VOLUME 19 - NUMBER 05 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1983

..,.;/' Hae .. .(.\" . (!I Rcgistrn:d service mark and T M .service mark o f Home Box Office. Inc. , r';' / One wants to catch a rich husband the other to catch up on the sexual revolution. They have a friendship you'll never forget. A Robert Coope r Production in association w ith Marian Rees Associates and List/Estrin Pro ductions Writte n by Shelley List and Jo nathan Estrin Directed by Lo u Anto nio © 1983 Ho me Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved Premiere on HBO®September 11 / 8 pm EDT

• •Sl•SSUe published bim onthly by the F ilm Society of Lincoln Center Volume 19, NumberS September-October 1983 Kasdan\"sBO1g Cho1ll' ••••••••• 20 Mlodsection: The Far East .... 31 Lawrence Kasdan writes smart . movies for kids (Empire , Raiders, Jedi) and for grownups (Body Heat). The Big Chill may satisfy both groups: it's got sex, drugs, and a fast car; it has much to say about a generation of Americans a little uneasy about taking over. Harlan Jacobson reviews this witty, likable film (page 20), and introduces scenes from the script by Kasdan and Barbara Bene- 1------------------------1dek (page 22). For its movies or its turbulent politics, the Far East is making news these days . A Japanese film wins the grand prize at the Coppola rumbles Back. . Cannes Film Festival for only the second time in almost three Never a dull moment with Francis Cop- decades. AChinese film details corruption and torture in the pola. He's made blockbuster movies, new Vietnam, and stirs controversy wherever it plays. In the godfathered a swarm of Hollywood Philippines, the assassination of opposition leader Benigno brats, created-and almost demolished Aquino sheds a harsh light on the Marcos govemme nt's policies -his own studio. His new film , Rumble toward a fettered film industry. So: Dave Kehr considers the Fish, may be his most rabidly debated ; career of prize-winning Japanese director Shohei Imamura his next one, Cotton Club, may signal a (page 32); Harlan Kennedy profiles Hong Kong director Ann retum to the Hollywood fold. He talks Hui and her BoatPeople (page 41); Elliott Stein reports on Fili- about all this and more in the Playboy . .. pino cinema (page 48); and Luis H. Francia chronicles the oops, FILM COMMENT interview struggles of Asian-Americans to make movies true to two cul- with David Thomson and Lucy Gray. tures (page 56). Also in this issue: 'Leopard'Redux ............ 16 People We Like ... . ......... 83 She's grown-up , smart, full of fun . Journals ................... 2 Luchino Visconti 's 1963 masterpiece Richard Corliss likes Joanna Cassidy Fred Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie has been restored to its full length. in Under Fire and Bonnie Bedelia in Blacksmith) is up in the Great White David Ehrenstein tells how and , more Heart Like a Wheel-two post-gradu- North with Timothy Hutton, carving important, why. ate American Beauties. an Iceman; Jim Verniere reports. The Soviets provide an answer to Warren Two Old Masters............ 26 Books ...... .. ............ 84 Beatty: Franco Nero as U.S. red John A pair of cinema giants died this sum- Why is this holocaust different from Reed . Kathy Gunst has the story. mer. Samson Raphaelson is lauded by all other holocausts? Annette Insdorf director Bob Rafelson (his nephew), wrote a book about movies on Hitle r Outlaw Cinema... . .......... 9 Richard Corliss, and Andrew Sarris. and the Jews; Steve Lawson reviews It Came from Beyond Midnight! A Luis Bunuel is recalled (in interviews it. sensibility so outrageous only weird by Dan Yakir) by some of the actors insomniacs could find it appealing! El who worked with him. Back Page ........ . ........ 88 Tapa set the stage; Rocky Horror pa- The winner of Quiz No. 2 li sted more raded on it. David Chute reviews the Douglas Trumbull......... . . 76 than 250 movies. Doing that for our high and low points (sometimes they The wizard of special effects (2001 , new contest will be even tougher: the were the same thing) of cult movies. CE3K, the first Star Trek movie) has entry can be only 50 words long. Outlaw Cinema dead or Alive ? come up with a provocative Brain- storm . As Stephen Farber reports, it's Cover photo: Columbia Pictures . more than Natalie Wood's last movie. Editor: Richard Co rli ss. Senior Editor: Harlan Jacobson. Busin ess Manage r: Say re Maxfi e ld . Adve rti sin g and C ircul ati on Manage r: Tony Impav id o. Art Director: Elli ot Schulman. Cove r DeS Ign: Mike Uns. West Coast Editor: Ann e Th ompso n. E u ropea n Co rrespo nde nt: H arl an Ke nn edy. Resea rch Co nsultant: Mary CO rli SS . Edlton al ASS istants: MarCie Bloom. Jack Barth . C ircul ati on Ass istant: De borah Freedman. Acco untant: Domingo Ho rnill a. Editorial Inte rn : Victor Zak. Executi ve DI~ector, Film Soc~ety of Linco ln Ce nte r: Joa nne Koch. Seco nd class pos tage pa id at New Yo rk and additi onal m a llln~ offi ces. Co pYrl ~ht © 1983 by th e.Film Society of L.lnco ln Ce nte r. All ri ghts rese rved . T he opinions expressed in F ILM COMMENT do not rep re- sent Film Society of Lincoln Center poli cy. ThiS publicati on IS full y protected by domes ti c and inte rn ational co pyri ght. T he publica ti on FI LM COM- MENT (ISSNOOIS-11 9X) IS made pOSS ible In part by suppOrt from th e New York State Co un cil on the Arts and th e Nati onal End ow me nt fo r th e Arts. Subsc ription rates in the United States : $ 12 for six numbers, $22 fortwe lve numbe rs. E l se~ h e re: $ 18 for six numbe rs, $34 fD r twe lve numbe rs, payable In U.S. fund s onl y. New subSC ribers should Includ e their occ upati ons and ZiP codes. Edi to rial, subsc riptio n, and bac k-i ss ue corres pond e nce' FI LM COMM ENT, 140 Wes t Sixty-fifth Stree t, New York , N. Y. 10023 U.S.A. .

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Fred Schepisi's Iceman Cometh; Red Bells Tollfor Reed. Altered States in the Great White North When The Chant ofJimmie Blacksmith Fred Schepisi on the set of Iceman . was released in 1980 in the U.S. , Fred Schepisi (rhymes with Pepsi) was hailed vals to warn that the cameras are rolling pisi directs the first, violent encounter. as the great Australian director. Since his in the vivarium, a $500,000 reproduc- He commands retake after maddening emigration to the U. S. four years ago , tion of the Iceman's natural environ- retake, but the result is a testament to Schepisi has completed only one film , ment where the scientists have placed Schepisi's demanding style: this eve- the pseudo-mythic western Barbarosa, him to observe his behavior. The vivar- ning's dailies will bristle with tension. which also received good reviews and ium is an enormous hollow full of cliffs None of the principal actors sees the was given only a minor release by Uni- and caves built out of chicken wire, bur- dailies, but Schepisi looks and limps versal. But the studio obviously has faith lap, and ABS foam on a skeleton of steel around (he broke his foot Indian wres- in Schepisi: he is now at work on Univer- scaffolding. In the center on a wooden tling on location). Cinematographer Ian sal's Iceman in Vancouver, British Co- ramp a Louma crane is perched. Above Baker grunts his approval from the back lumbia. is a great, plexiglass dome. of the room. And John Drimmer is clearly impressed, contral)' to the myth On the face of it, this hardly seems Inside, Schepisi is directing Hutton of the disgruntled screenwriter. Evel)'- like a Fred Schepisi project. Produced and Lone (a Chinese-American who one is drinking beer and munching pret- by Norman Jewison and Patrick Palmer, won an Obie Award for his galvanic per- zels. Iceman is the study of a prehistoric hu- formance in The Dance and the Railroad, man (John Lone) revived by a team of which he also staged and scored) in their Logistically, Iceman is Schepisi's most cryobiologists (headed by Lindsay first meeting. Lone makes a formidable arduous film, requiring five helicopters Crouse) after 40,000 years frozen in Arc- proto-human. Squat but muscular, he to ferl)' filmmakers to the ice-bound lo- tic ice. Timothy Hutton plays hotshot sports the ridged brow and bulbous cra- cations. \"Which means,\" he explains, anthropologist Stanley Shephard, whose nium of our evolutional)' forebears. Un- \" that you have to tl)' to maximize the efforts to communicate with our like the Neanderthals of Questfor Fire, number of shots in one drop, which thawed-out forefather is a struggle to Lone's primitive is more · human, de- sometimes isn't possible. We got down bridge the gap between modern and spite his oversized teeth and nails and to vel)' few shots a day at one point.\" primitive man. The project seems more the ceremonial scars that crisscross his Iceman is over schedule. \"We evacuated a combination of The Wild Child and chest. three times to avoid getting caught in a Quest for Fire-a kind of Altered States white-out,\" the director says. in the Great White North-than anything Only two weeks of shooting remain, in Blacksmith's ken. and the mood of the cast and crew vacil- The ice-bound locations also forced lates between giddiness and exhaustion. Schepisi to alter his shooting style. \"Ian \"The only science fiction in this film A local doctor has been by to give shots and I like to work with vel)' long lenses, is the first heartbeat,\" says scriptwriter of B-12. The locations have been mur- which packs things up and forces the John Drimmer, sitting in a trailer in a bus derous: in Churchill, Manitoba, where perspective, like painting. And a vel)' depot in Vancouver, where some Iceman the temperature dips to 50 below zero; long lens on faces can blow the back- interiors have been built. Drimmer is on ice fields near Summit Lake and Bit- ground away so it becomes a patina. It echoing the sentiments of the director ter Creek; and on the Salmon, Chick- gives you a dimensional effect of the and the producers. Apparently, the word amin , and Bear glaciers. person being pushed off the screen. But is out to softpedal the science-fiction el- when you're working on ice you some- ements of Iceman and to emphasize its The frustration level is high as Sche- \"human drama.\" Clearly, however, Ice- man will be more than a caveman-on- the-loose film . Though the genre is a science fiction and action film cross, Ice- man's creators are seeking to convey its serious philosophical underpinnings: a pop variation on Hobbes and Rousseau. \"It will be much more than a grunting Alley Oop,\" adds Drimmer. Outside the trailer, an assistant direc- tor blasts a pocket horn at regular inter- 4



times can't get the effect of why you're we need you to go to Mexico, John.\" The couple is strolling along, when Flash to a suave and handsome John Dodge exclaims, \"I feel so free, John. there unless you're on a wide lens. At Reed (played by Italian actor Franco From now on, happy will be our normal Nero). Brow furrowed, he stares at the state of mind.\" In another flashback, a the same time , you can't get the scale map. Then he extends his arms and the naked Ursula Andress is sprawled across three men shake hands. John Reed has a large silk quilt. \"Darling,\" she de- without a long lens. It was really a quan- accepted the assignment. clares, \"this bed is the center of the world. I love. you.\" The Americans in dary. We couldn't apply a single rule.\" Next scene: John Reed goes to a gala the audience break out into derisive party at the Fifth Avenue salon of New laughter. Schepisi's involvement in Iceman has York socialite Mabel Dodge (Ursula An- Cinematically, Red Bells is incredibly always been perplexing-even he ad- dress), where he IS introduced as the tedious, packed with battle scenes shot like a Thirties Western. Nothing looks mits that at first the film was not his cup \"sharpest pen in America.\" Dodge authentic. Bondarchuk films Mexico oozes over him. Moments later, the cou- more like a travel brochure for the Mexi- of tea. \"Before I was offered Iceman I ple exits for a walk in Central Park. can government: endless shots of the They kiss. \"I feel wonderful,\" Dodge bright blue Mexican sky, rows of stubby was involved in a debacle over a film announces. \"This has been the most cacti, groups of Mexican women gossip- glorious evening. I love you. \" ing as they shape tortillas. The director called The Consultant which was to star doesn't seem overly concerned with au- Before Warren Beatty essayed John thenticity. In one flashback to Dodge's Jacqueline Bisset and Roy Scheider. It Reed in Reds, most Americans thought Fifth Avenue apartment, Bondarchuk of Reed as nothing more than a footnote filmed a panoramic view of the Manhat- was supposed to be a 'go' picture, but as in the annals of dropouts. But to the tan skyline in 1910-and there's the Soviets, John Reed is a national hero, Citicorp Building, the 59th Street it turned out they didn't have the studied the way American kids learn Bridge, the Roosevelt Island tramway. about Lafayette. It's this Soviet senti- money, and it seemed I had to be ap- ment for John Reed that undergirds Red For all its flaws, the political under- Bells, the Soviet version of the Reed pinnings in Red Bells are ultimately proved by Jackie Bisset. After a number story. The film premiered in July at the clearer than those found in Beatty's Reds 12th annual U.S.-Soviet Conference (also shown to the delegates of the of meetings she said she didn' t feel she held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, U. S. -Soviet conference). Oleg N.H., before about thirty Russian dele- Voeikov, an executive of the Soviet could work with me. That kind of thing gates and a few hundred Americans. Youth Organization in Moscow, summa- rized : \"In Red Bells you see the Revolu- happens all the bloody time.\" Red Bells is a seven-hour epic in two tion. In Reds you see a person who just parts. The first half, subtitled Mexico in happened to be [in Russia] during the Schepisi bridles at the suggestion that Flames, focuses on Reed 's journalistic Revolution.\" foray into the Mexican Revolution , as he might be making more films ifhe had well as his relationship with Mabel \"Red Bells really tells a piece of his- Dodge. Part two, I Witnessed The Birth of tory,\" one Soviet delegate explained. stayed in Australia. Despite being a New World, ranges from Reed in Rus- But was it a good film? \"Well ... yes,\" he sia during the Revolution to his subse- answered cautiously. \"It deals with the bogged down by Raggedy Man (which quent efforts to establish a Communist struggle of the masses-be they Mexi- party in the U.S. Only Mexico inFlames cans or Russians. \" he was scheduled to direct before Sissy was shown at Dartmouth; the second half has not been dubbed into English. The locals were less kind: \"It's my Spacek's husband, Jack Fisk, took over) honest opinion,\" said Professor Maurice In this Soviet version, director Sergei Rapf, head of the Film Studies depart- for nine months, and losing several more Bondarchuk simply asks his audience to ment at Dartmouth, \"that this film can- accept Reed on blind faith. He never not be released in the U.S. unless some- on The Consultant. Schepisi argues he bothers to explore what makes John thing is.done. It's really terrible for an Reed tick. In Mexico in Flames, Reed American audience. \" has kept pace with Weir and Beresford. attempts to interview Francisco (Pan- cho) Villa but first must prove himself to Whether Red Bells will be released in \"Australia is just as tough in a different the Mexicans-as journalist, man, and this country in its full seven hours, or at comrade. So Reed drinks their booze, all, is unresolved. Chris Wood of Inter- kind of way. I was accused of destroying dances with their women, and acts national Film Exchange in New York bravely. In one scene, Reed asks the (the American company that brought it the Australian film industry, because it Mexican soldiers if he can accompany to Dartmouth) said, \"as of this date, no them to the front line. \"It's too dan- American distributor has bought the cost $1.2 million to make Jimmie Black- gerous,\" he's warned. \"You might get film.\" Perhaps, that is because Reed's killed.\" Says Reed: \" I'll risk death. story has already been told in Reds, smith. Now executive producers take a That's my job.\" which was not a financial success. But, as one Darmouth student wondered, $250,000 fee for doing fuck all. I didn' t Campy? You should see the love \"How could a country that has the tradi- scenes. L ying in a dusty Mexican tion of Chekhov make a film like this? have the problems I'm having here be- trench, his clothes bloodied and ripped What went wrong?\"-KATHY GUNST to shreds, Reed thinks back to the court- cause I did everything in Australia, and yard of Mabel Dodge's Florentine villa. I'm going to try to get back to that here. I don't want to get all excited and put considerable work and emotional energy into a project like The Consultant and have it drop because of somebody's neu- rosis. \" So, finally, what convinced Schepisi to stake his career on the Iceman script? \"I saw a lot of prospects in it. I thought it could be a thought-provoking but also commercially successful picture full of pace and energy. I thought this film could have-as Nabokov said-'the precision of poetry and the intuition of science.' But I have to be careful: I don' t want it to be too poetic. What I'm searching for is the perfect balance: a good picture that people will bloody go and see.\" -JAMES VERNIERE Reds Remake 'Reds' In the New York office of the Metro- politan newspaper, two high powered editors stand in front of a map of Latin America. \"We need a correspondent who will write the truth about the Revo- lution,\" one of them says. \"That's why 6

Lobby cards are IN. Enjoy 79 in glorious color - and SAVE $23 The Golden Age of Movies I It was also the Golden Age of Lobby Cards . So let 's visit the lobby of the Bijou . The lobby cards show you the coming attractions . Foyer Pleasure is the first volume devoted to those wonderful 11 x 14 miniposters that made you want to plank down your 50~ and step inside. All 70 collectors ' gems are from the legendary Kobal Collection , and this volume does them justice .. . • Striking 111/4 x 81/2 Landscape Format • 69 lobby cards in magnificent original color - and everyone of them full-page size • 10 additional lobby cards smaller in size - but also in sparkling full color • Informative writeups on each film • Stunning full-color laminated jacket • Knowledgeable section on the rise and decline of the classic lobby card • Printed thruout on thick , heavy, glossy stock for prime reproduction of all the color How to Enjoy This Volume You have two basic choices: 1. Deck the walls of your room or office , and listen to the Oohs and Ahs from your friends . 2. Put this beauty o ut on your coffee table, and watch everybody's eyes light up as they turn the pages . r - -H-ow-t-o -SA-V-E -$2-3 -off-th-e-$-24-.9-5 p-u-bli-sh-er-'s -pr-ice- -• II I ..,./\",811.11.10 •••1 CU. I I 15 OAKLAND AVENUE • HARRISON , N.Y. 10528 I I I enclose $1.95 . Please send me the $24 .95 full-color volume , Foyer counts . I'll be offered a new Club Selection plus Alternates every 4 weeks I Pleasure , postpaid and at no additional charge . At the same time please ac- (13 times a year) in the Club bulletin , PREVIEWS . If I want the Selection , I I I cept my membership in the Movie/ Entertainment Book Club. I agree to buy will do nothing and it will come automatically . If I want an Alternate or no 4 books over the next 2 years at regular Club prices plus shipping and book at all , I'll notify you by the deadline date specified . If I should ever I I handling . After I buy and pay for 4 books at regular Club prices . my receive a Selection without having had 10 days to decide if I want it , I may membership may be ended either by me or by the Club . I will be offered return it at Club expense and receive full credit. PREVIEWS also includes I I some 200 books on movies and entertainment , the majority at 20-33% dis- news about my fellow members and their hobbies . I am welcome to send in counts plus shipping and handling . For every book I buy at the regular Club similar items about myself and my interests . PREVIEWS will publish every I price , I receive one or more FREE Bonus Book Certificates which entitle me such item it deems suitable , FREE . to buy many books at far below regular Club price , usually at 60-80 % dis- Fe - 25 I I I NAME I ADDRESS I L -CITY - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -STATE - - - - - -ZIP . . 1I

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p 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 10 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 • Inema The Rocky Horror Picture Show-Outlaw Cinema or Midnight Movie? by David Chute where they'd first seen Hiroshima, Mon \"higher\" influences. And there are Amour. Amazingly, almost everybody some specimens of higher criticism (no- It will not do to condemn them on the did. When my turn came, I spoke with- tably Andre Bazin's essay \"The Ontol- ground that they are vulgar and ugly. That out thinking: \"No,\" I said, \"but I re- ogy of the Photographic Image\") which is exactly what they are meant to be. Their member the theater where I first saw aim to explain why the raw visual mate- whole meaning and virtue is in their unre- Viva Las Vegas.\" rial in movies is so piercingly immediate, deemed lowness, not only in the sense of and why the messages it sends are appar- obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every As wisecracks go, this one was noth- ently received directly through the direction whatever. The slightest hint of ing much, but I was unaccountably tick- lower sensory channels. Unwittingly, \"higher\" influences would ruin them ut- led by it. I felt that I'd struck a blow for perhaps, Bazin explained why movies terly. They stand for the worm's-eye view something-and against something. are the best of all possible media for both o f life. And in fact, I really can recall the tat- propaganda and pornography, and how a tered atmosphere of the old Empire cheesy dud like Viva Las Vegas can -George Orwell, Theater, in Lewiston, Maine, where change a person's life. That picture con- \"The Art of Donald McGill\" the Elvis Presley-Ann-Margret potboiler tained a couple of hip-swiveling song- Some L.A. film-crit types were con- 'played first-run in 1964. Nearly every- and-dance collaborations between Elvis ferring recently, all misty-eyed, asking one who loves movies has a few fond and Ann-Margret that made an enor- each other if they recalled the theaters memories of this sort, of personal mile- mous dent in my 14-year-old libido. And stones that have nothing to do with 9

I'm convinced that Ann-Margret had a most enjoy-recently, for instance, in this function and ritualized it into impo- lot more to do with my becoming a both Bad Boys and The Road Warrior. In tence. Like Donald McGill's naughty movie critic, almost a decade later, than fact , the psychic tremors set off by a penny postcards as seen by George Or- any six stylish French auteurs. pure-grain Outlaw film are pretty close well, Outlaw movies-whether funny, to the dark heart of the matter. It has or sexy, or scary-represent \" the • something to do with the piercing im- worm's-eye view of life.\" And more. mediacy of images. It has a lot to do with They embody the world view of the By extension , Ann-Margret is also to Ann-Margret. It has everything to do dog, the beast, the sociopath who lurks blame for so me of the temperamental with the ways in w hich people are drawn in each of us. problems I have with a mostly admirable to movies in the first place, and respond new book called Midnight Movies, by J . to them (on so me furti ve, sheepish Orwell suspected that humane atti- Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum. It level) for the rest of their lives. It's a tudes were unlikely in people who rig- was a surprisingly depressing read for question of being overtaken by some- idly denied those aspects of themselves me-not because it's bad but because, thing, as a sober grown-up, that can -that rigid denial bred intolerance and in its way, it is very good indeed. The evoke the kind of primitive leaps of sus- emotional paralysis. Now, many strains book is judicious and thorough and in- pended disbelief that come so easily to in popular culture are routinely con- formative; the writing is enviably felici- kids; something that cuts through the demned for appealing bluntly to our tous. The chapters on George Romero, layers of acquired taste and preconcep- lowest drives, and routinely defended as John Waters, and the Rocky Horror cult offering a harmless , vicarious outlet for are probably definitive, and there are John Waters ' Female Trouble. those drives. Pornography either incites additional strong sections on El Topo , tion we've slathered onto that initial or discourages rape, depending on who's Eraserhead, and the Mekas-Warhol un- urge, like coats ofyellowiQg varnish. Of talking; Charles Bronson revenge pic- derground scene of the Sixties. It's one course, most of the great works of movie tures either trigger or stifle urban of the best American movie books in art have this deep-diving power, too. violence. I won't declare that people are years, and I devoured every word of it. But they achieve it \"deceptively,\" in a healthier, but I will suggest that they are Nevertheless, Midnight Movies left me focused application of craft. Outlaw more congenial for occasionally tossing a feeling rattled for several days. I turned films are often stronger if artless in the bone to the dog in themselves. mopey and monosyllabic, and spent extreme, since what they' re after is a long empty hours zoned-out in front of visceral, pre-aesthetic response. Outlaw movies aren't an institution MTV, clutching a quart of Schlitz, nurs- yet, thank God, but they have been li- ing a worm of mortal dread. The ranks of Midnight Movies and of onized a little, at schlock and sleaze fes- Outlaw Cinema certainly overlap, but tivals in major cities, and in fanzines like Something had died : That was the they are not contiguous. The notion of The Gore Gazette and Sleazoid Express. essence of it. The very existence of a Outlaw Cinema embraces all those fl a- There's even a book out now on Hers- sober, dignified tome like Midnight grant film s, from splatter fli cks to hard- chell Gordon Lewis, whose splatter Movies told me that this countercultural core porn , whose crucial social function epics Blood Feast (1963) and Two Thou- phenomenon was no longer a vital abra- is to overstep the limits of established sand Maniacs (1964) are early landmines sive force. If Harper & Row can issue a taste. The midnight shows absorbed of loathsomeness. When considering a perfectly respectable book on the sub- ject, it's a safe bet that the midnight picture like Lewis' Gore-Gore Girls flicks are now a long way from the cut- (1972), with its french-fried eyeballs and ting edge of outrage. Like John Waters' scissored nipples (and a pitiful cameo by elegiac memoir Shock Value (published Henny Youngman), one is strongly in 1981), Midnight Movies tosses a few tempted to dismiss the whole Outlaw respectful clods onto the corpse of Out- fad as one more punk-perverse aberra- law Cinema. tion, along with safety pins and shit-blis- ters. (It's simultaneously nauseating and The ascension into schlock heaven of childish, like a preppy puking tourna- the mainline Midnight Movie-as epit- ment.) Still, I think there's something omized by The Rocky Horror Picture going on here that ought to be squinted Show-is no great personal tragedy. Pink at-and quickly, too, because it's mori- Flamingos and Night of the Living Dead bund already. Besides , the really low- are sentimental favorites, but the others down Outlaw films are more talked I can do without: Rocky Horror and El about than seen, and they' re cherished Topo are plain dumb; Eraserhead is too mostly as symbols. They are an em- \"cosmic\" by half. And the cults in gen- blematic extreme of the vestigial illicit eral, though often called \"subversive ,\" tickle in the thrill of moviegoing: the may actually have been a co-optive Viva /AS Vegas syndrome. In America, at safety valve that only served to blow off least, that syndrome is one of the central a lot of promising rebellious energy. As a traditions of film viewing-and film re- debased offshoot ofSixties tribalism, the vlewmg. movie cults were decadent, compro- mised , moribund affairs from the word There is a legitimate critical rationale for plunging into this particular sewer. In go. the first place, my profession has a proud Some distant emotional relatives of heritage of underdog advocacy, of stick- ing up for what others denigrate. James the extremist qualities I savor in the Wa- Agee, Robert Warshow, Manny Farber, ters and Romero film s do seem to crop up in many of the mainstream movies I 10

The conceit ofOutlaw Cinema goes way beyond meat and poflltoes. It's more like raw meat, killed on the hoofand swallowed while it's still warm ... Sam Raimi's Evil Dead (1982) . Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael-all these horizons of our interest in movies ex- ing with a lumpen, vengeful, rebellious element in popular taste. \" That's one great movies critics seem to have been pand as we ourselves expand. And for way to put it, although I think the word \"rebellious\" carries implications of revo- spurred on by subversive, iconoclastic some of us, at some point (perhaps at lutionary takeover and reform that aren't present in the Outlaw Cinema mental- attitudes. The vociferous differences Hiroshima, Mon Amour) , self-conscious- ity. The impulse in question is more nihilistic than that. It doesn' t want to separating some of these writers are so ness sets in. We repress our memories of alter social norms, it wants to annihilate them. The Outlaw is a subversive force familiar that their kinship is often over- the earlier evolutionary stages of our only in the sense that a true subversive could exploit the disorder he creates. looked-perhaps because their similari- film-fever the way some kids burn their Which is perhaps why Hoberman and ties are less verbal and ideological than comic books, when they earnestly de- Rosenbaum seem to shy away whenever the discussion in Midnight Movies instinctive and emotional. It just hap- cide that it's time they grew up. Still, a threatens to veer off into Outlaw terrain. Ultimately, they are serious men who pens that American movies, as rough- vestige of those formative , hooky-play- want the movies they support to be for something, in a fairly direct and literal and-ready plebeian entertainments, al- ing drives-the yen to duck out and see way. According to Rosenbaum, the Barthes quote is \"a succinct summary of ways seem to seduce intelligent people a movie, and the \"lower'\" the better- what I detest about extreme splatter movies like Blood Feast and Basket Case in more or less the same way. Many must linger as a quirt of temperament. .. . which make the monstrous viable without any sort of finesse or imagina- budding critics have embraced movies For us, even Porky's II still feels like a tion or wit. \" Well, those are unexeption- able qualities in a movie, and the splat- (as today's young brains embrace rock movie, while Fassbinder's Berlin Alexan- ter-style films with real flair (like Romero's work or Sam Raimi's Evil ' n' roll) in order to evade or slough off derplatz is .. . something else. (In this Dead) are obviously the only ones worth dwelling on as movies. But in the con- the stifling high standards of their guard- case, the \" movie\" stinks and the \"some- text of Outlaw Cinema, Rosenbaum's terms are just dismissive, irrelevant buzz Ians. thing else\" is wonderful, but the distinc- words. The issues here, don' t forget, are pre-aesthetic, .so that an application of At an early age we can easily feel tion stands.) critical criteria becomes a quick and easy way to write-off the entire field .Critical crushed by high standards, because we The conceit of Outlaw Cinema, standards matter enormously, especially in this day and age, but some rock-bot- think we can' t live up to them. If so, we though, goes way beyond meat and po- tom truths about movies precede the operations of criticism. And one of those may turn to movies as an easy, accessible tatoes. It's more like raw meat, killed on alternative. This debased art form the hoof and swallowed while it's still doesn' t make us feel dull or crass; we warm. In the final chapter of Midnight needn't struggle to comprehend. The Movies , a Q&A-style dialogue between movies cater to our secret needs, to de- the scribes, Rosenbaum offers an appo- sires we may not be aware of yet. They site quote from Roland Barthes: \"What's give us not what we say we want when terrible about the cinema is that it makes we think some righteous parent-figure the monstrous viable.\" Barthes' obser- might be listening, but what the primi- vation is a neat sketch of the psychic tive within us really wants, in its carnivo- profile of Outlaw Cinema, whose tol- rous heart-of-hearts. The movies wel- lowers seem to be identifying with the come us with open arms, just as we are, monstrous-or rather, with every poor with no ulterior motives of education or devil who is stigmatized as monstrous, im provemen t. when he's really just a bit \"different. \" In Later on, at a picture like Horror of this sense, both King Kong and The Ele- Dracula or The Great Escape , we may phant Man have all the emotional ear- begin to realize what skill and finesse are marks of classic cult pictures. all about, to sense that the pleasure of A few lines later, Hoberman responds even a meat-and-potatoes meal can be to the Barthes quote by suggesting that heightened if it's well prepared. The \"the splatter-film cultists [are] identify- 11



truths is the plain fact that some of the to their grind-house and drive-in fol- things movies do for us can easily be lowers-red necks and inner-city blacks done without finesse or imagination or who were thinking not about their par- wit. ents, but about their wives and bosses In Orwell's terms, the higher aspects and clergymen. of a human being share living quarters It's true that the pure exploitation with some lower attributes that ought to strains haven't made much headway on be acknowledged, and perhaps ap- the midnight scene. To date, only peased. And the aspects of movies George Romero's Night of the Living which act upon those lower attributes Dead has crossed over, in a big way, from (even when the higher attributes are also the graphic-gore ghetto. Nothing by touched) need to be recognized, in turn , Meyer or Lewis has ever taken hold on a . if a humane critical approach to movies midnight show, and recent efforts to is the end in view. Andre Bazin found float hard-core splatter films like Basket his key to the ontology of film in the Case and Bloodsucking Freaks at the startling power of some artless home- witching hour have garnered only mod- movie footage from the Kon-Tiki expe- erate success. But when the thrill-hun- dition. As a four-square American lad gry Outlaw attitudes were built right with pop proclivities, I've found mine in into the film themselves, by knowing Blood Feast and The Opening of Misty purveyors like Waters, Outlaw Cinema Beethoven. But it amounts to the same produced that stunted offspring known thing: an obliteration of Art that brings as the Midnight Movie, in which perva- us face to face with the riveting force of sive irony signals the beginning of the the raw , unmediated photographic im- end. age. And anyone who denies that this is The cult of Midnight Movies ap- a central factor in his infatuation with pealed primarily to feelings of awkward- movies is, in my opInIon, talking ness and alienation , to people who through his hat. themselves felt \"different\" or anathe- • matized-teens, gays, college kids . The Midnight Movies phenomenon Even trotting off to a midnight screen- was spun off in the late Sixties, from ing defies conventional viewing habits, some spicier varieties of underbelly art, and the essentially generous act of em- low and high alike. In Midnight Movies, bracing a culturally blitzed picture can for instance, Hoberman offers a persua- be gratifying in itself. I'm sure that the sive account of the ways in which the first-run failure of The Rocky Horror Pic- \" Underground\" film circuit helped set a ture Show and the virtual pariah status of clique-ish precedent for alternative, af- Pink Flamingos gave both those films a ter-hours moviegoing-a precedent leg up at the midnight box office. promptly exploited by perceptive ex- What's more, the storylines of the ma- hibitors, with pictures that offered heap- jor cult hits deal sympathetically with ing helpings of exploitation-style sex characters who bear the stamp of and violence in avant-garde drag. The hounded eccentricity. These identifica- classic midnight pictures drew some tion figures all tend to be social rejects of borrowed hip luster from the Under- one kind or another-whether benign ground, but they were also upscale, (as in King ofHearts, Harold and Maude, ironic variations on the sex-and-gore di- and Outrageous), socially rebellious (as versions of (among others) Russ Meyer in The Harder They Come), or actively and Herschel Gordon Lewis. Meyer and malignant (as in Pink Flamingos, Era- Lewis, after all, were the two key forma- serhead, Night of the Living Dead, and tive influences upon the Patron Saint almost all splatter films). Rocky Horror, and Theoretical Genius of Outlaw Cin- which became the ultimate midnight of- ema, John Waters, who calls his own fering despite its cretinous shortcomings pictures \"exploitation films for art the- as a movie, was an overtly messianic aters. \" musical about devine freakishness. With its bold aesthetic rallying cry Form follows function: The Midnight \"Crime is Beauty,\" Waters' Female Trou- Movies filled a transitional need for their ble is the definitive Outlaw movie. Wa- followers, while authentic exploitation ters believes that his films are attractive fare was just a tad too earnest in its ef- because they make people feel that their forts to offend. It lacked the snooty edge very presence in the theater is a taboo- . of irony that seems a prerequisite of suc- topping act: \"My parents would shit if cess with the hipper-than-thou late- they knew I was seeing this!' The porn night crowd . The delectation of outrage and gore movies that Waters grew up on for its own sake is another crypto-adoles- supplied the same sort of squirmy thrill cent ploy, and at bottom it's such a 13

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA RUM B L E F'I S H starring MATT DILLON MICKEY ROURKE as Rusty ]ames as the Motorcycle Boy VINCENT SPA N 0 DIANE LANE DIANA SCARWID NICOLAS CAGE and DENNIS HOPPER Screenplay by S . E. H I N TON & F RAN CIS COP POL A Based on the nooel by Music by Executive Producer S.E.HINTON STEWART COPELAND FRANCIS COPPOLA Edited by Production Designer Director of Photography BARRY MALKIN DEAN TAVOULARIS S T E P HEN H. BUR U M, A.S.C. Produced by Directed by FRANCIS COPPOLA FRED ROOS and DOUG CLAYBOURNE From Zoerrope Studios 1 IRead th~ DEll Book I ISOUNDTRACX ALBU M AVAILABl.£ O N A&..M RECORDS AND TAPES R RESTRICTED EDt 0 1982 Unlvcral CifY SNd lo, Inc:. UNDElll1REOUIIIUACCOMPAIIYUIG 'AIIEIITO\"AOULTIiUAIIDIAI ill SEE IT THIS FALL AT SELECTED THEATRES

deadly serious undertaking that its seri- close. (The new video-game/Star Wars ATTENTION ousness can never be openly acknowl- phase is distinctly subadolescent.) SOUNDTRACK ALBUM edged. The gross-out aficionado savors It's no wonder The Rocky Horror Pic- COLLECTORS his se nse of complicity when the va lues ture Show spawned the movie cult to end AND of a smug social stratum , from which he all cults. It stands for the failure of nerve FILM MUSIC FANS feels himself excluded, are systemati- that saw an initially anti-orthodox move- We are one of the largest cally trashed and ridiculed. But an ad- ment transformed into a rigid new \"al- dealers in the world mission that he cares about the lock-out ternate\" orthodoxy, a mass-participation specializing in the sale of soundtracks and original cast would give the game away. A show of ritual. At precisely the right moment, albums. We stock thousands breezy nonchalance is de rigueur. So Zeitgeist-wise , Rocky Horror opted not of titles including many rare out of print records and while the classic Midnight Movies serve for the bitter vengefulness and romanti- foreign imports . Some of up graphic raunch by the bucketful , cized self-pity of earlier midnight films , the soundtracks we stock include: Farewell to Arms , they serve it with a knowing insider's but for a clarion call to pride-in the Game of Death, Godzilla, Houseboat, Kings Go Forth , smirk. soothing context of conformity. Savina's Western , Missing , On The Beach , Prom Night, The revi sed Outlaw attitude of Mid- It doesn ' t seem likely that any new Midnight, Raise The Titanic , Return of the Soldier, Sodom night Movies implicitly betrays itself. Rocky Horror-style neo-tribalist cults and Gomorrah , Space Cruiser Yamato , and White Christmas Something has died , all right, and the will spring up in the near future. Current Write For advent of Midnight Movies was a central youth-culture trends like punk and New A Free Catalog l symptom of the fatal malady. Wave aren't particularly tribal; they' re Sound Track Album Retailers • either belligerent or narcissistic. (In the Department 722 Like pornography and the graphic \"dialogue\" chapter of Midnight Movies, P.O. Box 7 grass-roots splatter films, Midnight Hoberman describes the only major new Quarryville, Pa. 17566 Movies have reached a point of no return midnight hit, Eraserhead, as \" pro- Phone: 17171 284·2573 Hours: 9AM-5PM Weekdays where raw outrage is concerned. Outlaw foundly a film of the Seventies ... it Cinema has only a relative existence: It doesn't lend itself to collective experi- can only flourish in a society with hard ence.\") Midnight exhibitors could con- and fast cultural laws , ripe for violation. ceivably adapt to these cultural shifts And for a variety of reasons, there are no and draw in a new, younger audience. social taboos left for these films to vio- Films with a harsher, punkoid beat, like late. Gestures and attitudes no longer Dawn of the Dead or the concert docu- seem monstrous; only real-life screen mentary The Decline of Western Civiliza- horrors like authentic snuff or kiddie tion , have already drawn substantial porn could fill the bill , and the audience midnight throngs. But the new crowds for that would be fairl y limited. (Also, in make exhibitors squirm with worry over a period that can produce gore-journal- their soaring insurance premiums. It's ism magazines like Violent World and one thing to have a glitzy mini-Wood- splatter documentaries like Carnivo- stock in your movie theater every Satur- rous, with its head-on footage of canni- day; a scuzzy mini-Altamont is some- balism , even those last-ditch limits tend thing else again. to blur.) Pussycat Theaters are a fixture Time is not on their side. There is now on Main Street, U.S.A., and now more than enough real-life horror to graphic gross-outs are staple fare in high satisfy most appetites. The world seems profile, big-studio movies like Porky's tougher to live in , and survival demands and Monty Python's the Meaning of Life. a little more control and discipline. Orgi- The grind houses still exist, but they no astic and taboo-defying activities just longer feel like the DMZ. And populist don't seem profitable anymore. The film criticism has won a scorched-earth Outlaw-Midnight phase was a whim of victory: In the mid-Seventies, Ru ss the privileged few , with time and dis- Meyer and Wes Craven were earnestly posable income to burn , and few of us analyzed in Film Comment. feel privileged now. Life looks shorter There's no Outlaw subject matter than ever, and if we were planning to see left, no unexplored or uncolonized ter- Berlin Alexanderplatz (or to read Proust) rain , nothing that can fill a need to wal- we'd better start right away. Besides, we low in the acceptable. We've learned to can always wait for Basket Case to ooze accept (or at least to shrug off) almost its way onto cable TV, right into our cozy everything we once loathed. And per- grown-up home, where even Outlaw haps that's a health y attitude ; when Cinema can blend into the decor. there's no such real-life loathsomeness But little by little, as the new isola- around, anything short of acute indiffer- tionist attitudes take hold and become ence would be a waste of energy. Fortu- ingrown , the world will slowly grow natel y, the demand seems to have sub- . smug and snug enough to be vulnerable, sided along with the supply. It's a once again, to a grisly Outlaw Cinema question , again, of an adolescent phase assault. of popular culture finall y creaking to a Keep watching the skies . {\\~ 15

Luchino Visconti directs Burt Lancaster. by David Ehrenstein literary scholars. But de Lampedusa's noted the progress of Visconti's produc- tale of the Sicilian aristocracy in the time tion, which was humming along exactly The whole thing couldn't have been of Garibaldi (and based on the history of to its maker's specifications. As common simpler. A group of Fox production ex- the author's family) caught the imagina- in the Italian cinema, The Leopard was ecutives were sitting around at dinner tion of vast numbers of readers world- being shot in whatever language the ac- when Natasha Arnoldi, movie-wise as- wide. Almost overnight The Leopard was tors felt comfortable, the results to be sistant to Michael Nolan and Peter hailed as the Italian Gone With the Wind. dubbed into Italian. (Lancaster spoke Myers, said, \"Wouldn't it be nice to see And just as Clark Gable was seen as the English, his co-star Alain Delon French, the complete version of The Leopard?\" ideal Rhett Butler for the movie version and the rest of the cast Italian.) Fox had Everyone agreed she was right. They all of Margaret Mitchell's civil war saga, so assumed that an American star automati- had fond memories of Luchino Vis- the consensus viewed Visconti as the cally meant an English language film. conti's lavish period romance, released only filmmaker capable of bringing de Once top brass discovered for them- by Fox in 1963 in an English-dubbed Lampedusa's story to the screen. With selves what Weiss already knew, the version minus 30 to 40 minutes of its his family crest, love of historical specta- crisis-ridden studio had yet another original 185. A few inquiries revealed cle, and leftist political views, Visconti problem on its hands. that the negative of the original Italian was de Lampedusa's cinema twin. version was intact in Rome. Sensing a F ox, after all, wasn't exactly in the Art potential item for Fox's burgeoning Money was required to bring this vi- film business: this was the era of Lisa, Classics division, Myers gave approval sion to life-lots of it-and no Italian State Fair, and Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vaca- for a new print to be struck and subtitles film firm was willing to provide it with- tion . The Leopard was product and noth- made, and scheduled the film's release out the guarantee of international distri- ing more. So an English-language ver- for September. bution that only an American-backed sion was produced, supervised by co-production deal could provide. Tootsie-to-be Sydney Pollack and \"star- And that was that-the easiest film Though he was known throughout Eu- ring\" Lancaster, Kurt Kazner, Howard restoration job on record . On April 16, rope for his theater and opera direction cia Silva, and Thomas Gomez. The re- 1983, at Filmex in Los Angeles, an as well as his film work, Visconti in 1963 sults were fine for Lancaster: the words American audience was given its first was still a relatively unfamiliar artist in he spoke actually matched his lip move- opportunity to discover what most E uro- the U.S. But because of the novel's best- ments. With the others things were less pean film enthusiasts had known for two seller status and, more important, be- successful, not just because of vocal-vis- decades: that The Leopard is the summit cause Visconti had persuaded Burt Lan- ual mismatching but due to contempo- of its creator's art and a watershed in the caster to play the leading role, producer rary American speech inflections. It may history of the cinema. Goffredo Lombardo was able to get have looked like 1850's Sicily on screen, backing from Fox. And that's where the but close your eyes and you'd swear you Things didn't go nearly so smoothly trouble began. For it was the time of were in 1960's Bronx. Moreover the con- when Visconti's film first saw the light of Cleopatra, and at Fox confusion reigned trast between the leading performer and day. The novel on which Visconti's mas- supreme. the rest of the cast was aurally quite terpiece was based was the only work of severe. Whenever Lancaster spoke to an obscure Italian nobleman, Giuseppe \"I have a real question for Skouras one of the other actors he appeared to be Thomasi de Lampedusa. Published af- and Co.,\" wrote Cleopatra publicist Na- talking from far away, as if he were on ter de Lampedusa's death at the instiga- than Weiss to his partner Jack Brodsky. the wrong end of a long distance tele- tion of novelist Giorgio Bassani (The \"Do they know The Leopard is being phone call. Garden of the Finzi-Continis), the book shot in Italian?\" Apparently they did was thought to be of primary interest to not. Weiss, on location in Italy for the Far more damaging than the dubbing shooting of the Taylor-Burton fandango, was the cutting that the Fox manage- 16

Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon in The Leopard. ment soon imposed. rom an exhibitor's capable: rendering the texture of space Instead of marrying one of the Prince's daughters, as his ancestors standpoint the three-hour running time and time. The Leopard is a film of detail, would have done, Tancredi has chosen the daughter of a local politician. Angel- was prohibitive (fewer shows a day overflowing with privileged moments- ica (Claudia Cardinale) is everything the women of Tancredi's social circle are means less money). And with a film like bits of cinematic space-time in which not: spontaneous, vivacious , beautiful. Yet the match is not iconoclastic as it first this Fox saw no reason to hesitate over \"nothing happens\" in ordinary narrative appears. As Tancredi turns toward An- gelica he turns away from radicalism, trimming. There was precious little terms, yet which vibrate with meaning first by leaving Garibaldi's forces for the regular army, and finally by joining the plot, just a lot of slowly paced episodes conjured up through gesture, color, new government and becoming a politi- cian like his father-in-law . revolving around family gatherings. OK, movement, and intonation. Remove a The Prince observes these shifts in a battle sequence, a few attractive love detail and you make the whole mosaic Tancredi's character and the social fabric of his world with a mixture of amuse- scenes, and at the close a lengthy, meaningless. • ment and bitterness. The upheaval ev- splashy ballroom scene-but just about eryone feared has been avoided: the middle class has won new privileges and everything in the film seemed expenda- The Leopard's narrative backbone is powers; the aristocracy has managed to retain most of its authority. Yet the ble. Several conversations and dramatic simple but firm. The setting is Sicily in Prince is painfully aware that his era has come to a close, not with a bang but with episodes involving period politics were the Risogimento, when Garibaldi's call a whisper. And the poor, who had hoped to profit from Garibaldi's revolt, are excised (evidently on the theory that for a unified Italy threatened the power worse off now, with two classes to op- press them instead of one. Not that the U.S. audiences would care little for his- of that island republic's aristocracy, Prince is no hypocrite; he knows that their misery makes his luxury possible. tory not their own) as well as a number of which was loyal to the Bourbon monar- And awareness of the pain he causes make him long, not at all secretly, for his other bits detailing nineteenth century chy the renegade general intended to own destruction . A real revolution- even if it cost him his life-would be far aristocratic family life. Even the battle overthrow. As the story opens, the body preferable to the mediocrity he sees en- veloping the world soon to follow him. and ballroom scenes went under Fox's of a dead Garibaldino has been found in In the climactic ballroom scene, new arbitrary knife. the gardens of the estate of the Prince of money mingles with old-the bourgeoi- sie on the verge of discovering its dis- Not surprisingl y, the cut version Salina (Lancaster) while he and his fam- creet charm. The Prince wanders through the enormous rooms of the pal- pleased few moviegoers or critics. \"An ily celebrate morning mass. Everyone ace greeting old friends and watching admirable film of parts,\" wrote Andrew quakes at this omen except the far- Sarris, having no way of knowing that sighted Prince, who realizes that the rise the complete film, on view in non-Eng- of Garibaldi isn't a real revolution but lish-speaking territories, was a more rather an expression of the new bour- than admirable whole. What Fox had geoisie's desire for a rise in station. With succeeded in doing was not only reduc- a minimum of compromise, the Prince ing the film's running time, but elimi- believes, he can hang onto his social nating its thematic focal point. The po- position. litical discussions thought to be so much Unexpectedly, he is quickly aided verbosity contained within them the when his brash young nephew Tancredi motives for the actions of the principal (Alain Delon) runs off to join the Gari- characters. As The Leopard now stood, baldi forces. Tancredi's adventurous the comings and goings of its people idealism delights the Prince and shocks made little sense. Worse still, the cut- the Salina family who feel he's deserted ting destroyed Visconti's complex vis- his class. But by joining the Garibaldini, ual-dramatic design. Tancredi provides immeasurable help to In de Lampedusa's novel Visconti had . the Salinas: a link to the new govern- a magnificent opportunity to realize ment that could assure the safety of their something of which only the cinema is lives and property. 17

the comings and goings of the younger - generation. Overcome with intimations fAroFmILDMa CLaIBpoRPArResYs -of his own mortality, the Prince can take • little pleasure in what he sees here- • save for one moment when Anglica asks _DARK SIDE OF THE SCREEN: FILM NOIR him to waltz with her. It's the thematic • and emotional high-point of the film , _ by Foster Hirsch \" A good de al has been written o n the bleak era o f American e xpress io nism , but there has been no extend- • bringing together all the disparate strands of character psychology and so- __ ed work as good as Foster Hirsch's Dark Side oj the Screen: Film Nair. a well-written , imaginatively illustrated book. . ... - Philip French, Th e Observer ( Londo n) _ 229 pp .. 188 photos! $12.95 pbk. (8 '1, X II ) _ cial insight Visconti has created. But to -THE CINEMA OF ORSON WELLES see the world, this world, through his eyes we must be able to savor every __ by Peter Cowie - detail of dress, gesture and decor. In the Be lievi ng that the true creato rs o f film s are those \"w hose work could not be fas hioned o r expressed in an y _ a but c in emati c terms.\" Peter Cowie has anal yzed W elles's techniques and themes as ele me nts of a whole restored version, U.S. viewers finally mo ral vision. realiz able o nl y through the camera. The s ingle in-print study of thi s film master. _ • can. 262 pp.. 130 photos! $9.95 (7 X 10 ) _ •a SELECTED SHORT SUBJECTS: aFROMSPANKYTOTHETHREESTOOGES* Film histo rian Leo nard M altin here brings to life a vanished genre-the \"sho,\\ subject\" -those o ne- and - In shorr or long versions The Leopard has helped shape film history, especially a -two-reelers so popular in the 30s and 40s that headlined the biggest names in Hollywood. Broadway, and as made by Italian and Italian-American a -vaudevi ll e-from Keato n and Ho pe to the Three Stooges. Credits for mo re than 1,000 film s. with his- directors. All the Corleone family cele- brations in Francis Ford Coppola's God- to ri es of the leading p laye rs. p lot sy nopses . a nd pac ked with photos. father films find their origins in The a by Leonard Mallin Leopard. The V-J Day dance that opens a -246 pp.• 200 photos! $ 12.95 pbk. (8 '1, X II ) Martin Scorsese's New York, New York is -•aaTHE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ANIMATED CARTOON SERIES a paraphrase of Visconti's ballroom scene; and Jake LaMotta's look of long- •by Jeff Lenburg ing towards his wife-to-be Vicky in the church social scene in Scorsese's Raging • \"This ency cl o pedia is a valu able refere nc e for film scholars and animation fan s alike.\" Bull is nearly a shot-for-shot duplication ofTancredi's anxious glances at Angelica •--Los Angeles Tim es as she waltzes with the Prince. Michael •_ The inside stuff o n every anim ated cartoon series made betwee n the years 1909 and 198 1. Betty Boop. Cimino used Visconti's finale twice: in The Deer Hunter's wedding and in the Mi ckey Mo use. Bugs Bunny. Roadrunner . Popeye. Rocky & His Friends-thi s book li sts their creators. Heaven 's Gate roller-skating scene. Bernardo Bertolucci borrowed Burt a •directo rs. voices. runnin g times. and other esse ntia l info rm at io n for scho lars and cartoonatics. Lancaster and much of Visconti's overall design for his Italian history epic 1900. _ 192 pp.. 180 illustratio ns! $14 .95 pbk. (9 X 12) But Bertolucci like the American film- ' ori gin a l title: THE GREAT MOVIE SHORTS makers noted above had no propensity for the dramatic restraint that came so ••_LIVING IN FEAR: easily to Visconti. He was impatient to leap toward the telling moment and the aA HISTORY OF HORROR IN THE MASS MEDIA flashy gesture. It's this impatience that has held contemporary filmmakers back •by Les Daniels ••_ Why do people like to be sca red') Wh at scares them: How do Hitchcock and William Friedkin transform o ur o rdin ary fears into \" purely im agi n ary te rrors:\" Les D a niels exp lains in this pio neerin g work which •cove rs to pics from Dracula and Christopher Lee to Charles M anson and the Rolling Stones. No ho rror _ fan sho uld be wi tho ut it. •256 pp.. 48 photos! $ 12 .95 pbk . (8' 0 X I I ) •-PICTURES WILL TALK: •aTHE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOSEPH L. MANKIEWICZ •\" The book is rel entl ess ly researc hed and fe stooned with lively footno tes and seems as tho ughtful. literate. a by Kenneth Geist a •and ba lanced a portrait as a biographee could ask fo r. \" •_ 458 pp.. 32 pho tos! $9.95 pbk. -C harles Champ lin . Los Angeles Tim es a BEFORE MY EYES: FILM CRITICISM AND COMMENT • from the full force of Visconti's discov- eries. Admittedly it's a tough row to hoe. a b y Stanley Kauffmann • Even Visconti, in his later works, had trouble maintaining the visual and vis- \" The best c ri tic we have o n th e pe rform a nce s ide of film s . . always well argued ... a n immense fund of • ceral force of the de Lampedusa adapta- _ criti ca l se ns ibility. . ... - Ern est Ca ll en bac h. Film Quarterly 480 pp.. 16 photos! $9.95 pbk. • aaON MOVIES • tion. Still, when he had it-in Conversa- by Dwight Macdonald. New introduction by John Simon • tion Piece and parts of Death in Venice _ \"Thi s book rank s with Agee on Film . Pau lin e KaeJ's co llectio ns. and M a nn y Farber's N~ga!i\"e Space as and The Innocent-he had it. Today's cinema, by and large, doesn' t a the mos t vigoro us a nd entertaining film criti cis m written in thi s country.\" • - Michae l Sragow. Film Commell! • have it. Unable to deal with the past, unwilling to deal with the present, many _ 4 92 pp .. 26 photos! $9 95 pbk. • filmmakers toy with an imaginary future too trivial for scrutiny. The Leopard, set _ THE NEW GERMAN CINEMA • in the past, is a film of the future. We have yet to get within shouting distance a by John Sandford ••• of its achievements: a rich orchestration Film- by -film studi es ofsevcn dirccto rs- He rzog. Fasshinde r. Syherberg. Stra\"h. W e ndel'S. KI,, ~e . and of the novelistic and theatrical , full-bod- Sch lo nd o rff- tl1 is is a one-vo lum e rclcrcncc work nn th e most V11<1 1 (merna In th e wo rld (oLln y . ied as Tolstoy, precise as Proust, held together by a vision of space and time as a 180 pp .. S3 photos! $ 10.95 pbk . (R X 10) -a • Ask for these titles in your local bookstore or write directly to: • Da Capo Press, Inc., 233 Spring St., New York, N.Y. 10013 lucid as the screen has known. r~ 18

NEW RELEASES FROM NEW YORKER FILMS \"AN EXTREMELY GOOD FILM.\" - Vincent Comh\\ , N \\' Tlmc!'l \" ABSOLUTELY MAGICAL'.' - Judith Crist. IXMQN P~ND ·.1 ~: A New Yorker Films Release Plus: Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin-Feminin, Werner Herzog's Huie's Sermon and God's Angry Man, Edgardo Cozarinsky's One Man's War, Ababacar Samb's Jom, Ousmane Sembene's Mandabi. *The Atomic Cafe is available for non-theatrical rental only. CALL OR WRITE FOR OUR 1983 SPECIAL ATTRACTIONS CATALOGUE. etflf!ftn~a 16 West 61st Street, New York, NY 10023 (212) 247-6110

•• by Harlan Jacobson named Alex, does in The Big Chill. dan's first ambitious screenplay, and Now, here in 1983, the political and though co-authored with Barbara Bene- There is a moment in every genera- dek is perhaps the fulfillment of the tion when there is a shared recognition cultural \"revolutionaries\" of the middle flame that carried him from an ad copy- of being the loose cannon on deck. Not class, circa 1969, paying off at two points writer in Detroit through the scripts of only was there no place to hide in the above Prime, are not yet buying patriot- Raiders of the Lost Ark, Continental Di- Sixties, no one seemed to want to . ism-but trey are contemplating it, eye- vide, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return There were so many loose cannons on ing it warily, awaiting the next install- of the Jedi, where he was a waiter in deck, rolling and shooting at the bridge, ment of Consumer Reports. To that somebody else's cafe, and even Body that everyone believed at long last they extent, the people who inhabit The Big Heat, on which as director he searched were being confronted by the guns of Chill have remained faithful to their for his own rhythms and style of deliv- truth. And like the old man and the sea, younger selves. It's just that the Cadillac ery. the best of the rock priests questioned has changed into a Mercedes. their own authority and so increased it. Though it represents Kasdan tackling Kasdan genuinely appreciates the larger, more personal themes, The Big Forget the reasons for the Sixties. seven people here who once prowled Chill may be about nothing more or less Numbers were reasons enough. The the University of Michigan together in than how to survive a weekend with torch passed in every town the day in the jagged years (as he did, 1966-72). friends who knew each other for a short 1955 when Fess Parker materialized From the shocking title sequence (see period long ago on someone else's from a Cadillac and each six-year-old in a page 22), he sets out the notion that the money and who have since abandoned coonskin cap sensed the bemused indul- Ann Arbor 7 have come to mourn the each others lives and younger values gence on Dad's face was really terror. passing of an eighth as something larger faster than the U.S. military evacuated Later, the only way anyone who came of than a friend's death. It's as if Kasdan Saigon. The veterans of that children's age in the Sixties swore they'd ever set wrote in the character of \"The Sixties,\" war have come here not only to praise foot in a Cadillac was feet first-on the then went back and penciled in \"Alex,\" the Sixties, maybe to bury them, but way to the cemetery-the way Law- whom we never see alive, and who certainly to stare at themselves, and rence Kasdan's metaphor for the Sixties, never lived in the script except in an blink. eight-minute flashback coda that Kas- dan clipped under pressure. They are their own ghosts, their ro- manticized pasts hovering around and In some measure The Big Chill is Kas- 20

behind them as auras, asking impolitic just pl ain wro ng o r se lf-ri g hteo us th en , being our own heroes. not merel y frauds now. \"W ho did you Kasdan handed Willi am Hurt, his co l- questions of the banalities they've be- think your clients were going to be? Grumpy and Sneezy?\" th e People re- labo rato r from Body H eal, th e plum come: Harold , the jogging-shoe entre- porter asks the lawyer, lame nting the sce ne of the movie in which he mocks a guilty psycho-pathology of her \"scum of talk-show interview with himself that is preneur(Kevin Kline); Sarah, the physi- the earth\" Legal Aid cI ients. \"No, H uey at once hugely funny and a scin tillating and Bobby,\" interrupts another Kas- piece of exposition. Hurt's face seems cian (G lenn Close); Ka ren , the danite. Surprise! round and white like th e Pillsbury doughboy, but comes off the screen with ad-executive wife (Jobeth Williams); People flop down o n co uc hes in Th e a gleefully ironi c aware ness of its own Big Chill, then report to the dinner table malleab ility. He is John Wayne with a Michael, the People writer (Jeff with systolic certainty and diastolic fa- brain and an earring, stealing any sce ne miliarity. (You can take the boys and girls wi th a sile nt and sleepy power. His in- Goldblum); Sam, the TV star (Tom out of the dorm .... ) Feet go on tables, where they've always gone , just as eyes ne r disse nsion from time's march rises Berenger); Meg, the corporate lawye r glaze over in front of open refrigerator wi th an eyebrow above his Lava-lite doors , and mythology is stolen from tel- eyes. An arrow of clarity onscreen , he (Mary Kay Place); and Nick, the part- evision. Asks Glenn Close of her hu s- deserves to step into the front ranks. The band , Kevin Kline, who has just illegally Big Chill establishes that it's hi s turn. time dropout-cum-drug dealer to the passed on to Hurt a piece of inside cor- porate information , \"W ho do yo u think Of course, the part was written for trade only (William Hurt). yo u are , John Beresfo rd Tipton?\" him , says Kasdan, and while Hurt gives the lie to the ensemble acting that is all Only Chloe (Meg Tilley), ten years If there is an unstated character in The that's left here of Sixties socialism , his Big Chill, it is the television set. The role ultimately is the most unsatisfyi ng. younger and Alex's girlfriend, serves as new, good life brings with it more than As Nick, Hurt is the one hold out to the TVs that si mply offer up old movies and tidal wave of careers and appetites th at the group foil: \"I don't like talking about bad abstractions; now they can record us has swallowed up the Sixties survivors. talking back to ourselves on videotape. Enough that we have all come in from the past as much as you guys do. \" What No more taking something away from the cold, where we never gave much the set into the backyard to try it on- seriou s thought to remaining in the first happened back then? What happened now we can take ourselves out of the place. Nick's climactic capitulation is Peanut Gallery right down into the too symmetrical and unnecessary. One since? • tube to decide if we are worthy of cannon on everyone's deck s hould still be on the loose. Foranybody in his 30s, watchingThe Big Chill is a two-for-one sale: one movie with this synchromesh acting ensemble flickers by onscreen, cueing the second with your own youthful ghosts flashing by in your mind's eye and transforming themselves into those hit-and-run Visi- goths that fifteen years later come to visit wearing the scalps of their accom- plishments. This is not Return of The Secaucus 7 (The Big Chilrs people are prettier than anyone's friends) but be- cause the graininess ofJohn Sayles' char- acters matched the flatness of his film emulsions it was misperceived as truth . We know by heart the argument that a Salvation Army couch is no less a couch than a Bloomingdale's couch, but that doesn' t make it any more. Mostly everyone in The Big Chill seems apologetic about money-with good reason , since it limned all the re- sentments in '68, as it does now . In Kasdanland , ideals have necessarily mu- tated either into ambition, or more gen- tly, into abilities fulfilled . That little alli- gators have grown up to be big Izods- should we have expected anything less? Does \" Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke\" (a line Kasdan applies to money, but really means consumption) get ev- eryone off the hook? The mistake, perhaps, is to hold any- one hostage to their youth-certainly a value of The Big Chill, which is kinder to all us Molotov-insult hurlers of the Six- ties than we deserve. The Big Chill smiles and forgives as it addresses the contradictions of a class that asked fundamental questions of au- thority, even as it laid down its own tyr- anny. There are moments that crash down as clinkers, almost because the characters seem never to have grappled Lawrence Kasdan . with the notion that maybe they were 21

Chilly Scenes Sarah (Glenn Close). Meg (Mary Kay Place). Karen (JoBeth Williams). Following are extracts from the script tub . She is, like her husband, in her early starched shirt gets buttoned up the chest by of The Big Chill by Lawrence Kasdan 30s. Harold turns his attention back to his strong male fingers . and Barbara Benedek. Any script is the youngest child. The little one drops a boat INT. BEDROOM, MICHAEL'S naked baby body of a film , to which the with a big splash and sings about how his APARTMENT (NEW YORK CITY)- art director and cinematographer add friend the bullfrog \"always had some DAY clothes, the actors bring inflections of mighty fine wine .\" Harold uses a wash- MICHAEL'S face. Immediately begin voice and spirit, and the director-if ev- cloth on his neck. widening to take in the room and Annie, erybody's lucky-gives a little bit ofsoul . The muffled conversation in the other Michael's girlfriend, a black woman. She This movie is more than an ebullient ex- room comes to an end as the receiver is filling Michael's well-worn overnight cuse for ensemble acting; but it will help clicks back into place. After several long bag with his clothes from the closet. Mi- the reader if he scans the accompanying moments, Sarah appears in the door ofthe chael's eyes dart frantically about his mug shots and imagines how these people bathroom and leans against the door messy desk as he searches for something move , speak, listen , communicate. He jamb . Very quietly, she is crying . and keeps up a steady, hyped-up mono- should also keep a tape deck running in Harold looks up at his wife . Logue we cannot hear. Annie folds a dark his head of Motown's Greatest Hits (the FADE TO BLACK. tie into the bag and comes up next to Mi- seven lead characters all attended the The MUSIC BEGINS, loud and strong . chael . Very calmly, she extracts a new University of Michigan in the late Six- Likeallthemusicwhichfollows, it is high- package ofbatteries from the debris ofthe ties) . So read this and be a director: energy, move-those-feet, Sixties rock ' n desk and places them in Michael's hand. spoon the script some of your own soul roll . This stops him cold and calms him down, as she always does . He enfolds her in his food. -R.e. FADE UP AS THE MAIN TITLE BE- arms, sadly. She soothes him. GINS. Opening INT. ROOM-DAY We begin to INTERCUT: ALEX GETTING DRESSED Ill : The shiny The screen is black. The soft sounds buckle of a dress belt is fastened over the of WATER LAPPING, small SPLASHES. INT. ROOM-DAY buttons ofthe suit pants. Now comes the VOICE OF A THREE YEAR- ALEX GETTING DRESSED 1. (All Ex- OLD BOY-talking, laughing , and then , treme Closeups.) A suit pant leg, neatly INT. MEG'S LAW OFFICE, SKY- short bits of singing . A MAN'S VOICE pressed, pulled over a tanned calf· SCRAPER (ATLANTA, GEORGIA)- chuckles in response , coaxes gently for more. INT. KITCHEN, KAREN'S HOUSE DAY (BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICHIGAN)- MEG'Sface . Her eyes, too, flick over the FADE IN: DAY INT. BATHROOM, HAROLD AND papers which will soon come into view on SARAH'S HOUSE (RICHMOND, VIR- Full-screen closeup of KAREN'S face . her large , immaculate desk . But these eyes GINIA)-NIGHT Immediately we begin widening to include are different from Michael's. For one The little BOY is being given a bath. He her environment, a lavishly and recently thing , their movements are steady, con- plays with tub toys and continues to sing as remodeled kitchen, all dark-grained cabi- cise, controlled. Secondly, they are very his father, HAROLD, soaps his silky skin . nets and gleaming tiles. Karen, very pretty redfrom a long and recent cry. This child, oddly enough, seems to know in her tennis whites, sits at the butcher- the words to a Sixties rock song, \"Joy to block center island, a telephone next to the Meg sets some papers neatly into the the World,\" by the group Three Dog coffee cup she's staring into. Behind her, open briefcase on her credenza, looks at Night . He needs only intermittent coach- through a window, a large, neat suburban them a beat, then lights up a cigarette and ing from his father. They are both very lawn turning brown in the Michigan fall , stands gazing over the briefcase at the happy. the surrounding trees bleakly denuded. A Atlanta skyline. The office is large and In an adjacent bedroom, the telephone Maid, wearing her whites, passes through carefully appointed; her view is a good begins to ring. After a few rings, SARAH the kitchen. one. picks it up. Harold glances in at his wife, who he can see from his spot next to the INT. ROOM-DAY INT. ROOM-DAY ALEX GETTING DRESSED II : A crisply ALEX GETTING DRESSED IV: A skiny black oxford is tightly knotted on a black- _22~ _______~__________________~________~__________________

stockinged foot. A man's finger rubs at a and leaves the roach , then travels to the are ajumble in the trunk. He picks through single scuff. glove compartment. From the mess ofthat it. box it extracts a large bottle of pills and INT. FIRST CLASS SECTION, 747, flips the cap off with a thumb. The hand Harold comes out of the house in run- SAM'S SEAT-DAY shakes a dozen pills of various colors on ning gear-extremely well-used-says the passenger seat . The fingers forage something to Nick and heads off into the sAM'Sface. He looks up, his handsome through pills, picking out only white ones. gloom for a serious run . features in a mild alcoholic daze . The The hand disappears from view. Stewardess, a stack ofmagazines in hand, INT. MAID'S ROOM is flirting with him aggressively. He smiles We're outside and behind the Porsche Meg stands at the dresser on top-. of over a row of empty little vodka bottles. now, trying to keep up. But suddenly the which she has set her legal briefcase . She She teases a moment more, then reveals car jumps into hyperspace, and is gone . stares at the crucifix hanging on the wall above the dresser. Finally, she flips open the cover ofthe top magazine with a flour- Taking the MUSIC with it. the top of the briefcase, blocking out the sight of the crucifix. THE M USIC FADES. ish: it is US Magazine and on the cover is a INT. ROOM-DAY ALEX GETTING DRESSED VII: 1t's very INT. MASTER BEDROOM-SHOWER smiling-shot of Sam . The man himself quiet now . Only the rustling of the shirt's Hot water is beating down, steaming the seems slightly jolted by his mirror image at broadcloth, as the sleek feminine fingers room, but there doesn't appear to be any- this unsuspecting moment. But he recovers pull a cuff down out of the shadow of the one in the shower. Now we hear a HUMAN quickly and charmingly indicates to the suit's sleeve . The fingers turn the arm, SOUND in the roar of the water. Now we Stewardess what he wants right now: not which seems oddly slack, and insert a cuff- see Sarah. She is sitting on the floor ofthe her, not the magazine, but another little link into the holes of the cuff. Then, very shower. The water beats down on her, vodka bottle to empty. making it impossible to see her tears as she cries. INT. ROOM-DAY deliberately, first on one hand, then the INT. LIVING ROOM-NIGHT ALEXGElTlNG DRESSEDV:A woman's other, the fingers pull the cuffs down, to LATER. Meg , Sam, Karen and Michael sit rather stif.fl.y nursing drinks. Meg wears sleek fingers have made a neat knot in a cover that which body makeup could not a borrowed robe andfluffy slippers. Pro- col Harum's \"A Whiter Shade of Pale\" conservative tie . Now they slide the knot hide: the straight, awful slits across the plays softly from the elaborate stereo sys- lovingly, almost sensually, up to the collar. tender insides ofthe wrists. tem . MEG: So here I was working with the INT. LIVING ROOM, THE SUMMER THE MAIN TITLE ENDS. Philadelphia public defenders and my clients were just the scum of the earth, HOUSE (CAROLINA SHORE)-DAY really extreme repulsivos. I mean one of my guys got caught in the house, right, CHLOE'Sface seems very young. All the Unpacking, Unwinding and he and his friends have beat up the others have been in their early 30s, but husband and raped the wife and then tried to blow the whole place up. And I Chloe [Alex's erstwhile girlfriend] is INT. ATTIC-DUSK asked him what happened and he says, barely past twenty and there's no question Sam opens his fashionably worn-out, \"I was in Montreal at the time.\" about the difference it makes. This face , very expensive leather bag and takes out: MICHAEL: Who did you think your this young, smooth, strikingface, is strain- several identically faded, carefully- clients were going to be? Grumpy and ing now, heavily beaded with sweat. Chloe pressed work shirts and jeans; a beeper Sneezy? is on the thick carpet ofthis luxurious room from a phone-mate, three TV scripts with SAM: No, Huey and Bobby. doing tortuous dancer stretches . Her long, \"1. T. LANCER\" slashed across them, a MEG: I don't know. I just didn't wonderful generous body is bent at an Nikon, a paperback, The Portable think they'd all be so . .. guilty. impossible angle. She is working hard. Kafka, and a hair dryer. Harold comes in, freshly showered and feeling good. He walks up behind the sofa The room is singular to say the least, Meg's on and does a neat Fosbury Flop to land prone on the sofa beside her. Michael done entirely and expensively in original INT. DAUGHTER'S BEDROOM- and Sam seem relieved by his behavior model in this fancy room. Michael imme- Art Deco furnishings . Chloe's bright leo- DUSK diately puts his feet up on the coffee table; Sam swivels to lie down on the sofa . tard jumps extravagantly from the overall Karen opens the huge suitcase on her SAM: And then? MEG: And then ... I left. I had a muted color scheme . bed and begins unloading the top items: a friend from law school who was with a firm in Atlanta doing real-estate law. I This house belongs to Sarah and huge make-up selection case; a dia- went to see them. And the offices seemed so clean. And the clients were Harold. phragm; a copy of US Magazine with Sam raping only the land. And, of course , INT. ROOM-DAY on the cover; a hair dryer and curling there was the money. EI greedo strikes ALEX GETTING DRESSED VI: A brush iron. Underneath all this is an enormous again. [She takes HaroLd'sfeet on her lap pulls his thick hair neatly away from a amount ofclothes. in afriendly way.] part. One more touch makes it perfect . Richard makes an ariful arrangement INT.l EXT. NICK'S PORSCHE (ON on his bedside table of two items: a bottle THE ROAD)-DAY of Maalox and a traveling picture of their two sons, eight and ten years old. No face this time. Rather, we have NICK'S hands on the steering wheel of his INT. HAROLD AND SARAH'S SON'S aging 911. Beyond the hands, we can see ROOM-DUSK the scenery streaking by at a rate inconsis- tent with a lawful speed. That impression Michael unpacks and sets up camp. He is reinforced by the MUSIC, which now takes out: a mini-cassette tape recorder; a seems to have been emanating all along reporter's notebook; a harmonica; a hair from the tape deck of this car, blasting it dryer; some bright bikini undershorts. forward through the countryside. Now his Some prophylacticsfall out ofthe clothing. He stuffs them back in his bag . right hand disappears for a second and · EXT. DRIVEWAY-DUSK when it reappears we follow it to the Nick opens the trunk ofthe Porsche . He ashtray, where it stubs out a massive joint has no suitcase. His clothes and toiletries 23

Tisch School ofthe Arts HAROLD: Sarah has a robe like that. The Kitchen Announces the MEG: Not this weekend she doesn't. HAROLD: I always want to jump her Sarah and Meg are in the early stages of Willard when she wears that thing. preparing what will be an enormous meal T.C. Johnson MICHAEL: Harold, don't you have centered around a stuffed turkey. Sarah's any other music? Like from this century. Cuisinart is doing heavy duty. Meg is Fellowsh!p HAROLD: There is no other music. messing with what appears to be dough for Program for Not in my house. a pie, but her mind is roaring in another Filmmakers. MICHAEL: There's been a lot of ter- direction. rific music in the last ten years. In 1982 the Institute of Film and HAROLD [totally uninterested]: Like MEG: If they' re not married , they're Television of New York University's what? gay. If they' re not gay, they've just bro- Tisch School of the Arts was select- Sarah settles onto the arm of the sofa ken up with the most wonderful woman ed by the Willard T. C. Johnson near Harold's head. She's in a robe and in the world or they've just broken up Foundation for a unique fellowship has a drink in hand and looks much with a bitch who looked just like me. program for filmmakers. The pur- heathier for having cried. Michael passes They' re in transition from a monoga- pose of the fellowship program is to a smoking joint to Sam after Meg waves it mous relationship and they need more recognize and support emerging \"space.\" Or they' re tired of \"space,\" but filmmakers of exceptional promise. off· they just can't commit. They want to KAREN: How about you, Michael? commit, but they're afraid to get close. Each year two fellowships are They want to get get close, but you don' t to be awarded, one on the under- Tell us about big-time journalism. want to get near them . graduate level and one on the grad- MICHAEL: Where I work we have uate·level. Each award is in the SARAH [laughs]: It can't be that bad. amount of $10,000, covering the only one editorial rule: you can't write MEG: I'm going easy. You don't full cost of tuition at NYU and in- anything longer than the average person know. I've been out there dating for cluding a stipend for living expenses. can read during the average crap. I'm twenty years. I've gotten so that I can tired of having all my work read in the tell in 15 seconds if there's a chance in The fellows will be reviewed can. the world. annually, and fellowships are SARAH: Well, at least you're giving renewable for the full period of HAROLD: People read Tolstoy in the them a fair shot. study at the school. can. MEG: That's easy for you to say, mar- ried to Harold, \"The Perfect Man\" . . . Tisch School of the Arts is proud MICHAEL: Yeah, but they can't fin- Something flits across Sarah's face to be honored in this fashion and is ish it. here, but Meg either misses it or chooses to conducting a national search for the ignore it. most highly qualified candidates for SARAH [surveying the lounging MEG: Sometimes, I think I don't the fellowship awards. group]: This is certainly a familiar scene. even want a man anymore. [A beat. ] So here I sit on my ticking biological clock, For more information and an They know what she means. and the only thing I've known in my application, contact Dean Elena SAM: It's making me feel very guilty. whole life is that I want to have a child. Pinto Simon, Tisch School of the I'm so happy to be here and I'm sick Sarah gives her a sudden look. They Arts, New York University, 725 about the reason. share a strong memory of a traumatic Broadway, Washington Square, SARAH [gets up]: I'm going to bed. moment from their history. Meg responds New York, N.Y. 10003; (212) SAM: I'm sorry. We'll talk about to it. 598-2816. something else. MEG: Don't remind me. It probably SARAH: That's OK. I'm exhausted. was the right thing to do at the time, but Tisch School of the Arts. Goodnight, everyone. Our name is new. They say goodnight as she heads out SARAH: So what do you do? with her drink. MEG [slow to answer. She rolls her Our reputation is established. HAROLD: I'll be up in a minute. dough]: I'm going to have a baby. SAM [to Harold]: I'm sorry. New York University is an affirmative HAROLD: Hey, we all feel that way. A Walk in the Woods action/equal opportunity institution. SAM: I'd forgotten what this is like. (on Harold's Land) In L.A. I don't know who to trust. I feel like everybody wants something from Michael finishes taking a leak. Harold me. I know that sounds terrible, but it's stands nearby, a stick in his hand. true. .. . MEG [understands]: Tell me about it. MICHAEL [exuberant]: That's what's It's a cold world out there. Sometimes I great about the outdoors, it's one giant think I'm getting a little frosty myself. toilet. Karen watches Sam, rapt. SAM: I don't know what people think HAROLD: Maybe you should put a spot like this in your club. [Michael has of me. Or why they like me, or even if announced plans to open a chic restaurant in Manhattan, and wants Harold to be- they like me. come a partner. ] There is a rather long, pregnant pause. HAROLD: You don't have that prob- They walk on . lem here. You know I don't like you. MICHAEL: Me either. MEG: Ditto. Meg gets up and walks out. Sam laughs. 24

MICHAEL: This thing is going to be you people. Cinema big, Harold. You should take it more HAROLD: I like you now. Studies: seriously. You ' d have your own table SAM: I know what Sarah means. waiting at all times. An education When I lost touch with this group, I lost for our tiIne HAROLD: I'm considering the in- my idea of what I should be. Maybe vestment. I've always wanted my own that's what happened to Alex. At least Film is the art fonn that defines our table. Would I have a chair, too? we expected something of each other. I time. Films by Eisenstein, Bergman, think we needed that. and Fassbinder, for instance, offer pen- MICHAEL: Remember senior year etrating insights into human behavior, we were all going to get together and Again there is a long pause. Harold cultural change, life as we live it and buy that land near Saginaw. What hap- reaches out to touch Meg's nape affection- perceive it At New York University's pened with that? ately. Tisch School of the Arts , we believe the study of film develops analytic HAROLD: None of us had any HAROLD: Not me. Getting away skills, hones critical thinking, and money. from you people was the best thing that broadens perspectives. It offers under- ever happened to me. How much sex, graduates superb preparation for many MICHAEL: Oh yeah. [A beat .]That's fun, and friendship can one man take? of life's callings. when property was a crime. ... I had to get out in the world and get dirty. Our program in cinema studies The Dining Room allows undergraduates to study film KAREN: Half the stuff I did, I did to with the same distinguished scholars LATER. The meal has been severely piss off my parents. And it worked. who teach our graduate students. The dented. Much wine has been consumed. department's film archives, variety of They're feeling the effects. Michael is MICHAEL [not willing to let this mo- courses, and viewing facilities are whispering in an intimate manner to ment escape just yet. His tone is sincere, exceptional. And, students have access Chloe , who giggles . Nick and Harold both subdued]: No, I think Sam's right. There to all the film screenings that make have noted this. They exchange looks. was something in me that made me want New York City the richest film center to go to Harlem and teach those ghetto in the world. MEG [to Sam]: What am I hearing? I kids. don't want to hear that. Because film is a truly interdisciplin- MEG [:nods]: And I was going to help ary art fonn, the program includes the SAM: What d'ya mean? [slight embarrassment] \"the scum,\" as I study of related subjects: art, history, MEG: Video games? You' re telling me so compassionately refer to them now. psychology, and even film production. you relax with video games? As a result, our students get a broadly MICHAEL: Don't knock video HAROLD [resisting the tide]: Some of based education as they undertake a games . them were scum. serious study of cinema. MEG: Jesus, I let you guys out of my sight for a little while and you develop a MICHAEL: Some of us are scum. For more infonnation, return the bunch of moronic interests. HAROLD: So what's the thrust here? coupon below or call (212) 598-7777 . HAROLD: Don't knock morons. We were great then and we're shit now? SAM [to Meg]: Would you prefer I got I don't like where this is going. Tisch School of the Arts. into heavy drugs? [A beat.] No offense, Harold looks toward Nick for support. Our name is new. Nick. But Nick seems to be concentrating on his Nick waves it off, no offense taken. plate. He doesn' t look up. Our reputation is established. KAREN: Sarah? SARAH: No, we're not saying that. Down at the end of the table, Sarah is You know that, Harold. I'm sure we all Tisch School of the Arts Admissions Fe 9/83 crying . Karen, who's sitting next to her, think there's a lot of good left in us. I now has a comforting hand on her. Sarah, don't know, I just hate to think that it New York University embarrassed, wipes her eyes with her nap- was all just-fashion. Po. Box 909 , Cooper Station kin . She immediately tries to regain her HAROLD: What? New York , N.Y. 10276 composure . SARAH: Our commitment. SARAH: He should be here. [A weird SAM: It wasn't. We accomplished Please send information on the cinema studies laugh.] I feel like we should've had a things. program . chair for Alex. HAROLD: All evidence to the con- There is a moment ofsilence, pregnant. trary. o undergraduate 0 graduate Then Sarah snuffles again, and smiles. SARAH [irritated]: Now you' re just SARAH: Of course, we don't have talking a position. Name enough food. MEG: Sometimes I think I put that She smiles. They all want to comfort time down, pretend it wasn't real, just so Address her; they reassure her with their looks. She I can live with how I am now. [To starts to cry again. Harold:] Do you know what I mean? I C;ry/Sr.re/Z;p I SARAH: It's just so familiar, this ... HAROLD: Nick, help me with these I ~~ y~)I'k Univen.ity i:-. an affinnali ve aCliorLIequal opportumty [She vaguely indicates the table and bleeding hearts. Lm,::'~ __________ .J group] . .. and I love you all so much. I NICK (pause]: I know what Alex know that sounds gross, doesn't it? would say. KAREN: No , it doesn' t. SARAH [getting control again]: I feel SARAH: What? like I was at my best when I was with NICK: What's for dessert? ChLoe giggLes. Sarah frowns, as does Meg, who shakes her head. Nick ad- dresses Meg , in mock defense. NICK: I'm not cynical about dessert. ~ 25

Samson Raphaelson: 1896-1983 There weren't many things Samson nings followed in the warm, solid apart- Eric Rohmer, Barry Levinson, John Raphaelson didn't do in his 87 years, ment he and Dorshka kept on West 67th Sayles, Lawrence Kasdan, and some and do with style. He was an advertising Street, just two blocks from FILM COM- others. I can hear the gruff good will in man in the infancy of that commercial MENT's New York office. The wry de- his voice. I'm a little afraid to turn art. He was a short-story writer in the tachment of Raphaelson's dialogue had around: he might be standing there, Twenties, the glory days when the slicks not prepared me for the passion of his ready to read this godspeed, his rapier were paying Scott Fitzgerald $4,000 per, monologues. He was a fervent supporter eye deleting the adjectives and search- and Rafe (everybody called him Rafe) ofIsrael (where he spent two years in the ing for structure. He provided the struc- wasn't that far behind . Playwright: his late Sixties godfathering the infant film ture, though. A long, full life is the best first one, The Jazz Singer. was turned into industry), clean prose (\"Try not to write a movie that allowed AI Jolson to an- so compactly-they do pay you by the three-act play. -RICHARD CORLISS nounce, \"You ain't heard nothin' yet.\" word, don't they?\"), and dramatic struc- When he approved of my work I was When Hollywood learned to talk, it usu- ture, whether in films or film criticism. ally did so in the terse drawl of a cowboy his nephew. When not, a distant or in a gangster's staccato bursts. But it Samson Raphaelson . cousin. A month ago my father, his first could purr with ironic elegance; and of- He became a lecturer on rp.ovies at Co- cousin, died at 87. Samson and I shared ten the pearly words out of the mouths lumbia University, tearing pictures apart our thoughts by phone for many hours. of Miriam Hopkins (Trouble in Para- because, like the Hungarian frivol he'd (They were the same age.) \"What do dise), Margaret Sullivan (The Shop used as the merest excuses for his Lu- you feel about death?,\" I asked. Char- Around the Corner), Marlene Dietrich bitsch comedies, \"they've got no second acteristically he responded: \"Death is a (Angel), Cary Grant (Suspician) , even act.\" He chided his new friend Pauline bore. What else do you want to know?\" Judy Garland (The Harvey Girls) and Kael for what he saw as the scoliotic I suppose my feelings veered crazily Don Ameche (Heaven Can Wait) ema- narrative spines of her reviews. He between sentiment and metaphysics. nated from Rafe's mind and pen. wrote on Ingmar Bergman and Frederic \"I mean,\" I said, \"do you feel accom- Raphael for FILM COMMENT, arguing plished?\" \"If I could just work one or Samson Raphaelson, Screenwriter. their films' merits and lapses as if these two more hours a day, I could finish This tribute seemed like an impish joke authors were old friends worth being set what I have to do. \" Samson was editing to him when I reprised his movie career straight. a collection of his screenplays, he was in a collection called The Hollywood still teaching (at his apartment) a full Screenwriters (Avon, 1972). Rafe took I miss Rafe, but I feel him around me class from Columbia University. He his film assignments , especially those -in his movies and plays, of course, but was, at once, tired and tireless. with his Berliner friend Ernst Lubitsch, also in the good conversation in films by as seriously as a master woodworker \"You're a hypocrite, you know,\" he might a toddler's high chair: however shouted. \"You never take proper ad- smooth the finish, it couldn't compare vantage of me. You have a gift as a direc- with his fourposter plays (Skylark. Accent tor, and you foolishly think you can on Youth. Jason. Hilda Crane) . The the- write as well.\" \"I love you, Samson,\" I ater, he figured, was where his grab for said. \"If you love me,\" he said, \"you immortality resided. So he wrote me in need to be here with me now so I can surprise as much as pleasure after read- straighten out your priorities. As a play- ing my piece on his films: \"What lovely wright, I would've given anything to words! And you don't owe me money- write a great play. In the Thirties and you're not even a relative!\" At a publica- Forties, I always returned from Holly- tion party for another study of screen- wood's mode of collaboration to author, writers, Talking Pictures, Rafe showed alone, my plays. My God,\" he re- up with his wife Dorshka. It was quite flected, \"how stupidly hypocritical I an entrance: he frailish but dapper, she was. What I would've given to have as poised and lovely as she had been written a great play with Lubitsch. Your almost a half century earlier as a Ziegfeld signature really means nothing,\" he Girl. I felt as if my book had received an said. \"What means something is the ul- imprimatur from the Royal Couple of timate endurance of your work. You Broadway and Hollywood. need to learn this. You need me. \" Many (but not nearly enough) eve- Indeed I do. We all do, Uncle Sam- son. -BOB RAFELSON (continued on page 29) 26

Luis Bufiuel: 1900-83 by Dan Yakir Luis Bui'iuel, to quote a Spanish id- Luis Builuel . iom , \"went with the century,\" which means that he was born in 1900 and in the director's alter-ego in several films. considerations: he didn't know what ac- July, he died at 83. Before winning the Here, in turn, is what some of his collab- tress he wanted for Le journal d' une Oscar for Discreet Charm ofthe Bourgeoi- orators remember about Bui'iuel: femme de chambre, and the producers sie, in 1972, Bui'iuel scandalized the film offered me. We met in an apartment in world by predicting he would win and CATHERINE DENEUVE: Bui'iuel St. Tropez for lunch and enjoyed so saying he had paid $25,000 for the didn't like to talk too much. It would much being together that we also had honor. \"I told you the Americans were physically tire him. But we had a mute dinner. He was a fantastic person. He honest businessmen,\" he later declared understanding. Shooting Tristana went was the only director I know who never with a straight face. better than Belle de Jour, because there threw away a shot. He had the film in his was a nicer producer, but mostly be- mind. When he said \"action\" and \"cut,\" Bui'iuel rejected psychological anal- cause Bui'iuel himself was very happy ysis for the pure innocence of imagina- tion, and his moral point-of-view was all about shooting in Spain for the first time you knew that what was in between the the more poignant for his well-known since Viridiana. He was euphoric. He two would be printed . atheism. As Jean-Claude Carriere, his had a wonderful sense of humor. One favorite and frequent collaborator, wrote thing he stressed was, 'Above all, no He worked with me mostly on physi- in Le Malin, in 1981, when the Cannes psychology! ' I accepted it wholeheart- cal movement. We didn ' t speak too Festival paid him tribute: \"He's the only edly, especially because it came from much about the character. But, as in life, living filmmaker who has known the him. sometimes you express yourself better Middle Ages ... and he's still nostalgic and end up saying more by talking about about [the] imaginary, calm period of his JEANNE MOREAU: I consider him something else. childhood in rural Spain. 'At that time, my Spanish father, and I called him that. one had an interior life,' Bui'iuel said.\" We met simply because of box--{)ffice FRANCO NERO: Bui'iuel always told In his last decade, he vowed that each (continued on page 28) film would be his last. After That Ob- scure Object ofDesire (1977), he planned to make a picture that Carriere describes as \"a hermit's point of view vis-a-vis his epoch.\" He never did . Film lovers would have to find consolation in the work he did throughout his three careers -in Mexico, France and Spain-and regret that Hollywood never gave him a fourth. In a 1981 interview with France Soir Magazine, Bui'iuel remembered that after MGM invited him to Holly- wood in 1930, on the strength of L' age d' or, he visited a set where Greta Garbo was preparing for her close-up. \"She saw me,\" remembered Bui'iuel, \"called the a. d. and he came toward me, took me by the arm, and threw me out! I never wanted to come back. That was my ap- prenticeship in Hollywood. \" BUi'iuel had his favorites among ac- tors: Michel Piccoli, Julien Bertheau , ' Delphine Seyrig and Jeanne Moreau. In Spain, he cited Francisco Rabal, but not Fernando Rey, who was widely seen as 27

JRe dam JlnafJIsis ~eries BUNUEL (continuedfrom page 27) one scene in Belle de Jour, Georges Mar- me that the best thing was not to show chal had to go down the staircase, in a presents a series of guides for things to the audience, but instead to close-up, and you imagined him mastur- screen writing study. trigger their imagination. In Tristana, bating. It wasn' t easy. Builuel told him, there was a scene with Catherine De- \"Think of the setting sun.\" It was won- Each book analyzes a film in neuve nude at the window, looking at derful: at the same time that he gave no detail, including the sequence the boy in the square who was staring at explanation-he simply told him to go her, hoping to catch a glimpse of her down-he also told the actor he thought _....structure, the plots and subplots, naked body. The camera stayed on her of him as a sun. face. It was sexy, without being explicit. act climaxes, scene structure, He was severe in life and very hard to and the elements of theme, I think all geniuses are like children. please. He was a great Spanish bour- The Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli said, geois by birth, and very well organized . !':characterization , and. . . . . . \"In every man hides the soul of a child He was very good about working within -when it abandons him, he becomes the budget, because when he was motivation . nothing.\" One moming Builuel came to young, he had experienced economic the set and couldn't find his bag. The hardship, especially in the U.S. He Guides are available whole crew was looking for it and he lived very modestly. for the following movies, as well refused to start working before it was as others: found. He kept wailing, \"My bag! My We had great fun. He used to joke bag!\" Just like a little boy. Finally, it was like a kid , always telling the same jokes. • E. T. - The Extra-Terrestrial found and he grabbed it and withdrew He never wrote letters, except when into a corner, hiding. I followed him and there were very precise reasons for it. • Gandhi saw that he took out a ham sandwich and Each time, he signed, \" Disrespectfully started eating. He simply wanted to eat. yours.\" For my part, I used to taunt him • Tootsie When he saw me, he jumped and said, that it was Catherine Deneuve and I \"What are you doing? Please don't tell who made him. I said, \" For years, no- · Raiders of the Lost Ark anybody. I'm hungry... If they see me, body saw your films , except intellec- it will be a bad example, because they tuals , until we did Belle de Jour.\" And • Chariots of Fire will all want to eat. But I'm hungry. . . \" he'd become very animated and agree and say, \"You're right, thank you .\" We • Sta r Wars rS-1-1.-9-5-e-ac-h' Another day-he said he was deaf, laughed and joked all the time. His but I doubt it-he stopped a man who laughter came out of a terrible anguish, • Chinatown was dumb and said to him , \"You're but was non-stop. • Citizen Kane (shipping dumb? I'm deafl\" and laughed about it for half an hour. He was once interviewed in Spain by • Casablanca included) French TV, which sent a crew with two BULLE OGIER: Actors are instru- trucks. He told them, \" I could make a Send check to: ments to convey the director's ideas- film with what it cost you to bring all this The Film Analysis Series which is why I find all my roles difficult: here. \" He told them he preferred to do 5515 Jackson Drive, Suite 246 I can't betray the director. For Discreet the interview in Toledo. They asked Charm of the Bourgeoisie, however, I him if ne liked that town especially and La Mesa , CA 92041 he answered, \"No. I detest it. It's full of didn' t have all that much to do. Bufluel flies .\" Then they asked him if in EL, he For catalog , send $1.00,which loved actors as human beings and was influenced by Sade. He said no. will be refunded on first purchase. treated them nicely, but was completely The interviewer insisted: \" In the indifferent to them as actors-who movie, the man sews up the woman's ••••••••••••••• CINEM A,. CITY is a complete service for ••••••••••••••• played what, who I was. . . What mat- vagina.\" Builuel responded, \"When ci nema collectors. dealing with original tered to him was that the film reflect the your wife betrays you, you get drunk. I movie po sters, photos and related collect- script, because he always wanted to be a simply sew her up. There's nothing sa- ables . Original motion picture graphics are writer. You had to render exactly what he distic about it.\" sought by collector s th roughout the world . wrote. You couldn't make any depar- Original film posters are a unique remem- tures. He respected others. When De Ri- brance of a memorable film. and be cau se chaux died, I went on the radio to talk of the ir limited number. may becom e fine MICHEL PICCOLI: He never liked about him. I asked him if he wanted to Investment pieces. Many Item s. with the ir to give psychological explanations or dis- do the same, and he said, \"No. I never distinctive artwork. make attractive wall cuss motivation. He was very polite and speak about dead friends . I just give decorations that are sure to be the top ic of lovable, very attentive to people, and he stars as you would a restaurant: Sadoul, 5 discussion among movie lovers. had a great sense ofhumor. And a terri- stars. De Richaux, 4. \" bly perceptive eye. If you made a mis- All material is original - we deal With no take or told an ugly joke or hurt some- When we were shooting Belle de Jour, copies. reprints. or anything of a bogus body, he would judge you immediately. I posed for some publicity photos for Lui nature. Our latest catalO<Jue lists thousands Otherwise, he was very sweet-but and Builuel saw them and said, \"You call of Items that include posters. photos (over with the calm that accompanies great this an actor? It's a puppet! The great 30 .000 in stock ). lobby cards. pres sbooks. authority. actor Piccoli doing a thing like that! and o ther authentic film memorabilia. If What a horror! \" He folded the magazine yo u're looking for a particular item thaI is He was very kind with actors and sug- under his arm and kept it throughout the not in our catalogue, we will try to locate It gested things gently, and they knew he shoot, making frequent references to it. for you. To receive our latest catal ogue, was right. They knew he had no hesita- I loved him. {{i send $1 .00 (rerundable with first ord er) to : tion about his work, no doubt at all. In 'CII~ IE~' A\\ 'Cl lr \", P.O.Box 1012. Dept. FC Muskegon . Michigan 49441 28

RAPHAELSON (continued from page 26) FILm FORum I am doubl y sadde ned by the death ATWIN CINEMA NEXT DOOR TO SOHO of Sa mso n Raph aelso n: first for th e man, hi s loved ones and fri e nd s, and Presenting NYC premieres of independent films eco nd fo r hi s witn ess to an age and a & retrospectives of foreign & American classics me tie r we still kn ow mu ch too littl e about. Raph ae lso n was a sin gul arl y Aug. 31-Sept. 13: BELOW THE BELT by Robert Fowler gene ro us and lu cid w itn ess, and he Sept. 14-27: Fritz Lang's THE TIGER OF ESCHNAPUR and THE INDIAN TOMB neve r hes itate d to impart any of hi s ac- quire d wisdo m to new gene ratio ns of Sept. 28-0ct. 4: Fritz Lang: Hollywood & Germany dramati sts and sc ree nw rite rs. H e was Oct. 5-11: THE FLAT JUNGLE by Johan van der Keuken my es tee me d co ll eague o n th e fac ulty of the School of the Arts at Columbia Oct. 12-25: Sterling Hayden in PHAROS OF CHAOS U ni ve rsity, and I co nsid e re d it a grea t Open 7 days a week. can or write tor calendar & member discount Intormation. hono r to have bee n selected as hi s es- co rt at Co lumbi a's co mm e nce me nt 57 Watts Street, NYC 10013 Box Office: (212)431 -1590 ceremo nies two yea rs ago whe n he re - Partially supported by the NYS Council on the Arts & the National Endowment lor the Arts ce ived hi s hono rary degree. TIu?1.7th Ra ph ae lso n's un os te ntati o us g ra- International Tournee of Animation cio usness and hi s unyie ldin g poise un- de r stress marked the very virtues of A tribute to the animation artistry of the his wo rk on stage and scree n. It is no t National Film Board of Canada surpri sin g, at leas t to me, th at he has always b ee n und e rra te d b oth o n A feature-length program of 21 award-winning animated films in 16mm, avail- Broa d way a nd in H o ll ywoo d . As a able for theatrical and non-theatrical rental from: dramati st , he did not fit co mfo rtabl y into the ca mp of th e wail e rs (E uge ne 4530 18TH STREET O 'Neill , T e nnessee Willi ams, W illi am SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. 94114 lnge, C lifford Ode ts, and all th at) or the wiseacres (Philip Barry, S.N. Be hr- PHONE (415) 863-6100 man , Ro be rt E. S he rwood , Geo rge Kell y, and all that). Hi s modes t , mid- dle-class brand of romantic hum ani sm did not prov id e the theatrical intelli- ge ntsia with th e parabl es of los t purity they dem and ed . Hi s fee t we re always on the gro und , and he could never brin g him se lf to treat hi s pro tago ni sts, male and fe male, as e ith e r he lpl ess vic- tim s o r as supe rcili ously supe rio r be- In gs. Hi s greatest wo rk , howeve r, was in- spired by his collabo ratio n with E rn st Lubitsch o n The Smiling Lieutenant, One Hour with You, The Man I Killed , Trouble in Paradise, The Merry Widow, Angel, The Shop Around the Corner, and Heaven Can Wait . Lubitsch provid ed Raphaelso n with a stylized ca nvas th at Raph ae lson had neve r been able to provid e fo r himsel f, and Raph aelso n prov id ed Lubitsch with th e idi omatic fee lin gs of a new land with th e half-re- me mbe re d vi brations of an ancie nt civ- ilizatio n. It mu st be re me mbe red , of course, th at Lubitsch him se lf had al- ways bee n und e rrated . Fo r many of us it is as much the graceful and civili zed wo rld share d by Raphae lso n and Lu- bitsch th at we mourn as mu ch as th e me n th e mse lves . H e nce, the full , ade- qu ate obitu ary for Sa mso n Raph ae lson awai ts many yea rs mo re of inte nsive in- vestigatio n. -AN DR EW S ARRI S 29

On our fifth anniversary distributing films we wish to thank the producers and directors who have entrusted us with their films, and whose support is the basis of our growth. John Akin Doreen Kraft Atiat AI-Abnoudi Sheila Laffey Madeline Anderson Stephen Lighthill Chris Austin Robin Lloyd Jaime Barrios Simon Louvish Pen nee Bender Martin Lucas Obie Benz Arthur Mac Caig Rudolph van den Berg Mira Nair Cliff Bestall Judd Ne'eman lain Bruce Netherlands Government Information Service Antonia Caccia William O'Boyle Olivia Carrescia Anand Patwardhan Peter Chappell Nancy Peckenham William Cran Judy Pomer Cucumber Studios Ltd . Radio.and Visual Services, The United Nations DEC Films Jackie Reiter Claude Deffarge Robert Richter Frank Diamond Lionel Rogosin Kavery Dutta William Sarokin Howard Enders Gerhard Schmidt Elizabeth Fernea Glenn Silber Moe Foner/District 1199 Skylight Pictures James Gaffney Robert Stiles Marilyn Gaunt Robert Thurber Michael Gavshon Wolf Tirado Tami Gold Gordian Troeller Alvin Goldstein Tete Vasconcellos Dee Dee Halleck Claudia Vianello Ron Hollis WGBH-TV Ophera Hollis Women's Film Project ISKRA Writers and Readers Publishing Coop. Ltd . Institute for Food and Development Policy lion Ziv Jan Kees de Roy ICARUS 200 Park Ave . South Ste. 1319 New York , NY 10003 2 12-674-3375

· ection 31

J Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama (1983) . by Dave Kehr wives. Shohei Imamura is almost com- influenced by him. The fact that his pletely unknown in the U.S. and Eu- directing of actors, for example, was cast When Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of rope (though the Cannes prize, one in too rigid a mold was repugnant to Narayama won the Golden Palm at this hopes, will change that); it seems a mira- me.\" Where the typical Ozu actor May's Cannes Film Festival, it provided cle that he is able to find the domestic kneels on a tatami mat, gently sipping an abrupt reminder for many people that funding to work at all, much less in the tea and speaking in the soft, even tones the Japanese cinema still exists. It does epic mode he favors. of wisdom and tranquility, Imamura's indeed, though just barely. The impact actors move in a frenzy, barking their oftelevision has reduced an annual audi- Imamura has been making films since lines and flinging every available limb. ence set at 1 billion in 1960 to 150 mil- 1958. If he's still unknown in the U.S. Where Ozu's world was complete within lion in 1980; of the 350 fLims now made (along with most of the rest of the Japa- the squared-off limits of the classic 1.33 each year, the Japanese critic Tadao Sato nese New Wave), it's probably because image ratio, Imamura often requires a estimates that 200 are pornographic. his work breaks so violently with the wide-screen format, which still seems Many of the New Wave directors of the tradition of the Japanese cinema's ready to burst under the pressure of all Fifties and Sixties have given up in frus- \"golden age.\" Imamura's films have the activity it is forced to contain. Where tration: When not making films whose none of the serenity and spirituality that Ozu celebrates permanence, timeless- quality he sniffs at, Kon Ichikawa acts as we have come to expect from Japanese ness, continuity, Imamura seeks out the a spokesman for a Japanese cigarette movies. Instead they are ragged and vio- pressure points in Japanese culture and company; after the failure of his 1972 lent, vulgar and sarcastic, teeming with a history-moments of rupture like the Summer Soldiers, Hiroshi Teshigahara needling nervous energy that seems the anarchist riots in Eijanaika (1981), sites (The Woman in the Dunes) married an exact contradiction of Mizoguchi's cos- of institutionalized instability such as heiress and retired. If the elderly Akira mic regret and Ozu's sublime accept- the red light district that caters to Ameri- Kurosawa is able to continue working, it ance. can sailors in Pigs and Battleships (1961). is because of foreign support, while Na- gisa Oshima, the best known interna- Imamura began in films as an assistant The only continuity that Imamura tionally of the young filmmakers, sup- to Ozu, working on Early Summer, The discovers is a continuity of chaos, em- ports himself in Japan as the host of a Flavor ofGreen Tea Over Rice, and Tokyo bodied by the buzzing energy-a physi- popular television talk show for house- Story. But as he told Audie Bock, in her cal energy, beyond mind and spirit- indispensable Japanese Film Directors: that he sees in the Japanese underclass. \"I wouldn't just say I wasn't influenced This constant hum, which explodes by Ozu; I would say I didn't want to be 32

now and then into violence or violent hard-bitten younger sister. nificantly the image of the closed society sexuality, is the only transcendent force Apparently pleased with the results, as represented by the show-business in Imamura's films; yet it is a force not of Nikkatsu rushed Imamura intO two clan of Hidden Desire and the group of religion but of superstition, not of more projects for 1958. Nishi Ginza Sta- conspirators of EndLess Desire. These courtly love but carnality, not of spirit tion was a vehicle for the popular singer groups cannot contain the erotic energy but of flesh. If Imamura's characters are Frank Nagai; around the studio's only of the individuals they hold together; a able to survive the constant upheaval of instruction-that Nagai sing the title kind of moral incest breaks out, which their existence (the anarchy of civil war, song three times-Imamura invented a will lead to the literal incest of The Por- the devastation of world war, the desper- preposterous plot line that had a melan- nographer and The Profound Desire ofthe ation of everyday life), it's because they cholic Nagai constantly flashing back on Gods. And then there is Nishi GinZG Sta- possess this primitive, physical power- a desert island idyll he enjoyed with a tion, with its willfully ironic image of an the simple, brutal determination to be. native girl during the war. EndLess Desire island paradise-another closed society, but this time a redemptive, liberating • matched Imamura for the first time with one. The island paradise will appear again in Profound Desire of the Gods, According to some sources, Imamura Shinsaku Himeda, his cinematographer being prepared for a mass invasion of was himself a product of the underclass: for the next ten years. The story, which Japanese tourists. For the Imamura a teenager at the end of World War II, he has a real Imamura flavor, centers on a characters who dream of escape from supposedly survived by working on the group of five people searching for a Japan's closed, island culture, there is fringes of black market and prostitution cache of morphine buried in what was only the borrowed Western fantasy of rings. Audie Bock, more reliably, reports once an American air-raid shelter, and is another island-another paradise that that \"he was the son of a physician and now the basement of a butcher shop. As will quickly become another Japan. attended all the elite primary and sec- the search continues under the leader- ondary schools that should have set him ship of a ferocious widow, the characters • on a course toward the University of fall in and out of a series of affairs; once After one more assignment-My Tokyo and a comfortable, sedate busi- Second Brother, an earnest piece of social realism set among the impoverished coal ness or government career.\" But an miners of Kyushu-Imamura produced his first mature film , the 1961 Pigs and older brother introduced him to the the- BattLeships. Endless Desire's juxtaposi- tion of air-raid shelter and butcher shop ater, and while a student of Western his- here becomes the port city ofYokosuka, where the military might of aU .S. naval tory at Waseda University, he began to installation is aligned with the fleshy pleasures on sale in the local red light write and perform for student groups. district. To compound the metaphor, Imamura involves his hero, a scraggly Although his student friends performed young hustler named Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato), in a bizarre plot to raise black- \"modern\" plays, Imamura felt drawn to market hogs, which are kept penned in the shadow of the battleships and fed by the popularized Kabuki theater of the garbage purloined from the American kitchens. While Kinta doles out slop to lower classes. his tiny pink charges, his girlfriend Haruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) pleads with The movies might have seemed a him to escape with her. The island para- dise she has in mind is the factory city of modern way of exploring this popular Kawasaki, where they will be able to get honest work and settle down. But before tradition, but not at the Shochiku com- Kinta can make up his mind, a rival gang arrives and hijacks the hogs. pany's Ofuna studios, where Imamura The film concludes with a grotesque, was hired as an assistant director. Ofuna surreal, and very funny shoot-out on the neon-bedecked main drag, suddenly was the home of Ozu and all of the streaming with squealing pork. It is a spectacular debut for the animal im- aristocratic refinement that Ozu (at agery that will run through all of Im- amura's work. Though the equation least, late Ozu) represented; after three (victimized pigs = exploited people) is dispiriting years, he departed for the The Profound Desire of the Gods. newly revitalized Nikkatsu studios, more didactic than the effects he will create later, the use of the animals as a where he apprenticed himself, as assist- the treasure is found, the widow poisons kind of rhythmic extension of the char- acters is extremely sophisticated: The ant and later scenarist, to Yuzo Ka- them all, but is herself killed when she gangsters unleash the animal panic of the pigs, and the screen becomes a swirl washima, whose broad \"nonsense\" falls intO a river from an unfinished comedies were closer to what Imamura bridge during her escape. had in mind for himself. Although these first three films were When the chance finally came to di- never released outside ofJapan, the plot rect, Imamura was assigned to a story of summaries provided by Bock and Max a traveling Kabuki troupe, the same mi- Tessier in Cinema d' aujourd' hui No. 15 lieu that had fascinated him in his stu- suggest that Imamura's themes and dent days. Imamura later told Max Tes- manner were coalescing quickly. There sier that the hero of StoLen Desire, a is, first, the preference for provincial set- young intellectual whose love for the tings and the thick Osaka dialect; \"people's theater\" soon turns into an second, the way of seizing the broadest erotic fixation on the troupe's leading forms of popular entertainment-farce, lady, was a double for himself. As the musical, or melodrama-and pushing company tours the Tobacco Road dis- them to extremes where the code of tricts of Osaka (the program consists of surface realism breaks down, plots be- fragments of classical drama, punctu- coming a tangle of indecipherable in- ated by rowdy strip shows), the young trigues, character psychology turning man finds himself forced into an un- into ceaseless, unthinking movement. wanted relationship with his loved one's Other stylistic figures emerge, most sig- 33

of darting, dashing movements, both dari) is followed from her childhood as Sadako's family situation is, it is infi- human and porcine, creating a chaos the illegitimate daughter of a peasant nitely more secure than anything she that ends in universal destruction. woman through her career as Tokyo will know with her rapist-cum-Iover, Haruko survives-to become the first prostitute and madam; the film ends -no job for a man with a bad heart. ofImamura's instinctively independent, with Tome's betrayal by her own illegiti- Although she comes to pity him (he had infinitely resilient women. A sense of mate daughter (Jitsuko Yoshimura, the broken into her home only to steal fear surrounded the strong women of Haruku of Pigs and BattLeships), which enough money to pay for his heart medi- Imamura's apprentice films; they seem Tome welcomes as a sign that her child cine), Sadako knows that the passionate to have been more rough-edged, ener- has learned her lessons well. love he offers can only destroy what gized versions of the conventional The Insect Woman is a female-centered comfort, what marginal position, she femmefataLe, drawing men to their doom film about escape and survival; The Por- has. Because he threatens her with sex- through a consuming sexuality. In Pigs nographers (original title: Introduction to ual fulfillment, with a vague possibility and Battleships, fear turns to awe: Anthropology) is a male-centered film of romantic happiness, he has to die. Haruko does not destroy Kinta as much about entrapment and defeat, in which As Sadako, Masumi Harukawa is the as she supplants him, drawing on a hid- the protagonist, a mild-mannered busi- least actressy actress imaginable: A den inner strength to keep going long nessman who produces porno shorts, has solid, almost stocky woman, she doesn't after his frantic scheming has failed. Im- an affair with a dying woman who insists perform in front of the camera so much amura reverses the traditional associa- that he marty her daughter. In the end, as simply exist. Surrounded by highly tions to make Kinta the family man (he disgusted by flesh-and-blood women, stylized, emphatically expressive per- takes care of his pigs as if they were his the hero constructs a life-size doll of his formers (the two men and the rival mis- children, and himself plays child to the dream girl and retires to his houseboat- tress are deliberately overscaled, car- older, tougher men who run the gang) an island paradise that promptly sinks. toonish figures), she never seems to and Haruko the independent spirit; As their pseudo-scientific original address the audience at all. There seems from this point on, men will be the char- titles suggest, both fiLms are rather cold no urge to communicate in her gestures, acters tied most firmly to a group iden- and clinical; Imamura's themes seem no desire to be understood in her look. tity-most comfortable in and most de- here to have frozen into theses, and he is Imamura doesn't even allow her the pendent upon the closed, incestuous content to follow out their implications grace of movement that is used so often society-while women will feel the urge without adding much inflection or ambi- in film to create a sense ofspecialness, of to escape. guity to the schematic framework. But sympathy, for an inarticulate character. In Pigs and BattLeships, Imamura ex- the middle film, Intentions of Murder, is What she does have is a staunch physical presses this cross-sexual tension by al- a minor masterpiece, in which Im- presence, a body that insistently com- ternating densely packed deep-focus amura's scientific detachment comes up municates its own weight and shape. shots of Kinta (which bind him closely to against a subject it cannot conquer, a She is sexual without being in the least the parallel worlds of the hog farm and mystery it cannot explain. sensual-sensuality would require a the red light district) with airy, floating Sadako (Masumi Harukawa) is an un- self-consciousness, a cultivation, she telephoto closeups of Haruko (which lift married housewife-an orphaned peas- could never possess. If her sexuality is her out of the world, isolating her within ant girl who was taken in as a maid by a what has led Sadako to her entrapment, her own thoughts and feelings). The wealthy family, was seduced by the eld- attracting the weak, frightened men telephoto closeup is a closeup without est son, and later bore him a child. The who hope to find strength and security intimacy, a scrutiny rather than an affec- members of this unstable, improvised in her, it is also the secret of her survival tionate gaze. Imamura looks at most of family live together in a cramped, run- and triumph. It is the sexuality of pro- his heroines this way, in a regard that down house in the frigid northern city of creation, perpetuation, the irresistible suggests at once a cold, scientific de- Sendai, where the father, now a broken, urge to exist. tachment and an enforced, self-protec- petty man, works as a functionary in the Sadako doesn't change in any obvious tive distance. He wants to get close local library. While he is away on a busi- way over the course of Intentions ofMur- enough to study, but not too close to be ness trip to Tokyo, Sadako is raped by a der. No definable character emerges seduced. • burglar (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi), who im- from the blankness of her body, no ideas mediately falls in love with her; the are born behind her distant expression. Imamura's next three films-The In- strong, fleshy Sadako makes him long But she does learn-without ever grasp- sect Woman (1963), Intentions of Murder for the mother he never knew. The rap- ing the principle consciously-to trust (1964), and The Pornographers (1966)- ist returns to see Sadako again and again, the physical force she contains, to let her complete a definite period in his work, threatening to expose their relationship vitality guide her life. After the rape, after which he would end his association if she refuses to run away with him. Sadako tries to commit suicide out of her with Shinsaku Himeda (whose highly Sadako discovers that he has a heart ail- sense of shame; she fails, and decides to contrasted black-and-white images con- ment, and plans to murder him with a have lunch instead. It's the last time she tribute a great deal to the texture of cup of poisoned tea. Meanwhile, her will try to fight her body, and the deci- these films) and move in a radically dif- husband's mistress (other mistress) has sion to live, though it is made unreflec- ferent direction. The Insect Woman (the discovered Sadako's secret life, and be- tingly, seems to make her strength grow. original title was EntomoLogical Chroni- gins collecting evidence of her infidelity Imamura charts Sadako's progress by cles of Japan) anticipates Fassbinder's in hopes of finally securing her lover for giving her a complicated knitting ma- Marriage of Maria Braun in its use of a herself. chine to work. At first she can't find her naive young girl's gradual hardening into Intentions of Murder is the story of a way around the arrangement of wires a businesswoman as a metaphor for post- woman who is willing to kill in order to and yarn, but by the end of the film she war reconstruction. Tome (Sachiko Hi- preserve her unhappiness. As shaky as has mastered the mechanical, back-and- 34

forth movement that drives the appa- Pigs and Battleships (1961). ratus. She sits up into the night, repeat- ing the same simple gesture, the also use the snow to give her a mystical plex and contradictory portrayal. Im- c1ick-clack of the machine that becomes power, a supernatural stature. amura's first self-conscious response to an amplified, indomitable heanbeat, this crisis was apparently the 1967 A Man pounding out the rhythm of her life. She A clear tension can be felt between Vanishes (it has never been subtitled for seems to have invoked some primal the filmmaker and the film he has made, export), a project that began as a serious force, something supernatural, with the and behind that tension there is an ele- documentary investigation of the social incantation of her knitting machine: ment of fear. Imamura knows that Sa- phenomenon the Japanese call \"Jo- Snow begins to fall and cover the city as dako can destroy him, too-that her in- hatsu\"-the large number of people if in answer to her call, snow that stinctual power can defeat his scientific who, each year, simply disappear. Im- bleaches, blankets and abstracts Im- detachment and intellectualized an. At amura began by selecting a typical case amura's images as if the world of the film the end of the film, Sadako's husband from the Tokyo police files (coinciden- were evolving toward Sadako's own sub- shows her a roll of pictures, taken by his tally or not, the name of the vanished lime blankness. The snow, like Sadako, mistress, that unmistakably show Sa- man is \"Mr. Oshima\"), and then per- is nothingness triumphant; its meaning- dako arm in arm with her lover. She suaded the missing man's fiancee, less weight and stolidity conquer every- looks at them (printed on contact strips Yoshie, to allow his cameras to follow her thing. Thanks to the snow, the two char- that suggest lengths of movie film) and as she went about her investigation. But acters who stand in Sadako's way are flatly denies that the woman in the pho- somewhere along the line, Mr. Oshima eliminated; in the end, she hasn't had to tographs is her. She isn't just speaking to and the legions of Johatsu were permit- lift a finger. her husband; she is telling Imamura that ted to vanish again, as Yoshie lost inter- his images haven't captured her, that est in her absent boyfriend and began to With its location shooting, flat light- she has escaped him, too. flin with the actor (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi, ing, and ostensibly random accumula- the rapist of Intentions of Murder) who tion of sociological detail, Intentions of • had been hired to conduct the inter- Murder creates a context of social real- views, and as Imamura lost interest in ism. But the impression of realism is The ending of Intentions of Murder, abstract social phenomenon in favor of constantly inflected by Imamura's place- along with the implicit film-as-vain-illu- the real-life romance that was develop- ment of stylized, metaphorical images sion theme of The Pornographers, sug- ing in front of him. The film ends with alongside documentary details. This is a gests that Imamura was beginning to Yoshie in a violent confrontation with documentary style that pushes toward feel the same discontentment with the her sister, whom she believes guilty of symbolism-a reality that shares the closed forms ofclassical filmmaking that having poisoned Oshima; suddenly, Im- frame with its own analysis. Sadako's had seized many Western avant-gardists amura himself bursts into the room and son keeps two pet rats in a cage, and in the late Sixties. Naturalistic narrative kicks down the walls, exposing the Imamura uses his wide-screen frame to no longer seemed to be the pathway to balance Sadako, hunched over her the truth; reality was more complex and household accounts on the right side of contradictoty, and required a more com- the image, with a rat running furiously in his wheel on the left. The comparison is clear-and heavy and intrusive. This is Eisenstein's old cut in October from a preening Kerenski to a crowing rooster; it forces a reading on an image, reducing something complex and ambiguous to a pat statement. But where Eisenstein re- quires two shots, Imamura's 'Scope style requires only one: The juxtaposition is spatial rather than temporal, and it yields a more complex effect. The direc- tor is visibly entering his film, rather than hiding in the cracks between shots. He wants to make his presence felt. This kind of editorializing is usually offensive in a film, but in Imamura's case it seems crucial to his style. He insists on imposing himself between his character and his audience, on empha- sizing his own judgments on what he has created, as if he were afraid that other- wise his creation would completely ovetwhelm him. Like all of Imamura's mature work, Intentions ofMurder seems divided between irony and awe, recoil and respect. Imamura will use the rat image to trivialize Sadako, but he will 35

apanment as a set and the confrontation develop the island's sugar cane crop, the master criminal who violates all the laws as a performance. The documentary has lure of primitivism is still strong: He of society with impunity, stealing, se- evolved into fiction. goes native with a vengeance, dropping ducing, swindling, and killing his way his work in favor of frenetic coupling across the country until, to put the nec- A Man Vanishes seems a typically con- with Toriko (Hideko Okiyama), Ne- essary limit on this dangerous fantasy, he flicted modernist project of the period: kichi's daughter by Umu, whom two is caught. Based on a tme story, by way Fiction and documentary are intermin- generations of incest have rendered of a novel by Ryuzo Saki, the film fol- gled, and in the end revealed to be noth- mentally defective. lows Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) through ing more than variant forms of the same the course of a 78-day crime spree, be- basic lie. But the experience of A Man Much of this material is played in the ginning with the bmtal hammer murder Vanishes, far from shaking Imamura's broad farce style of Pigs and Battleships, of a utilities repairman (filmed in the faith in the documentary, seems to have with the blunt caricatures of hayseed most harrowing way imaginable: a neu- redoubled it. With the 1970 History of greed and carnality suggesting a Japa- tral, Hawksian medium-long shot) and Postwar Japan as ToLd by a Bar Hostess, nese version of Li'L Abner; yet the leg- ending with the strangulation of his mis- he launched a series of straight docu- ends and landscapes that hover in the tress, who offers herself as a willing vic- mentaries made for Japanese television. background lend the film a genuine tim as they are making love. These films are perfectly conventional grandeur. This blend of awe and con- in form, yet beneath their standard rhet- tempt is, ofcourse, highly Imamurian; it Enokizu repeats the journey of The oric, a touch of modernist malaise lingers is an application across an entire culture Insect Woman in his progress from the on; taken together, they form almost a of the attitudes he held toward his earli- provinces to the city, and he seems parallel oeuvre to Imamura's feature est heroines-Sadako, of Intentions of meant as a male analogue to Tome's fe- work of the Sixties, in which the sub- Murder, conceived as a society. The is- male survival talents, the quiet power of jects and images he had previously sexuality turning to the jittery despera- treated as fiction are recycled as docu- Vengeance Is Mine. tion of violence. Where Sadako ofInten- mentary tmth, with Bar Hostess stand- land represents something different for tions of Murder is secure in her own ing as a vinual remake of The Insect each of the major characters. For the blankness, Enokizu adopts a series of Woman. Tokyo engineer, it is a dream of escape identities as masks to cover his personal come tme: a playground of primitive im- emptiness. There is nothing in him but The documentaries represent only pulses and the source of a revitalizing the restless urge to mn and destroy; halfofImamura's output during the Sev- primal energy. For Nekichi, it is a micro- when he finds his own island haven, in enties. If his disenchantment with natu- cosm of Japan, where the primitive im- the form of the back-street inn where his ralistic narrative led him to reportage, it pulses are punished and rechanneled also led him to a greater interest in fan- into meaningless work in the name of mistress works, he is compelled to de- tasy, legends, and folk tales, an attempt progress (he dreams of escaping to an- stroy it, too. The film eventually offers a to outflank naturalism on the other side other island, and is killed trying). Only disappointingly simplistic Freudian ex- by delving into epic, spectacle, and Umu, the priestess, seems genuinely in planation for his hero's actions: The line highly stylized melodrama. The Pro- harmony with the place; her energy is of \"We always kill the wrong people\" is found Desire of the Gods (1968) begins a different son from the frenzy that grips beautiful; the motive-Enokizu had a with an old man singing the founding the males, more controlled and serene, weak father-is not. But it is Imamura's myth of the primitive southem island more permanent and implacable. ultimate refusal to either despise or for- where the film takes place. It is, of give his protagonist that makes Ven- course, an incest myth-\"brother and • geance Is Mine a devastating experience. sister become man and wife, together Like Sadako, Enokizu is beyond judg- they form an island\"-and much of the Where Profound Desire was spun from ment: He is a force in the world, a fact. action will center on an incestuous fam- a primitive myth, Imamura's next film, ily. Nekichi, the hero (Rentaro Mikuni), Vengeance Is Mine, was based on a con- With The Profound Desire of the Gods is himself the product of a liaison be- temporary, urban one: the myth of the and Vengeance Is Mine, Masao Tochi- tween his grandfather and his mother, zawa replaced Shinsaku Himeda as Im- and is in love with his sister Umu amura's cameraman, Himeda's deep (Yasuko Matsui), the island's high focus, black-and-white compositions priestess. But in spite or because of the giving way to Tochizawa's bright but islanders' association of incest and divin- shallow color style. The loss of depth in ity, Nekichi must be punished for his the images seems to have given Im- love. An immense boulder tossed up by amura a greater interest in montage as a the sea on Nekichi's land has been inter- means of maintaining his symbolic jux- preted as a chastisement by the gods, tapositions; the animal imagery no and tq expiate his guilt Nekichi has been longer shares the frame with the charac- sentenced to dig a pit deep enough to ters, but appears in cutaways that inter- bury the huge rock, a task he has been at mpt the dramatic flow. At the same for 20 years. time, Imamura's narrative style be- comes more tortured and fragmented, as This tropical paradise is a prison for the classical unities of time and space of Nekichi (whose Sisyphean punishment the early films are replaced by the dis- suggests Imamura's beloved animal en- continuous episodes of Profound Desire ergy turned in on itself, made futile and and the multi-level flashbacks of Ven- destmctive), but for the Tokyo engineer geance Is Mine. Psychological realism- (Kazuo Kitamura) who has been sent to the concentration on a single character 36

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developed in depth-is exchanged for (though we assume the motive is profit), the carnival as two branches of the same the broad, flat characterization of folk and there's no real attempt made to keep business. Kinzo, a practical man, is on tales and popular entertainments; the the two sides politically or morally dis- the payroll of both the shogunate and conflicting elements that Imamura once tinct. Instead of history, Imamura is in- the emperor's forces; when he is simul- portrayed in a single character are now terested in the eijanaika state of mind. taneously ordered by one side to start a spread out over a large ensemble cast, as riot at a silk warehouse and by the other society replaces the individual as the The subject is approached from two to protect it from the mob, he gives both focus of his work. directions, in two different narrative orders to his men without a glimmer of styles. From above, Imamura looks at contradiction (and they successfully • the political machinations-the brib- carry out both assignments). eries, broken alliances, and murders that The title oflmamura's 1981 Eijanaika lead to the breakdown of order-in the Kinzo's carnival isn't the whimsical comes from the rallying cry of an 1867 style of an action~adventure film; the playground of illusions of the Federico mass movement. The subtitles render paranoid drive of these passages, with Fellini films; it's a malignant illusion, an eijanaika as \"Why not?\"; a more satisfy- their insanely complicated plotting, calls institutionalized fraud, recognized as ing translation might be \"What the to mind specifically the highly stylized such by both the people who run it and hell!\" It is a cry ofa dangerous, rock-bot- samurai films of Hideo Gosha. And from the people who pay for admission. Yet tom freedom, of the abrupt realization below, Imamura looks at individual ex- the need to believe in something is so that traditions are dead, laws arbitrary, periences-the gradual erosion of cer- strong that the carnival has a positive society an empty convention. Such was tainty in ordinary lives-in a style of social function. These dreams may be the situation the lower classes of Edo richly ironic character comedy. The two shoddy and commercial, but they are (present-day Tokyo) found themselves styles blend into something quite origi- dreams after all, and everyone (the show in in the middle of the 19th century, nal, as if Buster Keaton were starring in people included) needs something to when the provincial Shogun clans were one of Lang's Mabuse films. hold on to. When paper charms begin to battling the emperor for control of the rain down mysteriously over the carnival country. Inflation was spinning out of The opening images plunge us into grounds-a sign from the sun goddess sight (a running gag in Eijanaika is the the nightmare world of a carnival side- that she approves of the eijanaika move- price of rice: If a character goes away for show. Mountainous women wrestle in ment-the carnival people start making a day or two, it's tripled by the time he the nude; a \"mountain girl\" bites off the and selling counterfeit charms, telling gets back); and the entire culture was head of a snake and, after chewing the themselves that they're helping out the reeling under the opening of the country fat, spits a stream of fire over an open gods. The fraud, which was probably to the West after 200 years of enforced flame; a pretty girl in a kimono suddenly started by some showman in the next isolation. For the poor, there is nothing extends her neck to a height of six or district anyway, has a divine origin and a left-a condition that makes evetything seven feet, the camera rushing upward divine blessing; the gods are all for mak- possible. Why not wear wild costumes, with her smiling face to catch her tiny ing a buck themselves. dance in the streets, loot stores, tear giggle of satisfaction when she reaches down buildings? What the hell! her full extension. This carnival of the Kinzo's mistress is a country girl subconscious becomes Imamura's ruling named Ine (Kaori Momoi), sold to the Though Eijanaika is based on histori- metaphor and main staging area. It's ac- carnival by her impoverished parents af- cal incident, Imamura doesn't have tually an entire district, spread out along ter her husband Genji disappeared in a much interest in historical detail. Appar- a riverbank near the Ryogoku bridge. shipwreck. She's now the star of an at- ently, he even flaunts his indifference: The area is home to Edo's pickpockets, traction titled Tickle the Goddess, in The film is said to be full of unsettling beggars, prostitutes, and slave dealers- which members of the audience take anachronisms that Japanese audiences a Times Square with everything but the turns trying to blow a paper streamer perceive immediately. The causes of neon-and the head man is Kinzo (Shi- between her flashing legs; she thinks of the conflict between the Shogun clans geru Tsuyuguchi), who runs crime and herself, unshakably, as an artist. Then and the emperor are never given Genji (Shigeru Izumiya), suddenly pops up: He'd been rescued by a passing Intentions of Murder (1964). American ship, and has spent six years in the U.S. Now Ine isn't sure what to do -whether to return to America with Genji and start the farm they'd always dreamed of, or to stay on in Edo, where things are getting interesting. Ine be- comes the pivot point between Kinzo's ruthless pragmatism and Genji's moony idealism, and pivot she does, betraying both of them in turn and in increasingly quick alternation. If there's a crisis in the- culture, she's living it, unable to choose among the options suddenly, dizzyingly opened to her. And, like the eijanaika rioters, she's enjoying the crisis, dancing through it with a smile of calculating naivete. Ine is also the link between the film's 38

Kaori Momoe in Imamura's Eijanaika (1981). two styles, acting as a willing pawn in line. Episodes fire off one another with a Over the course of its two-and-a-half Kinzo's political plot and playing a comic lightning crackle, as Imamura puts sev- hours, Eijanaika has been gathering en- heroine in Genji's misadventures. Genji eral plot strands in motion at once and ergy, storing it up. When the riots finally bums with his new knowledge of Amer- furiously cuts among them. Kinzo plots arrive, the stored energy bursts forth: ica, and wants to share his dream of schemes involving Genji; the political It's an irresistibly giddy, rushing mo- freedom and escape with Ine; it won't factions plot schemes involving Kinzo; ment. As the dancing, shouting hordes be complete without her. But every and soon it's impossible to tell who's stream out of the riverside carnival, time the dream is within reach, Ine lets controlling whom. Causes and effects threatening to cross the Ryogoku bridge him down, turning back within sight of are systematically, exuberantly mud- into the upper-class territory that is for- the ship that will take them to the U.S., died; the baffling plot soon seems to be bidden to them, Imamura allows us to or getting herself kidnaped (without ob- rolling along on its own, impelled by feel the crowd's excitement and sense of jecting too much) from the farm Genji some internal energy none of the charac- mad freedom. Yet, by photographing has managed to secure in the country- ters can grasp. Meanwhile, Imamura is the river crossing through space-com- side. Is Genji's freedom-abstract, ide- multiplying the focal points in his im- pacting telephoto lenses, he also traps it, alized, and pretty hard work-really ages: Bright colors compete with sudden pinning the riot down in a two-dimen- preferable to the freedom Kinzo offers movements for our attention , striking sional space where the energy of the in his way, the freedom of money and individual faces leap out of dense group crowd loses its thrust and purpose. power? Genji sticks with his play with a compositions. Imamura seems to be Though Kinzo has encouraged the riots determination that is truly Keaton- shooting lines of energy across the for practical political reasons, they are esque, brushing himself off and grimly screen-sometimes he'll exploit the more than political now. The energy starting over each time something ex- hard, sharp lines of Japanese architec- plodes. But Genji's adversaries aren't ture to give the frame an internal, geo- that was fed, exploited , and barely con- Keaton's inanimate objects and natural metric tension; at other times, he'll cre- tained by the carnival has escaped , lev- forces-they're people, and much less ate a rhythmic tension between eling everything before it. It is an energy predictable. foreground and background actions, a without cause and without control, fed contrast that seems to yank the image equally by greed and ideals, dreams and, The unpredictability that dogs Genji apart. frauds, Marx and Freud. It is the energy is the principle of Imamura's narrative of Kinto and Haruko of Pigs and Battle- 39

Ken Ogata and Imamura on location for The Ballad of Narayama. ships, of Tome of The Insect Woman , Sa- the first half of The Ballad of Narayama by) the effons of a younger, idiot son to dako of Intentions ofMurder, Enokizu of occupies familiar Imamura territory, yet lose his virginity. Once the new wife has Vengeance Is Mine, and the islanders of this mountain village differs from the been found, Orin is willing to go; indeed Profound Desire brought together and tropical paradise ofProfound Desire in its she must, to make room for the new unleashed in its full anarchic fury. It is extreme poverty. Because there is so lit- mouth at the table. Tatsuhei agrees to horrible and hopeful, devastating and tle to eat, an ancient tradition requires carry her there, and as they approach the invigorating. everyone over the age of 70 to be taken traditional exposure site-a canyon to the mountaintop and exposed to the filled with skeletons, representing sacri- • elements; even so, there is not enough fices from time immemorial-a few for the children, and newborn babies are white flakes begin to fall from the sky; The explosion of Eijanaika can't be sometimes found drowned in the by the time Tatsuhei returns to the vil- repeated; it is the culmination of 20 stream. In this world, sexuality is not a lage, the entire landscape is covered years' consideration ofone idea, and Im- life force but a curse, and with every with snow. amura can go no funher. It is time now coupling a potential murder, the sexual to step back and examine the idea from humor takes on a black, dangerous tone. It is the snow, of course, that we first another, more reflective point of view; The forces that Imamura has celebrated saw in Intentions of Murder, the snow and that is what Imamura, now 57, has in other contexts must be kept tightly that Sadako called down as the exten- done with The Ballad ofNarayama. The repressed here; they mean not survival sion of her survival. Orin's snow is a sense of a filmmaker in fierce confronta- but almost certain death. It is a world snow of survival, too, but in a different tion with his material, constantly defin- harsh even by Imamura's standards: sense: Its blankness is not of sexuality ing and redefining his attitudes toward The animal imagery is much more vio- but of death, the survival it offers not of the events he portrays, has begun to lent than usual, the human violence the individual but of the individual fade away; in its place is a sense of ac- (which includes an entire family buried through the family, and through the ceptance that brings to mind Imamura's alive for the theft of a few potatoes) family the species. The Ballad of Nara- old master and counter-example, Yasu- much more stifling and cruel. yama concludes with a profound sense of jiro Ozu. The film itself is a remake (by loss; but, as always in Imamura, the way of a novel by Shichiro Fukazawa) of Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto) is approach- emotion is balanced by its opposite. a movie from the Japanese cinema's ing 70, but she is determined not to go to This is a loss that offers a hope, a disap- \"golden age,\" a 1958 production with the mountaintop until she has found a pearance that makes possible a perma- the same title by Keisuke Kinoshita. new wife for her widowed son Tatsuhei nence. Ozu couldn't have said it better. The circle has staned to close. (Ken Ogata). The first half of the film is devoted to her efforts to find a suitable ~':: With its primitive provincial setting (a candidate, intercut with (and parodied village in the northern mountains) and Portions of this article first appeared in concentration on rustic sexual humor, a differentform in the Chicago Reader. 40

Ann Hui's Boat People-the surprise ofthe 1983 Cannes Festival. by Harlan Kennedy festivalgoers (especially those not given galvanic thrillers The Secret (Feng lie) to scouring the small print of their daily and The Spooky Bunch (Zhuang Dao \"I don't know what Political Truth movie schedules) didn't know it was in Zheng), which romped through the in- is,\" Hong Kong director Ann Hui said the program. Only the gathering rumble ternational festival circuits in 1979 and brusquely, in answer to a question, as we of debate in the movie's wake woke 1980. She followed those in 1981 with sat on the sun-flecked terrace of the Cannes up to the fact that there was an her first \"boat person\" film, The Story of Carlton Hotel in Cannes. \"All I know is \"event\" in their midst. Woo Viet (Wu Yue De Gushi), which was that I stand by the statements I make in screened at Cannes' Directors Forrnight Boat People, the things I say and present The movie, though Hong Kong-fi- in 1982. Ann Hui insists that Woo Viet, in it. I have been under a lot of attack in nanced, was filmed in Mainland China like its successor, Boat People, is not a Hong Kong, as well as here, for the (on Hainan Island and in the city of political diatribe but a human story. movie and its politics. I've been bandied Zhajian) with full cooperation from the about by one parry and another as anti- government of the People's Republic. \"In Woo Viet I showed a young Viet- Communist-which I firmly state that I Set in Vietnam in 1978, three years after nam refugee who leaves a camp in Hong am not. The film has been shamelessly the Liberation, Boat People paints a Kong to go to America, only to be used by political parries as a weapon for harshly unremitting picture of a country trapped on the way in the Philippines. attacking other parties. But Boat People riven with poverry and tyranny, in an Because the film is very adventurous, is a survival story set in a tragic moment attempt to explain just why hundreds of very melodramatic, and uses American in history. It's not a propaganda state- thousands of Vietnamese have put their B-movie visual styles and techniques, ment against Communism.\" lives at risk to flee by boat to hoped-for people wouldn't take it seriously as a safety and freedom in Hong Kong. social comment. But if you look at the Ann Hui's Boat People (Return To film's story, the message is very clear. Danang) came to the 1983 Cannes Film Boat People is the fourth feature film This man Woo Viet cannot survive in the Festival as the most highly c1assifiedjilm by 36-year-old Hui, who is justly reck- ultra-materialistic, capitalist world he surprise of the festival's 36-year history. oned second only to King Hu (A Touch of finds himself in. I think if people take Even after it had first been shown, many Zen) in her homeland as a stylist, a story Woo Viet and Boat People together, they teller, and an explosive movie innovator. will see that the political 'messages' can- Her first two films were the snazzily cut, 41

cel each other out! \" they created a great whirlpool, so that she conducted with Vietnamese refu- I Nonetheless, Boat PeopLe is being the whole boat was sunk. It was in all the gees beginning in 1978, when the boats newspapers in Hong Kong at the time. that made it were flooding into Hong handled like a keg of dynamite. The But we couldn't shoot the whirlpool, be- Kong harbor. I asked her how many top-secret starus accorded the film at cause technically it was impossible for changes the Boat People script had gone Cannes was far from accidental. Origi- us. It's a pity, because it would have through before the final version was nally it had been picked for the festival's been a much more impressive scene. reached. Main Competition. But the French So- But we kept the real point of the inci- cialist government, anxious about their \"Well, the script went through four or diplomatic relations with Vietnam, in- dent, which is that Vietnamese officers five rewrites,\" says Hui. \"First we tried sisted on viewing the movie first-an deliberately 'set up' escape attempts- to concentrate mainly on the story oflo unprecedented demand. The film was pocketing the bribes beforehand, of Minh, the prisoner who tries to escape screened, festival director Gilles Jacob course-and then ambushed the on that boat. In the original script he gets was told to remove it from the Competi- boats.\" away and most of the film is set at sea. tion, and Hui was given a choice be- But when we were location-hunting be- [Ween screening it in the Directors Fort- The sources for the film's story and fore production began, our cameraman night or as the film surprise. In either the stories within the film, Hui told me, said we would probably need the set-up case publicity was to be kept to a mini- stem from the hundreds of interviews of Guns of Navarone to shoot the sea mum. scenes properly! So we decided to con- centrate instead on the first part of the She chose the latter. And the film was script set on land and expand it. This finally smuggled in, refugee-style, as a allowed us to introduce new characters last-minute addendum to the official like the Vietnamese army officers and program, with an unprecedented lack of the madame in the bar- representative fanfare . types of the people who were left over from an older regime. The movie pulls no punches; but Hui vigorously denies that any of the events \"During our research,\" continues depicted, which were based on the first- Hui, \"we came across a book written by hand reports of refugees or reporters a Japanese reporter called Lener to UncLe who had come from Vietnam , were Wah . It's set in Vietnam in 1974 and crudely exaggerated. written in the form of a diary for a little girl. And we found, when comparing • this account with conditions in Vietnam after the Liberation, that the living stan- Boat People follows the adventures of dards of the very poor had not basically a Japanese photo-journalist, Akutagawa changed. If anything, they were worse. (played by the Hong Kong actor Lam), So the details of the diary could be trans- who revisits Vietnam in 1978, three posed to 1978. years after having witnessed the Com- munist victory over the forces of South \"And then we finally hit upon an Vietnam and its American allies. Akuta- overall mechanism for telling the story, gawa becomes the audience's eyes and which was to have a point-of-view char- ears. He witnesses hunger in the slums, acter. Someone who is not suffering, an police brutality in the streets, corruption outsider; although in our story he does among the local officials. He befriends a eventually get involved by helping the poverty-stricken Danang family living daughter of the Danang family to escape on a combination of wits, street-wise by boat. And so we created the fictional cynicism , and a flair for scavenging. Japanese reporter, Akutagawa, who was (The daughter and the older brother an amalgam of [wo real people. One is coolly riffle the effects of men who have the very warm, gentle, more 'sentimen- been executed by firing squad; the wi- tal' reporter who wrote the little girl's dowed mother becomes a prostitute.) diary. The other is based on a Japanese And he meets a petty thief who is later reporter who had been in Vietnam in hauled off to a distant labor camp, eu- 1975, during the Liberation, and went phemistically dubbed a New Economic back in 1980. I met him in Tokyo and he Zone, where we follow his hair-raising showed me his photos from Vietnam and told me how he'd been treated there.\" ordeals digging for unexploded Ameri- can land mines and his doomed attempt • to flee the country on a refugee boat. The vessel is ambushed and fired on, Having knitted together the movie's with loss of all lives, by a Vietnamese script, Hui had to submit it to the Chi- patrol boat. nese authorities. China lent several of the film's actors (though the leading That is based on a real event,\" Hui players were from Hong Kong) and vir- told me. \"In the real story the boat was rually all the extras. Hui was given per- sunk. What happened was that the Viet- mission to adapt buildings and street namese had [wo patrol boats which fired fronts so that they matched photo- into the hull of the refugee boat and then went around and around it, until 42

In the mid-Seventies, Hui directed a fistful of dramas and documentaries for TV. One of the dramas, made as an episode in a TV film series helmed by several top Hong Kong directors and titled Below the Lion Rock, was her first brush with the Vietnam subject: Boy from Vietnam . She quickly followed this with two other Lion Rock dramas: The Roe, the story of an opium smoker who becomes pregnant; and The Bridge, about a foreign reporter getting mixed up in the local populace's struggle to preserve a footpath, and then being ex- pelled from Hong Kong for his involve- ment in their demonstrations the mech- anism of Boat People's reporter in embryo. It was Hui's first two feature films that propelled her into the heady jet streams of the film festival circuit. The Secret was a boldly fractured thriller about a murder investigation in which Hui's mercurial cutting, vivid color sense, and ability to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end-but definitely not in that order -invoked comparisons with Nicolas Roeg. The Spooky Bunch followed, a daz- zling tale of ghosts invading a Chinese Opera troupe. It was both giddily funn y (where else have you met a ghost called Andy Lau in Boat People. Catshit?) and so dynamic in its cutting that it makes Poltergeist seem as stately graphic records of Vietnam. She was also trying to do: to tell a classic story with as an Ibsen play. able to use items of clothing borrowed that particular background. But people One snag with Boat People is that from some of the 20,000 Vietnamese look at it from the point of view of poli- settled on collective farms on Hainan tics, like my film . I understand both Hui, treating a subject with huge inter- Island. Having given so much coopera- viewpoints. But the thing is I cannot national political reverberations, has tion, I asked, did the Mainland govern- work understanding both viewpoints, here opted for a style more generalized ment want any changes made to the because the movie must be told from and linear, and less individualistic, than script? The Secret or The Spooky Bunch . one single point of view. If you keep \"I'm not very satisfied with the style \"They told us to change some details. qualifying your statements, you end up of the film,\" she admits. \"I didn' t find a They said the script had to be as factu- not saying anything.\" way of shooting it that was wholly appro- •ally accurate as possible. But they never priate. Perhaps it was because the sub- imposed any propaganda demands on Perhaps only a filmmaker tossed at ject matter is so strong, the script and me. You know, 'Put in two lines here birth right into-and then right out of- dialogue so carefully written, that I saying how terrible Vietnam is.' Nothing the political epicenter of 20th-century couldn't use an obtrusive visual style. It like that.\" Chinese history could preserve such an imposes its own shots. I found I had to Boat People was made in both of the inviolate armor against political quakes be very very fast in coming to the narra- main Chinese languages, Mandarin and and questionings. For Hui was born in tive point, but very slow in the shots. Cantonese. \"Which means,\" says Hui, Manchuria in 1947, the year of Mao Actually I shot a lot of coverage, but \"it will be distributed in Mainland Tse-tung's Long March, and her family sometimes I just let the whole scene China as well as in the usual movie mar- emigrated to Hong Kong in the same play when we came to the editing. And kets for Hong Kong films. That's Tai- year. when we looked at it, it was much better wan, Malaysia-Singapore, and all the She grew up and was educated in the that way. Chinatowns of the world.\" British crown colony, graduating from \"When I was shooting, I was con- The film has also been signed up for Hong Kong University in 1972 with a stantly frustrated because I could not America, by the newly-formed company master's degree in English and Compar- find an overall style, which I think is a Spectrafilm. There was a possibility, I ative Literature. After two years in Eng- good concept. When I was shooting The suggested to H ui, that Boat People could land at the London Film School, she Secret, I was feeling that although I was create the same kind of stir as Michael returned to Hong Kong to work as assist- very inadequate-it was my first feature Cimino's The Deer Hunter. \"I like The ant to King Hu. \"I only worked in his film-there was a style there that said Deer Hunter,\" Hui says. \"And I quite office for three months,\" she says, \"but what the subject matter said. The frag- I understand what Michael Cimino was I've always greatly admired his films .\" mentation of The Secret is a statement in -1-3





Beyond Kung Fu: Seven Hong Kong Firecrackers King Hu's Legend of the Mountain. ghosts in a deserted fort; a battle of soaring limbs and stylized cries in a Hong Kong is a tiny community ex- vura and sardonic wit (Tsui Hark and bamboo forest lanced by dazzling ploding with the kind of demo- Patrick Tam). shafts of light. But of his other films, graphics that film producers swoon The Fate of Lee Khan (1973) had a over. From a population of 600,000 in • cunning, chess-game plot, and a typi- 1945 it has grown to more than 5 mil- cally astounding action showdown. lion today, forming a big enough regi- King Hu's A Touch of Zen was the The Valiant Ones (1974) flaunted inter- ment of movie customers to allow me- mittent visual bravura in its tale of dium-budgeted films to recoup their forerunner and perhaps the finest rival warlords and pirate bands. And initial costs. (Bigger profits then come flower of the new movement: a Ming Raining and Legend use their wild and from sales to Taiwan, the Philippines, Dynasty costume Epic as strong on beautiful Korean locations to mysti- and other Asian ports of call-and, for philosophy as fisticuffs and composed cal, lyrical effect. ultra-successful movies, the West.) with a dazzling painterly eye for wide- And since most of that Hong Kong screen Images. • population is under 30, and 40 per- cent are under 20, the large cinemas Hu, born in Peking in 1931, is the Allen Fong, 38, sits firmly en- perform to regular capacity business. oldest and longest-working ofthe new directors. He was a supporter of the sconced at the opposite end of the The best-known product from this Communist takeover in China in 1949 seesaw between mysticism and real- British crown colony is the wu xia pian and became a Hong Kong resident ism. He served his apprenticeship in -the martial arts film. More than 800 almost accidentally-stranded in the Hong Kong television, after getting have been produced in Hong Kong colony on a visit when the borders his B.A. in film at the University of since the war, ranging from costumed were closed. He has lived and worked Georgia and his M. F.A. at the Univer- sword-and-swashbuckle to modern- there ever since, making seven fea- sity of Southern California, and like dress kung fu, absorbing and canni- ture films, of which the most recent to Ann Hui he made his name with two balizing a rich diversity of Asian physi- reach the West were Raining in the episodes in a verite-style TV film se- cal arts, from Chinese Opera to Mountain and Legend of the Mountain, ries called Below the Lion Rock. Fong's swordfighting to wrestling. both made in Korea in 1977-78. episodes (Wild Children and Song of Yuen-Chow-Chai) proved him a bril- Until recently, popular Hong Kong His feature debut was Come Drink liantly acute and unsentimental realist cinema was dominated by the Shaw With Me in 1966. But it was with his who could catch the big-eyed expres- Brothers and Golden Harvest, two second film Dragon Gate Inn (1967) sion of slum children caught between companies that pushed the kung fu that his career achieved lift-off. The wonder and mischief, the frozen, stoic boom Westward with such marketable movie was an explosive box-office grief of a bereaved family, or the tiny human firecrackers as Bruce Lee and success in South-East Asia, outgross- truthful details of waterfront poverty. Jackie Chan. But in the last ten years, ing even The Sound of Music . This as Shaw Brothers decelerated and helped to win financing for A Touch of His first feature film, Father and Golden Harvest got stuck in a popular Zen, shot in 1968 and the subject of Son (1980), was financed by Mainland entertainment groove, a host of inde- tribulations and litigation. Hu's pro- China and partly shot there. It pooled pendent production companies have ducer first determined to split the all Fong's strengths in the tale of a helped prove that barnstorming mar- story into two separate full-length shanty-dwelling Hong Kong family tial arts pics are not a Hong Kong cine- movies, then whittled the material and the generational conflict between qua-non. In addition to the innovative down for mass distribution to a single Dad, a paper-shuffling office clerk, cutting and jugglings with time and two-hour feature. The final version and Number One Son, a semi-delin- space of Ann Hui, there could also be shown in the West in 1975 was all one quent who wants to be a filmmaker. thought and grace and beauty of line movie but the footage ran to a near- Again Fong's forte-indeed fortis- (King Hu); passionate and compas- complete three hours. simo-is his handling of children. \"I sionate social realism (Allen Fong); get them to make up their own lines,\" and adventure films totally transfi- None of Hu's later films have Fong says. \"As shooting goes on, they gured by a new aesthetic of visual bra- equaled the extraordinary episodic come to trust me, we become friends, structure ofA Touch ofZen, a slow-mo- and there's no shyness or diffidence in tion relay race with three different front of the camera. With grown-ups \"heroes.\" Nor have they matched as well, I try to allow space for impro- Zen's sumptuous visuals: the war of visation in my films. That way a movie creates its own life inside the stucture you build for it.\" Fong's new- est film, Ah Ying, is due to bow at Western festivals later this year. • After the Big Three of Ann Hui, King Hu, and Allen Fong, the liveli- est young Hong Kong helmers today are the three or four giving a novel 46

twist to wu xia pian form s. itself. But in Boat People the style does things and, I believe, a more realistic Tsui Hark's The Buttel1y Murders not make a statement. It's just a plain one. The film is set in 1978, which (1979) was a magnificent morsel of costumed derring-do, set in an action- narrative. But I still can't think of better means rhat the situarion we're showing packed castle and boasting an inven- tive use of composition and cutting. It ways to shoot it.\" could have changed even now. I re- was balanced on a knife-edge be- • member reading in The Far East Eco- tween lyricism and absurdism. His Boat People is inevitably a movie nomic Review in 1979 a speech by Pham second film Don't PLay With Fire (also known as Dangerous Encounters ofthe which will rattle all the old questions Van Dong to his people, saying that he First Kind) toppled right over the edge and onto the knife. This visceral and about \"What is truth?\" In the back- finds the economy unbearable and that freely chaotic melodrama contained many examples of the ancient art of ground details of the film, Hui admits, the state of corruption musr be revised. disembowelling and caused much tut- tutting among the Hong Kong cen- there are one or two pressure-of-budget And so by admitting it, he means it sors. The unpredictable Hark re- cently fini shed shooting Hong Kong's shortcuts and even one outright howler. might change. most expensive ever spectacular, Zu Warriors ofthe Magic Mountain . \"We discovered that the death of the \"So I'm nor damning the country for- Japanese reporter could never have hap- ever. It's just that I am trying to explain pened the way we showed it. He's run- this particular phenomenon of the boar ning to join the refugee boat, which the people and their fleeing from the coun- girl-the daughter of the family-is al- try, and to make people understand why ready on, and he's carrying the can of they flee. And that has the immediate diesel oil that each refugee had to bring effect of making the Hong Kong people to help pay for the journey, which was a much more sympathetic. So it's a posi- standard practice. The police are firing tive film rather than a negative. Nega- at him from behind, and the diesel fuel tive is the very last thing I want.\" • ignites and explodes, burning him to death. Well, later, people came up to me Any filmgoer still unconvinced that after the screening and said, 'But diesel Ann Hui isn't hopping on the nearest oil isn't flammable like thatl' Sometimes careerist bandwagon by embracing Chi- there are things you find out too late.\" nese ideological dogma should consider Eagle-eyed viewers may also note, the risks she did take in making the film from their design, that the supposedly with Chinese cooperation. She confided American land mines being dug up in to me: \"I might get shot for rhis, but I'll the New Economic Zone are actually say it. In Hong Kong there is a society Chinese. called the Society of Freedom. And ev- But these are vagrant hiccups, not ery film worker, including technicians major mishaps. And they are balanced and especially directors and actors, has by some vivid and horrific details that to join this society for a minimal fee of30 Hui insists are well documented: the Hong Kong dollars a year. If you do not Allen Fong 's Ah Ying. \"chicken farm,\" an execution ground enroll as a member, your name cannot where firing-squad victims are plucked appear on the credits of your movie. Meanwhile, Kirk Wong has made clean by scavengers; and the scene in \"The Society of Freedom is really a the stylish underworld movie The which the family'S prostitute mother political association, because you have Club (for Bang Bang Films!). Patrick kills herself from shame by piercing her to subscribe to the politics ofTaiwan-of Tam (The Sword, 1980; Love Massa- throat with a meat hook. anti-Communist China. And you are not cre, 1980; Nomad, 1982) is a dashing The most ferocious flak Ann Hui will permitted by the Society to go to China poet of the action story. Alex probably receive when Boat PeopLe is to shoot a film , not even an anti-Com- Cheung has hit the big time this yea r screened across the world is for her un- munist or a non-political film. If you do, with TwinkLe TwinkLe LittLe Star, a pop- compromising espousal of the Chinese you are faced with the prospect that not ular special-effects extravaganza. Shu (as opposed to the Soviet) attitude to only will Taiwan not buy your movie but Xuan's The Arch was the hit of this Vietnam. Hui answers vigorously: \" I that they also won't buy any of your yea r's Pesaro Film Festival. have never thought of the film as repre- following movies. Next spring, London's National senting the Chinese point of view. Even \"But we went anyway. I tried to keep Film Theatre will mount a giant retro- if! had thought it, I would still have shot Boat People a secret before the shoot, spective of the Hong Kong New the story the same way, because that is and it created a hell of a lot of trouble for Wave. And in June 1984, the Pesaro how J see it. If I believe that what is said me and my crew. We all have to con- Film Festival will concentrate on is not distorting the truth, then I do not tinue working in the Hong Kong indus- Asian films. Hong Kong turns out feel it is morally wrong. Maybe in the try. Some directors backed away from about 150 films each yea r;and because future, when we have the film distrib- Boat People, but I didn' t, because I felt it is still a British Crown Colony (until uted, I will have to add a 'flip-cut' saying that it was a film I simply must make, 1997 when the lease runs out), they that the events depicted are based on whatever the personal cost. Otherwise I are all sub-titled in English. Hui, Hu , word of mouth from refugees. Then if would not be able to develop as a film- and Fong have lit the way to the new there is any official statement against the maker.\" Hong Kong Cinema. Now it's high film, it might be better. With the billion seats of Mainland time Americans started enjoying the \"But it's not a political film . I always China already pre-sold, and America on fireworks. Why shouldn't we have believe that it isn't the system that mat- the way, chances are good to superb that some fun as well? -H.K. ters in a country but the people who run Ann Hui will develop into a force in it. It's a more optimistic way (Q see cinema, Occidental as well as Oriental. ~ 47

The Manila International Film Festival's palace-cum-mausoleum. by Elliott Stein dinand E. Marcos. President Reagan bulances were not permitted access to supports the agreement, but it is cur- the scene of the disaster until nine hours The Film Center is an uninviting edi- rently receiving opposition from some after the cave-in. (Later, there were bit- fice, stylistically a mix of brutalist members of Congress concerned about ter accusations from survivors that they branch-bank Parthenon and Edward the human rights record of the Marcos had been given little help in digging out Durell Stone embassy. Its harshness jars government. co-workers.) Orders were given to slice with its lovely site, for it is perched on a in half those caught unconscious in the strip of reclaimed land fringing Manila At the Film Center, before the quick-drying porous cement. Had they Bay, not far from the Yacht Club and the movies and between shows, it is custom- been dug out or drilled out whole, con- hydrofoil embarkation for Corregidor, ary to take a stroll around the broad ter- struction would have been further de- where the view is superb and sunsets are race. In addition to its view of the great layed. This graveyard shift claimed well spectacular. bay, the terrace offers a wide choice of over a hundred lives. local food: Kentucky Fried Chicken, When the American fleet, led by Ad- Chicken in a Bikini, Orange Julius, Mc- Weeks later, when the Center was fin- miral Dewey, sailed in here in May Donalds, and Dunkin' Donuts. The ished, an exorcism ceremony was per- 1898, it signaled the end of 300 years of roof of the nearby Holiday Inn glowed formed on its steps, presided over by Spanish rule. The Spanish-American this year with a sign announcing that the highland priests. A pig was sacrificed. War was followed by the Philippine- opening of Sardi's Manila would coin- Officials declared that the troubled American War (4,000 Americans killed, cide with the second Manila Interna- building was at rest-that an invisible and more than 200,000 Filipinos, one- tional Film Festival. winged angel was now posted on every thirtieth of the nation), which lasted floor. from 1899 to 1901. The Islands were • granted independence from the United Those who attended the gala opening States in 1946. This year, a newly nego- This Film Center is the only palais du of the 1982 festival were of the opinion tiated accord was drawn up to reinforce festival which is also a mass mausoleum. that flypaper would have been of more the symbiotic relationship between the Workers had been manning round-the- use than the wings of invisible angels. two countries: the United States will clock shifts for several months in order to The air at the Film Center was thick continue to use the Subic Bay Naval finish the building in time for the open- with thousands of flies. They buzzed Base, home port of the Seventh Fleet, ing of the first MIFF in 1981 when, around dignitaries, who were observed and Clark Air Base, the largest U.S. Air shortly before 3 A.M. on November 17, by television viewers throughout the Force installation in Asia, in return for the roof collapsed. More than 200 per- land shooing off swarms of miniature $900 million in economic and military sons were buried under fast-drying ce- aid to the government of President Fer- ment. A security blanket was immedi- memento morL ately imposed; nothing could be done Last year's MIFF had other crosses to until an official statement, minimizing the accident, had been prepared. Am- bear: a boycott by French film personali- ties, protesting the human rights record 48