE : You know, I agree with them . I think nine reels , I was just playing a straight man to those wonderful characters , and that's really hard . it is his best western. MCINERNEY : John Farrow directed HONDO . What MCINERNEY: Because of the character you play do you think of him as a director? or the entire environment of the film? WAYNE : HONDO was really a Batjak production , so he didn 't really have a great deal to do with it. WAYNE : The one picture was a classic, a kind Everything was set up before he came on it. But he did direct SEA CHASE and prove to me that he of Bret Harte character , STAGECOACH . Then he did should not be put in charge of a prOducer-director position . He failed to tell the good story that was all the cavalry pictures. Then comes THE SEARCHERS , in the book . But now , we're talking about a matter of opinion and that 's only my opinion. For some , a story of the harsh reality of the West , where you ' re he may be considered a fine director. faced with a real enemy. In most of the pictures MCINERNEY : On HONDO , what do you mean, \" everything was set-up \" ? that I played in we tried to make the image of the WAYNE : I mean like it was written and I went Indians very noble, even though we know that he out and looked for locations and picked the loca- tions where each scene would be shot. I went back was a savage, that they were uncivilized. I probably and brought the cameraman , and they said there 's no color here. I said wait until I show you, and within more than anybody in the business gave them an seventeen miles of town I had white molten rock , blue pools of water, black butes, big chalk-white image of being a noble, a strong moral-coded people. butes. We were using 3-D . We made it in 3-D but then it was never released in that , because Warner MCINERNEY: Would you elaborate on that? Brothers decided to give up and use the Fox system . WAYNE: Take a look at HONDO, MCCLINTOCK , MCINERNEY: But on locations, Farrow was directing the actors and saying where the camera or anyone that I had any control over. We treated would be set-up. them as if they had the same moral code that the WAYNE : Well you said it. I guess you know all about it. I' ll just sit here and listen to you . American people wish every American had , and we MCINERNEY : You think I 'm putting words in your gave them a nobility that was worthy of a king , when mouth again. actually we know that they were, you know, savage, WAYNE : Sounds pretty much like it to me. I'm not saying that he didn 't and I'm not saying he did . treacherous, competent warriors with little or no pity MCINERNEY: How involved do you usually get or mercy. A people who lived a harsh life and when in the production of your films? they killed .. . You know, it can be said that maybe WAYNE : I' m not involved at all unless it's a Batjak production . we drove them to it. Whatever it was , that 's what MCINERNEY: What I was wondering is, if you 're they were. not involved in the production, how do you account for your films being so especially tailored to your MCINERNEY: What about the Indians in Ford 's character? westerns? WAYNE : Well , it might never have dawned on you that some of those parts are quite a bit different WAYNE : In one film , he made them the heroes from others . You ' re like everyone else , trying to label people and sometimes you find that they just don 't trying to get back to their homeland against im- fit the package. I just can 't understand the theory that you ' re trying to put those words in my mouth possible odds. Then in another film he'd show them that I play myself, which is a lot of crap. In one role , I' m a guy with a sense of humor. In another as harsh as the land they were living in. I' m a mean old man . In others , I' m a romantic or a tough character . Each of those characters is MCINERNEY: You started in films to become a different. And he 's different to the people around him . You don 't see that, do you? director. Now that you ' ve directed two films , what MCINERNEY : THE SEARCHERS is ce rtainly a dif- do you think of directing instead of acting? ferent role. WAYNE: No director I know can make the kind WAYNE: You know, I just don 't understand why that film wasn 't better received. of money that they pay me as an actor. Uncle 's right MCINERNEY: It's been rediscovered. It has a there on my back all the time , so it's pretty hard fantastic reputation now. Some people rank it among Ford 's best westerns. to make the changeover. If a good one comes along that I feel that I can do both ... MCINERNEY: Why would you want to do both? WAYNE : Well , it's not the eas iest chore in the world , but if there is something I want to put on the screen I'd have to do it that way . I guess I'm about the only director in the business who has never directed a picture that grossed less than seventeen million . MCINERNEY: After starring in westerns for over forty years, why do you think they 're so effective? WAYNE : If you have a good personal story that fits in a western , there is no better way to tell a story for our medium than in a western background . You have the beauty of the scenery, the harshness of the scenery, the misery of the elements, the excitement of the action , and the horse is the best vehicle to show action . A modern-type film is dependent upon the scenes . In the western you can still tell stories about people , but as an added attraction , you know you have a little platinu m to put in the setting. You ' re not stuck in one room in a hotel in New York-it's too familiar . People like to go where they ' re taken out of their familiar , every- day life. 11111111 FILM COMMENT 55

Flllm FA II~III- S alternative revolutionary instead of the traditional robber of the Bible , is, besides being highly charac- Robin Wood teristic of Ray thematically , above all an architectural on decision , strengthening the linear narrative with a structure of parallels and oppositions. ~igge( Than lit It is this strong architectural sense-not only in ~ the construction of the scenario , but also in the clarity with which it is pointed in the realization-that Nicholas Ray studied architecture (under Frank most surely distinguishes Ray from Kazan and Penn , Lloyd Wright) , and has always been fascinated by the two directors with whom he has most in common folk-song , ballad , the culture of primitive ethnic in terms of outlook and thematic preoccupation . groups. An examination of his work could well take What one might call the architectural lines of Ray's this striking and suggestive juxaposition of interests films are so much firmer and cleaner ; he is less easily as its starting-point. Each has its obvious impor- seduced by actors and incidentals. The advantage tance independently. The architectural awareness is not entirely Ray 's: it is a strength that precludes , is there not only in the extreme sensitivity to decor- for instance, the profusion of spontaneous invention in the way the structure of rooms , apartments , that is the chief joy of BONNIE AND CLYDE. But it seems houses is used for purposes of dramatic ex pression to me one of the marks of the superiority of his films -but in the structure of the images, in which the to most of Kazan 's: it is the expression of a surer actors themselves are often used architecturally: control and sense of direction , of the achievement Ray 's treatment of the human body is closer to of a necessary artistic impersonality and distance Cezanne than to Renoir. that acts as a check on the very powerful and personal emotional elan of the films , strengthening The complex role architectural features can play a force that in Kazan tends to be dissipated through in Ray 's work can be typified by his use of the self-indulgence. staircase in BIGGER THAN LIFE. The staircase con- nects (as Victor Perkins suggested in Movie 1) the The influence of Ray 's primitive ethnic interests upstairs world of private dreams and escape with on his art is even more obvious: one has only to the downstairs world more vulnerable to the intru- point to HOT BLOOD , WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES sion of reality . But it is also the heart of the Avery and THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS, or to the folk-ballad home; the whole house is constructed around the impulse that is one of the many determinant factors central staircase. As a place of transit (and Ray 's behind the bewilderingly complicated JOHNNY GUI- protagonists are always in a state of transit) it is TAR . But the interaction of these interests in Ray where most of the major conflicts and confronta- is more significant than their individual contribu- tions occur-from the argument with his wife about tions. It epitomizes the basic creative tension in all their \" dullness \" that provokes Ed Avery 's break- his work , that between conscious , rational control down to the climactic battle with Wally which culmi- (architecture) and the promptings of spontaneous nates in the shattering of the banisters. Finally , it anarchic impulse (primitive art). is the insistent verticals or diagonals (depending on camera angle) of the staircase cutting across the Plenty of films before CITIZEN KANE used depth horizontals of the CinemaScope frame that give so of focus , and there were CinemaScope films before many of the compositions their Cezanne-like REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. Yet the acclamation of strength and cleanness. Welles ' (and Toland's) work on KANE is perfectly justified , for it revealed a whole new range of ex- Architecture, at a further remove, also has its pressive possibilities, a much fuller and more con- bearing on the rigorous and solid scenario struc- scious sense of the effects achievable; and what tures that attract Ray: a feature of his work so Welles was to deep focus , Ray was to CinemaScope. consistent that one can , I think , confidently deduce The 'Scope frame gave a new acuteness to his (without belittling the contributions of the writers) architectural sense: he both uses the inherent hori- that in many cases his influence was decisive at zontal emphasis of 'Scope, and fights it by an equal quite an early stage in the planning of the films . insistence on the vertical. The constriction of the To suggest but one possible example out of many: frame (a shot showing the whole length of the body to raise Barabbas to a prominence almost equal to has automatically the effect of long-shot) repeatedly that of Christ in KING OF KINGS , making of him an intensifies our awareness of the characters' sense of entrapment: in REBEL, especially , James Dean 's hunched , ~ense body seems to be struggling to burst out of those constricting horizontals, the top of the frame continually pressing down upon him. If there is a single recurrent image that seems to express the whole spirit of Ray 's art , it is probably that of hands reaching out to touch-from the close-up of the hand of the blind Ida Lupino stretching down to meet the outstretched hand of Robert Ryan at the end of ON DANGEROUS GROUND (situated, what is more , half-way up a staircase) , to the hand of Christ reaching down through the prison bars to 56 SEPTEMBER 1972

James Maso n and Barb ara Ru sh . All photos: Mu seum of Modern Art / Film Stills Archive. -- touch that of John the Baptist (Ryan again) as he thereby the greater force of expression) by the strains upwards , via the magical moment in REBEL strong and emphatic formal elements. But the sen- where James Dean stretches out his hand to Natalie sitivity is not restricted to such moments : it is ex- Wood on the world 's edge after the chicken-run . pressed in a formal and stylistic inventiveness dis- cernible everywhere. To take a representative More generally, images of reaching and stretch- (rather than exceptional) sequence from BIGGER ing-expressive of bodily and spiritual tension , of THAN LIFE : the scene in which Ed , exhilarated by a straining towards contact or an effort to burst his release from the hospital and by the first effects metaphorical bonds-pervade Ray's art, and the of the cortisone treatment, takes Lou out to buy her great horizontal expanse of the 'Scope screen en- new dresses. The sequence begins with Lou show- ables Ray to imbue them with maximum energy and ing their son Richie a chocolate cake she has baked force . Consider , for ex ample , the moment in BIGGER to celebrate Ed 's homecoming . Even this banal THAN LIFE when Ed Avery (James Mason), about to domestic incident is given the characteristic Ray leave for the hospital , collapses on the threshold \" thrust\": Lou 's hands, holding the cake, entering of his home and grabs the door-post for support, from left of screen as Richie 's head enters from the his hand pressing on the bell. His wife , Lou (Barbara right, the child 's delight communicated to the audi- Rush) , crouches beside him , clasping him , her hand ence as much by the dynamic force of the image- also stretching out around him to try to loosen his the simultaneous converging movements from fingers from their hold . The moment expresses oppOSite ends of the wide screen-as by acting and physical and mental anguish with the most painful dialogue. immediacy: the unremitting buzz of the bell suggests both a cry for help and the discord that the release When Ed arrives home and dictatorially (if genial- of Ed 's suppressed frustrations will increasingly ly) announces the shopping spree (the cake , and represent in the precarious harmony of his family. the simple domestic unity it represents, swept aside The bodies and arms are stretched out across the and then forgotten ), he stands in the kitchen door- 'Scope screen , the hands over the bell thrust across way, arms uprised , hands grasping the doorframe and forward into the extreme right foreground , the above his head . The shot is an ex cellent example frame seeming to squeeze the actors between its of Ray 's architectural use of the human body, and narrow horizontals even as its width allows the sense a useful reminder that such shots in his films are of strain and physical tautness to be conveyed with never only that: they invariably have their dramatic extraordinary intensity. justification, their moral and emotional and narrative meaning . Ed 's stance ex presses his exhilaration , Ray 's sensitivity to the artistic potential of the his joyous sense of power and freedom , and at the 'Scope shape is especially evident at such moments same time his desire to dominate: the shot's com- ple x emotional effect, which alarms us even as it of crisis, where emotion so intense as to border on the hysterical is kept under rigorous control (gaining FILM COMMENT 57

Wal ter Matthau and James Maso n. to create the structure or at least be inseparable communicates the character's sense of well-being , from it, suggests the director 's guiding hand as epitomizes that of the whole film . The dramatic ultimate determinant), the thematic / dramatic devel- force as well as the architecture of the shot depends opment of the narrative is a model of lucidity. The on the way the strong verticals of the body and progression of Ed 's psychosis , from the time of his door-frame cut across the horizontal \" pull \" of the release from hospital , is shown with inexorable 'Scope image ; Ed 's feet are out of frame at the logic : One can chart four main stages , in each of bottom of the screen , his arms seem stretching up which his drive towards self-expression and self-as- to thrust off the constricting narrowness that en- sertion takes a different form ; as each attempt at closes him . fulfillment is frustrated , the urge that gave rise to it seeks new ex pression elsewhere . The visit to the dress shop begins with a shot that uses the 'Scope screen 's expressive potential First there is the shopping-spree , Ed 's manic-de- in quite a different way . When the family gets out pressive period , his efflatus collapsing in nocturnal of the car outside the shop , Ray loads all the action despair; it represents Ed 's attempt to assert his on to the right of the screen , leaving the left superiority through status symbols and material occupied only by sidewalk , the canopy in front of possessions , and it has obviously ceased to satisfy the shop entrance , and passers-by. As Ed draws him even before he confronts the bills (at the mo- his protesting wife towards the shop, Ray, instead ment when he is about to phone the doctor for help). of allowing them to cross the screen , tracks with This gives way to his assertion of personal, intellec- them , preserving the image's dramatic imbalance. tual superiority: contempt for Lou , plans to write a The camera movement , seeming , with Ed , to draw brilliant series of articles on education , desire to Lou on , and the empty space to left of screen (with reform television with really \" adult\" programs. This the shop front coming into view), beautifully express culminates logically in his move to leave the intel- Lou 's simultaneous attraction to the shop and recoil lectual constriction of his home. As he descends from the extravagance . In the ensuing scene inside , the staircase , Richie comes in , and Ed suddenly Ray uses the width of the screen to strengthen a recognizes a duty to his son ; but it is clear that he striking color effect. Ed sits left of screen organizing had nowhere to go , and urgently needed a reason Lou 's selection of dresses, like a complacent and not to go through the front door. So the next phase tyrannical movie director supervising the mise-en- scene ; all his half of the screen is drained of strong is Ed's drive towards fulfillment-by-proxy , through his son ; but Richie , a likable kid of average intelli- colors . To right of screen , Lou , trying on an ex pen- gence, proves quite inadequate as the vehicle for sive orange dress, is closely ju xtaposed with a his father's grandiose aspirations. In fact , all the cherry-pink dress on a stand and with Richie in his possible roads to fulfillment are now closed to Ed . scarlet jacket; the opposing halves of the image are The visit to church suggest a new-and ultimate- divided by the mirror in which Lou is reflected . The form of expression for his power-drive: religious jarring color clashes concentrated right of screen tyranny, and the eventual usurpation of the role of are expressive at once of the extravagance of Ed's God (\"God was wrong\") . But Ray reveals this as newly-acquired sense of grandeur and of the false- a screen : the real drive here is towards annihilation ness of imposing it on his family , ostensibly in Lou 's -the total destruction of family and self, expressing interests. a furious nihilism that, retrospectively, appears im- The problem of the authorship of the script of plicit in Ed 's condition from the outset , but which BIGGER THAN LIFE is decidedly complicated . Apart Ray presents as another desperate evasion of the from the two credited screenwriters , Ray mentions difficult and delicate business of living with what both Gavin Lambert and Clifford Odets as collabo- you 've got. rators. Whoever was basically responsible (and the perfect appropriateness of image to idea throughout Yet BIGGER THAN LIFE is not really a film about psychosis , any more than it is an Awful Warning the film , the way in which the mise-en-scene seems about cortisone . Ray is concerned more with the normal than the abnormal , with the tensions inher- ent in life in contemporary society; or, more basical- ly, with the tension between aspirations and envi- ronment which is perhaps fundamental to the human condition . The structure of the film draws its strength from the way in which all of Ed 's excesses under the influence of the drug are subtly anticipated before he has taken it, without at any point over- stepping the bounds of recognizable \" normality\"-a normality, that is , with which all of us can (to what- ever varying degree) identify. Ed's urge to buy Lou extravagant dresses is prompted by his appreciation of his chic (and single) schoolteacher colleague Pat, and this appreciation is evident early in the film when he arranges for the gym teacher Wally (Walter Matthau) to bring Pat to the bridge party-dating her by proxy , as it were . 58 SEPTEMBER 1972

His purchase of the dresses (at the shop where Pat Walter Matthau. Christopher Olsen. Barbara Rush and James Mason. goes for hers) can be read as evidence of a desire to substitute Pat for Lou . The whole urge towards Ray either.) Such moments are always characterized material display, in fact , is already implicit in the by a visual heightening , a force in the images that suggestion that Ed is living beyond his means and may superficially appear a mere rhetorical flourish . has to work after school hours for a taxi company. One such moment (brilliantly pointed out to me by Also significant are the travel posters that are the John Dyer) occurs at the end of WIND ACROSS THE most striking feature of decor in Ed 's house, sug- EVERGLADES: the shot with the dead Burl Ives staring gestive of his frustrated yearning for escape or at us from the foreground of the screen as Chris- transcendance. His desire for intellectual superiority topher Plummer, his broken arm dangling uselessly, is evident from his awareness of the essential poles away awkwardly in long-shot, and we sudden - dullness of what he later (under the drug 's influence) ly realize that, metaphorically, he has become Billy describes as \" petty domesticity .\" \" We 're dull ,\" he One-Arm , the outcast Seminole who belonged nei- tells Lou after the bridge party-a perception that ther to his tribe nor to white civilization. obviously has never occurred to her. \" Can you tell me one thing that was said tonight that was funny , Another, more unequivocally created by the startling , imaginative ... ?\" At which precise point mise-en-scene, is the shot near the end of KING OF comes Ed 's first major attack , significantly linking KINGS where the camera, behind Christ's head as his \" illness\" (which Ray is careful not to account he is nailed to the cross , rises with the cross as for in terms of physical causes) with his emotional / it is erected , until we look down with him from a spiritual frustrations. height in anguish , compassion and triumph . The shot reminds us of the earlier overhead shots (casti- The use of Richie as the vehicle for vicarious gated by Victor Perkins in Movie as \" dictatorial \" ) fulfillment is also anticipated early in the film . When of Herod the Great , \" crucified \" by his nightmare Ed arrives home from work his first action is to send (the cross image already present in the horizontal Richie away from the western he is watching on of the curtain he has pulled down in his panic) and television to practice the piano , and , before he of Herod Antipas-at the identical spot at the bottom leaves for the hospital , he gives his son the football of the steps to the throne, the place where he he keeps as a trophy from his solitary athletic murdered his father for power-grovelling before triumph , telling him that perhaps he ' ll get to be Salome. The film 's \"complex moral and metaphys- captain . Ed 's urge to dominate is present from the ical rhetoric \" (Jim Kitses on JOHNNY GUITAR) , its beginning-in the way he treats his son , in the way intricate paradoxical patterning of physical and he follows Lou around turning off lights as she tries spiritual freedom , temporal and spiritual power , all to clear away the dishes after the bridge party , in converges on that one shot, and on the shots his detention (albeit benevolent) of a child on the grou~ing the various characters who watch the last afternoon of the school term . crucifixion (Mary and John ; Claudia and Lucius; Barabbas and Judas). Indeed , it is implicit in the film 's first image. We see a teacher 's desk, with a watch on it. A hand BIGGER THAN LIFE is structured on a series of such comes out from the bottom of the screen as if to moments, of which I shall isolate three. The force take the watch, and hovers over it dominatingly . We of each of these moments, which could in isolation don 't know , at this stage , whose hand it is, so the appear rhetorical, is I think fully justified by their image has a generalized significance rather than context: the effect is not of a mere dramatic gesture a personal-psychological one: the passing of time, but a heightening that , by providing a series of of life, and the attempt to dominate it. But the hand landmarks , pOints the whole structure of the film . draws back, and the camera draws back with it, to And though the emotional impact in each case is show it clasped to the back of a man 's head as very strong and direct, the meaning is complex . he is suddenly gripped by pain. The whole film can be felt to grow out of that opening shot , and its 1. Lou drives Ed to school on the first morning emblematic quality gives it the force of metaphor, after his release from hospital. She tells him she's expressing something of the metaphysic that under- proud to be a teacher's wife. He says that with her lies Ray 's work . The role of the drug in the film is in fact purely functional : it removes all inhibitions and releases the urges that are already present in Ed . His illness can be read as the product of the inner tension built up by their frustration : it is the illness of man-in-society rather than of a particular individual. But the structure of a Ray movie cannot be grasped solely in terms of its scenario . The inner progress of his films is marked , characteristically , by what might be called \" nuclear \" moments: points where the thematic threads are pulled together, so that we feel the nucleus of the film suddenly made manifest. (If the term also suggest energy and explosions , then that is not wholly inappropriate to FILM COMMENT 59

and Richie behind him he feels ten feet tall , and true that Ed has been maddeningly demanding ; it's she replies , rather glibly, \" You 've always been ten also true that he had just been , almost miraculously, feet tall to me , Ed .\" Cut to a low-angle shot of Ed restored to health after a medical death sentence. as he turns away to walk towards the school , his The broken mirror becomes an emblem , then , not head against the sky , a gigantic figure seeming to only of Ed's pluge into psychosis but also of the tower above the school building . The shot expresses extreme fragility of the \" normal \" family life he and Ed 's pride and pleasure in health since the cortisone Lou have been living . The width of the screen allows treatment began , which we have hitherto shared ; Ray to frame Ed 's shattered reflection ironically but it is also the pivotal point at which the whole between the neat white lace curtains of the tone of the film changes and darkens. The effect bathroom windows. of immense size and power conferred by the shot is half-funny , half-ominous. We are suddenly alerted 3. I must confess to doubts about the dramatic to the dangers inherent in Ed 's sense of stature , plausibility of the shot of Richie holding out a foot- and the expressionist exaggeration of the image ball to the father who has come to murder him . suggests for the first time that that sense is illusory. Wouldn 't the child be hiding under the bed or jumping out of the window (as Lou has screamed 2. I have heard the shot of Ed 's face reflected up at him to do, presumably but not very convinc- in the shattered bathroom mirror criticized as obvi- ingly unheard)? It is untypical of Ray to sacrifice ous and bombastic . Certainly it is very forceful , and narrative logic to \" meaning \"; usually in his work not in itself particularly original , the smashed mirror the latter grows naturally out of the former. Yet the being a common enough image for expressing meaning of the shot is so rich that one can half-sym- breakdown . Yet such a criticism ignores the shot's pathize with his surrender to temptation. One could structural significance and the complexity of its almost argue that the structure of the film demands implications; its purpose goes far beyond that of the central presence of the football in the image facile impact. It occurs almost exactly halfway at that point. The shot shows Richie in the fore- through the film , and at another pivotal point in the ground , prone on the bed , head towards the camera. development . It marks the moment when Ed first Ed bursts in through the door, in long-shot, arm deliberately takes an overdose of cortisone- upraised to strike, fingers clutching one blade from therefore , in a very precise sense , the moment at a pair of scissors. Without turning , Richie holds out which his \" image \" as integrated social man , the football with one arm , behind him , to his father, respected teacher, happy husband and father , is so that the ball becomes the focal point of the image, decisively shattered. The mirror was smashed , in center of screen and center of the line of tension fact , not by Ed but by Lou , in a fit of temper . It's between father and son , murderer and innocent James Maso n, Chr ist o ph er Ol se n and Barbara Rush. 60 SEPTEMBER 1972

victim. The football has accumulated complex as- the awareness of his limitations , and in a more sociations (both positive and negative, like every- thing else in the film ). It is, First, the emblem of Ed 's realistic appraisal of his relationship with his envir- high school triumph-about which he is, before the cortisone threatment influences him , suitably ironic . onment . Later, it becomes the medium for the realization of Ed 's grandiose expec tations of his son . But it is also It would be quite wrong to see BIGGER THAN LIFE the chief medium of communication between father and child: against the painfulness of the scene in as a simple endorsement of the American bourgeois the garden where Ed tries to force the boy into athletic prowess must be set the earlier scene (also family . The constricting limitations of the milieu and not without ominous overtones) , after the start of treatment but before the overdoses , where Ed and its values are concisely rendered in the first part Richie practice throws in the house. It is Richie 's offer of the football (whether as an attempt at con- of the film . If Ray honors what is real and potentially ciliation or a rejection of all his father now stands for; I find the gesture dramatically ambiguous, a living in the family , he equally honors what is valid corollary of its dubious plausibility) that prevents Ed from killing him-not only what the gesture suggests, in Ed's disruptive aspirations, He presents his char- but all that the football means, his own youthful hopes and his hopes for his child , their moments acters with an intelligent balancing of understanding of spontaneous togetherness. and distance, sympathy and criticism , getting ad- In general , as in such specifics , the forces of Ray 's cinema is almost everywhere balanced by mirably just and lucid performances from his comple xity of attitude. It is illuminating to explore BIGGER THAN LIFE by means of this question: Where principals. Ed Avery has many of the characteristics in the film do we look for its positive moral center? A film carrying so strong an emotional charge , and of the archetypal Ray protagonist caught between eliciting such sympathetic concern for its people , cannot but be motivated by a sense of positive value , impulse and control , yet there is nowhere the feeling an impulse towards the formulation of human norms. The end of the film, moving towards that that the director is emotionally involved with him .characteristic reaching out of hands and the very last word of dialogue , \" Closer . . . closer ... ,\" as at the cost of intellectual clarity: we are allowed Ed draws his family to him over the hospital bed , may seem unequivocally to locate that sense of neither to patronize ; Ed nor to identify with him. Simi- value in the re-affirmation of the family , and one would scarcely wish to deny the force of this. larly, Lou 's limitations are made quite clear without Yet our confidence in the future is undermined our ever being allowed to look down on her; she by various factors . For one thing , it is made clear that Ed 's life depends on the continuance of the is neither the All-American Mom nor a contemptible cortisone treatment. Lou is told that the doses must be carefully regulated , that Ed 's disturbance was idiot. due to abuse of the drug ; but the film has made it unambiguously clear that Ed 's behavior changed Characteristically , Ray 's films (WIND ACROSS THE significantly before he began abusing it. The shop- ping spree, the indoor football practice, the noctur- EVERGLADES is the supreme example) embody a nal collapse into despair-all preceded the first overdose. complex dialectic that provokes in the spectator a This, in turn, leads us (with the logic the film 's critical yet constructive attitude to both sides and style and structure encourage) to reflect that the real problems were merely released by the drug , a sense of the necessity for seeking a middle way not created by it, and remain essentially untouched. The optimism of the ending (and a tough and real- that will preserve the finer elements of each . The istic optimism-a sense that the only real failure is to give up-is characteristic of Ray generally) takes sequence of the P.T.A. meeting in BIGGER THAN LIFE its strength from the sense that both Ed and Lou , by confronting the near-destruction of everything offers a useful microcosm of this method , Ray mak- by which they have hitherto lived , have learned to value their marriage and their family more con- ing it equally impossible to accept either the smugly sciously and intensely, and to be more aware of the issues. The inner movement of Ray 's films is often liberal parents or Ed 's incipiently fascist diatribe, but concerned with the education of the protagonist in implying through their confrontation the need for sanity and empirical reason in tackling educational problems. Ray 's concern for society and its future graviaties naturally to the educational concerns of BIGGER THAN LIFE ; the scenes between Ed and Richie are , in their implications, worth a hundred teachers' manuals. Yet that is only one aspect of a film that denies the spectator equally the comfort of easy solutions or the luxury of despair. BIGGER THAN LIFE is among the cinema's most intelligent and searching state- ments about man-in-society. Its message (i n so far as a comple x work of art can be said to offer one) is not \" Be satisfied with what you 've got,\" but \" Work with what you 've got, empirically and realistically . And know yourself. \" 11111111 BIGGER THAN LIFE 1956, 20th Century-Fox, 95 minutes. Distributed in 16mm by Films Inc. Director Nicholas Ray; producer James Mason ; screenplay Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum ; based on the article \" Ten Feet Tall \" by Berton Roueche; photography Joe MacDonald; editing Louis Loeffler; music Lionel Newman . CAST James Mason Ed Avery Barbara Rush Lou Avery Walter Matthau Wally Gibbs Christopher Olsen Richie Avery Kipp Hamilton Pat Pamela Mason Nancy FILM COMMENT 61

Fll FA II~III- 5 information as to the whereabouts of his son from a man in the mining camp. At the end of the con- Richord mcC;uinneJJ versation , after Mitchum has gotten his information , the man asks, \" What's your name?\" and Mitch- ornoon um replies , in order to bring the conversation to an abrupt close , that (unlike the boy) \" I' m not lost. \" River Reiurn and leaves. It is as if to say only in the direst situation would one member of a family divulge information Richard McGuinness is a freelance writer who about another to a stranger-and then he would give away only the minimum . The rule of loyalty to a few has contributed film and television criticism to The in the wilds , unnatural to us at first , applies abso- Village Voice. lutely and makes Mitchum often wooden and pre- tentious to strangers. Large, abstract questions don't concern Otto Preminger.To him , such philosophical-religious sub- Preminger's spinning pith out of dross through- jects of inquiry as man 's capacity or incapacity for out RIVER OF NO RETURN is all the more remarkable love and his relation to the universe have no point because he didn 't especially want to make this in movies. For some reason , people in life lead movie. He doesn 't like Westerns and himself calls animated existences and do seem to need one it an \" assignment. \" He does his best to direct another. There is only one urgent issue in Preminger straight ; but often at weak pOints , in order to main- movies: What are the constructive and practical or tain some kind of credibility, even if it's anti-dramat- destructive-obsessive uses individuals have for each ic, his direction arches back at the characters, other? and , Can the wrong-headed ones learn to almost making us feel they are unworthy of our change their behavior in emergencies? concern . However, they are real , and it must be admitted , particularly after the passage of two dec- I've often been disputed on this, but some of the ades, that Preminger's resistance to the usual direc- prominent means Preminger has of showing peo- tor's impulse to please audiences with unreal, ple 's wrong approaches in dire situations include though entertaining , characterizations, indicates a bad , unconvincing effects, unfinished acting , and timeless desire for truth-telling . exigencies in the script. RIVER OF NO RETURN is one of my favorite Preminger films , replete as it is with The Robert Mitchum characterization becomes questionable aesthetic devices used for truth-telling. a problem , though at first it is quite satisfying . In The occasional stilted readings by some of the the beginning , he moves through the wilderness actors are most striking. They show the artificial with ease. His love for his son involves no game- approach to a threatening environment of people playing , and his hugs and touches communicate struggling to find their center. credible and binding love and complete trust. In dangerous situations Mitchum uses his great physi- Many of Marilyn Monroe's lines and her reading cal power knowingly and sparingly. When , for fun , of them give us the feeling of a false consciousness. a man in the mining camp shoots holes in the pails These lines have a raised , badgelike quality , as if his son is holding , Mitchum braces one leg surely their recitrix knows she's on her high horse and and knocks out the brute with one punch. not in touch with her best judgment. Her words sound as if they were written in concrete-especially Then aspects of Mitchum begin to appear that when she 's been offended by Robert Mitchum's seem to have been crudely stuck in the script to frontiersman and will not lower herself to appreciate complicate his character. We discover that he has the necessity of his unsubtle force. Her civilized , been in prison for shooting a man in the back , that though corrupt, sensibility and pet peeves against he had left his boy in the wild mining camp with men find their correct home in art , in the songs she no protection , and that, when Mitchum and Monroe sings in a saloon ; but her complete personality is seem to be warming up to each other, Mitchum capable of being satisfied only at home in the woods responds to her advances, not with the gentleness as a mother to Mitchum 's boy. There she's free and she wants, but by trying to rape her. Instead of easy and convincing , and her conversation is fluid . softening the incredible materialization of Mitchum 's unlikely aspects, Preminger manages to integrate Lines in RIVER OF NO RETURN that have this plant- their rough-draft quality into a personality credibly ed , concrete quality may, on the other hand , also coping with wilderness. He manages by the end of be the outcrop of a sure wilderness personality . M itch- the river journey to show us a much more difficult um employs his stern , sententious voice often. There and challenging entity than we had anticipated . is an ex change at the beginning where he seeks Mitchum has become as surprising and tangible as a real person . Aesthetic propriety and civilized codes of behav- ior in RIVER OF NO RETURN parallel each other. And as the aesthetically compunctious viewer doesn 't trust the impossible aspects of Mitchum, Monroe's over-civilized kitten also doesn 't trust what she takes to be Mitchum's incorrigible bestiality. The issue of the credibility of his actions, though , becomes re- solved eventually when Preminger makes us under- 62 SEPTEMBER 1972

stand that Mitchum , seen in the absolute conte xt night to steal the trio 's raft while Mitchum and the of untamed nature , acts as justly as he can and still boy are asleep. Her mindless attempt to go it alone, survive . As for his interest in convincing an audience sprung from her injured humanity, would have been , that he's real , we can safely assume it is nil. had it succeeded , far more destructive than anything Mitchum is c apable of. It would have stranded not Mitchum 's sense of right is emphasized through only him , but also the boy Monroe is supposedly a string of actions all the way down the river, and so fond of, in the wilderness without a gun and at it challenges our sense of decency, of whom Monroe the mercy of the Indians; and Marilyn herself here is the confused exemplar. Monroe thinks that wouldn 't have been able to maneuver the raft down the choice of men available on the frontier is be- the dangerous rapids alone. Her destructive fool- tween the crafty-civilized , sensitive ones (Rory Cal- ishness is so obvious to her, when Mitchum catches houn , her gambler lover, whom she is going down her, that she is embarrassed into a permanent neu- the river with Mitchum to meet) and the barbaric, trality toward the rough but sensible actions she had insensitive ones (Mitchum , who is going down the previously disdained. river to get back the horse Calhoun stole and to get even). But eventually, by seeing herself from the Soon after, on the raft again with the others, she outside in situations where Mitchum is, in contrast , murmurs that she doesn 't feel like living any more, reliable and sensible, she begins to realize that and faints . This weak and ancient device, of the Calhoun 's brand of sensitive humanity-and her woman swooning when she sees no way out of her own-turns devious and destructive under the least dilemma, here occurs necessarily, as a poignant pressure. psychosomatic symptom of her absolute wrongness for the frontier. She has momentarily lost her will , The change in her view of Mitchum from wildman but is on her way to discovering herself. Monroe to a sensible man turns basically on the following , has been existing de facto as part of a family-she , seemingly senseless, audience-souring incident, by the boy, and Mitchum-though she would not admit which observers might easily be convinced Monroe this consciously. Only the boy seems aware of the isn 't worth the film she 's photographed on . A grudge advantages of the arrangement. She has been en- spurs her foolishness. It started at the beginning gaged in a big split , acting one way but thinking of the movie while she was still singing in the mining her loyalty lies with Calhoun , whom she intends to camp . There, she hollered at Mitchum for leaving join downriver. After her faint, she wakes up with his boy in the loose-living environment, and didn 't a fever and is wrapped in a blanket in a cave . In believe his explanation that leaving him was safer her feverish docility, she's unable to maintain her than bringing him along while he staked out farm- superficial loyalty to Calhoun and is receptive to land in Indian territory . Through later events she whatever man is near. Mitchum gives her a rubdown keeps her spite against him , and he maintains his that is ludicrously inappropriate to her sexy type ; contempt for her wrong-headedness . She eventually if she had enough energy, she would have been gets her chance to retaliate against Mitchum 's crime offended. In a more willful state , she would have of insensitivity when she thoughtlessly tries one Maril yn Monroe , To mmy Rettig , Ro bert Mit c hum All p h otos : Mu se um of Modern Ar t / Film Stills Archive. FILM COMMENT 63

desired a coyly sexual, dandyman attempt at a triggers the action , which evolves eventually into a massage. Now she gets brisk, rough fingering from solution to the sexual confusion between the two. Mitchum , whose only purpose is to get her blood As they walk in the forest , one of Monroe 's straps circulating well. And thus , Monroe feels a real man is down , gimmicklike , and her conversation is bearing down on her with purpose for the first time. cheesily provocative . Mitchum tries to rape her. She trusts him wholly. Predictably, she's tremendously alienated by the assault, but before she can articulate her hate, After the rubdown , she raises her rosy face and Mitchum 's son yells that a mountain lion is about apologizes for accusing him of his past crime in to attack. Mitchum gets to his son and , finding there front of his son. They then share a long , under- are no more bullets, begins wrestling with the big standing look; but unfortunately it becomes almost cat. A shot rings out and the cat is dead , and it immediately the beguiling , nearly glutenous, civi- turns out that two strangers, mountain men , have lized expression of a Hollywood temptress . It re- shown up. They ask for some of the cooking meat, minded me much of the look of sexual accomplish- and eventually one also demands that Monroe ac- ment Linda Darnell gives over the shoulder of company them to Council City. Insinuatingly, he Michael Rennie in Preminger's THE THIRTEENTH mentions rumors about Monroe-she 's an enter- LETTER . But where Darnell , the clubfoot , is clearly tainer and the lover of a gambler-and thinks she approved of by Preminger for her spirit in attracting and Mitchum can be treated like trash . Monroe, the matter-of-fact doctor Rennie plays, he equally however, says she 'd rather not get to Council City clearly senses the extraneous, possibly dangerous than go with those two. The man who wants Monroe aspect of Monroe 's beguilement in the wilderness. pulls a knife and Mitchum gets it away from him The tension started by Monroe 's overt interest in in a long silent fight. After Mitchum wins , takes one Mitchum-e xposing as it does the huge split in her of their guns, and sends the men on their way, personality between the natural and the unnatural Monroe relaxes into companionship with him. even when her intentions couldn 't be better-is Opposite versions of the bestial man have appeared broken in a later scene of massive and , as it seems just now in her life , albeit in a scene involving a initially, gratuitous proportions. Within about five breath-taking compression of time. Although both minutes, there is an attempted rape , an attack by want her for sex, one , Mitchum , is capable of loyalty. a mountain lion , an attempted kidnapping , and a Her tacky toying to attract him had been unneces- knife fight. sary and had probably caused his assault on her. At the start of the scene, Monroe has backtracked Soon after the violent events , they have an open , from her first feverish acceptance of Mitchum to her mutually considerate conversation , the importance usual toying treatment of men. Her manipulativeness Robert Mitchum , Marilyn Monroe , Tommy Rettig . 64 SEPTEMBER 1972

of which crystallizes for the viewer in the elemental vs . propriety of such an act , Mitchum achieves a discovery that the river has changed direction. (Lit- erally , the pair is camping on the side they hadn 't certain amount of liberation from having his life before .) Their relationship has changed , and though Monroe's words quietly still group Mitchum with the saved in this improper yet common-sense way by cruder side of life , she is now at ease , and her tone is trusting. The river itself echoes the new direction. his son , and Preminger thereby avoids the inevita- Though the crisis has pushed Monroe and Mitch- bility and fatalism of most westerns, where the um into even closer companionship , Monroe is still intellectually loyal to snake Calhoun , but this loyalty guilt-obsessed hero either has to become drawn into is now circumscribed and doesn 't touch anyone destructively but herself. Sitting by the river, Monroe more evil action until he is destroyed, sacrifice tells her real feelings for Calhoun. She identifies with him because of his desperation , and she forgives himself for those he loves, or prove himself through anything that results from it, including his misleading others, his cheating , his lack of loyalty to anyone, impossible Herculean tasks. and his pasted-on personality. When the trio arrives at Council City , we , ourselves, get a closeup view After Calhoun is dead , Monroe realizes she has of Calhoun. Since we only saw him at the beginning , when we had little interest in him , except as a fly wasted energy on the wrong man and hopelessly in the machinery of the plot , we are now curious to see his unconvincing relationship with Monroe goes back in a saloon again to sing . The self-pitying again. Mitchum of course means to get even with him for stealing his only horse; but oddly Calhoun in her again finds its expression in art: \" Love is a is unconcerned , and lazes around slickly after stak- ing his claim , with no intention of escaping Mitchum traveler on the river of no return ,\" says art. Mitchum , or of returning to reclaim Monroe, who thinks she is still his woman . though , is no longer interested in satisfaction from Monroe now meets up with Calhoun and drags passive, self-blaming states. He breaks through the after his independent, unconcerned figure-not to endear herself to him or to get in on his deal , both congealed bar group surrounding her and looking of which motives he suspects , but to save him from Mitchum . He can't fathom her loyalty because he her over. He hoists Monroe over his shoulder and only understands unconvincing relationships. He does sit down with her once and describes his lack carries her out in the film 's second clima x. No of interest in her, his man-on-his-own self-justifica- tions, his using her money to stake his claim , and sentimental loss endings for him . his throwing her over. He explains all this, not with especially good arguments, but with a Clark Gable The last shot of RIVER OF NO RETURN sees Marilyn kind of tough , earnest independence, an artificial persona he's acquired apparently for proper mo- Monroe famously dropping her red entertainer 's- ments with women . (Seeing the ghost of an alien acting style in Preminger actors usually happens at shoes on the street from the family wagon she 's least once in each movie. As here , it often occurs as a criticism of the facility of acting effects , of the joined. The ending of the discarded shoes was used ease with which a style can be appropriated for selfish purposes by destructive people. This appro- discordantly in ANATOMY OF A MURDER (w hose score priation initially seems like transubstantiation and can be startling.) was jazzy and which also involved the trashy lives The most sour moment dramatically in RIVER OF of transients). The motif was used to undercut NO RETURN is the climax , but the manner in which Calhoun is there dispensed with helps Mitchum get Jimmy Stewart's triumph at winning the case . The over his own wrong-headedness. Though frontier Mitchum is unsentimental , he has been tortured by sexy wife of the accused murderer left her shoes the knowledge that his once having shot a man in the back put him in the same category as other in the trash basket of a trailer park after her husband human refuse of the frontier , even though hi s action was necessary to save a friend 's life . He was brought got off-and they left without paying their lawyer. low by the law of civilized man , and his guilt often sticks out like a badge. His son 's shooting Calhoun The discarded shoes of Monroe, on the other hand , in the back at the end , though deflating the dramatic value of the movie, in real terms makes it quite indicate the end-not the continuance-of her unarguable that sometimes , in the wilderness , the law tawdry life and the recognition by Monroe of her is wrong . The son 's killing crystallizes the necessity past addiction to sentimentality. Like Dietrich 's exit in MOROCCO , Monroe 's gesture isn 't litter. It indicates an acceptance of her surroundings , the possibility of her acquiring a place in nature and in a family through the beginnings of self-awareness and will , uncovered in her during the maturing travel on the river of no return . 11111111 River of No Return 1954, 20th Century Fox, 91 minutes. Director Otto Prem inger; producer Stanley Rubin ; screenplay Frank Fenton ; Cinematography (Cinema- Scope and Te chnico lor) Joseph La Shelle; art directors Lyle Wheeler, Addison Hehr; editor Louis Loeffler. CAST: Matt Calder Robert Mitchum Kay Weston Marilyn Monroe Harry Weston Rory Calhoun Mark Tommy Rettig Colby Murvyn Vye Benson Douglas Spencer The Gambler Ed Hinton Ben Don Beddoe Surrey Driver Claire Andre Dealer at Crap Table Jack Mather Barber Edmund Cobb Trader Will Wright Young Punk Hal Bayler Dancer Jarma Lewis FILM COMMENT 65

Fll m FA OII~IIITES on dense, intricate novels-spring from the improper bridging of major sequences. As a rule , the only [lIio~, J(kin serious adaptations that escape lopsidedness are on the silent ones (like GREED) or the ones that have active first-person narrators (like GREAT EXPECTA- The Group TIONS) . With the summarizing resources available to those movies, there's no need to enact the linking Early in her justly admired \" The Making of THE materials-so there 's also no need to squash new GROUP ,\" Pauline Kael briefly admits that Sidney data into deformed connecting scenes and no Buchman's screenplay \" reduces the novel without temptation to try doing without exposition alto- undue vulgarization .\" But instead of examining the gether. Buchman can 't, unfortunately, use nimble fascinating process by which vulgarization is side- condensations on title cards, or graceful paragraphs stepped , she uses most of her section on the pro- read over the soundtrack, to prevent disjointedness ducer-writer (the one seriously flawed passage in and asymmetry from infecting his script. But he gets an otherwise brilliant essay) to describe why logical- around that limitation by designing transitional ly the script should be a vulgarization . She highlights scenes-telephone conversations, private chats, what Buchman told her privately-how he initially lunches-that are compact without being hasty, planned to include sleazy ironies about unnoticed occur frequently enough to be part of the film 's bread-lines and apple-sellers and how he thought over-all rhythms, and are sufficiently charged dra- the movie might redeem itself socially by boosting matically to reveal new features of the characters contraception , etc . In other words , rather than cen- who participate in them . They 're so much a part tering on what Buchman actually does with the of the film 's contents that sometimes it 's hard to screenplay , Pauline Kael centers on-to use her own distinguish between the sequences that are essen- phrase-\" what he had thought or hoped to do .\" tially transitional and the ones that aren 't. Consequently, she slights one of the most literate and unusual movie scripts of the Si xties. As a film , Still , the more complicated aspect of Buchman 's THE GROUP is far from a faultless work . But for people THE GROUP is the \" undue vulgarization \" side of it . who love the Mary McCarthy original , it can be an \" Undue vulgarization \" -with those two words, Pau- immensely gratifying one-because of Boris Kauf- line Kael very neatly sums up just what it is that man 's sumptuous color photography and because can legitimately be censured in films made from of the cleverly chosen cast-but chiefly by virtue of important books . An adaptation can 't provide the Sidney Buchman 's resourcefully professional adap- same depth of characterization , the same wide tation . range of actions and thoughts , as its source . But it can provide characters who respond to the same Buchman 's \" reduction \" of the novel is precisely impulses and whose combined behavior reflects the the sort of shrewd , light-fingered screenplay that same moral outlook as they do in the original. In a writer who spent twenty years pounding out classy, this most crucial area , Buchman travels an insanely well-made scripts for Columbia Pictures would know tortuous route , but he does arrive at the desired how to assemble. It shrinks the book 's key events end . It's safe to say that the main point made by down to effective scale-models of themselves; inter- The Group as a book is that there 's a tragic distance cuts and merges the eight girls' stories to give the between what people expect to do with their lives plot-line suspense and dramatic structure; makes when they ' re young and what life finally does with suitable dialogue out of the text's many swatches them-that, no matter how high their aims, inexperi- of interior monologue and retrospective biography enced human beings stumble into snares that they and undramatized detail-and does all those things can escape from only partially , if at all. It's something with the kind of dexterity that generally requires a of a struggle, but Buchman keeps this idea, fully life-time's devoted practice. Admittedly, the screen- ramified , alive in his version. Like the novel , his play suffers from a few limp, disarrayed scenes, such screenplay is about innocent, untried people ; and as Kay 's cocktail party ; but according to Pauline like the novel , it takes a sorrowful , almost benevolent Kael , the messy stretches are due to Sidney Lumet 's attitude toward the fates the in nocent meet. sloppy shooting style and Ralph Rosenblum 's desperately self-destructive editing tactics. Pauline Kael reports that, several different times , she was told by Buchman that he was certain the Formally, the script 's great triumph is its avoid- moral of the book was \" higher education does not ance of bumpiness in its transitions , its immunity fit women for life.\" She roundly dismisses this inter- to the ragged contours that-in many movies based pretation as a bizarre distortion of Mary McCarthy 's insights ; and , in theoretical terms , she's more than right to do so . In practical terms , though , she makes a mountain out of a molehill. Nowhere in Buchman 's script is it contended , directly or by implication , that higher education ought to prepare people for life, and nowhere is it said that education should be an exclusively male prerogative. If the screenplay did contain any such corrupt pamphleteering , then, of course, the movie would be unpardonably guilty of disfiguring the novelist's vision. Since it doesn 't, the part of Buchman 's reading of the novel that's not 66 SEPTEMBER 1972

James Bro derick an d Shi rl ey Knig ht. Uni dentifi ed. Larry Hag man . Joa nn a Pettet and Kat hl ee n Wi dd oes. Joan Hackett (back to c amera), Ca ndi ce Berge n. El izabeth Hart man. Kathlee n Wi dd oes (ba ckg ro un d), Jessica Walte r (on co uch), Mary- Rabi n Red d. All photos : Ci nem ab ilia. wrong-headed-the part that stresses the girls' \" un- ration of Kay Strong . She 's the character w ho most fitness \" -is free to point the adaptation in the right personifies besieged innocence and exploded direction. Pragmatically, Buchman ends up saying ho pes-the nai vely pretentious kid whose dreams basically th'e same things that Mary McCarthy says : push her into a disastrous marriage that drives her that the girls in the group aren 't ready to live as crazy . Astonish ingly, Buchman ignores this . His Kay adults when they enter the adult world , and that is a hard-bitten , mate rialistic , ball-c utting nervous their slow starts eventua lly leave them strand ed . The w reck-and very little el se . With the ex ception of only difference is that Buchman works under the one touching moment when she rushes to embrace tac it , wholly un identified assumption that the girls' her husband after he's com e back to her, the sc ript education is somehow indire ctly responsible for shows her do ing almost noth ing but grossly un- their unreadiness, while Mary McCarthy 's 'view ap- pleasant things, very few of which are inspired by parently is that noth ing is responsible for their the ingenuousn ess or the profound inferio rity feel- unreadiness, that unreadiness, like most forms of ings that ex plai n most of what she do es in the boo k . inadequacy , is an inevitable facet of all lives , young When Bu c hman ex pands a scene for her out of the lives in particular . novel 's welter of minor nuances, he selects Kay's callous counseling to Polly to jilt her fir st boy-fri end ; Buchman 's preservation of The Group 's mean- when he puts her in a sequence of his own devis ing , ings is fascinating , and not simply because the it's on e in which she discourag es her husband screenplay is faithful in spite of itself. More than sex ually. that , it actually refuses the most significant help that the book could offer it. Intellectually and emotional- The upshot of al l this slanting is that Kay is ly, the nucleus of the novel is the agonizing deterio- converted into a miniature Harriet Craig-a bitch FILM COMMENT 67

who tries to pile up security by accumulating expen- idea, not lumet's, to use the Singing of a women 's sive furniture . When , in the hospital scene , the time comes for her to admit the failure of her marriage collegiate choir as background music for the tail- and the thoroughness with which she 's fallen short of her hopes , her words constitute an outraged ends of the scenes in which the most pulverizing battle cry instead of a harrowing confession . Joanna Pettet's tinny frenzy and lumet's hollow direction miseries arise . Pauline Kael considers it a calamity , are further detriments at this point; but it's Buch- man 's writing and his whole misconceived notion but this device, used sparingly and at the right times, of Kay that sabotage the scene totally. The script's theme should find its most heartbreaking realization is a ingenious substitute for the ironic attention the in Kay 's confession ; the way Buchman remodels it, it looks like a detour from the drift of most of the book gives to the peaceful satisfaction the charac- rest of the film. ters enjoyed as students. Often the contrast between Yet the screenplay hangs on to the book 's inspi- ration . Buchman destroys the possibilities in Kay 's the triumphant voices and the drooping lives is predicament , but he enhances the possibilities in the predicaments of the four other sympathetic main crushing ; and , with at least one character, Buchman characters . He mimics Polly 's, Priss ', Dottie 's, and Helena's temperaments and goals completely and uses it to do something that 's more consonant with accurately . Far more importantly , he italicizes the most difficult, frustrating sides of their disillusion- Mary McCarthy's theme than what Mary McCarthy ments. \" Nothing turns out right,\" his Polly dejected- ly notes at one point ; and , for Buchman 's group , does with the character herself. He enlists the past- things do go a little worse than they do for their literary prototypes . The girls don 't , as the Kael essay present gap to win a smidgen of sympathy for the claims, seem like \" poor weak creatures \" or \" little women \" -their mistakes still have stature. However, group's one incurably unsympathetic member- the forces they ' re up against seem bigger , harder to combat: Helena's parents control her more rigidly, shallow, pushy, mediocre Libby. Polly 's affair with Gus leRoy is a worse blow , Priss ' husband is harsher, Dottie gets a slightly rougher In the movie , after Libby has been phYSically deal from her seducer. And to that end , the tangen- tial details from the novel that the screenplay sal- attacked and humiliatingly mocked by a tough Swe- vages and dramatizes concerning these girls' lives -e.g ., the emphasis given Priss ' two miscar- dish stud , the same sweet vocalizing that accom- riages-are mostly bitter. panies the other girls ' traumas and defeats is played Likewise, the purely invented developments-like the loneliness that surrounds Helena 's sexlessness for her. The suggestion that libby-a successful -are also melancholy (though Buchman goes too far, lapsing into routine cliche, when he has Dottie careerist-isn 't getting exactly what she would have turn into an alcoholic after her marriage). Taken as a whole, the amplified plights of this quartet of sec- liked either, could almost symbolize Buchman 's ondary heroines equal the poignancy that Kay 's situation stimulates in the novel and compensate instinctive appreciation of the novel 's approach to for its absence in the screenplay . Polly 's tears after her lover treats their parting like a business meeting , the collective dilemma of its people . For, by granting Priss' disaffection after her NRA work is declared illegal-these little signs of despair make up for Kay 's this girl a degree of humanness that the book denies miSSing statement of surrender. Polly 's story ends happily , as it does in the book . But hers is the only her, he carries the book 's perspective to a more one. natural extreme than the book does. If that kind of Naturally, the acting (Shirley Knight's and Eliza- beth Hartman 's especially) and the direction con- harmony between adapter and the thing being tribute invaluably to the film 's subplots being able to carry so much extra thematic cargo . Neverthe- adapted doesn 't sound like much of an achieve- less, just as Buchman rates most of the blame for what 's done with Kay , he deserves most of the credit ment, then just consider the demolition job lately for what's done with everyone else-he furnishes the cues for their passions. Another thing he de- done by Elaine May on lois Gould 's Such Good serves most of the credit for is the means by which the movie gets hold of Mary McCarthy's way of Friends. If a present-day Sidney Buchman had done re-enforcing the pathos of the group's disappoint- ments . Pauline Kael reports that it was Buchman 'S that script, it would have sounded a lot better. And lois Gould 's frightening story about the impact of an upbringing obsessed with beauty and status wouldn 't have become an imbecilic sub-Neil Simon revue sketch about a sex-starved dullard let loose in a non-existent Upper East Side. 11111111 THE GROUP 1966, United Artists , 153 minutes director Sidney lumet; producer-screenwriter Sid- ney Buchman ; from the novel by Mary McCarthy; photography Boris Kaufman (Deluxe color); art direction Gene Callahan ; editing Ralph Rosenblum ; music Charles Gross and Robert de Cormier. CAST: Joanna Pettet Kay Strong Shirley Knight Polly Andrews Jessica Walter Libby MacAusland Joan Hackett Dottie Renfrew Elizabeth Hartman Priss Hartshorn Kathleen Widdoes Helena Davison Candice Bergen Elinor Eastlake (lakey) Mary-Robin Redd Pokey Prothero Larry Hagman Harald Petersen Hal Holbrook Gus leRoy James Broderick Jim Ridgely Carrie Nye Norine Schmittlapp 68 SEPTEMBER 1972

Because it is a Bolex. slot arrangement. And the camera incor- The Bolex EBM has everything a profes- porates the famous Bolex registration claw sional could wish for in an electric 16. At a The new Bolex EBM Electric 16. With all that assures rock-steady images . price that sounds like wishful thinking . the solid, dependable features you asso- ciate with Bolex. Plus built-in motor, and Equipped with the Vario-Switar 16-1 OOmm E30LEX rechargeable 12-volt battery contained in zoom lens with electric-eye through-the- the most comfortable grip you ever held in lens light metering and power zoom, the PAILLARD your hand. A compact, easy-to-handle, EBM becomes the most automated pro- thoroughly professional 16mm camera . At fe ssional camera . (NASA chose Switar Other products from Pa illard : Hasselblad cameras and a price that should put an end to rentals lenses for use in the Apollo flights .) A accessories , Hermes typewriters and figuring machines. forever. dozen other top quality fixed focus and zoom lenses are available, all incorporat- Paillard Incorporated , Th e motor is electronically controlled for ing the bayonet type lens mount for instant 1900 Lower Road . Linden. N.J . 07036. accurate, steady running at speeds of 10 lens changing and locked ring security. Please sen d me your f ree 32 -p age cat al og on to 50 frames per second , and 24 and 25 th e EBM and a ll other Bolex 16mm c ameras fps for synch sou nd . An easily attachable Accessories for the EBM include a small , and accessories . 400' film magazine is also available. lightweight synch pulse generator that Nam e___________________________ rides in a pocket. And a pocket-sized The EBM has flickerless ground glass re- crystal control unit for wireless synch Compa ny _________________________ flex viewing and focusing with 14X magni- sound filming. fication. Plus a handy behind the lens filter Address _________________________ City________ State_______ Zip_ _ :....._-_ . . . . ... ... . . . . . . ..... ..... . . . ....... __ ..... . ...... _. . . ..... . ... -.. :

CRITICS Griffith . Others carried over or began to friends) for many years to come . In his write concurrently with Sherwood in the innovational movie anthology , The Best ROBERT E. SHERWOOD Twenties: George F. Blaisdell (Moving Moving Pic tures of 1922-23 (plans for by John Schultheiss Picture World), Burns Mantle (Photoplay), future annual editions never material- Henry Alan Potamkin (National Board of ized), he quoted Alice Duer Miller in John Schultheiss teaches English at Review Magazine and others)-again in rebuffing the skeptics: \" the people who EI Camino Community College in Califor- specifically oriented film publications . go to the movies don 't criticize them , and nia . The phlegmatic Mordaunt Hall was the the people who criticize the movies don 't first regular movie critic to get a by-lioe go to them .\" In the Spring FILM COMMENT, Gary in The New York Times , in 1924 , three Carey argued that Otis Ferguson 's film years after Sherwood began at Life. Still Barnum Was Right was also an early criticism in the Thirties was refreshingly others, such as Ale xander Bakshy (Na- manifestation of a stylish , though slightly free of the high-brow emphasis of more tion), Seymour Stern (Greenwich Village acerbic, humor which would infiltrate academic critics who would scorn Mit- Quill), and Gilbert Seldes (The New much of Sherwood 's later writing-from chell Leisen for Pare Lorentz. Carey then Republic) were not prominent until very his apprentice work as a glib rewrite man wrote that \"what we need is a going late in the decade . at Vanity Fair (1919-1920), through such steady in the Twenties. Any sugges- charming plays as The Road to Rome tions?\" As a suitable candidate I would Kaufman 's statement, however, repre- (1927) , Reunion in Vienna (1931) , Idiot 's nominate Robert E. Sherwood , who , be- sented a qualified truth , because it Delight (1936 ), Abe Lincoln in Illinois fore becoming a four-time Pulitzer Prize served to illustrate the perspective of the (1938). Ind eed , it was intrinsic to his film winner for drama and biography, was era's elite literary establishment-typified criticism at Life. Note this passage from movie critic for Life ':' (1921-1928) , Photo- by Sherwood 's own Algonquin \" Round Barnum Was Right: \" If you dine on the play, Movie Weekly, The New York Herald Table \" group-in its awareness of film in public / You 're sure of a feas t,/ They are (1922-1924), and McCall 's (1926-1932 ), the early Twenties. To a group which then innocent lambs I And they long to be in addition to writing a syndicated column generally held motion pictures beneath fleeced ,/ For they are fools , gosh darn called \" The Moving Picture Album \" and legitimate artistic consideration , and ' em / Said P.T. Barnum , / And Mister Bar- several film essays in assorted publica- which , consequently, probably would num Was Right. \" tions . (Fortunately-since he some- have eschewed the criticism of film-trade times had to review the same picture five publications, Sherwood 's reviews repre- There is definite continuity in a later times-he had a sturdy talent for finding sented an initial, acceptable confronta- Sherwood indictment, written as part of fresh phrases for identical opinions.) tion for them with the film medium be- a series of witty verse entries called \" The cause it was achieved through the eyes Cinema Primer ,\" in Life, June 23 , 1921: George S. Kaufman said Sherwood 's of one of their own . \" You ask me why the Films are cheap ,I movie reviewing in the Twenties And why they make an Ar-tist weep ,I And marked him as \" the founder of a form Sherwood did appear to them as the why they ' re a ll so Far from Pure ,/ And of journalism .\" While this statement is not founder of a species of journalism, be- why they Man-gle Lit-'ra-ture ,!And why completely accurate , it adumbrates an cause when his weekly film column , \" The they stress , in ev- ' ry Reel ,I The el-e-ment analogous truth . Chronologically, Sher- Silent Drama ,\" was initiated in Life in of Se x ap-pea l,I And why they over-flow wood was pre-dated by a number of men 1921 , no regular reviewer for a national with Bunk,I And why they 're-in a Word- who wrote seriously and intelligently magazine had approached the movies so Punk , I And why they run in such a Rut about film , but they appeared mostly in with his critica l standards or belief in the specialized movie journals. The New York film's artistic potential. (A possible ex- I l'd solve your grie-vous Rid-dies, Dramatic Mirror, an important weekly ception might have been Vachel Lindsay, bu t! A-las-I am no Nec-ro-man-cer- / Go publication whose record of the Ameri- but his poetry with its folksy , agrarian ask the Fans , for they 're the Ans-wer.\" can theater dates back to 1879, estab- themes never carried much weight with lished a motion picture department on the sophisticated Algonquin crowd any- Sherwood 's style was perfectly su ited May 30 , 1908 which carried film reviews way- and his film criticism carried even for the old humorous week ly Life, whose by Frank E. Woods , who wrote under the less.) Thus , when Sherwood at age 24 tone was pleasant , civi li zed , leisurely , at signature of \" The Spectator.\" Other pio- opened his critical department in Life, he once sentimental and mocking-Ameri- neers included Louis Reeves Harrison, was making a precedent. \" By the time ca 's Punch. Sardonic remarks were scat- W , Stephen Bush , William Henry Jack- he was 27 ,\" asserted S ,N , Behrman , \" he tered throughout his reviews , as in the son , James S. McQuade, and C ,S , Sewall was called the dean of motion picture following samples from 1922 (February 2 (all of Moving Picture World), Julian critics.\" and September 21 , respectively) ; \" It was Johnson (Photoplay), Henry MacMahon my privilege to attend the wor ld premiere (Motion Picture Classic and others), Va- An early Sherwood literary effort-a of Erich von Stroheim's FOOLISH WIVES in chel Lindsay (The New Republic), and satirical review Barnum Was Right, which New York. On that occasion , the picture Kenneth Macgowan (The Philadelphia he wrote for the Hasty Pudding C lu b in ran for three hours and three-quarters. Evening Ledger and others). 1917 while at Harvard-presaged the na- Or perhaps ' ran ' is not exactly the word , ture of his future film criticism through It got off to a running start, then slowed These critics emerged in the Teens at least two of its creative and stylistic down to a jog trot, then to a walk, then concurrently with , and probably in elements . Th is college piece was an ini- began to limp, then to stagger, then to response to , the rising artistry of D. W. tial indication of Sherwood 's ardent fas- crawl and, finally, was dragged across cination with the movies: it took the form the finish line like Dorando in the 1908 \" No relati on to the current Life magazine, whose of an intricate allegory about the efforts Marathon .\" And: \" Marion Davies! I have name was purcha sed by Time , Inc . in 1936. Unless of a character named the \" Spirit of the yet to encounter a single movie fan with no ted o ther wise , all quot ati ons are fro m the Origi- Movies\" to win recognition from Jupiter the slightest respect for her ability-and nal Life. for the motion pictures as an art form on yet the coal that has been used to keep Mount Olympus. her name flaming on the electric signs would probably run the city of Syracuse His first column for Life, January 27 , for a whole year.\" 1921 , called \" The Tenth Muse ,\" was a condensed version of this same mytho- Th e admi xture of humor in his criticism logical plea . He wou ld defend the movies ' should not suggest that movie reviewing artistic validity against many snobbish was a frivolous matter to Sherwood . His and cynical attacks (some by his best column was as restrained as it could be in a literary firmament which contained 70 SEPTEMBER 1972

Franklin Pierce Adams ' \" Conning his large and ardent public unless he ments of the screen \" (December 10, 1925). Tower,\" Dorothy Parker's \" Constant treats them to a display of erudition . He SUNRISE \" is , to my mind , the most impor- Reader,\" Robert Benchley 's drama col- dissects motives, analyzes technique and tant picture in the history of th e movies \" umn (a lso in Life)-efforts by his \" Round boils his results in a test tube , as if he (October 13 , 1927). Table \" colleagues for whom wit was a were trying to isolate the cancer germ \" As for hi s film heroes , he had difficulty way of life. Sherwood 's film criticism was (December 31 , 19 25). remembering which one he admired the most seriously written and sincerely This, of course , was the yo uthful Sher- most. When he wrote about them he did motivated element in Life 's satirical for- woo d cracking off , since his own embel- not praise-he raved ; a press agent cou ld mat. lished rhetoric belied this critical dictum not have been more exuberant. He wor- Eve n after he became editor in 1924 , -just as there were other inconsistencies shiped Greta Garbo, Mary Pickford, Lon movie reviewing remained his major in- over the years between his professed Ghaney; he admitted his admiration for terest in the magazine and his most ma- movie doctrine and his actual film prefer- Jackie Coogan \" is as rabid as that of any ture contribution to it. He spent more time ences . But he was inconsistent in ways high school girl of Rudolph Va lentino . in movie theaters than in his office . And which substantively did not impugn his I'm just a sentimental, maudlin old fool he quickly earned the respect of his credibility as his ind ivid ual , gut-level eval- on the subject. \" About THE THIEF OF BAG- readers, including professional movie uations of different film experiences have DAD and his good friend Douglas Fa ir- people. To Lillian Gish he was \" the only held up remarkably well since the Twen- banks (who was an usher at his weddi ng one reviewing pictures that Griffith , or any ties . For example, he fluctuated as to of us, looked forward to reading and took whether the proper scope or subject mat- in 1922), he said : \" If anyone can see seriously everything he wrote .\" (G riffith , ter of movies lay in the little picture or however, might have been dismayed by the spectacle : \" there is no doubt that the this marvelous picture and still choose to Sherwood 's reactions to his own films, salvation of the mo vies lies in small pic- sneer at the movies , I shall be glad to escort him to Hollywood and feed him to the largest dragon in the Fairbanks me- as the reviews chronicle a steady decline tures , produced with a minimum amount nagerie I have never been loath to in quality over the years-except for Or- of ostentation and a maxi mum amount of phans of the Storm, 1922-since his apo- intelligence\" (April 27 , 1922); \" size and back Fairbanks w ith all the verba l capital gee with The Birth of a Nation.) romance are distinct assets ... the big at my disposal , but now I am compelled to shoot the works . He is a genuinely Sherwood did not pontificate ; he picture has all the advantage over the great man \" (April 3 and 10, 1924). . reacted . His tone was down-to-earth , his little one, especially if it goes back into Sherwood 's \" Silent Drama\" Pantheon point of view personal , his style con- history to find a theme and a back- of directors , if he were to have composed ve rsational in its ease ; but he wrote on ground \" (December 28 , 1922). one, would have consisted of F.W. Mur- all aspects of film with a vibrant and However, he was able to appreciate nau, Ernst Lubitsch , Erich von Stroheim, muscular conviction , and was almost bel- artistic examples of each type , as both Re x Ingram , Henry King , Robert Flaherty , ligerently without aesthetic pretensions . TOL 'ABLE DAVID and ROBIN HOOD made his King Vidor, James Cruze, Fred Niblo, He was prominent among his film critic Best Film list for 1922-though it was Raoul Walsh , William Wellman , and D.W. contemporaries in his extraordinary liter- heavily weighted in favor of the specta- Griffith. Lubitsch-directed features made ary ability, bowing to the hegemony of cle , as seven of eleven choices were of architecturally strong paragraphs , sym- this kind . (Su bsequent favorite film lists metrical coordination of his words , a fluid were much more evenly balanced .) It was continuity. an instinctive and almost unerring ability His approach was that of an es- to perceive films of enduring importance , lor y sayist-like a latter-day Charles Lamb, regardless of the theoretical precepts he .oosop, Inc. whom he admired-creative, ornate , said motivated him , which gave Sher- 6658 Hollywood Boulevard sometimes verbose , always entertaining. wood his permanence and validity as Hollywood, California 90028 2131463-3273 But this was both a strength and a critic ':\":' If there is one unifying pattern Most complete stock of film weakness, for he resembled at times what throughout the criticism , it is his gratified publications and related material now in existence. Andrew Sarris calls \" a disconnected styl- recognition of the sincere , intelligently- 525 page catalog ist writing about nothing in particular. \" made film-and his unqualified rejection now available $2.95 In a great many instances his effort would of any film enterprise which was meretri- consist of ingeniously flamboyant pas- cious or smacked of what he called the sages, pleasantly readable , but which arch movie evil , HOKUM. ultimately provided the reader with little Sherwood did not possess a diffidence more than a clear indication of whether to praise which characterizes most critics Sherwood liked the film or not. (Perhaps (Rex Reed notwithstanding ). When he this quality should not be deprecated in wrote a favorable review he could be- light of a sometimes equally disconcert- come rhapsodic : \" THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE is a living , breathing an- aing modern tendency , la Penelope Gil- swer to those who still refuse to take liatt, toward a kind of critical chiaroscuro which shuns direct statements of one 's motion pictures seriously . Its production feelings about a film .) lifts the silent drama to an artistic plane Very seldom would Sherwood cite or that it had never touched before \" (Ma rch analyze in depth specific shots , scenes , 24 , 1921 ). \" THE BIG PARADE is a marvelous narrative elements, or isolate in expand- picture. a picture that can be ranked ed detail the cinematic references of his among the few genuinely great achieve- delight or displeasure. But he thought that the more analytical approach-what \"\" His most famous lapse was the negative review he called \" the New Republic critical he gave POTEMKIN (September 23, 1926), for which style\" -was \" the main trouble with criti- he was chided by such critics as Richard Watts cism. Although a reviewer could summa- and Seymour Stern that , like most \" deans,\" he rize a book, a play , or a movie in one was suffering from harden ing of the critical arter- phrase- 'It 's marvelous ,' 'It's pretty good ' ies. Only half-jokingly Sherwood c laimed th is cen- or 'It's punk ' -he feels that he is cheating sure jeopardized his future as film cri tic , and drove him on to finish h is first play, The Road to Rome (1927). FILM COMMENT 71

500,000 ITEM the most appearances on his Best Film (July 6, 1922; November 13, 1924), an INVENTORY lists , three in 1924 alone : THE MARRIAGE astute prediction about the inevitable use of color photography (July 31, 1924), FANTASTIC SELECTION CIRCLE, THREE WOMEN , FORBIDDEN PARA- and , of course , his varied film judgments OF PRESSBOOKS BACK discussed in this essay-comprise a criti- TO THE EARLY 1930'S! DISE . Chaplin , of course , would have cal totality which has been innovative, made any Sherwood Pantheon , but being prescient, and substantially vindicated by the complete artist he was considered in subsequent film scholarship. a class by himself. Toward the end of his film-critic tenure At the top in his hagiography were at Life, Sherwood reviewed Robert the comics , to whom he always looked Benchley 's THE SEX LIFE OF THE POLYP for honesty and artistic integrity. Some- (August 16, 1928) and registered some thing of a dead-pan comic himself, Sher- apprehension about Benchley's involve- wood took them on their own terms, and ment with Hollywood: \" I hope the money felt utterly at home with their rowdiness and fame won't go to his head. There are and irreverence and the loneliness of the plenty of good actors in this world , but characters they created . \" Nothing that is all too few good dramatic critics. \" Sher- being produced in literature or in the wood was again cynically taking note-as drama is as funny as a good Chaplin , he had with Edward Knoblock (June 2, Lloyd , or Keaton comedy. The efforts of 1921) and Dorothy Parker (\" Renaissance these three young men approximate art in Hollywood \" )-of the sound-era phe- more closely than anything else that the nomenon of Hollywood's massive em- movies have offered\" (June 1, 1922). ployment of established literary figures. But, ironically, Sherwood himself (like He gave his two comic favorites spe- other critics who made the trip-such as cial treatment. In a New Yorker profile on Clayton Hamilton , Louis Sherman, Harold Lloyd called \" The Perennial Charles Brackett, Frank Nugent) would Freshman \" (January 30, 1926), he wrote : spend several screenwriting stints in Hol- \" His comedies give the effect of efferves- lywood during the ensuing years. Unlike cent spontaneity, of breathless haste; ac- Benchley, Parker, and other of his Algon- tually, they are carefully studied, and quin cronies, he would suffer no impair- completed only after months of strenuous ment of his independent writing career. effort ... To my thinking , he is the most refreshing individual in the movies.\" And During these screenwriting days he Charlie Chaplin , who \" has the ability to was not always happy with the Hollywood be coarse without being offensive, to mix environment: \" We ' ll be glad to get out Rabelaisian wit with Chesterfieldian deli- of this place ,\" he wrote to his mother. cacy,\" received one of Sherwood's many \" The people are very nice and the work panegyric tributes in \" The Perils of Mo- is interesting , but there 's a horrible pall notony \" for Photoplay, November, 1925: of boredom hanging over everything . The \" To quote a writer more famous than stench of stagnation assails the nostrils. myself, age can not wither nor custom It may be ideal for the natives , but it' s stale his infinite variety.\" no place for a white man .\" Nor was he always able to rationalize the strictures Sherwood could be just as eloquent of studio employment: \" I frequently long in his scorn , however , especially when for the good old days when I was an he was dealing with Elinor Glyn , Rupert unshackled critic of the cinema, instead Hughes, Marion Davies, Wallace Reid , of its hireling , as I'd like to disgorge a Gloria Swanson , Will H. Hays, or the number of embarrassing views .\" moguls Zukor , Loew , Laemmle , Fo x. These , he felt, perverted the artistic vision Nevertheless, the films he wrote com- which he thought accessible to the silent plemented nicely the vigorous talents of drama. Ceci l B. De Mille earned an entire , dramatist and critic , bore witness to his vituperative New Yorker profile (No- maturing personality, and reflected the vember 28 , 1925), in which he was literary icons of his earlier work . The dubbed \" The Hollywood Zeus,\" a sobri- humorous strain which was evident in all quet suggestive of the Olympian ex- his endeavors continued to manifest itself cesses which De Mille had wrought in his in ROYAL SCANDALS ( 1933 , written with films. Sherwood alerted the reader to George S. Kaufman) , THE SCARLET PIM- \" think of all the grotesque absurdities PERNEL (1935) , THE GHOST GOES WEST with which the movies abound, and which (1936, directed by Rene Clair), his own have made the screen a tempting target IDIOT'S DELIGHT (1939), and THE BISHOP 'S for satirists , and you will find that most WIFE (1947). of them may be traced back , by direct or indirect routes , to Cecil B. De Mille .\" One of his working tenets for film when he was a critic- \" go back into history to Sherwood formally celebrated the ar- find a theme and a background \" -found rival of the sound film in \" Renaissance fruition in many of his plays , and his films in Hollywood ,\" in The American Mercury, reflected this interest as well . His work April , 1929, and was quite prophetic on the scripts of RASPUTIN AND THE about the expansion of film art. His fu- EMPRESS (1932), REMBRANDT (1936), CON- turistic comments-considered together QUEST (1937), and MARIE ANTOINETTE with a remarkably sagacious article on (1938), and his screenplays for THE AD- the potential of television (Scribner 's VENTURES OF MARCO POLO (1938) and his Magazine, July, 1929), a persistently en- lightened position against film censorship 72 SEPTEMBER 1972

own ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS ( 1940) all BOOKS Yet the book lacks passion and , despite the eloquence and density of framed their stories in historical periods . CINEMA BOREALIS: Ingmar Bergman language , an embracing clarity that and the Swedish Ethos would meaningfully refine ou r accepted When Sherwood handed John Barrymore BY VERNON YOUNG ideas of Bergman 's filmi c preoccupa- David Lewis , New York , 197 1; hardcover tions . For all its promise , Cinema Borealis his screen adaptation of his play Reunion $12.50 ; 331 pages ; illustrations , index, remains an irritating reminder of the bibliography , filmography , list of plays . dangers of the purely literary or dramatic in Vienna-an affectionate glimpse at fall- bias in the discussion of films . Every so REVIEWED BY STUART LIEBMAN often one must pinch onese lf to be assur- en aristocrats , filmed in 1933-Barrymore Stuart Liebman is a graduate of Boston ed that the figure being discu ssed is in- University now teaching film at Brandeis deed a filmmaker. For Young , as for so was delighted : \" Why , that character is University. many writers before him , the medium sim- ply e xists , a functional prerequ is ite for autobiographical! A crazy, conceited , ar- Vernon Young 's Cinema Borealis: Ing- the translation of literary meanings. mar Bergman and the Swedish Eth os wi ll rogant, offensive egotist-flaunting him- come as a disappointment to both adula- He neglects how the images them- tors and hostile critics of this major film selves mean , an ironic and painful ne- self about, hogging the center of every artist. Bergman is certainly the most w rit- glect given the achievements of one of ten-about director in film history , attact- the finest visua l stylists in the history of stage, devising magnificent exits for him- ing an intellectual bombardment note- the cinema. Bergman 's persistent visual worthy primarily for the desperate themes of silhouettes and half-faces cUl- self-why, that's me!\" search for extended meanings by ad - minating in the schizoid sophistication of mirers and the equally calculated hatchet the great PERSONA are discussed as if It was with his screenplays for REBE C- jobs of opponents. Between these two they were representative of a coy com- extremes , Young manages to chart a parison Bergman once made many years CA (1940) and THE BEST YEARS OF OUR sensible middle course , a learned and ago : \" The cinema is my mistress ; the matter-of-fact evaluation of the films in theatre is my wife .\" Black face , white LIVES (1946) that Sherwood was most succession , without recourse to any of the face , masks and silhouettes represent metaphysical progressions conjured by more than a nostalg ia for realism , a sim- compatible with the filmic qualities which \" critics ,\" auteur or otherwise , who are ple concession to the stage decor of the more skilled at shadow boxing with their travelling troupes who in the middle years involved him as critic : cinema which was intellectual constructs than at seeing and of Bergman 's maturity (1950-'58) were commenting expansively on the films featured characters . There is a darker literate, intelligent, unselfconsciously themselves . underside to these themes most rem ini- scent of E.T.A. Hoffmann , the great Ger- honest. Bergman 's \" intellectual \" vision seems man novelist of the demonic-a figure, to have found in Young an ideal if slightly moreover, Young astonishingly fails to In a moment of despair over Hol- arid commentator. He has had access to mention as an important influence on private scripts of the Svenskfilmindustri, many of Bergman 's most intriguing films. lywood-recorded in an article called conducted several personal interviews with the principals of the justly famous Bergman 's characters are plagued by \" The Blessed and the Cursed \" -Sher- Bergman repertory company. Yo ung lived a moral climate of half-truths. In Berg- in Sweden for nearly ten years during the man 's society , to embrace is to grap- wood wrote : \" I'm sure that Omar course of writing the book and his aware- ple , to love is inflict pain . This paradoxi- ness of what it means to be Swedish cal universe exists within the modernist Khayyam would have loved Hollywood, provides the basis for an original if not consciousness of God's death and the totally convincing attempt to integrate ironical questioning of man 's life. Berg- and that, had he lived there, he would Bergman 's concerns-some would say man takes us to the country of the intel- obsessions-with the bleak Swedish lectual nomad where the atmosphere have left behind him no compositions that mind . though thinner than that to which we are accustomed is believably airless and ha- an Edward Fitzgerald would have both- bitable . ered to translate .\" Sherwood was not Living in truth becomes of necessity speaking autobiographically. He had dealt with Hollywood on many levels, and had left a body of film literature-criticism and screenplays-that not only would have engaged the talents of an Edward Fitzgerald, but would have excited , gratified , humbled them as well. 11111111 Errata NOW~VAILABemQb\\\\\\Q To the Editor: A regrettable error has crept into two of the cameramen 's filmographies print- ed in the summer issue and supplement. Sixteen lines of type were inadvertently omitted in Ray June 's filmography and included in Boris Kaufman's. Kaufman , of course, photographed the 1933 ZERO DE CONDUIT and SEINE , followed in 1934 by L'ATALANTE. The transposed sixteen lines belonging to June come between the Kaufman 1933 and 1934 credits , starting with Fleming who directed the 1938 TEST PILOT . The next film is WOMAN AGAINST WOMAN . The transposed lines end with the 1943 I DOOD IT directed by Vincent Min- nelli, which should be followed by the 1944 THREE MEN IN WHITE . Sincerely yours, Richard Koszarski In Estelle Changas' article on Elia (,n CATALOGUE OF FILM LITERATURE Kazan in our summer issue, on page 14 Kazan is quoted as saying , (\"I don 't Over 270 pages{ iIIus.) fully indexed. Complete listing of see what films they've made that say all books stocked: current & out of print $2.50 postpaid anything ... \" ) the \" they\" Kazan refers CINEMABILIA 10 CorneliaSt, NYC 10014 212/989-8519 to are his critics on the Left-as Ms. Changas characterizes them , \" the When writing to advertisers please mention FILM COMMENT blacklisted writers and directors who have never ceased their attacks on him for his cooperation with the House Com- mittee on Un-American Activities .\" FILM COMMENT regrets these errors. FILM COMMENT 73

a life of silence and isolation , often physi- us who have been profoundly affected by great stature such as Kierkegaard and cally stranded on an is land : the bleakest these films , Young 's comment that \" He moral evaluation of man 's fate since [Bergman] is a seismograph , merely Hoffmann . The scope of Young's cin- Strindberg , Munch , and Soutine . This vi- trembling at the shocks he receives but sion of man reached its earliest fulfillment there is in him no comprehension of any ematic references also seems curiously in THE NAKED NIGHT and has been extend- least cause of man 's behaviour\" (page ed by the films of the sixties , films as 238) strikes one as pointlessly overstated limited to Swedish and French sources . v aried as THE SILENCE , SHAME , PER SONA and undiscriminating in its bile . and THE PASSION OF ANNA . For Young , He passes too quickly over a significant these late films are only symptomatic of There is much intellectual refuse scat- an increasingly parched and sterile vi- tered throughout the book. Such evoca- fact: that Bergman 's first purchases for sion . In Bergman 's failures such as HOUR tive references as Pirandello 's slighting OF THE WOLF , certainly , there is a too remarks about the cinema are over- his private film collection in 1948 were v is ible and self-conscious restatement of w helmed by an increasingly untidy and patterns: intellectual conjuries rather bothersome intellectual tour de force in German silent films . Where , then , is men - an apparent attempt to cover serious than aesthetic unities. But for those of om missions , in many cases artists of tion of Murnau's FAUST or Fritz Lang 's DER MODE TOD (D ESTINY) in relation to THE SEVENTH SEAL? How are the circus locales of THE CABINET OF DR . CALIGARI or Dupont 's VAR IETY , with their peculiar blend of the kinetic and the terrible , influential in Berg- man 's treatment of similar themes in THE NAKED NIGHT and THE MAGICIAN? Why is Lang 's Dr. Mabuse, the lurking embodi- ment of evil , such a felt presence in Bergman 's early demonology? Young is Eight Dynamite Filmsl certainly right when he observes that Bergman 's preoccupations developed independently of these specific sources .. . for art . .. for entertainment . .. for box office! but his style evidently did not. Jean-Luc Godard's There is an unfortunate cultural insu- WEEKEND larity in most contemporary film criticism . \" A great original work of art . .. Weekend Young is too much of a literateur to is Godard' s version of hell and it ran ks with the vis io ns of the greatest.\" confine his discussion of Bergman 's films -Pauline Kael solely to the historical precedents of other films . But the enthusiasm for film Allen King's as a medium so evident in less erudite WARRENDALE critics such as Pauline Kael or Manny \" A shattering, illuminating an d unfor- Farber is missing in Young . He is ap- gettable experiencel\"-Judith Christ parently confused about what a film is Frederick Wiseman's and the ways in which it communicates TITICUT FOLLIES its meanings . \" The who le [of SMILES OF THE \" A towering, overpowering, haunting Vilgot Sjoman's SUMMER ' S NIGHT] is cinema , for it creates social document.\"-Cue I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW, illusion \" (page 147). Whatever this bogus \" One of the ten most important films of declamation means , it is at best a back- the past decade.\"-Tim e handed compliment to a film that Young Les Blank's professes to admire. He objects to the A WELL SPENT LIFE \" reduction of movement in the later films \" Honoring Mance Lipscomb, the 75 year-old (page 202) and still identifies them as Te xas blues master. more \" filmatic ,\" a comment that advo- THE BLUES ACCORDIN' TO cates of a fast-paced cinematic mise-en- LlGHTNIN' HOPKINS scene will find difficult to comprehend . SPEND ITALL Yet it is precisely Bergman 's intensive \" A percepti ve, lusty, lyrical document of the Caiun people.\" questioning of the nature and limitations -Times-Picayune, New Orleans of the medium itself that Young virulent- \" Les Blank has created three of the best \" I Am Curious (Yellow)\" films on music and its cultural roots ever ly objects to . The theme of creating cine- made.\"-B ill Gree ley, Variety ma images has occurred in Bergman 's work since the early PRISON and recurs prominently in the accomplished ILLI CIT Dusan Makavejev's INTERLUDE and in such different films as MAN IS NOT A BIRD PERSONA , HOUR OF THE WOLF , and PASSION The newest available film by the OF ANNA. Young too easily dismisses these acclaimed directo r of WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Innocence Unprotected interesting if not wholly successful medi- \"Man Is Not A Bird\" tations on film form as irritating blunders , a peculiar critical inflexibility given the consistent and passionate modernist questioning of the boundaries between @~ ~~~!!~~~~kil\"\"\" The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins\" life and the mediating forms of art. One GIOlePren New York 10003/Tel. : 212677-2400 senses, somehow, an embarrassed objec- tion to the medium he is writing about. For all its occasional insights and erudi- tion , Cinema Borealis promises more than it delivers. Better books on Bergman remain to be written . 11111111 When writing to advertisers please mention FILM COMMENT AGE 18 REGISTER AND VOTE 74 SEPTEMBER 1972

LETTERS three-part film c alled UN POCO MAS DE AZUL arts , bann ed his pl ay The Nun s (whi c h (A LITTLE MORE BLUE) w hich was shorn by became a bi g hit in Par is and has since To the Editor: the c ensors of two of its parts , Fernando been produ ce d else w here) and t he ICAI C There were a fe w inaccurac ies in my Villaverde 's ELENA and Canel 's EL FINAL ba nned his film EL HUESPED . (THE END). Manuel Octa vio Gomez 's EL article about the Cuban cinema in the EN CUENTRO ( THE MEETING) was left to fend It remains tru e that Cuba has been at Spring , 1972 issue. (There w ere also a for itself. (Villav erde is no w an indepen- times astonishingly libera l w ith its direc - few misprints: it should be cine-no dent filmmaker in Ne w Y ork .) to rs , allow ing Tom as Gutierrez Alea for accent-and cine-moviles .) instance to c reat e h is su btl e MEMO RIE S OF The first feature-length Cuban film in UNDERDEVELOPMENT, w hi c h has now bee n In a footnote to some comments by c o lor is not LOS DIAS DEL AGUA , as I erro- so justl y praised by V in c ent Can by and Fausto Canel, a filmmaker who left Cuba neously indicated , but Eduardo Manet's others . The ICAIC simply has not been in November , 1968 and is now living in EL SOLAR . The reason that the latter film as boldly or consistently libe rtari an as it Paris, I listed a few titles as examples of is seldom referred to in Cuban m aterial w ould have LIS believe . It is no d o ubt banned films. It turns out two of them is that Manet has been livi ng in Paris symptomatic that w hile MEMO RIE S had were never made, though they remain since 1968, having left Cuba when the been completed by early 1967, release interesting examples of a more blurry but Cultural Council , the administrator of the was held up until the film had recei ved equally stifling form of censorship . The finest in film books SE XTO MANDAMIENTO had been ap- from Praeger proved as a script by the ICAIC establish- ment and shooting was due to start the THE ITALIAN CINEMA Pra e ge r Film Library following week when the minister of edu- Pierre Le pro hon FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT cation got wind of it and intervened to C. G. Crisp an d Michael Wa lker kill the project. According to Cane l, w hom This thorou9h and defi nit ive study is the A com prehe nsive survey of Truffaut' s I w ish to thank for much of this informa- first book in Engl ish to trace the histo ry li fe and films. tion , the reason was that the script dealt of the Ita lia n cinem a. It cove rs com- with a love affair between a boy and a pletely the ea rly historical spec ta cles $6.95 ci oth; $2.95 paper ': girl attending a specially funded and rig- th at ta ught Hollywood a new gen re, th e idly segregated school for peasants. The declin e of fi lm un der Fa sc ism, and the ROSSELLINI two are compelled to part ways because eventu al emergence of the g re at post- Jose Luis G uarner of the narrow-minded sense of morality wa r Italian directors: Rosselli ni , Visco nti, and discipline which is official policy . Di Sica, Zeffi relli, Antan ion i, Fellini, Ber- Descri bes the g reat di recto r's w idely in- Reflecting that policy exactly the director tolucci, and others. Spec ial feature s in- flu enti al workS -including th e la te r film s, of the school where the film was to be clude a chrono logical listi ng of ma jo r largely overl oo ked ou tside of Italy. shot and his higher-ups apparently were Ital ia n films by ye ar, as well a s bi og - afraid that parents would be shocked at ra phies and filmogra ph ies of direc to rs, $4.95 cl oth; $2.50 paper the suggestion that their daughters could acto rs, and te chn icia ns, and maj or doc- develop any such \" illicit\" relationships uments relating to the eme rge nce of the ANTONIONI and that any controversy could end up Ita lia n film indu stry. An indispensab le Revise d Edition interfering with the program , which is not additio n to any serious fi lm libra ry. Pierre Ia n Cameron an d Robin Wood devoid of political advantages. The direc- Leprohon is th e auth or of Histoire du tor , Robert Fandino, was later able to Cinema . Fi lm-by-fi lm ana lysi s of Anto nioni' s bril- shoot EL BAUTIZO (THE BAPTISM) , which lion t caree r-in cludes his recent wo rk, was released only after a long sojourn 360 pp., 200 ill us., chrono logy, Augus t Zabriskie Point. in limbo . He is now working as a film $10.00 cl oth editor in Madrid . $5.95 cl oth; $2.95 paper MOVIE READER HAIDE is another project which was Edited by Ia n Cameron ALLAN DWAN suddenly aborted , after having been peri- The Last Pionee r odically approved as a script. ICAIC Pres- Here is the firs t antho logy of some of Pete r Bogd anovich ident Alfredo Guevara finally vetoed it, the best of MOV IE magazine' s much- A stud y of the caree r of one of Ame ri ca 's reportedly calling it an \" empty , bourgeois discussed articles . Among the autho rs and formalistic vision of Revolutionary are fi lm critics Rob in Wood, Ra ymon d most prolific directors, who made both Cuba .\" Alberto Roldan (not Roland , as Durgn at, and Mark Shivas, writing on g reat sound movies and immo rtal swas h- it was misprinted) was nevertheless al- directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, O tto bucklers of the ea rl ier \" Rom antic\" era. lowed to shoot another film , LA AUSEN- Preminge r, Howard Hawks, Joseph Losey, CIA (ABSENCE), which he had written w ith and many importan t films of the po st $6.95 cloth; $3.45 paper Cuban star Sergio Corrieri . It is this film decod e. W ith its appeara nce in 1962, which the ICAIC refused to allow Chris the British Journ al become the first majo r FRITZ LANG IN AMERICA Marker to import into France, though it mqg azi ne in English devoted to auteu r Pete r Bogdanovich did receive a rather discrete release in fil m criticism. Cuba . Roldan , incidentally, has since The film greot' s American ca ree r-a lter been expelled from the ICAIC (which 120 pp ., 100 illus . his flight from Hit ler's Germa ny- is re- means of course that he can 't work in $12.50 cloth; $4.50 paper co rde d th rough interviews wi th Lang him- films) and has been repeatedly refused self. permission to leave the country . $4.95 cl oth; $2.50 poper I feel I should make up for the non-ex- istence of the abovementioned two p(aeg~ \" banned \" films. A curious example of outright censorship concerns a planned 111 Fou r th Avenue, New Yo rk, N.Y. 10003 FI L M COMMENT 75

the approval of East European film festi- April 25: A mimeographed letter ar- then see a long series of checks being va ls . These judgments imply to arbitrary ri ves in the mail. Roughlytranslated , it signed in closeup which enumerate the comparative standards. The exact de- reads as follows : various expenses of TOUT VA BIEN-an gree of freedom from censorship of the Dear Comrade / Old Bitch (de lete one), instant lesson in economics that brilliantly American filmmaker , say , within his sys- illustrates the contradictions of making a tem , is another issue entirely . You are invited to a projection of TOUT commercial Marxist film .. In the first few VA BIEN ( which is a great disappointing minutes , the groundwork of all that is to I regret having failed to allude in the film, neither explosive nor visionary) follow is laid out as SUCCinctly as in the article to the persecution of homosex- which will take place on preludes to Welles' best films. uals , w hich was long an official policy in Cuba but has abated. Several filmmakers Wednesday, April 26 2. Before 1968, advance publicity for have indeed suffered from it. One leading at precisely 9:55 a.m. any new Godard film was generally found Cuban director is even said to have hesi- 13, rue Beethoven, Paris 16 e in Cahiers du Cinema ; for TOUT VA BIEN , tated to return home at one time from a Due to the limited number of seats, it was found regularly on the pages of trip to Europe and having been finally you are asked to come alone, with your Le Monde. This probably says more about induced to do so only by promises that press card . Godard's changed intentions and desired he would not be hassled. Apparently, they audience today than any of his public have been kept. Fondly / Get stuffed (dele te one) , announcements. J-L Godard Sincerely, J-P. Gorin 3. The main stylistic differences be- Pierre Sauvage tween TOUT VA BIEN and earlier Godard 1. Ostensibly Godard's return to com- can be summarized in two sentences: (A) PARIS JOURNAL continued from page 2 mercial film-making , TOUT VA BIEN opens nothing is left up to chance ; (B) the with a flurry of references to and re- compositions are \" neutral \" -that is to set wi th light contrast , creates a praxis minders of his pre-1968 work. The credits say, a lot of effort seems to have been entirely fitting to Vertov 's achievement: (a complete set, for once) are again given waged to keep the shots from appearing individuality within collectivity, difference in red, white and blue , the colors of the either beautiful or ugly. In earlier Godard with in sameness , separation within cohe- French and American flags ; a love dia- films , objects tended to assume a great sion , choice within a common endeavor. logue between Yves Montand and Jane plastic importance , like the groceries in Discounting the inevi table losses suf- Fonda virtually repeats the Piccoli-Bardot TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER. fered by any film on television-the dif- exchange opening LE MEPRIS: one also In the lengthy supermarket sequence in ferences between a screen bigger than glimpses fake group portraits out of WEEK- TOUT VA BIEN , groceries remain only gro- life and a tube smaller than life-the pre- END , a black studio shot echoing LE GAl ceries-neutral objects to be recorded sentation of Vertov 's masterwork in these SAVOIR. A settling of old accounts? Per- like the rest. conditions only enhances its virtues. haps; but more specifically , an attempt to demythicize the past. An offscreen 4. In films like UN FILM COMME LES dialogue situates the film in its own \" his- AUTRES , WIND FROM THE EAST and VLADIMIR torical \" context: \" I want to make a film. \" AND ROSA, one felt that Godard was trying \" To make a film you need money.\" We '~ w ::E u:o:E ::E ..J iL c: ..S! 'E E G'\"i ~'\" > .\" 2'\" 76 SEPTEMBER 1972

to divest himself of all that was he portrays is a virtual stand-in for MARRIED WOMAN , MASCULINE-FEMININE , superfluous to his political evolution . At Godard-an ex-New Wave director who MADE IN U.S. A., TWO OR THREE THINGS, LA their most painful, these works resembled is now reduced to making publicite films CHINOISE and WEEKE ND, Goda rd was at- desperate acts of self-mutilation . In TOUT for Remington razors (not too long ago, tempting a sort of sc ience-fiction , a VA BIEN , one observes a new sense of Godard was doing precisely that for cross-breeding of past and present that calm and assurance , a consolidation of Schick). Later he is seen shooting a film yielded the future conditional, the tense the previous experiments, and the appar- of his own that bears an immed iate re- of \" anticipation .\" TOUT VA BIE N, see ki ng ent beginning of a new cycle. After work- semblance to TWO OR THREE THINGS . More to be \" neither explos ive nor visionary ,\" ing four years to shake off the role of generally, the Montand character seems addresses itself only to the past (earlier Cinema Oracle that had been assigned a speculative self-portrait-what Godard work , May 1968) and present (TOUT VA to him , Godard (with Gorin) has taken on might have become had he responded BIEN , May 1972), and pa ys little heed to the task of being a village explainer- less radically to the May Events in 1968 , the future , except by implication . \" May which is fine , Gertrude Stein said , if you much as Stephen Dedalus in Ulysse s was 1968, May 1972 \" announce two early happen to be a village . The political con- Joyce 's guess at what he might have flash titles-a challenge and a rebuke, but cerns of TOUT VA BIEN-centering around become if he had remained in Dublin. hardly a pred iction . What will it mean in an extended strike in a French sausage Montand's lengthy monologue to the May 1973? factory-are more consistently local than camera about his political past is in many in any previous Godard film . Unless I ways the thematic and emotional center May 26 : A screening of Julia Solntse- missed something , the war in Vietnam is of the film , as well as its most effective va 's THE ENCHANTED DESNA (1964) at the not alluded to once. scene . Cinematheque. Here is another Russian masterpiece that, like ENTHUSIASM , rarely 5. In BREATHLESS, it was easy to forgive 6. Whatever else might be said about gets shown , is ignored in most film litera- or overlook the implausibility of Patricia 's Godard, one cannot criticize him for suc- ture , and on first glance seems to outdis- job as a journalist, which somehow in- cumbing to the fate that threatens every tance nearly all the \"official \" Russian volved both selling newspapers on the French culture hero, that nemesis that classics . First glances are often decep- street and interviewing important celebri- Chabrol and Truffaut have long ago ca- tive; but how can we verify them when ties at Orly . The radio journalist played pitulated to : he has not turned into a the films remain so difficult to see , and by Jane Fonda in TOUT VA BIEN is statue of himself. As a committed are so seldom spoken about? Indeed , if superficially more believable, yet the part response to the May Events-the only it hadn 't been for Godard 's enthusiastic comes across as synthetic and contrived . really sustained one , to my knowledge, reference to DESNA in a 1965 interview, While Patricia may have faltered \" realisti- in his profession-his subsequent career I might never have gone. But surely it is cally ,\" she triumphed as myth . Deliber- has continued to evolve , and is still more one of the most ravishing spectacles ever ately deprived of her mythic dimensions, involved with change than refinement. made, an ecstatic riot of color and sound Fonda tends to remain a postulate more But with TOUT VA BIEN , his ambitions have that uses 70mm and stereophonic re- than a presence . .. Montand is another become much more narrow and special- matter. In certain respects , the character ized . .. Not only in ALPHAVILLE, but in THE The ,eel Goda,d • • •A • • • • • • •A • • Translation and commentary by Tom Milne Introduction by Richard Roud You 've waited in line for hours to see Godard 's films. Now, here are the pun-, allusion-, and joke- filled interviews and writings of Jean-Luc Godard , from his early efforts for La Gazette du Cinema and Cahiers du Cinema to today. Richard Roud, in his Introduction to the book, calls it \"the best introduction to the films of Godard, and through them, to the cinema of today.\" 80 illustrations $10.00 cloth; $3.95 paper For a free brochure describing all of Viking 's film books, write : THE VIKING PRESS 625 Madison Avenue New York , N.Y. 10022 FILM COMMENT 77

c ording with all the freedom and imagina- ANNOUNCING: ti o n of an inspi red home movie . AN INSIDE LOOK AT CZECH FILMMAKING. Co mpl etin g a trilogy of fi lms derived fro m posthumous Dovzhen ko texts by his w idow , DESNA describes a Ukrainian vil- lage in the ea rl y 1900 's as an extended pare nthetic al flashback between vi stas of th e modern dam that replaces it. If I understood the untranslated credits cor- rectl y , the film is labelled as be ing \" by Al exander Dovzhenko ,\" but presumably this is a con vention simi lar to that of listing Stanislavsky as the director of con- temporary Moscow productions of The Ch erry Orc hard . DESNA uses one of Dov- zhenko 's autobiographi c al te xts , and contains such familiar features of his kingdom as sunflowers and talking horses , but as Barth elemy Amengual points out , the images remind us more of paintings by Brueghel and the Russian post-impressionists than of shots from ZVENIGORA and AR SENAl. And the adven- turous use of sound seems to come from an intelligence even wilder than the one that made AEROGRAD and SHOR S. It is tempting-but misleading-to re- duce the problem to a formula (e .g ., Solntseva = Dovzhenko') . DESNA is less All the Bright Young Men and Women: an extension of Dovzhenko than a giddy A Personal History of the Czech Cinema dream inspired by him , like Paradjanov 's by Josef Skvorecky SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS . The Th e \" b right you ng men and women\" referred to in th e ti tl e of astonishing landscape shots that perme- this new boo k are the filmm akers of the Czech New Wave of the sixties . Josef Skvo recky was associated wi th most of the ate the film-a moonlit lake and sky suf- impo rt ant directors o f thi s peri od (in c lud ing Nemec , Schorm . Form an, Pa sser and Chytil ova) and th e larg est secti on of th e fused in green , a field rapidly traversed book is devoted to their wo rk . Howeve r, the wo rk o f ear lier filmm ake rs is not ign ored , for All th e Bri ght Yo ung Men and by the camera as though by a plow-seem Wo men tr aces the enti re hi story o f the Czec h ci nema from it s earl iest days to the post-inva si on seventies . to have no precedents in Dovzhenko 's work. Solntseva has gone on record as saying , \" If Dovzhen ko had lived , I would never have become a director. All that I do I consider as 'propaganda, defense Jose f Skvorecky is \" one of Europe 's lead ing nove li sts\". He is and illustration ' of Dovzhenko. \" Be that also an essayist , tr ans lator and screenwr iter, w hose screen- pl ays have been filmed by Eva ld Schorm and Jiri Menze l as it may , I find THE ENCHANTED DESNA among oth ers . The Co w ards, Skvo rec ky's fir st nove l to be tr anslated into Engli sh, was publi shed by Grove Press in the probably more exciting and beautiful than United St ates and by Go ll anz and Peng uin in Britai n. He is presentl y teac hing at the Un iversit y of Toronto . any Dovzhenko film since EARTH . If Solntseva 's talent be treason , then let's make the most of it. 11111111 All th e Bright Yo ung M en and Women is publ ished jo int ly by l. A. JOURNAL continued from page 6 th e fi lm mag az ine TAK E ON E and by Peter Mart in Assoc iates . Its 280 pag es inc lude more than 100 illu strations. a co mpre- live theater performance exciting . \" All hensive index , and a c hrono lo gi ca l li sting o f the most im por- you get on screen ,\" Vorkapich argues, tant Czec h fi lm s and the ir directors . \" is the surface .\" - - - - - -SPECIAL MONEY-SAVING OFFER One may not agree with Vorkapich on screen acting. Literary and dramatic TO READERS OF THIS MAGAZINE qualities d o i nterest me in films. Vorkapich 's approach-stripping film Take One, Box 1778, Station B, Montreal 110, Canada down to the fundamentals of visual lan- guage-is comparable to the formalist Ple ase send me as qUick ly as possible co pies revolution in twentieth-century painting , which eventually led to abstract art. This of All the Bright Young Men and Women at the specia l pri ce study of form is absolutely crucial , and invaluable for anyone seriously interest- of Just $7 .95 per co py (regu lar ly $8 .95 In all books tores ). ed in films ; but, as in painting , it may ignore other equally important dimen- I en c lose my c heque or money or der . You p ay postag e and sions to art . Perhaps film is not a com- pletely autonomous art ; perhaps it is a shipp ing costs . If I am not absolute ly satis fied . I may ret urn hybrid . my books w ithi n fi fteen days for a full re fun d . Name _____________________________________________ Address ___________________________________________ Cl ty_______ Prov i State_________ Zone/Zi p_________ 78 SEPTEMBER 1972

Vorkapich calls for a Shakespeare of If you·re thinking CP-16••. think Camera \"art. c inema, who will create visual poetry in- stead of verbal poetry. But of course Shakespeare was not simply a poet; he was also a dramatist, a storyteller, inter- ested in ideas-politics, history , meta- physics , psychology-as well as in lan- guage . It is undeniably true that many students of Shakespeare , by concentrat- ing on the stories , give too little attent ion to the language itself; at the same time, there is a danger in focusing exc lusively The CP-1616mm sound Camera \"On-the-spot\" coverage for TV News on language. and Documentary Film Makers. Nevertheless , Vorkapich offers a Whether you're shooting a crowd scene, a stimulating challenge to the literary bias person-to-person interview, fast moving action news while it's happening or a of most writing about film ; his approach carefully planned assignment for television or documentary, seems to me an absolutely necessary your job is easier with the all- new CP-16 Single System/ starting-point for any original thought Double System Sound Camera. Made of lightweight about film . His precision about visual magnesium (weighs only 9 lbs., including motor language exposes how little knowledge and battery). It combines maximum portability with most film critics actually have . \" Most film comfortable hand-holding balance. critics are essentially drama critics-pho- toplay critics ,\" Vorkapich points out. \" Take out a few words from the average review , and it could have just as easily been written about a play or a novel. \" And Vorkapich undercuts the ecstatic tone of film cultism quite succinctly: \" There are no consummate craftsmen yet . We are still in the preliminary stages of film .\" In the last analysis , Vorkapich 's rigor- ous, thoughtful approach instills a greater respect for film . He sees film as potential- ly something more than photographed stories or plays; and although he laments that it rarely is more than that , he takes its unique possibilities seriously. By giv- ing us a sense of how little has been Built-In Lightweight Battery Operation. achieved beyond sheer entertainment, Crystal Controlled DC Motor NiCad rechargeable battery will Incorporates high efficiency, low run at least ten 400 foot magazines and how much can be achieved by the power use, high torque, solid state per charge. No heavy external integrated circuitry and high power packs or entangling cables. rare innovative artist. Vorkapich explodes accuracy. complacency about film . 11111111 coming in PARTIAL LIST OF SATISFIED CAMERA MART CUSTOMERS: FILM COMMENT articles on Capra, WCVB TV - Boston WTEN TV - Albany, NY NET TV -NY Hitchcock, Welles, NBCTV-NY WPRI TV - Prov., R.I. UPI-NY women directors, CBS TV -NY KYW TV - Phil., Pa. Boston University more film favorites WABC TV - NY (Local News) WKRC TV - Cinn., Ohio Jersey City State and book reviews WRAL TV - Raleigh, N.C. WCKT TV - Miami, Fla. College, N.J. SPECIAL ISSUE on Sex Films I...,.----..-..-..-r'------------------...For more information fill in the coupon below or phone. ---~\" THE CAMERA MART INC. AGE 18 REGISTER AND VOTE 456 W. 55th ST., NEW YORK, N. Y. 10019 • (212) 757·6977 RENTALS 0 SALES 0 SERVICE Yes, I would like all the facts on the new CP-16 Camera. Name ________________________________________ Company ____________________________________ Address _____________________________________ City State _ _ _ _ _ _T_el.____________ _ _ J ~~-------~--- FILM COMMENT 79

Make the kind BACK ISSUES Give to of films you'd like WITH CHAPLIN & BERGMAN to see. Still available is one back issue of the college FILM COMMENT with extensive Study the kind of material on Charles Chaplin and of your COUNC1l f OR another one with material on Ing- choice. films you wish mar Bergman . Volume 5 number 4 VN INANCI AL you'd made. contains the complete transcript of AIOTO Chaplin 's MONSIEUR VERDOUX press You and conference and a study of his legal ~ The Film School troubles. Volume 6 number 2 con- have some subjects tains two articles by Ingmar Berg- ED UC ATI ON to discuss. man , and a biography and bibliog- raphy of Bergman. Each issue is Back Pages will be re sumed on this page Th e F ilm Sch ool may playa major ro le $1 .50 postpaid from FILM COM- next is sue. Deadline for the January- in yo u r life this fall. Th e F il m School has MENT, box 686 Village Station , Febru ary 1973 issue is 1 November 1972. a li m ited num ber of openings in its profes - Brookline MA 02147 USA. Many siona ll y o ri ented co u rses. A ppl icati o ns other bac k issues also available. AGE 18 REGISTER AND VOTE for se m inars, an d interviews and sc reen- ings fo r labs and exten d ed cou rses are ASK US now being accep ted. Wheth er yo u want FOR OUR to master your amateur status or look NEW SERVICE to f ilm as a ca ree r d irection , Th e Film & PRICE BOOK. School has a p ro gram for yo u . Make T he F ilm Sc hool 's spl ices of l ife TI part of your own. babell\" Seminars .'-\"~<»~F-C>~~\"\"'E:\" View and disc uss some of t he greatest cinematic achievements for on ly $ 100 416 West 45 St. New York 10036 per co urse. Se lect fro m ni ne t h ree -ho ur co u rses: Film Hi sto ry , Directo r as PHONE: (212)245-8900 Rea list, Conte mporary F oreign F ilm , Film Comedy, Contemporary Amer- ican F i lm , Fi lm Syntax, Doc um entary Film , H ol l ywood H eroine and D irect o r as Vis ual St rateg ist. Videotape Lab T elevision on a perso nally ex p ressive leve l. Presum i ng no prev io us vi deo ex per- ience, t h is worksh op costs $ 400 and offe rs 11 ho u rs of st ud io an d class ti m e per week. Son y Porta-Paks are avai l ab le at all times. 16 MM Filmmaking Labs Fro m tech nology to creativity , t his co u rse IS deS ig ned to teach th e se ri o us fi lm st udent hi s craft. Yo u mu st have worked previously in fil m for one year. L imi te d to 12 peop le, this co u rse is ac- tua ll y run like a p rofessional produ ction co mpany, an d yo u w ill be pai d f o r th e free-lance work you are assi gned. Th e cost of the lab is $1 ,000 an d incl udes use o f all equi pm ent , f ilm stock, and process ing . One and Two Year Film- making Programs F ilm as a way of li fe . T hese two pro- gram s co mb ine fi lm la bs, f i lm hi st ory courses an d elect ives with specific t ech - nical work sho ps. Emph asis is on tech · nique , aest hetics and creat ivity , and you w il l em erge a fi lm pr ofess ional at t he progra m 's co mpl etion. 80 % ot t he students w ho finish have immediate ly fou nd jobs in t he fi lm indu stry. Cost of th e one yea r p ro gram is $ 1, 100; two years is $3 ,200 1001 Mass A ve ., Ca mbridge MOTION PICTURE DIVISION Fo r m ore inform at io n cal l FILMSTRIP &SLIDE DIVISION (617 ) 6 61 -3900 Co u rses begin O ct . 2, 1972 When writing to advertisers please mention FILM COMMENT ~ 5

WR- MYSTERIES OF the Garden of THE ORGANISM the Finzi-Continis I The Sorrow and The Pity _AllY Now available in 16 mm from Cinema 5 -16 mm 595 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022 - (212) 421-5555

Available exclusively from FILMS INCORPORATED ..,. ... .,. .: (Offices nationwide)