VOLUME 07 - NUMBER 03 FALL 1971

an interview with Roger Corman. ROGER photo : Th e Museum CORMAN of Modern Art/ Film Stills Archive. by Charles Goldman Charles Goldman is a free-lance writer and critic. two days on the film , go back to England and then This interview was made in preparation for.his forth- the film would be picked up later. I didn 't have the coming book on Roger Corman . money to shoot the rest of the picture union , which meant I couldn 't direct myself because I was per- CHARLES GOLDMAN: How did you begin as a sonally signed with the unions. So I would say that filmmaker? at one time half the young filmmakers in Hollywood did pieces on THE TERROR . Francis Coppola directed ROGER CORMAN: I started originally as a mes- part of it; Monte Hellman directed part of it; Dennis senger at Fox . I came out of Stanford as an engi- Jacob; Jack Hill ; Jack Nicholson finally directed neer, worked four days and quit. The only way I himself when we ran out of directors; and I think could get into the business was a messenger. I a couple of other guys worked in there. worked up - became a reader - quit - went to Europe-studied in Europe a while-came back- GOLDMAN : You might be called the papa of the wrote-sold a story-took the money from the story jet-propelled film directors. What significance does I sold (i sold the picture to Allied Artists for some- the speed in which you direct a film have for you? where around $4000-3500)-borrowed some more CORMAN : No significance that I'm conscious money-made a picture for $12 ,000 which I pro- of , other than the fact that most of the films I've made duced-took the money from that and made a sec- were very , very low budget pictures. The only way ond picture-made a couple of pictures with AlP to make a film on a low budget is to work quickly and on the third picture simply told them (it was before the money runs out. I've made films for as partially financed by me and partially financed by low as $12 ,000 . (I must admit that was $12 ,000 in them) that I was going to direct as well as produce cash .) With laboratory deferments , the final cost was on the next picture. I started directing at that point. somewhere between $20-30 ,000 . But it's still a very low budget picture. GOLDMAN : Which film was that? CORMAN: FIVE GUNS WEST-which was the first GOLDMAN : Which film was that? picture I directed. CORMAN : That was MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN GOLDMAN : What was your association with THE FLOOR , the first picture I produced. I directed many FAST AND THE FURIOUS? films which cost $30-40 ,000 . THE LITTLE SHOP OF CORMAN : I was the producer of that picture. HORRORS cost , I think , $33-34 ,000 . The majority of my GOLDMAN : Did you have any hand in directing films were done on schedules of five to ten days the film? and budgets from $40-100 ,000. It simply was all the CORMAN : Not really. I set up a little of the racing money there was available. car business because I was interested in that, and GOLDMAN : Can you comment on the collabo- I did some of the second unit stuff. But I didn't direct rative relationship between you and your camera- as such . man and scriptwriter? Do you modify much of the GOLDMAN : How much of THE TERROR did you script? direct? CORMAN : Most of the scripts start with my ideas. CORMAN: I did most of the interiors. What hap- I come up with the original ideas of what we 're going pened was that all the interiors were shot in two to do on the film-bring in a writer-work very closely days on the sound stage that had been used for with him on the treatment, the outline of it-develop THE RAVEN. I didn 't even have the script as a matter what we ' re going to have-then he 'll do the first draft of fact. I had a previous deal with Jack Nicholson, on his own . We ' ll work then on the modifications Dick Miller and Sandra Knight. They were going to of the first draft. With the cameraman , it's almost work two days on the film . Boris [Karloff] would work divided up . I almost always (95% of the time, some- times 100%) pick the sets on the picture . I simply FILM COMMENT 49

THE SECRET INVASION . photo : United Artists. say, \" The camera goes here. I want a 30mm lens. I'm going to dolly from here to here and the actors THE WILD ANGELS . Peter Fonda and Michael J . Pollard. photo : AlP. are going to do this.\" The cameraman then has full charge of lighting . I won 't say anything about where THE SAINT VALENTINE 'S DAY MASSACRE. he is going to set the lights. He will do that, although photo : 20th Century-Fox. before the film starts I'll have a meeting with him to tell him the mood I'm looking for, the type of lighting I want. Eventually he becomes what they refer to in England as a lighting cameraman . He sets the lights. I pick the shots. GOLDMAN: 00 you have a favorite cameraman- one that contributes effectively to your style? CORMAN : For a long time it was Floyd Crosby for a variety of reasons . One, I got along very well with Floyd . And two, he could work very rapidly and give above-par results. A lot of cameramen work rapidly, but you don 't want to see what they photograph. A lot of men give you quality, but you can 't sit around on a low budget and wait for them to do it. Floyd gave me good quality, worked rapidly and got along well with me. He was a good guy. He's been retired a few years now, and I've worked w ith a variety of cameramen. But I've gotten along reasonably well with most of them and would use almost any of them again should the opportunity present itself. GOLDMAN : 00 you take an active part in the editing process? CORMAN : Yes. Each day on the set the script girl makes notes on what I'm shooting , but at the same time makes notes on how I want the film assembled for a rough cut. The cutter is essentially assembling according to my notes during the time we ' re shooting . When we ' re finished , he shows me the rough cut. I then start working with him in the cutting room . I' ll go there in the morning and run one to two reels a day-generally two reels a day-in which I'll make specific statements on how I want the cutting done. He then will work the rest of the day himself to make the actual physical splices. I'll then come in the next day and we ' ll repeat the process. We'll go through the film until I feel the film is right or the release date arrives and we can 't spend any more time. GOLDMAN: Are there any conscious elements you look for in a script? What type of script appeals to you? CORMAN : It varies from time to time . One year or one day, I'm looking for something different. I have no specific plans to direct at this moment, for the reason that I am not positive what I want to do next. I want to do something that has personal meaning for me. At the same time , I'm looking to the market. So ideally what I would like to do is a film that has meaning for me , that may have mean- ing to other people and has a chance at commercial success as well. At the moment I am open as to what I am going to do . GOLDMAN : Have th e styles of any previous film- makers influenced you heavily? CORMAN : No one in particular. I'd say every film I' ve ever seen has influenced me in one way or anothe r, includ ing tho se in which I think I' m certainly not going to do anything like that. I was influenced very much by Eisenstein 'at one time. I like the work 50 FALL 1971

of Kurosawa and of Bergman and Fellini. At one GOLDMAN : Many of the characters in your films time I was very much impressed with the work of are outsiders, people on the fringes of society. Does Alain Resnais : HIROSHIMA MaN AMOUR , LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. Recently I' m not as interested , possibly this indicate a personal concern for the outcasn for reasons of my own . So that , in other words , I'm giving you the commonly accepted great directors. For his search for freedom? I can't say that there was some obscure Czechoslo- CORMAN : It probably does . A lot of what an artist vakian director whose work taught me a great deal. of craftsman does-I prefer the term craftsman-is GOLDMAN : Your films seem preoccupied with partially conscious and heavily unconscious. And the dark side of life. Is this a personal vision of I couldn 't explain it totally, but I think it's related America? Or of society? to my feeling of the universe as being somewhat hostile. I would think in that way a society would CORMAN : It probably is . I wouldn 't push that stand for the universe and man 's relationship to the concept too heavily. But somebody once said society around him would stand , to a certain extent, something ... well let me say it myself. I see man to man 's relationship to the universe. to a certain extent as being adrift in a partially hos- tile, partially indifferent universe. And I see a strug- GOLDMAN: In many of your films these outsiders gle there. In some of the fantasy films , I see an band together to combat society. As you said before, optimistic outlook for man 's attempts to come to in your more contemporary films they are defeated, grips with-call it a human situation. In realistic films , while in your horror / fantasy films they sometimes I see possibly a pessimistic outlook . In THE TRIP I was fairly optimistic . I had taken an LSD trip before overcome. Is there a functional relationship involved the film and instead of seeing man in a hostile universe, I saw man in a loving universe. And I here? reflected that in the film . But AlP cut the film after CORMAN : It wasn 't conscious. It kind of grew I was finished to give it a negative look because they became worried about certain outcries against out of itself. After I was aware of a little bit of this, drugs. They changed the ending and took certain I thought to myself-and this is somewhat Monday things out of the film to change· it so that it wouldn 't morning quarterback-that this (the outsider, the be construed as a plug for LSD . I can understand struggle against hostile forces) represented uncon- their point of view but I think they hurt the film pretty scious forces in myself. In a fantasy film these forces badly . can be overcome and there will be as it were a happy ending . When I'm dealing with more realistic films, GOLDMAN: You 've been quoted as saying that I probably look at it more realistically and say, \" No! the dark side of your films may represent a possible I don 't think we ' re going to overcome this .\" This is why-again getting back to GAsss-there is a little vision of the future . Is this more in the form of a bit of this in GASSS. GASSS is an attempt to look at prophecy or a warning? certain aspects of the youth movement and an at- tempt to move to a better way of life. I end there CORMAN : I would think possibly as both . My with something I probably believe , which is that newest film , GASSS , which is going to open at the there is a struggle and that it is possible to overcome end of the retrospective here is something in the but not necessarily probable. It's not like some of nature of a warning and a prophecy. It's a very the youth films that have come out in the last couple interesting film . It was a very inexpensive film. It was of years that have been an unquestioning accept- shot with a skeleton crew, with a cast of almost ance of all the values of the youth culture. I've just entirely amateur actors. Only the leads were profes- been around too long to accept anything unques- sionals. It opened at the Edinburgh Film Festival last tioningly. This would be a kind of questioning ac- year, and I got a cable from the organizers of the ceptance of many of the values but not all of this festival saying , \" GASSS explodes . Five minutes stand- culture . For that reason I' m not certain GASSS will ing ovation .\" I thought , \" Boy, I've really got one .\" be a success despite the initial reception at Edin- But AlP hates the picture . They dislike it intensely burgh. Also the film is a little flawed in some areas . and they would not give it a New York opening. Since it's a very inexpensive picture , they 've been GOLDMAN: Another theme that recurs frequently playing it around the country in drive-ins and small in your films is the impossibility of man 's returning towns where it's been doing only moderate business. The projection is that it will break even and possibly to a state of innocence. Can you comment on this make a tiny profit They don 't want to spend the money to open in New York because it's very ex- idea? pensive to open right in New York . They feel it will CORMAN : I would just give you the title of a not do well here and will turn a possibly slight loser into a slight failure. Because of the retrospective Thomas Wolfe novel , You Can Never Go Home, if we have an essentially free opening here . However, that was the title. I think there is a progression in I'm not quite as optimistic about the picture as I all nature to greater and greater complexity . As we was after the news of the Edinburgh Festival. The start from a one-celled an imal and move up to fact that its been playing around to only moderate man-and who knows where we ' re going after audiences may indicate some weaknesses in the this-and as the culture of man starts on a very film. On the other hand , it could mean that it's been simple basis of eating , sleeping , fucking and staying playing to the wrong audiences. alive, the culture becomes increasingly more com- plex . And I think there is always the desire to go back to a simpler mode of existence. But I do not think it can be done. I think you must gain in com- plexity and sophistication and make this work for you rather than yearn-as some elements of our society are doing today-yearn for an earlier and FILM COMMENT 51

THE TRIP. Peter Fonda. photo : AlP. more simplistic and possibly nicer way of living. GOLDMAN : Why are your films getting bloodier BLOODY MAMA. photo: AlP. and bloodier? VON RICHTOFEN AND BROWN. CORMAN : The world is getting bloodier and John Ph i lI ip Law. photo : Uni ted Artists. bloodier. The violence in the streets of America is as great as it's been in history. I know there has been violence continually, particularly the Civil War riots , but at least during my lifetime the concept of violence was not much thought of when I was young. We did not think of it. I remember Art Buchwald writing a column in Paris before he came back to write in Washington .... And it was a column about his coming back. And he would write about political violence in America the way it took place in France. And the whole point was that political violence didn 't take place in America . It was unknown here ... Whereas there were riots very often in France . A few years later Buchwald is here . And he's writing about real violence in the streets. I think the cou ntry has become more overtly violent. GOLDMAN : Do you find that you have less inter- ference with your films now than previously? CORMAN : No! More . It's very strange , but as I find myself better known and more established, I find myself having more interference. A few years ago , when I was not well known, I was making less expensive pictures and I had much more freedom . The key there is the fact that the pictures were less expensive, and the companies didn 't really care that much . I had a good record-still have-for the ma- jority of my films made money. Someone once wrote an article saying that every picture I ever made, made money. That's not quite true. But almost all of them did make money. At one time I had a string of 27 consecutive successful pictures, all made for between $50-100 ,000 . Well the people backing me, at that point, hardly cared what I did . They all made money. All they wanted to know was what is the film about? What is the budget? I had a great deal of freedom . Now I'm spending more money and I'm dealing possibly on slightly more controversial sub- jects . So the interference grows in proportion to that. GOLDMAN : Onward to GASSS. GASSS seems rela- tively disorganized compared to most of your earlier films . It has a shoestring plot; many sequences merely linked together by blaring rock music; and some dialogue which escapes comprehension. Was this an experimental film on your part? CORMAN : It was a partially experimental film . I didn 't have the completed script when I started shooting , but winter was coming and I wanted to do the film . I was going to be shooting in New Mexico . I actually shot in December and to wait one more month would have put me in January and I could not have made the film . To wait till next summer would have dated the material I was dealing with , so I wanted to bring the film out early. But it has no meaning now. It's a year and a couple of months later and it's still waiting to come out in the major cities . So there was some sense of disorganization and experi- mentation as we went along . I think one of the great problems is that the film is far too intellectual. Other people have told me that they think it's a meaning- 52 FALL 1971

less film . They may well be both right. It is the most GAS-S-S-S. Bruce Karcher. all photos : AlP. intricate and the most organized intellectual film that GAS-S-S-S. I have ever made. I was so careful to keep each GAS-S-S-S. Alan Braunstein. concept deep behind a humorous look at it. I didn 't want at any time to allow the preachings of what I was saying to come across too heavily and dis- turb the flow of the picture and its humor. In my desire to keep it in the background , I may have kept it so far in the background that I'm the only person who is going to know what is in every scene. A simple little scene that may be on the screen for a minute or two would be the result of hours and hours of agonizing work between the writer and myself and sometimes the actors-to work out the basic meanings of what we were saying. Everything stands for something in that picture . As far as I know there isn 't a wasted shot or a wasted character. Everything has some meaning or some comment. Frankly it is too big on civilization . It is too grandiose. Recognizing that the film could become pretentious, I pushed it way down. And as I say, it's possibly faded someplace into the background and is lost some- where. GOLDMAN: What would you say GASSS is aboun CORMAN : I'll just comment in a general way because what you start off to do in a film is not always what it ends up to be. What GASSS is about ... ? It is about change and progress in the world . And it is about that the change for the better is not automatic and is not easy. It can only be gained, I believe , if one is fully aware of the mistakes of the past, of the problems of the past. To move forward , one must move carefully through the pitfalls and the traps and the ways one can fall back-until one arrives at an ending which may represent a better state but which may be illusory at that. In other words, it's a somewhat cynical statement that progress is possible . Now whether any of that comes out, I am not at all positive. GOLDMAN : In your role as artist / capitalist, which comes first? CORMAN : It varies from time to time. I don 't know and therefore am not qualified to answer the ques- tion . GOLDMAN : Although you are widely known to help young filmmakers get a start in the film busi- ness, some complain of being grossly overworked and underpayed. Is this your way of resolving the artist/ capitalist paradox? CORMAN : There is no particular paradox . Some people have misremembered what actually took place . On the other hand , I'm friends with practically all these guys. I got married in December and just about everybody who was in town who had worked with me was there: Francis Coppola, Monte Hellman , Danny Haller, Peter - no Bogdanovich was out then-but a number of the directors who I had worked with were there. Jack Nicholson, who wrote and first produced with me but directed for some- body else, was there . They sometimes joke about that , but my feeling is this. I'm not a corporation . I'm not a public source of capital. The money I have, I made by going out. I inherited no money. The money I made, I made myself. And if I'm putting FILM COMMENT 53

my earnings into a picture-if I'm going to back a the end of Sir Galahad , Achilles and whatever. Floyd young filmmaker-I 'm going to pay him a small amount of money and give him an opportunity. He Brown, the man who shot him down , was a wheat gets a living wage out of the project and the oppor- tunity to make his film . And he can progress from farmer from Saskatchewan who was so nervous there if he is good. What I get out of it are certain psychic satisfactions in helping somebody and pos- about flying in wartime that he developed a stomach sibly making a profit off the film . I think it's a reason- able bargain . And nobody I've ever offered that ulcer and had to drink a quart of milk before he bargain to has turned me down . It's the other way around. I'm besieged by people who come to take took off. And I felt that symbolically this was the this bargain . Many people have suggested to me that when I make this bargain, I should make mul- end of one concept of warfare and the beginning tiple picture deals. What is the point of financing Monte Hellman, Francis Coppola or Peter Bogdano- of another-that the last of the true knights were vich on one picture and when they get big I have no hold on them? That would be an unfair bargain. the pilots of the last World War. Again , possibly it In other words , to me, it 's fair on one picture. The attempt to lock them up for the future on the basis doesn 't come off quite as well as I expected . I think of what I have done once, I do not do. one of the reasons for this is that I' m always careful GOLDMAN : Do they know their wage and labor requirements in advance? and maybe too careful not to intrude these ideas CORMAN: Oh yes. It's always a firm deal in con- too much . SO VON RICHTHOFEN may be accepted-if tract. it is accepted-primarily as flying action . GOLDMAN: Do you have any unrealized projects? CORMAN : A few. ROBERT E. LEE was a script I GOLDMAN : In recent interviews you 've stated developed and THE GREAT PEACE SCARE was what I thought a great idea and developed two scripts that you wished you could go back to the old days on that and dropped it. But most of the scripts I've developed , I've shot. when a film could be made in two and a half days. GOLDMAN : What Corman projects are in the wings? CORMAN: Right! They could still be made . CORMAN : I've got a new distribution company called New World Pictures which is about six months Whether I could do it, I don't know ... That's a kind old and in which we ' re backing a number of young filmmakers . At the moment New World Pictures is of nostalgia, wishful-thinking thing on the basis that the most active production company in the United States. We have four pictures shooting as of today pressures mount up. I also think that maybe what and three pictures in the cutting room . So we have seven pictures actually being made at this time . And I've given you is only part of the reason why. Maybe there is no other company in Hollywood-and I don't think in New York-that's sending that many films . some people are distance runners and others are I'm not actively producing anyone of them but each has my supervision in a general way. A number of sprinters. I can key myself up emotionally to work directors are doing their first film. Others are direc- tors doing their second or third film . very hard for a brief period of time. But when you GOLDMAN : How are you coming with VON RICHTHOFEN AND BROWN? get into a motion picture like THE ST . VALENTINE'S CORMAN : I finished . I finished cutting it last week as a matter of fact. It's down now for sound and DAY MASSACRE-which was the longest picture I've music cutting , and I'll dub it around the end of March. I think its scheduled for release around the ever shot (seven weeks and a couple of days)-by end of June. GOLDMAN: Was this the most expensive picture the end of the picture I was very weary. you ever made? GOLDMAN : Do you find yourself becoming more CORMAN : Except for THE ST . VALENTINE 'S DAY MASSACRE . This picture cost about $950 ,000 to analytical, more critical with reference to your own make, plus some charges from a previous contract with United Artists which has nothing to do with this films? picture. But by contract they were able to apply them over. I think it's a good action picture which says CORMAN : Probably. That's one of the reasons something about the changing face of warfare. My concept is that von Richthofen represents the last films have become more difficult to make. It was of the knights. When he was shot down , that was more fun . You said I'd been quoted as saying that I'd like to go back to the quicker way of shooting. And that probably means going back to a more fun way of making motion pictures. When we did the little comedieS-LiTTLE SHOP OF HORRORS in two days and one night of silent shooting , BUCKET OF BLOOD in five days, and CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA in six-everybody worked hard . We took the work seriously, but we weren't overwhelmed by it, unless overwhelmed by the schedule. So there was an air of camaraderie and pleasantness on the set of those films . And I enjoyed that, and I think it showed in those films. I like the films. They're unpretentious. They ' re amusing . They're nice films . GOLDMAN : Which of your films are you most satisfied with? CORMAN : I'm not completely satisfied with any film that I've made. And that's one of the reasons why I will have a burst of activity, making a lot of films at one time and then stop. The reason I stop is that I simply become discouraged with the films . GASSS might be a case in point-an extremely in- tricate, thought-out film . A great deal of care went into what I was saying and how I was going to say it. The finished picture does not evidently make all these points . It discourages me and so for a little while I prefer to step away. And when I step away, I still stay active-I work as a producer. Directing is very hard and very painful. Producing is easy. I can do it without really thinking about it. 11111111 54 FALL 1971

Flllm F~ OII~111 5 and the simple wish-fulfillment of Frank Capra and his MR . DEEDS GOES TO TowN-not to mention the multi- Joe RdomJon directed IF I HAD A MILLION , the wish-fulfillment film for on all time. The common theme seemed to be that the money and property demons had gotten us into this monkey ~Winefj mess, and if we can make them look silly for an hour and a half we won't feel quite so victimized . Which ~A is just why the money and property demons put up the capital to finance MR . DEEDS GOES TO TOWN and This is an excerpt from Joe Adamson 's manic and IF I HAD A MILLION . monumental study of the Marx Brothers which will be published by Simon & Schuster next year. The Marx Brothers' theme was more basic , and much bleaker. \" Everybody,\" says Groucho, \" thinks Apparently one of the most inviting aspects of writing he 's an individual and everybody else is nothing. \" a history of the Marx Brothers ' career is the opportunity MONKEY BUSINESS is the cinema 's strongest expression to brush off their first three original films in one subordi- of that belief. It establishes the Marx Brothers once nate clause . \" After they made MONKEY BUSINESS , HORSE- and for all as the artists of anti-art-that is , while the FEATHERS, and DUCK SOUP ,\" is the approach they all conventional role of the artist is to impose order on take-as if to say, \" once they finished their tea and the chaos of life, the Marxes take what order there had a few crumpets with jam ...\" And yet, whenever is iri life and impose chaos on it. a critic discusses \"the films of the Marx Bros.,\" he is describing precisely these three pictures , or which- In any other comedy about stowaways , the gags ever one of them he has happened to see recently. would all be about hiding from the captain and eluding All three films , which bear a great family likeness to the first mate, not directly confronting them and telling each other on account of common paternity, are pos- them what you think of them right to their face. Accord- sessed of an upsetting combination of the bizarre and ing to Harpo, \" People all have inhibitions and hate the mundane that makes them stand out, not only in them. We just ignore them . Every man wants to chase relation ' to the more conventional Marx films following a pretty girl if he sees one. He doesn 't-I do. Most and preceding them , but the whole pile of Hollywood people at some time want to throw things around reck- oatmeal surrounding them. Like the Tenniel drawings lessly. They don 't-but we do. We 're sort of a safety for ALICE IN WONDERLAND , they have the essence of valve through which people can blow off steam, \" Into something antiquated, buried, and exhumed, mixed with a world of hungry bread lines and depressing headlines, the taste of worlds unknown. They bear faint resem- a world of rules and conventions, a world of stop lights blance to program fillers or formula films , they always and picket fences , burst this beloved safety valve. seem to be trying for something, and even when they MONKEY BUSINESS became one of the biggest hits of don't succeed they are breaking new ground , experi- the season, menting, r.eaching, panting , running , shouting , striving for infinity. And when they do succeed there are mo- MONKEY BUSINESS was released toward the end of ments of rarely echoed brilliance that are triggers to 1931 , the same year as Charlie Chaplin 's sweet and the impossible. lovely CITY LIGHTS. The difference is obvious right away. MONKEY BUSINESS is riddled with a mood of unabated There's no point in even discussing MONKEY BUSI- rebellion and out-and-out revolt. Chaplin, like most NESS , for example , unless we take the effect of mood filmmakers , appeals to our sympClthies. MONKEY BUSI- into account. There was a mood dominating the early NESS appeals to our drives. 30 's that affected everything that went on ; it clearly outstripped whatever influence anything else may have Hardly have five minutes of the film elapsed before had , like the weather, or politics, or religion , or even we are aware of this. sex. In its deeper moments it might have been termed despair. On good days it worked its way up to discour- In COCOANUTS and ANIMAL CRACKERS, the pho- agement. Very often it was the basic reflex reaction tographed stageplays immediately preceding MONKEY of hunger. The Great Depression was an economic BUSINESS , the Marxes were four men in funny clothes term, but it was also, inadvertently, a pun . Everyone who were perfectly satisfied to crack jokes and do silly had their brighter moods, of course, but they usually things . In MONKEY BUSINESS they are ruthless gnomes kept them locked away in a chest until some day when from altogether another realm. On Broadway , they were they could use them. The Movie Industry was kept busy strapped down by all the restrictions prosperity and turning out images of spectacle and wealth to drug the stage bring with them , In COCOANUTS, Groucho was people, like novocaine, into losing track of what their even burdened with running a Florida hotel. The glory lives were like. As for coming up with a clue to how of MONKEY BUSINESS is that all four of them run nothing to go out and face those lives , it wasn 't much help. but amok. Typical of 30's comedy was the desperation of Laurel They are stowaways on an ocean liner, and each and Hardy , the sneering malevolence of W. C. Fields , is instilled with the idea that he has not only as much right on the ship as any of the paying passengers , but a great deal more. Groucho wreaks vengeance on the captain for the rotten life he 's had for two days in a barrel. \" Are these your gloves?\" he says, interrupting the officer in the middle of a boast. \" I found them in your trunk.\" (After only five minutes of the cyclonic Marx Brothers, the captain looks like six feet of premed- itated bluff. He spends all his time wearing an insignia on his shoulder, but I' ll bet he sleeps with his hands between his knees like everybody else.) Groucho brow- beats the man for five merciless minutes , and then in a moment of unwilling condescension offers him his gloves back. When the captain is so nervy as to accept, Groucho starts in again. \" You would take them , FILM COMMENT 55

wouldn 't you?\" he says, as if he knew all about the with abandon (having had no abandon to play along man , and then shouts , \" Keep away from my office! \" with ever since she got married) . Then , just as her for a parting shot, as he disappears into the captain 's sorrows are half-drowned, she rescues them again and office . All the while the captain reacts less with rage lays them dripping on the table for his comiseration than with an unsettled incredulity. He hasn't just been and sympathy. More puns. \" I want life, I want gaiety, insulted , he's had his whole world view invalidated . I want music! \" she screams, enumerating exactly the wild desires Groucho rattled off a few minutes ago to After that, the scene in which Groucho and Chico a disinterested captain. They both find themselves, share the captain 's lunch is doubly outrageous . Grou- Bonnie-and-Clyde fashion , in the middle of an early- cho , who has just confessed to spending the cruise Depression rut. Before they get around to dancing, they in the hold , breaks into the captain 's quarters, takes stretch things out delectably by feigning reticence , the one remaining chair at the table , and orders the arranging settlements , and finding in their absurdities captain to give his to Chico. The captain , reflecting loopholes of logic . .. in other words , by making an the popular view of figures of authority, is an officious, afternoon of it. dimwctted person who tries to run a taut ship but hasn 't got a taut in his head ; gradually it gets through to him Having established a perfect rapport, Groucho that these hungry fellows might be the stowaways; moves in to culminate the affair with a well-aimed kiss , ominously he announces his intention to begin to sus- and finds monogamistic morality standing in his way. pect them , while they sit there and eat his lunch. \" One Angry monogamistic morality. With a gun . When he of them goes around with a black moustache! \" he opens his eyes, there stands Alky Briggs, ready to do declares, glowering at Groucho. When Groucho makes him in . a half-hearted funny reply , the captain is even good enough to repeat the straight line and give him a chance Now, how many alternatives does a situation like to come up with a better answer. Apparently this is that offer you? Groucho utilizes twenty-three out of a all so new to him he has no idea how to cope with possible none. Caught red-handed, staring down the the situation. barrel of death , no physical or logical escape at his disposal , his first response is to rebuke his adversary . Harpo eludes the first mate by crashing a puppet Referring to the intrusion as \" an outrage ,\" he explains show disguised as a puppet. He plays Punchinello to indignantly that he is \"not in the habit of making a hand-made Judy, and soon it becomes hard to tell threats \" but that his immediate response is going to the real puppets from the unreal Harpo; so hard, in be \" a letter about this in the Times tomorrow morning.\" fact , that his pursuer (Tom Kennedy) begins to feel that he must be part of the show too. By the time he catches Briggs ' only answer is \" You won 't read it. 'Cause sight of Harpo, he has lost sight of what he's supposed I'm going to lay you out pretty.\" to be doing , and he jabs Harpo 's rear end mischievously with a pin to get a laugh out of the audience. At one Well , it 's in the bag! Groucho is up against a sitting point the captain grabs Harpo's leg and begins to pull duck! Not only is Alky Briggs a gangster, stuck in the it. Tom Kennedy runs around behind him and pulls role of a gangster, accustomed solely to gangster situ- Harpo's leg too . Then Harpo runs around and pulls ations and gangster responses, but he is a movie gang- Harpo 's leg . That's when you realize it 's not Harpo's ster, choked in the dust of gangster cliches , and leg . It's Harpo pulling their leg . doomed to go on mouth ing the same inane gangster words forever. It's not hard to beat an opponent like Another of the officers, sending his subordinates this ; all it takes is a little versatility. Groucho begins off to \" look up on B deck\" for the stowaways, lets Harpo babbling nonsense; he utters a long string of homilies, and Chico shave off his moustache, right from under vagarisms, and non-sequiturs; his voice goes up, his his nose. voice goes down; he wanders back into the closet, he duc ks out of it again ; he changes the subject , he The first twenty minutes of MONKEY BUSINESS is four changes the object, he changes the preposition . Rea- comedians and a boat full of straight men . Like any listically, of course , he could be gunned down in a code of accepted behavior, the drab routine of the ship minute. But by the rules of the cinema , the victim has makes no allowance for such free-spirited renegades. to deliver the proper lines first. He can 't be shot until They tend to disregard routines, show them up for what he 's said, \" Don 't shoot! Don 't shoot! \" or \" Layoff, Alky , they are, and snafu their functions beyond repair. And it 's not what you think! \" So there stands Alky, delivering so , like any code of behavior, it demands nothing more cliche after cliche, waiting for his cue, and off goes urgently than to hunt them down. Groucho on a whirlwind of nonsense, leaving him stunned. In a very brief span of time , the fire is going , the pump is primed , and the stage is set for a climax . What That's the Marx Brothers for you , coupling jokes one follows, Groucho's confrontation with the gangster Alky after the other like railroad cars. You find yourself stuck Briggs , is one of the si x or eight priceless gems left at the crossing fascinated, unable to do anything but to the world by these spasmodically brilliant comedians. watch them all roll past. How many ways can there be to stall when somebody 's got a gun at your head? Alky is having a vicious argument with his wife Thel- Groucho must have smart answers for everything , some ma Todd. Groucho, hunted by Tom Kennedy , charges of them funny because they integrate so perfectly with in with some drycleaning in his hand , a perfect stranger, the situation , some of them funny because they don 't and says , \" Pardon me wh ile I step into the closet. \" relate to anything at all. As no conceivable reaction would be adequate , they ignore him altogether. Only after Alky leaves does his MONKEY BUSINESS goes on and on after this scene , wife, sharing some of the attributes of the captain , allow and some of it is awfully good , but there 's nothing it her gradually dawning awareness of his presence to can do again to top all that. In everyone of their best evolve into something resembling suspicion. \" What are sequences, the Marx Brothers have this quality of insis- you doing the the closet?\" she demands. \" Nothing,\" tent consistency, where the wisecracks keep coming whispers Groucho softly . \" Come on in .\" and won 't stop, where the puns and the sight gags battle for attention , where the illogic carries you along They engage in one inn ing of ring-around-the-closet with its seeming logic and then dumps you in alien in order to get to know each other, he punn ing and territory and walks away, where the real crosses into extemporizing by way of introduction , she playing along 56 FALL 1971

the unreal and then back again so often that you doubt MONKEY BU SINESS. your own sanity less than you mistrust it. These mo- Gro ucho and Chico ments, rare though they are, are magic ; there are few Marx. all photos: moments on film that can match them, and none that Museum of Modern can top them . Art/ Film Stills Arc hive. To director Norman McLeod can be attributed the Groucho and air of easy fantasy that colors the film (he was one Thelma To dd . of no less than four cartoonists engaged in the project) , the light, apparently effortless atmosphere in which the Chi co and Harpo. madness all takes place , and the smooth integration of this whole pack of divergent loose ends. Directorial Thelma Todd , control is most evident in certain shots : the scene of Harry Woods and the sa xophone improvisation , for instance, where Grouch o. spontaneous applause bu rsts out of nowhere, or the great single shot of Harpo riding the puppet's wagon FILM COMMENT 57 down the ship's hallway, wearing a mask on the back of his head , honking his horn . But, true to form , it is the Marxes ' personality that comes through . The movie is all theirs , there are more comedy routines than can be recorded , at least one of them is doing something every minute , and when there are two or three at once there are unexpected cuts to the other one, busy with something else. The bitterness of Depression sarcasm, the non-stop comedy of a platoon of gagmen, the newfound cinematic mobil- ity, and the incredible cartoon quality of some of the images are all added to the established non-pattern of the Marx Brothers to create a wi lly-nilly, pell-mell film. ConSidering it was the first movie for everyone on its rostrum , it had no right turning out so good . In a 1957 interview , Charlie Chaplin mentioned a routine he had always wanted to do. \" Then there 's this gag ,\" he said , \" about the man who goes to a very pompous dinner party . Everything goes wrong for him . The butler gets his name wrong ; his neighbor at table drops butter on his coat; the serving maid pours soup down his neck. He suffers it all with a sm ile and polite reassu rances : 'Oh , please don 't bother-it's quite all right! ' Then finally, after the last indignity, he goes ber- serk, runs wildly round the room, breaking the china, scaring the guests, and, at last, setting fire to the place. \" This is the routine that the Marx Brothers spent their lives doing . Except, of course , that Marx Brothers mov- ies all begin just after the last indignity has been inflict- m~. MONKEY BUSINESS 1931 , Paramount, 77 minutes director Norman McLeod; producer Herman J. Mankie- wicz ; original screenplay S . J. Perelman and Will B . Johnstone; additional dialogue Arthur Sheekman; pho- tography Arthur L. Todd. CAST: The Stowaways Groucho Marx Harpo Marx Lucille Chico Marx Joe Helton Zeppo Marx Gibson Thelma Todd Mary Helton Rockcliffe Fellows Alky Briggs Tom Kennedy The Captain Ruth Hall Second Mate Harry Woods Manicurist Ben Taggart Opera Singer Otto Fries Evelyn Pierce Maxine Castle

sFlllm FAVOII~III in the decadent decades to follow. Terry 's vivacious innocence seems to help him remember it: \" If you wish Richord Corlif} long enough in your mind , and if you wish strong on enough in your heart, and if you keep on wishing long enough and strong enough ... \" Terry interrupts, pi- Rrbiuio quantly: \" You get what you want for Christmas?\" The first theme suggests Michel's European fatalism , the Remember second Terry 's American optimism . That Terry is given the first song and Michel the second evokes both her Delmer Daves spent most of his long screenwriting reservations about falling in love with a playboy and career at Warner Brothers. While the studio evolved his hope that he has found the woman who can trans- from a si x-day-week sweat shop in the Thirties to a form him from a flirtatious home-wrecker into a faithful Seven-Arts subsidiary in the Sixties , Daves played it husband . the company way, an attitude which some current critics mistake for classicism. The early pictures Daves Both Terry and Michel are technically \" engaged \" wrote for Frank Borzage (such as FLIRTATION WALK and to other people. But if she marries her lustreless boss, SHIPMATES FOREVER) and Leo McCarey (LOVE AFFAIR , Ken , it will be for convenience ; and if he marries his remade as AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER) were just as de- colorless fiancee , Lois, it will be for money . Neither lirious, if not so hilarious, as his own efforts to revive opportunity is precisely exalting . Both Terry and Michel an embalmed genre would be a quarter of a century will still be searching-for the love they eventually find later. It's just that the world-and the film world-had in each other . spun wildly off a course that Daves was still travelling. Without his knowing it, the craftsman had become Michel is characterized by three radio broadcasters camp . We respond to his best films (and the two AFFAIRS- in the opening scenes as a playboy, impure and simple . to-remember represent his very finest work) with an Our knowledge of movie conventions alerts us to the admiration inextricably mixed with nostalg ia. If the nos- strong probability that he and Terry w ill wind up to- talgia demeans Daves ' contributions , it also makes them gether, but for this to happen Michel will need to be more memorable. either reformed (if he really is nothing but a playboy) or rehabilitated (i f he is a good boy gone bad) . The Some remakes are superior to the original film , as latter case applies here . Like Senator Paine in MR . SMITH is HI S GIRL FRIDAY to THE FRONT PAGE. Some are inferior, GOES TO WASHINGTON , like Rick and Renault in CASA- as is BUNDLE OF JOY to BACHELOR MOTHER . This applies BLAN CA, Michel has an idealist's past: he was an altar even when the scripts are nearly identical, and the boy, he was a gifted pianist, he was a talented painter. difference can be fairly easily traced to directors and Even as a lover Michel was idealistic. actors . McCarey is one of the few filmmakers who has remade an earlier film very closely. (Hitchcock made TERRY: I imagine you've known quite a few women, important changes in his second version of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH , for example , and when Hawks ha ven 't you? Or maybe few is the wrong word . . . ? remade BALL OF FIRE it became a Danny Kaye musical , (He nods.) And I gather you haven 't much re sp ect for although the dialogue stayed pretty much the same .) them . .. (He shakes his head.) But of course, you 've Because McCarey treated his familiar material with always been fair in your judgment . . . something more than the contempt Hawks showed for BALL OF FIRE when remaking it , and because Cary Grant MICHEL: I 've been more than fair. I idealize them . and Deborah Kerr were fully as palatable and compati- Everv woman I meet I put up there . .. (holding hand ble in AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER as Charles Boyer and up). But the longer I know her . . . the better I kn o w Irene Dunne had been in LOVE AFFAIR , the two versions her . .. and the better I know her . .. (His hand has of Daves ' script are almost equally successful, though dropped below the table. He looks at it, lifting tablecloth they are hardly identical. to see; then shrugs .) The films ' counterpoint themes , as well as their two Though masquerading as the world-weariness of the possible solutions , are expressed in the pair of songs continental lover, Michel's attitude is not too different that run through LOVE AFFAIR . One is \" Plaisir d'Amour \" from that of the repressed American Catholic ad o les- ( \" The joys of love in one short moment pass ; / The cent-the disillusioned altar boy-who believes that a girl pain of love all my life will grieve me \" ) , sung by the is frigid if she says no and nymphomaniacal if she says heroine, Terry McKay, on what she describes as \" the yes . One imagines Michel 's statement delighting the loveliest day I've ever known .\" It portends a long , tragic same audience that would later find McCarey 's THE epilogue to her shipboard romance with the notorious BELLS OF ST . MARY 'S and MY SON JOHN to their taste . ladies'-man , Michel Marnay. The other theme , \" Wishing Nevertheless, it adroitly establishes Michel as more of Will Make It So ,\" had been composed by Michel when a Don Qui xote than a Don Juan ; and Hollywood always he was a child-prodigy pianist, and all but forgotten preferred heroic vulnerability (Qui xote) to pathetic ve- nality (Juan). AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER is suffused with the lush musi c and luscious c olor of so many Fo x CinemaScope travelogues of the middle and late Fifties . The opule nce of the production suits Grant's impeccable coiffure, clothes and charms to a tee , while Deborah Kerr's smile , unalterably ironic, suggests bemused accept- ance of the fact that the physical nature of the film favors her co-star, even as th e matter-of-fact mise-en- scene tends to validate her own earthy aristocracy. The production of LOVE AFFAIR is more restrained , though neither bleak nor really austere. There 's less musical underscoring than in most McCarey romances , and this makes the characters a bit less sure of them- selves and the film less deterministic. In many Holly- wood tear-jerkers, the music seems contrived not only 58 FALL 1971

to inform the audience of the actors' motivations and LOVE AFFAIR . Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer. to cue in the application of handkerchiefs , but also to drive the characters relentlessly down a river of plot photo : Muse um of Modern Art/Film Stills Arc hive. to a predestined docking spot in each other's arms. The absence of violins trilling seductively in the back- ·Iudicrous shallows of the weepie and emerged de- ground of LOVE AFFAIR deprives Michel of one of the liriously triumphant-and the last time Hollywood had accoutrements of seduction , makes him less over- the strength to believe in the stuff that made it great. 11111111 powering and thus more likable. Michel's reputation is practically an albatross around his necking , and it LOVE AFFAIR can be assumed that he is retiring into marriage (with a woman who calls him \" Michael \" !) simply to escape 1939, RKO-Radio, 87 minutes the boring routine of conquest without involvement, and not to use his fiancee 's philanthropy to finance more director and producer Leo McCarey;screenplay Delmer philandering . Daves and Donald Ogden Stewart; from a story by Boyer could easily have let his winsome vulnerability be understood as a pose that makes him all the more Mildred Cram and Leo McCarey (and, uncredited, attractive , and his interest in Irene Dunne could have been taken as an artist 's response to a fresh challenge Delmer Daves); photography Rudolph Mate; editors Ed- instead of an expression of his search for a savior . But his balance is perfect, giving Michel just enough ward Dmytryk and George Hiveley; songs B. G. charm for the audience to find him worthy of its trust. Miss Dunne is hearty , playful , morally confident as befits DeSylva, Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. her character's Kansas upbringing ; whereas Miss Kerr, who is supposed to be from Boston (invariably used CAST: as the home of British actors who play American roles, just as American actors who play Englishmen invariably Irene Dunne Terry McKay come from Canada), has the reserve and the resilience typical of the finest cultivated Easterners. Charles Boyer Michel Marnet What Boyer and Dunne , Grant and Kerr all possess Maria Ouspenskaya Grandmother Janou is the power to convey conviction. An actor once said that the two most difficult phrases to read meaningfully Lee Bowman Ken Bradley were \" I love you\" and \" I believe in God .\" McCarey 's actors sell both these emotions beautifully in the de- Astrid Allwyn Lois Clarke manding scene in the chapel of Boyer / Grant's grand- mother. The visit to Janou 's chapel unites the three Maurice Moscovich Maurice Colbert positive strands of our hero 's life: his religion (lapsed), his painting (dormant) , and his love for Terry (budding) . AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER McCarey, in his best films , was able to make religious belief believable and \" cute\" Hollywood children tolera- 1957, 20th Century-Fox, 119 minutes ble. Few other directors could skate so close to propa- ganda and bathos and end up with ankles straight and director Leo McCarey; producer Jerry Wald ; screenplay poise intact. Delmer Daves and Leo McCarey; from a story by Perhaps even more demanding is the final revelation scene , in which Boyer / Grant discovers that Terry , who Mildred Cram and Leo McCarey (and, uncredited, had planned to meet and marry him on the top floor of the Empire State Building six months after their Delmer Daves); photography Milton Krasner (Cinema- shipboard romance , had been hit by a car and crippled on her way to the assignation . Through no fault of Scope and De Lu xe Color) ; art dire c tors Lyle R. Wheeler Boyer's , the Grant version is superior. Grant has ambled through the film with such assured sophistication that and Jack Martin Smith; editor James B. Clark; music his ultimate display of vulnerability comes as a poignant surprise. He prowls around Terry 's apartment, ever the Hugo Friedhofer; song Harry Warren , Leo McCarey and Hitchcock cat-burglar, looking for evidence that will convict Terry of transcendent selflessness and thus Harold Adamson . undying devotion . At last we see that his suavity is a nobleman's mask for understated compassion . But he CAST: reveals this only to the audience and not to Terry; for he is also noble enough not to embarrass her with his Cary Grant Nickie Ferrante ardor in case her own may have cooled. Their ultimate embrace is the definitive moment in weepie cinema : Deborah Kerr Terry McKay every matron 's tear-and every critic 's-has been well earned by characters whose honesty turns conventions Richard Denning Kenneth Bradley into convictions, and cardboard into flesh . Neva Patterson Lois Clarke If LOVE AFFAIR is an example of romantic comedy- drama at its peak , during its peak years , AN AFFAIR Cathleen Nesbitt Grandmother Janou TO REMEMBER is a vibrant evocation of the genre , if not its elegy . Soon after , the form would be laid to rest , Fortunio Bonanova Courbet with Ross Hunter movies and television soap operas acting as zombified descendants. The denouement of Delmer Daves \" contributed original story concept AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER may mark the last time a writer , without credit \" and \" worked with Leo McCarey, the a director, and a pair of actors dared to plumb the director, from the original concept and throughout the making of the film , actually writing scenes as the film progressed thus developing them from the already created (in continuity) scenes \" (quoted in the FILM COMMENT Screenwriters Issue). LOVE AFFAIR and AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER are almost identical in dialogue ; the half-hour difference in running times is mainly due to scenes Daves wrote for the original version which McCarey chose not to film until the remake two decades later. FILM COMMENT 59

WILLARD Willard Maas died January 2, 1971 , four days after his wife, Marie Menken . He was sixty-four years old. MAAS Maas was one of those dynamic personalities worthy of intensive psychological and sociological study. An Interview His \" behind the scenes\" involvement with a major portion of the writers, critics (literary and cinematic), by George Semsel poets and independent fimmakers of our day was phenomenal in itself. He was a curious, captivating 60 FALL 1971 man. Twenty years before the rise of the underground film, Willard Maas began making films whose themes in a major way, and whose techniques in a lesser way had tangible influence on that recent develop- ment. Whether his work will endure remains to be seen , but in the historical chain of causes and ef- fects, he has certainly left a lasting impression. In his penthouse in Brooklyn Heights overlooking the harbor on a sunny afternoon in March, 1970, he gave me the interview printed here for the first time.-George S. Semsel George Semsel is a filmmaker now teaching at Ohio University. SEMSEL: Willard, you studied literature and taught it for a good many years . You also .have published two volumes of poetry, written many poems and articles, and have had no little notice for your writ- ings. What brought you from this work into film? MAAS: Norman McLaren, a very close friend , was connected with the Guggenheim Foundation where Marie Menken , his wife was working . When WW2 came, he went to Canada, and I, supposedly, had to get some kind of defense job. Marie and I made three or four films in just one weekend , one of them an animation called BOMBS FOR BULLETS. I made up a lot of scripts, claiming I had done films. These were shown to the Signal Corps and Marie got a job in the miniatures division and I, of all places , landed in the animation division. I couldn 't draw a damned thing. I used to pretend to draw every day, and George Baker, the English poet who was staying with us at the time, would execute all these things at night and I would go back with them in the morn- ing. Finally one day somebody came around asking me to do a quick job in animation. I was exposed and going to be fired , but the head of the division said: \" Hello no! We ' ll promote him instead .\" So I became a checker, a man who checked animation . I worked there for about a year before I went into the Army. George, Marie, and I made GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY here in the house in about four days. SAMSEL: When was that? MAAS: Jesus, I don 't know. SEMSEL : In the forties? MAAS : Yes. SEMSEL: I know you have long had dealings with Cinema 16, and that you formed a sort of coop called the Gryphon Film Group. Could you tell me something about the two? MAAS: Marie organized Gryphon Films, and we've kept it up for twenty or more years. It was a means of sharing equipment and getting screenings. Cine- ma 16 began with Amos Vogel. !t was just a little

thing when Maya Deren showed her now-famous done that in the so-called underground world. You films there. The first film Vogel showed was my know I'm much more conventional than most people GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY. Ever since then every making films today . As a matter of fact Stan Brak- film I did premiered at Cinema 16. I worked closely hage, who I helped a great deal and who is a great with Amos and others surrounding the group and friend , always considered NARCISSUS stinking be- organized and chaired the symposium on poetry and cause it was a narrative film . Supposedly something film with Parker Tyler, Maya Deren , Arthur Miller and is awfully wrong with the narrative; well , I don 't think Dylan Thomas. Other than that I didn't have that so . And I'm not that interested in the kind of things much to do with Cinema 16. Brakhage does. SEMSEL: Had you seen many films before you start- SEMSEL: Is there one filmmaker you would consider ed making them yourself? your favorite? MAAS: I'd always seen films, you know. When I MAAS: Certainly my wife, Marie Menken; I certainly was a kid I would go to the local nickelodeon and have to say that. But I also like a lot of Brakhage's see one film . Then they'd have another feature and tho'ugh I guess Dreyer is my favorite . I'd stay for that, too . Then I'd go across the street and have a frankfurter and orange juice or coffee SEMSEL: Of late have you found yourself being and then go to another movie house. I saw a lot influenced by the underground? ORGIA seems to fit of films. I think that's the American mystique, seeing its mold. film after film . Of course my taste in films didn 't de- MAAS: I don 't know if you would say I'm influenced velop that widely until much later when I got to see by the underground ; I'm influenced by myself and foreign films. I sawall of Eisenstein when I was very those people around me. ORGIA was part of a great young , but really the great influence was Norman unfinished work that had a narrative sequence and McLaren , though he isn 't , perhaps, an underground logical overtones. The part that has been preserved , filmmaker . Recently McLaren was in town with the as somebody said in The Village Voice , is an uptown Guggenheim retrospective and I said to him: \"When sex party. Well , it wasn't uptown , it was right here . are you going to do some more of those unde r. In the end it's just a little lyrical extension of a sex ual ground films? \" And he said : \" Good grief! I'm no orgy. I think it's kind of sad , but I don ' t like it. It underground filmmaker at all .\" He would most like isn 't the way I wanted it to be made , but it's done to do a homosex ual film which ht::: can 't do while now, and that's that. he 's at the Canadian Film Board. That's his great ambition , to do a beautiful , sweet homosexual film. SEMSEL: How do you look upon your past work? MAAS: Everytime I see it , I' m surprised I could have SEMSEL: Why did you never go into the commercial done it. Certainly when I see NARCISSUS I feel it's film industry? pretty good. I don 't really know how I could have MAAS: Well I suppose you can say I made a kind finished it without funds . It took over two years to of half-assed stab at it with the Signal Corps . But make, working on weekends , building sets and all. I was always academic and found that better than It was a very ambitious project. IMAGE IN THE SNOW getting connected with commercials. Anything to do was a peculiar film. It took a great deal longer be- with commercials always ends with rather rotten cause it didn 't snow here for a couple of years. I stuff anyway. It's just death to a filmmaker to worry don 't think anybody then except Robert Flaherty about commercial success . You try to get it, but would have thought of making a film in the snow. if you don't you don't worry about it. Despite all I look on all my work rather pleasingly, except for the films I started, I never thought anything about ORGIA and a few minor th ings . You know I've done commercialism , and, of course, they haven 't been a couple of documentaries, one of which was lost, that successful commercially either. But I'm revolted a one-half hour film on four great American artists, by commercial films . and that was sad . But then artistically it wasn 't that great a loss except for the p~eservation of the artists . SEMSEL: When you started making films, did film That can never be restored. I haven't done that represent anything special to you? much work , but what I've done, I'm satisfied with . MAAS: It represented a great new art form to me, and I still think that it's the great art form today . SEMSEL: How many films ha.ve you made? Everything that had to do with it was exciting when MAAS: Five or six complete films , and quite a few I started. I didn 't know a damned thing about film , others never completed orreleased. Time and money, but somehow did very complicated things. Marie and as usual , have been factors here . I experimentally accomplished a lot that we probably wouldn 't if we were in a big studio. You know they SEMSEL: You were long a poet before turning to wouldn 't even consider doing anything like GEOGRA- film . 00 you find a link between your poetry and PHY OF THE BODY or IMAGE IN THE SNOW or NARCISSUS . your films? MAAS: There is a close link , especially in IMAGE IN SEMSEL: Did you find yourself influenced by anyone THE SNOW which has a complete poetic sound track in particular? McLaren, perhaps? of my doing . I always look at a film with a poetic MAAS: McLaren was a catalyst in the thing , but he conception of some sort. I just don 't see things in didn 't influence me that much . I was much more documentary of logical terms. influenced by Dreyer and , while it seems pretentious to say so , perhaps by Eisenstein and Murneau , too . SEMSEL: 00 you consiously work for a certain style? After alii made narrative films. Very few people have MAAS : Yes, I believe very strongly in Eisenstein 's theories and in Dreyer's approach . I believe in ex- FILM COMMENT 61

treme long shots and extreme close-ups . ORGIA The frame 's like a picture in a way , every detail doesn 't show that because it was all taken in this becomes very important. A lot of people don't give front room , but if you 'll look at NARCISSUS or IMAGE a damn about what is in the background. In many IN THE SNOW you ' ll see it 's true . I have fantastic long underground films everything looks like a piece of shots ju xtaposed with extreme close-ups. I think film junk. Well , unless you want junk, it's certainly not should do something with the naked eye one can't good to do that. You ought to worry about composi- always see. I believe my use of the extreme close-up tion and the position of the actors as much as you has been very important and has influenced a few would in painting a picture. That's my idea. people into making other things. Then I have a poetic feeling I try to project. I couldn 't help but SEMSEL: All of your films have required some act- do it in whatever I'm trying to say , even if it's not always that clear. ing. Have you found directing a cast to be much of a problem? SEMSEL: 00 you follow a script or some other MAAS : By and large I've been pretty lucky in getting process when you are preparing a film? good people. Of course there was no problem about GEORGRAPHY OF THE BODY. I was fortunate in getting MAAS : No, I don 't. I had a kind of script for IMAGE very fine actors for NARCISSUS. The girl who played IN THE SNOW, but it was abandoned completely. I the \"Moll \" was wonderful. In IMAGE IN THE SNOW I didn 't have a script at all for ORGIA and very little had a very wonderful boy, too . But then I had a for NARCISSUS . Much of that film was extemporized . terrible time with him because he lost all his hair I don 't believe in using a set script. Maybe I will in the five years I took to finish the film . I had to someday, though . I do have a couple of scripts right use doubles a great deal because poor Hunter was now for a film I wanted to do in Puerto Rico called bald by the end . I was careful to shoot him only THERE SONGS FROM SAN JUAN which I wrote very up to the forehead , all close-ups. I was very lucky, carefully . But by and large if I started shooting I'd for once when I thought he was moving away I took probably change everything . him out and did about fifty shots of him showing different expressions in the snow. Later when the SEMSEL: How important is technique to you? great tragedy of Hunter's hair came about, I used MAAS: If you try to work in film , you ought to make these extra shots to fill in. Either I did close-ups it as technically perfect as you can. I don 't believe or put him thirty feet from the camera so you in abandonment of technique as many of the un- wouldn 't notice. Still I used doubles a good deal. derground do . I saw recently several films by young I used doubles in NARCISSUS too . Carol , the girl , was filmmakers which seemed pretty rotten to me be- having trouble with her husband . So she went away cause they were so technically bad. Swinging the and wasn 't going to go on with it. I had spent thou- camera over their heads and under their arms and sands of dollars doing this , and put in two years all that, they think that's great technique. I don't. of work. Finally her husband , a famous pho- I'm much more conventional in my technical ap- tographer, persuaded her to return. When I started proach. Of course you ' re doing abstract films , yet editing I saw there were still parts unfinished and you must be pretty careful about whatever you 're so got a girl to do doubles . MECHANICS OF LOVE which attempting to do . I don 't believe in this stuff where I have not talked about at all was made during a you throw it around your shoulder and let things time when we ran out of money for NARCISSUS . We go on and on . One thing I would say that is wrong decided then to make a little film and the Irish boy with the underground filmmakers is that they have I had in that was beautiful and wonderful. But one no sense of beginning , middle and end. It 's very day he came to work with his hair completely cut important that one has some such relationship as off. I had to shoot his as I did Hunter, close-up or well as a good sense of timing . After all , I think the far away. Luckily I had shot the end scene very early most important thing in film is the timing . I don 't when everybody was there in bed . OtherWise It think a film can be any good unless it has it. Some- would have been a complete fiasco . times I worry about Andy Warhol because he doesn 't seem to have that sense. What he does seems the SEMSEL: With all the recent upsurge in film , do you opposite of timing . think our concept of the film artist is changing? MAAS: I think that with the underground and with SEMSEL: I find in my own films that whenever I work independent producers the whole concept of the with narrative the editing becomes exceedingly im- filmmaker is changing . People are going into it left and right, getting grants, doing things. There's more portant. How much value do you place upon it? respect . My God, when we started out there was MAAS : If you shoot very carefully sometimes you no place you could show films except Cinema 16. don 't have to edit that much . But certainly you can (Whatever one says about Cinema 16, I'm very make a film or destroy it in the editing room . It's grateful to them for being the fore-runner of all thiS . a vital part of the entire filmic process. They certainly did wonderful things) . All kinds of people are making films now who wouldn 't have SEMSEL: 00 you wQrk consciously for a rhythm in dreamed of it before. I don 't know yet If any really wonderful filmmaker has come out of this. your films? .. . SEMSEL: 00 you think that with all that has hap- MAAS: Not only shooting, but editing , too , IS con- pened in the past decade your attitude toward film has change? cerned with rhythm . The first editing I ever did was MAAS : I don 't know . I don 't think so , but perhaps it has somewhat. One finds so many filmmakers on GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY . God , I just chopped around him now one is inclined to be slightly jealous of them . But I haven 't seen anything that upsets it up. I don't think it's that marvelous a film . I me terribly . I must admit I haven 't seen too many underground films. I recently saw Jonas Mekas's changed it a lot, though , by editing , and by getting a rhythm into it, that tiny little nothing . SEMSEL: I notice in your films what to me is a very keen eye for framing and compOSiton. 00 you place great stress on camera compOSition, or does It just happen? MAAS: I am always extremely careful with framing . 62 FALL 1971

'DIARIES and had mixed feelings about it. There was IMAGE IN THE SNOW. an awful lot of fancy shooting and non-shooting , IMAGE IN THE SNOW. wipes and making everything white and all that. Still NARCISSUS. it's a very interesting experiment. Certainly Jonas has been terrific encouragement to the whole under- ground movement. He's dedicated himself for years and years to constantly writing about underground filmmakers . Of course he doesn 't seem to have too much discrimination : Everything is wonderful! great! I don 't think everything 's wonderful! great! Never- theless we have to give Jonas credit for single-han- dedly fighting for the underground movement, get- ting grants and funds, and things like that. Those things are important, and he does it. A tremendously sweet person . SEMSEL: When you are preparing to film a subject, do you apply any special principles? MAAS : The only principle I have is a cinematic one . I see things visually; I don 't see them otherwise. Very often my whole concept of a film has been changed by seeing a certain scene, like discovering statues at Southampton , the waterfront material I used in NARCISSUS. I don 't think I ever again want to make a film with ruins and rubble , that kind of dessication in it, but I' m very attracted to that sort of thing , and have used it symbolically in my work. SEMSEL: That leads to what are the themes and ideas you have wanted to express in your films? MAAS : In GEORGAPHY OF THE BODY I don 't know what the theme is. I guess it's just the very close inves- tigation of the body which is interesting in itself. In IMAGE ' IN THE SNOW I had a terrific theme which I may not have been able to complete , but there was a kind of theological idea there . Maybe I didn 't resolve it as it should have been , but I had a very complete theme there . Homosex uality has a part in both IMAGE IN THE SNOW and NARCISSUS , I told Parker Tyler once, and I think he wrote it up somewhere, that making IMAGE IN THE SNOW was better than spending three years in analysis . NARACISSUS was so complicated , and I was so involved with the leading actor, Ben Moore, that again it became a matter of catharsis. The artist against society, that would be my idea of the theme there , Something like THE MECHANICS OF LOVE is very small , thin , but even so there is a tenderness in the thing , It's not purely sex ual , although in a way it's a sexual joke on film . On the other hand , it ends with a sad note, ORGIA I cannot separate from the greater film of which it was part but which I have since abandoned and will never fin ish . SEMSEL: Sometimes I have ideas which somehow don 't seem to work in the cinema. Have you found that the film leads itself to particular subject materi- als and perhaps not to others? MAAS: There 's nothing one can 't photograph . Doc- umentaries, fantasies, abstractions-that's the won- derful thing about the film-we can do all these various things , from realism to the fantastic . It just depends upon the type of film you want to make. A lot of people make beautiful abstract films, for example, and that includes Brakhage, John Haw- kins , and yourself, and they have nothing to do with the real world . I see no restrictions on the cinema any more than I would say there are only certain subjects about which one could write a poem . SEMSEL: 00 you aim your films toward a particular audience?

MAAS : I just make films ... and hope there will be SEMSEL: Do you have plans for other films? an audience. MAAS: I wanted to do a film on Constance Seeger, Pete Seeger's mother. I wrote a whole script for it, SEMSEL: You have repeatedly said that you favored but then she didn 't want to be known as Pete narrative over all other forms, yet the documentary Seeger's mother so the whole thing went to pieces. seems to be given much weight these days . What I worked very hard on that and think it would 've do you think of that? been a fabulous film . Then I've another idea which MAAS: Many people don 't want to use narrative at I've wanted to do for years called DEATH BEFORE all , as Brakhage doesn 't , but it's still very important. DISHONOR or THE HISTORY OF TATTOOING . As I said You couldn 't write a ten thousand page poem unless before , I have a long script for THREE SONGS FROM you used narrative. On the other hand , there's no SAN JUAN . Sometimes I get started doing these things necessity in small lyric things for narrative . It de- and find it's really too much to organized them as pends on form . Form always has to influence the happened with Constance Seeger. Something like content, content the form. If you 're going to do an that can be pretty shaking. extended work, an hour's length or more, you have to use narrative of some sort. I think all film-makers SEMSEL: Are you working on anything now? would do well to read Aristotle over and over. I was MAAS: Not now. I'm going to Europe, Germany, and teaching a graduate film course and went in and there I might be able to do something for Munich started talking about Artistotle and nobody know TV which would be shot in Amsterdam. But I have what I was talking abou t. not that much hope since it's a commercial venture. SEMSEL: How important is the underground film SEMSEL: Anything else? movement? MAAS: I think it got thousands of people interested MAAS: I'd like to do another dramatic film of some in film and certainly has influenced Hollywood and TV. It was bound to influence and it has. It has sort, apart from the others I have organized , and influenced people, too, because they see things and react differently than they used to to the film . perhaps a comedy . I think I' ll probably go back to SEMSEL: Has the underground been doing good the homosexual film . I'm also looking foward to work? MAAS: I wouldn 't say it was doing good work as when I come back to doing a film w ith Marie called a whole, I wouldn 't say so. But if five hundred people start making films , ·and you know if you 've taught MOTHERS where she takes off on eight orten mothers: film how rare reaJ talent is, there 's bound to be ten people who are good . Whistler's mother, Oscar Wilde's mother, Andy War- SEMSEL: Who from the underground do your find hol 's mother, Malcolm X's mother, Oswald's mother. good? MAAS: Brakhage, Menken, Hawkins, you . It will be a great film. 11111111 SEMSEL: Warhol? WILLARD MAAS FILMOGRAPHY MAAS: I have divided feelings about Warhol. Tech- nically he's pretty awful , but he has a SOCiological 1942 sign ificance we cannot deny. I don 't know if his films CONEY ISLAND 10 minutes, black & wh ite , silent. Never have any great value . I didn 't see CHELSEA GIRLS released . which is pretty awful since my wife aCted in it. I have 1943 known a lot of people around Warhol, like Ondine, GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY 10 minutes, black & white , who's a great actor and a rather fabulous person , sound. Shot in 1942 by Willard Maas and Marie Menken. but when I saw BLUE MOVIE , I thought it was the Poetic commentary by George Barker. Released end. It was terrible . Viva 's an interesting actress. through Grove Press. One th ing about Warhol , he has a wonderful eye 1943-1948 for picking people. That makes his films more in- IMAGE IN THE SNOW 30 minutes, black &white , sound. teresting than they would be otherwise. Starring Hunter Jones. Music by Ben Weber. Poetry by Willard Maas, read by Ben Moore. Released through SEMSEL: Parker Tyler in his rather fine book on Grove Press. the underground finds a vital link between mytho- 1948 logy and your NARCISSUS. Would you comment on MERRY-GO-ROUND unedited . In collaboration with his ideas? MAAS : I think his statement is a good one. There Ben Moore . is a lot of truth in what he writes. Anything he would 1955 write about NARCISSUS I would have to go along with. MECHANICS OF LOVE 7 minutes, black & white , sound . By Willard Maas with Ben Moore. Music by John Gruen . SEMSEL: Do you think you have been an influence Released through Grove Press. on the underground? 1956 MAAS: I don 't know that I've been much of a influ- NARCISSUS 48 minutes, black & white , sound . By ence, but evidentally something like GEOGRAPHY OF Willard Maas with Ben Moore . Starring Ben Moore. THE BODY is world famous . Time and time again I've (Marie Menken plays a minor role). Music by Alan seen films that have been influenced by it. As a Hovahness. Released through Grove Press. matter of fact , a young filmmaker from Chicago 1957 made a whole film called DISCOVERY OF THE BODY FOUR AMERICAN ARTISTS unedited (now lost) . which he dedicated to me. I get letters from young filmmakers about certain th ings I've done , but I 1966 haven 't really done that much . EXCITED TURKEYS 9 minutes, color, sound. Willard Maas, assisted by George Semsel. Released through Grove Press. 1967 ORGIA 8 minutes , color, sound . (Part of a now aban- doned work entitled: BROOKLYN HEIGHTS AFTER ANDY WARHOL .) Music by Teji Ito. Released through Grove Press . 1967 RADIATOR 5 minutes, color, sound . Not released . 64 FALL 1971

WIND FROM THE EAST A Review by Joan Mellen Joan Mellen is an Assistant Professor of English at cause Eisenstein was influenced by \"that fascist mov- Temple University and has published film criticism in iemaker D. W. Griffith, \" denying that the revolutionary Film Quarterly , Cinema, Cineaste, Take One and Sexual goal is the sharing by all in the technological and Behavior. aesthetic achievements of the species. The history of the film must be the common property of all filmmakers , Jean-Luc Godard now imagines himself pure, the especially of those with a revolutionary perspective who bourgeois filmmaker emancipated and reborn. He sees are in search of a form commensurate with their belief himse~f as a director no longer subject to the values in radical change and in the transformation of social of producers whose object is to make films expressing and cultural institutions. the ideology of the ruling class. The medium in his own hands, Godard can now make not only political films, WIND FROM THE EAST , one of the latest of Godard 's but films \"made politically.\" The pretense of WIND FROM revolutionary epics, fails miserably: first, aesthetically, THE EAST (1969), one of the most recent efforts of the because Godard cannot find a myth or a situation by new Godard, is that it expresses in its structure, in the which to bring to life its Maoist ideology, a problem unity of its parts, not only revolutionary ideas, but the he has failed to solve in many of his films . It is concep- process toward revolution itself. tually weak and inane as well , failing to make any coherent statement about revolutionary purpose, al- Godard the revolutionary now judges other film- though the basis of Godard 's technique in this film is makers on the basis of his estimate of the purity of the accumulation of statements. Further, although Go- their ideology. He no longer speaks to Truffaut. Pon- dard frequently says that the goal of the revolutionary tecorvo's BATTLE OF ALGIERS is dismissed not for its filmmaker is to make films for a revolutionary audience, errors, but for its omissions: \" It does not show the way (part of what he means by a film \" made politically\" ), the present Algerian regime is dealing with its complex WIND FROM THE EAST is addressed to the same audience problems ,\" says Godard , \" so it is really harmful to the as BREATHLESS . Algerian revolution and a victory for Hollywood,\" or as he calls it in WIND FROM THE EAST, \" Nixon Para- What Godard reveals as the filmmaker emancipated mount.\" is the degeneration of an artist who has , in the excite- ment of the new ideas he has recently discovered, Godard thus sets himself up as a dictator, the con- forgotten the potentialities of his medium. Godard 's science of the revolutionary movement for whom to purpose in WIND FROM THE EAST, as it was as early as make a film about the revolution alone is categorically not permissible! He dismisses z because it does not WEEKEND , was to shock the bourgeois audience out \" speak at all of what the real situation is in Greece of its complacency by a denial of its expectations from today.\" Politically, of course , one might argue that z a film , even from a Godard film . In its intensity WIND fails as either a political or a revolutionary film because FROM THE EAST is meant to threaten the bourgeoisie Costa-Garvas never explores the politics of its protago- with an inevitable class struggle in which its enemy , nists . Instead he presents Lambrakis as a matinee idol the proletariat, will emerge victorious, but the means disguised as Yves Montand and fails to explore Lam- by which Godard has chosen to fulfill this aim are brakis ' beliefs , aims or alliances. But certainly it is adolescent and empty of subtlety or filmic discovery. difficult to maintain that z does not create an image They make of his effort a farce , a film manque, an or vision of fascism . Eisenstein , whose POTEMKIN marks unconscious parody of the politics of Mao Tse-Tung, the first cinematic portrayal of a successful revolu- which by the end of the film only the director is still tionary mass uprising , is condemned by Godard be- taking seriously. FILM COMMENT 65

- I One has only to compare WIND FROM THE EAST with a Throughout WIND FROM THE EAST Godard fails to find a film like Mizoguchi 's CHIKAMATSU MONOGATARI (1954) to see visual equivalent for his narrative. Within the individual how profoundly Godard fa ils to make convincing in terms frame , he can devise no other image but his predictable of lived experience his avowed theme, the class struggle. group of very pretty young people play-acting. These are Mizoguchi creates a carefully structured set of interwoven dressed up in costumes of the American West; they cavort relationships between capitalist and worker, patriarchal on the grass playing \" cowboys and Indians\" and in general husband and enslaved wife, feudal lord and servant class. behaving as people do who clown on a Sunday afternoon He anatomizes the growing power of capitalism over indi- before the family 8mm movie camera. Occasionally flower- viduals , in particular the victimized artist of 17th century ing blossoms overwhelm the lens of the camera for several Kyoto, the painter of scrolls who must sell his skills to a frames only to return to the costumed adolescents discuss- middle class merchant, yet without whom the work could ing the merits of a strike or listing statistics of the exploita- not continue. Refusing to pause long enough to find a myth tion of workers . Toward the end of the film there are mo- equivalent to his own desire for a call to arms, Godard ments when the narrator continues speaking over an un- resorts to slogans and cliche. In place of a realized drama- used strip of film , Godard abandoning the pretense of tization of class conflicts , he substitutes the droning voices making a film at all, a \"bourgeois\" activity in the light of of narrators superimposed over the entire ninety-two min- the urgency of the revolution . At times the narration pro- utes of film . These exhort the audience against \" revision- ceeds over celluloid colored red , as if the symbol of the revolution were in itself persuasive of its merit. As one of ism \" and lament the historical betrayal of the working class. the narrators announces the calling of a two hour general It is not that a film need employ a traditional , chrono- strike , one of the men fondles a woman, a forced attempt by Godard to equate love with justice? At one point, Godard logical plot in order to persuade the audience of political attempts to tell us that what we are seeing , young men or historical truths. Bertolucci 's recent IL CONFORMISTA and women at a Manet-style picnic, is not what it seems. (1970) is an excellent example of a film which exposes If one looks closely, a rifle rather than a bottle is being political ideologies obliquely, through the psychology of passed around , and a revolution is in the making . But such character. Mizoguchi explores the limits of human rela- bits are precious, symptomatic of the general stasis of tionships by building up through episode and vignette a Godard's conception of the revolutionary film. sense of the growing impotence of the exploited with the rise of capitalism. In comparison with this method of enlarg- WIND FROM THE EAST can go nowhere, make no discover- ing the insight of the viewer through a cumulative effect, ies, only duplicate the pathetically inadequate imagery Bertolucci 's techniques belong to the avant-garde. But Godard has chosen for very complex ideas. His message, unlike the approach of either Mizoguchi or Bertolucci, if one were to take him seriously and not see his \" wind \" Godard's, despite the invocation of authorities like Lenin as empty rhetoric, is that historically the workers have been and Mao, convinces no one of the importance of its ideas betrayed either by the capitalists who offer reforms or the because it fails to show how they originate an assert them- false revolutionaries, the \"revisionists\" who deny that a selves in the lives of real people. class struggle exists and talk about peaceful co-existence. But to dramatize this complex historical problem, one which Although he aspires to convince the audience of the reasserted itself as recently as May 1968 in France, Godard obvious truth of his ideas, Godard clings to the disjointed can conceive of no pictorial equivalent but one of his young juxtaposition of unconnected images common to his earlier actors dressed up as an Indian , complete with feather, films . Despite the over-enthusiastic praise of such influential walking together with the capitalist enemy down a pleasant critics as Susan Sontag and Richard Roud, the anti-rational hill alongside a babbling brook. The capitalist is disguised and anti-human facade behind which Godard has always as a cavalry officer! WIND FROM THE EAST ex poses embar- hidden is now exposed as being destructive of the medium rassingly a gross failure of imagination. itself. Interrupting the interminable incantations of the prob- Miss Sontag , for whom Godard has been \" aside from lems of workers is a narrator who speaks for the militant Bresson ... the greatest director working actively in the moviemaker. He asks, \" where are we nowT Godard cuts cinema today\" defended Godard for his rejection of causal- to the symbol of bourgeois cinema, a make-up man painting ity and rationality, those earmarks of \" interpretation .\" She multi-colored stripes onto the face of an actor. For Godard saw in Godard an artist who gave, not another dreary a revolutionary cinema has not yet come into existence. explanation of how or why something happens, but a repre- D. W . Griffith , who indeed is not remembered for the social sentation of its happening . She even went so far as to defend content of his films, but for his contribution to the maturity the abstract ideas which had always been a feature of the of the art form , is called an \" imperialist,\" an obstacle to Godard film , and which seemed \" interpretive,\" on the the new cinema. Eisenstein is abused for portraying the spurious ground that their presence led to no preconceived collective in outdated terms, whatever this means . The truths. \" militant moviemaker\" is relentless in stripping from his own understanding any sense of the history of his art, as By now it has become clear that nothing could be a if only a masochistic self-mutilation could save him from more inaccurate rendition of the direction Godard's work the temptations of making a bourgeois film . Pontecorvo, has been taking from LA CHINOISE onward. Further, a film whose BATTLE OF ALGIERS is perhaps the major effort of which rejects a priori the possibility of causally organized the last ten years to faithfully reproduce the emotions and montage is inevitably reduced in the formal sense to a view events of revolutionary struggle, is childishly condemned of the world which equates all things. Thus the structure for being a white man who made a film in Africa, Godard of Godard's films runs counter to his new purpose-which revealing racism as one of the new lenses through which he looks at the world . is to express the undeniable rightness of a series of very particular beliefs. Miss Sontag contradicted herself when The middle of WIND FROM THE EAST purports to be an she described the ideas in the films of Godard as \" units autocritique, Godard evaluating the adequacy of his con- of sensory and emotional stimulation \" and then went on ception . What emerges is not self-criticism , but a stubborn to call such films \" meta-artistic activities aimed at reor- reassertion of the rightness of his conception . He insists , ganizing the audience's entire sensibility. \" Abandoning an mechanically that the problems of how to hold a general explanation of life based on some notion of causality, Go- assembly of workers (soviet) and how to make a film are dard sacrifices any organizing impact the images of his the same problem . He draws and erases cross marks over films might have. Lacking or consciously rejecting a single a picture of Stalin to show that both positive and negative unifying metaphor for his images, Godard presents ideas contributions were made by that gentleman , quoting out which appear more unrealized than the most didactic rhet- of context a sentence in a speech of Stalin 's about politics commanding economics which Godard misconstrues even oric of socialist realism. What in fact Godard has done in as he fails to explore its specific reference . Out of the blue films like WIND FROM THE EAST, SEE YOU AT MAO, and PRAVDA he defends the Chinese cultural revolution through quota- is to revive the tired and aesthetically moribund notion of tions from the Peking Review \" proving \" a few directors proletcult by now thoroughly discredited by those people, were back \" on the road to capitalism.\" The voice of the from Robbe-Grillet to Andrei Sinyavsky, seeking to create a revolutionary art, not to mention the opposition to this mechanical notion by Lenin , Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and others. 66 FALL 1971

narrator begins to grow breathless, fearing that she will authority, Mao Tse-Tung . Although the last part of the film not have time to say it all. She tells herself that since \" no image exists beyond the class struggle,\" the film cannot raises substantive questions of interest to revolutionaries , fail as a revolutionary document. A strike is discussed over the image of a man in a ridiculous woman 's hat covered Godard allows no debate-despite the fact that a dialectic with blood . The images come to matter less and less as the narrators' monologue proceeds without organization of ideas could have added conflict and interest to a very or direction. static film . Instead, Godard hands down the word. The Godard thus fails to generate either emotion or convic- tion for his revolutionary ideas . The audience is bored as Chinese cultural revolution , in which thousands have been blood is sprayed on Anne Wiazemsky who plays the \"whore,\" while a soldier interminably holds his hands executed and jailed , in which basic freedoms have been around her neck. We never feel that we are in the presence of genuine suffering. Anne bandages a bloody arm only further denied to the Chinese people, is called a victory for Godard to show in close-up blood oozing through the thin bandage, but there remains no relationship between for Mao. The former head of the Communist Party, Liu these bits of melodrama and the narration. We are expected to translate Anne 's stuffing her mouth with bread as an Shao-chi , who became the scapegoat of this movement, expression of the hunger of the masses, but the disjunction seems laughable. In the auto-critique Godard does indeed is called an \" eternal renegade, \" although the only evidence criticize such images. He tells himself: you speak about workers, yet \"you are outside,\" \" you don't really inves- Godard provides is a charge from the Peking Review that tigate.\" The camera flashes to naturalistic scenes of con- struction sites, peasant hovels in Latin America perhaps, Liu wanted to centralize medical facilities in the cities! On yet it does not convince itself of the viability of locating its message among the lives of people. Nor is it sl,Jrprising , the question of auto-gestion , the growing workers' control for in none of his films has Godard dealt with the problems of adults whose lives are a daily struggle for emotional and movement in the advanced industrial countries , which many physical survival , who all too quickly pass the age of thirty- five and whose worn faces rarely resemble that of the marxists feel is a means of creating a transitional program apple-cheeked Anne Wiazemsky. The faces of real working people , in whom Godard professes to be interested , show to SOCialism , Godard is equally dogmatic. He slaps the the ravages of the psychological price they pay for the mere continuation of life. The faded wife of the young fascist slogan \"restoration of capitalism in Yugoslavia \" onto the in IL CONFORMISTA , who has had to live with the knowledge of the atrocity in which her husband has participated, would screen and labels this \" state capitalism .\" One wonders if be out of place in the unreal, make-believe world of Godard. Godard would repudiate this film were the Chinese to create Because he relinquishes the aesthetic potential of his medium with its capacity to move at will from one segment a program of democratization of work , as Fidel Castro has of time and place to another, Godard cannot convey the sense of historical struggle . But his choice of an unrelieved recently done. The revolution Godard would give us should placard style, substituting statement for a nuanced devel- opment of dramatic conflict exposes as well disturbing arouse the contempt of anyone for whom social change features in Godard 's new ideology. It is one thing to note that Godard's imagery of primitive idyll as the prelude to must mean greater powers for judgment and decision-mak- class struggle is painfully naive and inadequate given the highly complex social organization Godard hopes to ing to the largest number of people, and not subjection change. But the methods Godard selects as the tools of social change-brutality, terrorism , coercion-are presum- to the dictates of either bureaucratic state or guru . ably the very abuses of human dignity he finds so appalling in bourgeois society. Godard presents one of his costum'ed The end of WIND FROM THE EAST is a call for terror- young ladies reading Proust as a sledge hammer is lowered onto her head and a sickle moves simultaneously to decapi- ism-which for serious revolutionaries should mark a lack tate her. He proclaims not only \"down with bourgeois culture ,\" but death to those who value it. For all Godard's of confidence in the ability to win through persuasion the appeals to authority-Marx, Lenin , Mao, it is important to correct a very confused director. Marx and Lenin were both great majority of people . It substitutes the dubious heroics very much aware that bourgeois culture was a rich human achievement which must first be made accessible to the of a clandestine handful and is as elitist as it is self-defeat- mass. It is the exclusion of the mass from appreciation of and contribution to culture which had to be solved-the ing. Certainly it delays awareness for those not yet won first step toward transcending class culture in favor of a truly human one. But the program was never to denigrate to revolutionary consciousness. Impatient as a child with or destroy the high sophistication and accomplishment of bourgeois culture. The goal was rather to advance beyond the long process of convincing a majority and building a it. Those who would burn Proust, purge Eisenstein or ban Mondrian are not revolutionaries, but vandals. These are revolutionary organization, Godard prescribes bomb-throw- the values of capitalism in final decay-the decadence of fascism . Such moments in WIND FROM THE EAST make com- ing, the most attractive action for the adolescent revolu- plete the alienation of his audience from Godard, even those who were prepared to accept his ideas as they were bored tionary who spends most of his time picnicking on the grass. by his film . Godard cuts to a skeleton of a building. His goal is the An anti-democratic , authoritarian tone pervades both the style of WIND FROM THE EAST with its preaching narrators levelling of existing societies, confident in his self-delusion and its content as well. The very title gives Godard away. Refusing to use film for the purpose of persuasion , a motive that a revolutionary, industrialized society will spring from shared by other politically conscious directors from Eisen- stein to Rossellini , Godard is forced to demand acceptance the wreckage as from the forehead of Zeus. Godard con- for his ideas on the basis of an appeal to his current favorite cludes with a pious invocation: \" it's right to rebel. It's our duty to change\" and to fight \"revisionism.\" In its ultimate advocacy of terrorism and murder, Go- dard 's infantile rantings turn out to be dangerous as well as poor filmmaking. For Godard 's films may well appeal to those who like him believe that a revolution involves only the \" right \" views and a ready bomb. Because such a course can lead only to self-deception and defeat, WIND FROM THE EAST militates against the very reVOlutionary aim Godard has so zealously and so recently discovered . Shrill , mindless slogan-mongering without argument or reason , combined with childish miming, is the last'thing that the politically conscious worker, Godard 's implicit hero, would find either appealing or cinvincing . On the contrary, he would more likely reject WIND FROM THE EAST for its smug self-indulgence and its lack of any real connection with his life. He, as were we, will be bored . Those who accept Godard as a revolutionary will be inoculated against the revolution . 11111111 WIND FROM THE EAST 1969, New Line Cinema, 92 minutes director Jean-Luc Godard;producers Gianni Barcelloni and Ettori Rosbach; screenplay Godard and Daniel Cohn-Ben- dit; photographer Mario Vulpiani ; editor Godard ; sound Ze Antonio Ventuza. CAST: Whore Anne Wiazemski Soldier Gian Maria Volonte Christiane Tullio Altan Allen Midgett Paolo Pozzesi Glauber Rocha Jose Varela FILM COMMENT 67

PARIS JOURNAL continued from page 6 ing-and God knows where they got it-an auteur is someone who is thought to do everything in making temporary setting , the film will be split up into episodes a picture. to compose a TV serial , while another 2-hour version Usually when a new concept enters public con- sciousness , it 's watered down . But in the popularization will be put together for general release . Having just of auterism, something else again-a complete reversal of meaning-has taken place. Thus an LA journalist seen the 4-hour version of Rivette 's L'AMOUR FOU (1968) recently reported that he'd taken a poll of the Hollywood community and found that the three greatest \" auteur- for the first time , I can only regret that OUT ONE will style\" directors at work were considered to be An- tonioni, Bergman , and Fellini (with Kurosawa as run- probably not be available to many audiences in its. ner-up). Thus the notion of the filmmaker who is per- sonal despite the demands of a regimented studio original form . The earlier film , which parallels and by- system , who stamps his style on some aspects of a production he may have little control over, simply gets passes much of Warhol 's research (in FUCK / BLUE MOVIE lost. It may be that the concept of the auteur was originally historical and specific, that's to say more and other films) in giving precise framings to random appropriate to big-studio era Hollywood, and funda- mentally theoretical in suggesting a critical method . bug-like actions and lifelike durations, is also compel- However, the term has now been appropriated and more often than not applies to the \" art\" cinema ofthe pre- ling for its dialectical use of 16 and 35mm footage , sent and future. It may be that these specific meanings have been lost at the popular level, and in Hollywood, each of which approaches and contains the action in as a result of American criticism 's failure to apply auteur methods systematically, as opposed to arguing a different way, and its additional unforced dialectic about them. between acting (continuing rehearsals for a production Now that Franklin Schaffner has his Oscar, perhaps he'll get a bit more critical attention as well. Certainly of Andromaque) and living (the fluctuating relationship it's fascinating to contemplate how Schaffner's conserv- ative nature has found expression through a range between the play's director and his mad, despairing of subjects and genres: small-town soap opera (THE STRIPPER) , the political thriller (THE BEST MAN ) , epic (THE wife). Although I haven 't seen the 2-hour version of WAR LORD) , science fiction (PLANET OF THE APES) , and of course the war film / epic character study of PATTON . L'AMOUR FOU , it is hard to imagine that it could be half In many of these what seems to interest Schaffner is the conflict whereby a character of advanced morality as rich or absorbing as the longer one. To spend 257 or vision is brought down by the mob-chilling and , to put it mildly, pessimistic studies of democracy at minutes watching the same people provokes an in- work. Power seems to be rooted in mobility for Schaffner, horses in both THE WAR LORD and PLANET timacy and involvement that is qualitatively different OF THE APES marking the elite off from the proles . PATTON thus may have been an ideal subject, what with its from the experiences of most films: curiously enough , charismatic hero of the tank corps. What would be interesting to research is the development of the pro- it is less e xhausting . 11111111 duction from Francis Ford Coppola's original script. Coppola has said that he took pains to build the script L. A. JOURNAL continued from page 2 around the central ideal of Patton as an anachronistic warrior so that. regardless of who directed, a critical ex pected , this wasn 't it-and for some weeks Siegel perspective was inescapable . This element is clearly was circulating with the print and trying to get reactions in the picture , but Schaffner 's sympathy for his hero (and some word of mouth started) at various universi- seems to me to create virtually the opposite effect, that ties. The big question mark was whether the movie the times are wrong for having changed . Maybe that would find an audience , since Clint Eastwood fans explains why the Academy loved PATTON so much . might be disappointed that it wasn 't an action flick , while those who might respond to the movie wouldn 't There 's no shortage of Hollywood filmmakers who attend because of Eastwood's presence. (Howard get neither journalistic attention nor critical analysis. Hawks feels that Peter Bogdanovich, his \" protege, \" Someone like Irvin Kershner, who suprisingly doesn 't got into a similar bind with Boris Karloff and TARGETS. ) even rate as ' less than meets the eye' in Sarris, has Predictably , Siegel has had his wrist slapped by con- made a number of good movies in recent years (THE servative critics for having been ambitious enough to LUCK OF GINGER COFFEY , A FINE MADNESS , THE FUM FLAM change genres. However, what I find attractive about MAN ), although he was never satisfied with the finished the film is the masterful way it ex ploits genre ex pecta- product until LOVING , his last and most personal picture . tions, moving from war film through love story and Kershner is not particularly bothered to have lost DIRTY comedy into horror before the audience has any idea HARR Y to Siegel. Neither script nor star suited him , and what's going on . The cynicism that one senses behind he managed to extricate himself gracefully, getting both so many of Siegel 's earlier films has flowered here, his director's fee and a promise from Warners for a especially in his treatment of the women (hinted at with picture in the near future with Brando in the bargain . Angie Dickinson in THE KILLERS and Vera Miles in THE Then there 's Jack Smight (especially for HARPER and HANGED MAN) and in Siegel's use of his invulnerable NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY) and the Englishman , David phallic star to beguile , titilate and finally castrate his Greene (THE SHUTTERED ROOM , THE STRANGE AFFAIR , audience. As Andrew Sarris pointed out recently , the term \" auteur\" has officially entered the English language. And now everybody out here wants to be one. Phil Feld- man , for example, has made it clear on many an occa- sion whose movie THE WILD BUNCH is . Understandably enough, Lawrence Turman also has a considerable proprietal interest in the various movies he 's initiated , many of which (he points out) deal with a similar kind of young , unstable hero (THE FUM FLAM MAN , THE GRADUATE , PRETTY POISON) . In all the squabbles that take place over authorship (which don't occur, needless to say , when a movie bombs), what seems overlooked is the possibility that a movie can be personal for more than one person involved in its making. Either way , what drives some producers to extreme statements and encourages others to make the jump (in the past it would have been a step down) to the director's chair, is in part all the journalistic attention given to that figure , the simple popular equation of director and auteur. Of course the screenwriters' and cinematographers' guilds aren't very happy either. In their understand- 68 FALL 1971

... SEBASTIAN), whose I,!st movie , THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR , got as much thoughtful analysis as Kazan's THE ARRANGEMENT. Perhaps these guys lack high-powered publicists. If so, Monte Hellman doesn 't share that problem : few filmmakers have had the dubious distinc- tion of making both Esquire and Sight and Sound. People in Hellman 's camp have actually begun to worry if TWO-LANE BLACKTOP has been over-sold. The most neglected of established directors in this town , however, would have to be Jerry Lewis. A micro- cosm of American \" good taste,\" the liberal, middle- brow Hollywood establishment loves Truffaut and Milos Forman, charm and civility. Lewis gets his share of the spotlight, of course , but always for his comic turns at Las Vegas and his charity work. His students at USC evidently pay for this on occasion by having to sit through tirades of abuse aimed at both Hollywood and critics for their failure to understand his concept of \" total cinema .\" Whatever one thinks of his pictures, it's ironic that in a period when personal cinema is all the rage, a director like Lewis, whose films are so personal as to invite psycho-analytical interpretation , is beyond redemption precisely because of his artistic personality . Not surprisingly , Lewis is a great student of Chaplin , and never fails to show his USC classes a print of MODERN TIMES (in mint condition) which Chap- lin reportedly gave him . Although not in the same league as London or New York, LA is a passable movie-going town . There 's a great shortage of European movies, of course, with only two or three theaters running these. However Japanese movies flow in regularly to service the local Oriental population through specialist houses like the Toho-LaBrea . The Encore is LA's camp cinema , regu- larly running Busby Berkeley and Bogie seasons to small knowing audiences that applaud every credit. A rEfcent Errol Flynn series there ran Raoul Walsh 's OB- JECTIVE BURMA , THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON , and DESPERATE JOURNEY , in rapid succession . Flea-pits in \" old \" downtown LA show three movies for a buck (JOHNNY COOL , MCLlNTOCK , KING SUN) , but the unwary may find themselves watching Spanish-dubbed ver- sions on occasion. USC and UCLA both run valuable programs on weekends. USC 's policy seems the more open and goes in for depth , running pretty thorough retrospectives of Wilder and Renoir this past year , as well as a survey of the musical. UCLA tends to follow a narrowly auteurist line in weekly double-bills of Hawks, Sirk, Ray , Borzage, etc. LA 's County Museum does what ,e.120 ~.#§: it can on a small budget; for the fall a Cukor season trlACrj\\)! T is planned , followed by a survey of early De Mille . The oPTT(.~l. experimental c inema is LA 's single biggest gap . TI\\AII>SF~A~, Is Hollywood dying? If you come into this town with 1Ylt.4f>IC., a view of it as a haunted house , you won 't have any .sO\\.ltJD F.'/.. problems finding the evidence to confirm that reality for you : studio cutbacks and auctions make particularly se xy copy . And if you want to do a Kevin Brownlow number, there are plenty of movie senior citizens tucked away up in the Hollywood Hills. Actually , Hollywood 's demise is as much myth as the popular notion of Los Angeles as a brutal landscape of neon and freeways (in its bizarre way LA is really very attractive). Of course Hollywood 's changing (and what isn 't?) as it attempts to deal with an increasingly fragmented audience . But I for one don 't find the contortions it goes through searching for new formulas any more vulgar or pathetic than a good deal that's happen ing in contemporary America, including the squabbles over personal taste and prestige that make the New York critical scene such a spectacle. 11111111

NEGATIVE SPACE dustrial kin to pulp fiction, popular music and journal- BY MANNY FARBER ism , radio and TV. Inevitably, Farber and his contem- poraries were shaped by the play of these ideas. In Praeger, New York, 1971; hardcover, $7 .95; 288 many ways Dwight Macdonald is Farber'S opposite number in his total commitment to the moral values pages, index. of literature, art and high culture. Curiously, Farber and Macdonald were to meet on the same battle-field in REVIEWED BY JIM KITSES attacking the inflated mid-cult product; yet what each sought to protect was vastly different. Somewhat closer Most writing at the level of public criticism is rooted to Farber was Robert Warshow in his attempt to find in the belles-lettres tradition , the writer a heightened ways of talking about the immediate experience of consciousness interacting with what is under review. movies. Warshow intervened in the debate by stressing Criticism in these terms is a function of the individual 's the values of traditional concepts-popular art, con- taste and style, and at its best (we are often told by vention, genre-in the cinema. its hopeful practitioners) it aspires to the status of a minor art in itself. The form is typically the essay , there Farber's position is ambiguous , never spelled out, is generally a lack of critical method , and opinion rather but certainly far to the \" left\" of either Warshow or than analysis pre-dominates. The great failing of this essentially bourgeois tradition is that it tends to relegate Macdonald. At times Farber seems simply to be polemi- the art to a secondary level of interest: the true subject cizing against pretentious, \" bloated\" movies, white emerges as this or that individual's sensibility \" taking elephant art and hard-sell cinema. But the strategies off\" from the launching pad of the work in question . Thus and attack of Farber's writing , especially in the Fifties , it is commonly assumed that one may be only a so-so are much tougher than that, often suggesting an out- critic but a \" good writer,\" or even be far superior to right refusal to accept film as an art form analagous the shoddy subject (as Auden has said about Agee) . to literature, drama, painting . In general Farber does This kind of writing tends to dominate the field , as it not write on one movie in any great detail since this does film writing in America, when scholarly and aca- would imply its value as a significant art-object, an · demic levels fail to build traditions of theory , polemic organic and affective projection of a world-view (\"How and a more objective criticism. many movies since MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY have been Manny Farber's Negative Space is in some ways an sustained?\"). In the same way, Farber does not write exquisite embodiment of this critical style. Farber does on directors in any depth with regularity ; the brief pieces not interact with a film, he collides with it. The subjective on Huston and Capra are clearly in part a debunking element is not only high , it is literally pp.\"rlorl before response to Fifties' fashion ; the excellent study of Pres- the reader. Yet in his own terms Farber is a \"' ...... ..isingly systematic critic, and this collection , which brings to- ton Sturges, co-written with W. S. Poster, is uncharac- gether many of his best pieces written over a span teristic in style and length, but in any case insists on of three decades for small magazines, makes clear that the \" showman \" side of Sturges as essential to his Farber's contribution is something beyond , in Pauline quality. One looks largely in vain for a kind word for the Kael 's phrase, \" a triumph of personality.\" screenwriter from Farber: literary elements such as narrative and theme are generally ignored, as are con- When Farber began writing on movies, a dominant cepts of structure and dramatic organization. European critical movement was the \" art of the film \" approach emigres and Hollywood stylists such as Hitchcock and which sought to legitimize the cinema by pointing to Lang , Ophuls and ·Lubitsch , Ford and Welles, either Griffith and Chaplin, the Germans and the Russians, rarely appear or are chopped down to size by Farber's democratic prose . Such a bona-fide undergrounder as documentary, neo-realism , CITIZEN KANE . Criteria were Budd Boetticher doesn't get that much of a look-in, essentially social and literary: that the film was orig- nor does Nicholas Ray ; presumably they are overly inal or edifying, formally expressive, a self-consciously \" aesthetic .\" Time and again Farber returns to Hawks artistic creation. A second, sociological approach and his primitivist \" tribe\" : Walsh , Wellman , Anthony was concerned with \" effects\" and saw film as in- Mann, Farrow, Karlson , Aldrich , Fuller, Siegel. Even here , however, there is surprisingly little individuation , a minimum of critical distinctions. For all the feroc ious surface of Farber's style, the over-all effect is oddly recessive , the critic backing in , dancing out, some concrete detail alongside of outrageous general- izations, praise and scorn rubbing shoulders, a dialec- tical , cumulative method ; which is one of the reasons this collection is so welcome. For Farber it is \"the continuous stream of quality \" that matters, and not the individual movie. Farber's subjectivism , his jazzy prose, the wealth of popular allusion (candy, comics, sports, entertainers), firmly anchor movies within the perspective of folk culture. At the deepest level in Farber we sense a tough popu- lism in the commitment to function as witness to the qualities of American \" low class\" experience. Evident at times in individual essays , this feeling flowers into a full-scale romanticism when the pieces are read back to back. In Farber's criticism the struggle for a mean- ingful movie culture takes on the tone of class war- fare between the poor (the undergrounders) and the rich (Huston, the \"businessmen artists\"), male action and sentimentalism / sophistication, intuition and con- sciousness, an acceptance of reality and a \" breathing hard\" by the director (Farber is close to Bazin here) . At the core there is a concept for artistic freedom within mass culture which is essentially Hawksian : through a professional acceptance of the machine and the conditions it imposes, rather than an attempt to tran- scend them, a limited self-expression becomes possi- ble . Personal cinema in these terms is essentially inter- 70 FALL 1971

mittent, collaborative and democratic , and res ides in our knowledge of space and its re lationship with other the ability to find a style that allows performers their expressive dimensions of the medium (the eclectic authentic ity and freedom w ithin the role , that honors introduction on space is one of the weaker pieces). the complexity and texture of objects, terrain and pro- What Farber does do, at his best, is sharpen ou r own cesses,and does not\" tyrannize''the audience.Paradox- responses to the particularity and variety of the cinema ically, the road to success may be through remaining by involving us in his unique way of seeing . submerged and a \" natural. \" Often the movie artist in Farber is like a jazz musician playing in a cruddy band With his own roots in painting and popular culture , who does what he can when no one is really listening . Farber is inevitably contemptuous of \" Mr. Clean \" critics whom he sees as reductive in their methods. Yet As a critical response to the full spectrum of the Farber's own criticism is of course incomplete as well , cinema , Farber 's position is as impoverishing as the and points to our need for a synthesis of critical ap- orthodoxies he reacted away from . Its great virtue was proaches, and the value of literary, sociological and the insistence that a graphic naturalist cinema close other disciplines. For, at his worst, Farber can strip to the comic strip and journalism was part of the lan- a film of its conceptual and emotional content, leaving guage. It is quixotic, however, to insist that that kind it little more than a phantom , a kind of conc rete ab- of experience is the cinema . With the increasing spec i- straction . The point is that Farber's main premise , that ficity of American films, the new experimental work, a film is its spatial and visual form , while completely and the general move away from a narrative, naturalist acceptable in theory, can in practice become as reduc- cinema, Farber has inevitably had to modify his position tive as any critical system . At times desperately at- (the neo-primitivism of a Godard has assisted in this). tempting to recreate the physical experience of a par- ticular film , Farber's style can be simply scintillating , Thus Negative Space ends a more conventional book intervening between the reader and the movie , and as than it begins, with pieces on Bunuel, Michael Snow, exhausting as supposedly dull academic modes. Godard , reports on festival films by Bresson and Rohmer (disfigured by slaps at the aud ience; Farber However, it would be uncharitable to stress Farber's grew up with loose talk about the masses-he indulges limitations which are, after all , intimately bound up with in the same about \" long-hairs\" ). The change is even his strengths, and his great polemical contribution. For more noticeable if one bears in mind that Farber's own three decades Farber has been pioneering a genuinely kind of auteur piece-on Hawks , Siegel and Fuller, all alternative American critical tradition. Negative Space, written in 1969-have been dropped into the text at a book that is in a different league altogether from the earlier stages. volumes of personality and opinion that keep spinning off the presses , places on record an original and sub- However as a c'ritical approach to American film stantial body of work. Now that movies have become history , Farber's method is provocative and valuable . intellectually fashionable, Farber's dialectical ap- HollywQod for Farber is neither oeuvre nor genre, but proach , his belief in the values of critic ism and trad ition , particular movies and details within movies that add his commitment to culture rather than art, seem all up to larger patterns of stylistic and cultural change. the more relevant. No critic balances close \" analysis\" with the distance of an industrial perspective quite like Farber. All of the FOUR SCREENPLAYS longer, more celebrated pieces-\" Underground Films,\" \" The Gimp,\" \" Hard-sell Cinema,\" \" White Elephant Art BY CARL THEODOR DREYER vs . Termite Art\" -illustrate the approach . Farber re- deems mass culture by insisting on its topical nature Indiana University Press, 1970; hardcover, $12.00; and seeking within the ebb and flow of fashion small islands of quality: moments of a performance by Fonda, 312 pages; preface; introduction, filmography, illus- Lupino, Ryan ; the nameless bit players; the classical trations. use of space and terrain that he so values. Good mov- ies , or good bits in movies , arise from the collaboration THE CINEMA OF CARL DREYER or collision of many talents, major and minor. Directors BY TOM MILNE can clearly be creative spheres of influence, yes; but so, too, can studios, producers, performers, movie A. S. Barnes , 1971 ; paperback , $2.95 ; 192 pages ; styles, fashion itself. Auteur criticism asserts the same, filmography. of course, but Farber has been acting on this premise for a long time: the fine piece on the Warners ' animation REVIEWED BY DAVID BORDWELL team of Jones-Freling-McKimson was written in 1943, David Bordwell has written on Truffaut and Chaplin 's the Val Lewton article in 1951 , the seminal study of \"underground \" realist-action style in 1957. Over the THE CIRCUS in previous issues of Film Comment. His years Farber has given more detailed coverage to article on THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE appears acting than any other critic writing. elsewhere in this issue. With the full impact of auteur criticism in recent The long neglect of Carl Dreyer by Anglo-American years, avaluable strategy that has become widespread scholars seems at last to be ending . While the Italian is to \" unearth \" the themes that structure a work. Often and French have produced si x book-length studies , five the implication is that because the themes are impor- volumes of Dreyer scripts, and innumerable essays, tant, so too is the film . Depending on its application, we have had to content ourselves with Neergaard 's this approach can blur the social and industrial con- classic but outdated BFI study and some fugitive articles texts within which the film was created, and lose touch by Warshow, Trolle, Kelman , and Bond . For forty years, with the feel of the experience. Farber's gadfly attack our critics ' neglect of Dreyer was exceeded only by on the texture of movies is a healthy corrective to our audiences ' indifference to him . But finally things analysis that skips over problems of realization . see.m to be changing . By the time you read this , Donald Whether Farber likes what is under review or not, his Skoller's translation of Dreyer's essays and Dial Press' writing invariably and vividly evokes the physical imme- translation of (he never-filmed JESUS screenplay may diacy of the movie. have appeared. Other Dreyerphiles (among them my- self) are preparing books on his work. And already we Farber achieves this through his attention to formal have two English-language premieres: the first transla- elements. Perhaps the only critic who consistently ap- tion of Dreyer screenplays and the first full-length study proaches movies through their plastic and dynamic of his oeuvre . Both are valuable, and despite some properties , Farber is an invaluable source of inSight. weaknesses, they constitute a down payment on the However, Negative Space is an oddly academic title overdue debt we owe a great director. for a collection of writings so dominated by practical criticism . Farber has no gift or sympathy for theory, The screenplays (THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC , VAM- and his work actually contributes surprisingly little to PYR , DAY OF WRATH , and ORDET) , first printed in Danish in 1964, are curious documents, at once precious and maddening . As Ole Storm points out in his introduction , Dreyer's scriptwriting style was semi-novelistic , intent on nuances of characterization and atmosphere rather FILM COMMENT 71

than on cinematic style. His descriptions are often pure intended these scripts to be read, but the reader de- stream-of-consciousness: \" It is not the awareness of serves to know about these deviations. The book badly danger, nor even fear of being burnt, that is crushing needs some critical material comparing the scripts to Anne-only the thought that Martin has betrayed her. the films in detail ; without it, the volume 's usefulness This is more than she can bear . Her love for Martin seems limited to students of Dreyer. has become the most important thing in her life . .. \" Such passages remind us of the importance Dreyer More valuable for the general reader is Tom Milne 's laid on a certain interiority of acting : \" What I seek in critical study. Milne ably rebuts the popular misconcep- my films , what I want to obtain , is a penetration to my tion of Dreyer as the melancholy Dane by emphasizing actors ' profound thoughts by means of their most subtle his commitment to the physical as well as the spiritual expressions .\" In these scripts we see Dreyer wrestling and defining him as an artist preoccupied with the with the problem of describing verbally emotions that problem of love. Milne 's main contention is that Dreyer 's he wanted his players to evoke visually. On paper, he work is essentially magical , springing from a mi xture fails. But the banal style of most of the screenplays of the earthy and the unearthly. \" At the beginning of only confirms the skill w ith which , during production , his career, Dreyer had been like an apprentice sorcerer, Dreyer extracted subtle and rich performances. attempting to dominate the four elements without mas- tering one of them in his eagerness to make a diagnosis There are other insights. The painstaking descrip- of man 's human and spiritual condition . Gradually, tions of locales (especially in VAMP YR) reaffirm Dreyer's however, he learned mastery of his elements , in partic- care in selecting decor that intensifies mood . Interest- ular the natural and the supernatural, until he hovered ingly, THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC was planned to begin in a kind of limbo between them .\" As a result , Milne with Joan in her cell arranging two straws to make calls Dreyer's heroines witches and vampires , figures a cross ; this would have initiated the cross-motif in wielding the supernatural power of love. It is a provoca- the film and formally rhymed with the last shot. I was also surprised by the persistent aural effects in the JOAN tive idea , especially if applied to DAY OF WRATH and screenplay-the clank of chains, the sound of her GERTRUD , but too often Milne uses it impressionistically groans-which suggest that, when writing this version (\" This shot is an incantation , weaving a magic circle of the script, Dreyer had not yet learned that the film over the banquet\" ), not argumentatively. could not be shot in sound . Other minor surprises await the reader who is familiar with Dreyer's work. Milne's emphasis on the concrete physicality of Dreyer 's work leads him to re-investigate the pre-JOAN But some sou rces of interest for the Dreyer specialist films, and here the rewards are great. Admitting that may prove annoying to the general reader. As the he prefers the early, hearty Dreyer to the majestic Dreyer in trodu c tion should emphasize but doesn 't, these are of JOAN , DAY OF WRATH , and ORDET , Milne captures the scripts, not transcripts. Storm says, \" The four scripts nuances of mood and gesture in THE PARSON 'S WIDOW , are published as they came from his hand when the evokes \" the almost religious mystery\" and play of film was made ,\" but he 'neglects to add that all four te xtures in MIKAEL, and pays homage to one of Dreyer's scripts differ markedly from the films. Students and greatest works , THE MASTER OF THE HOUSE, in an affec- teachers relying on this volume without viewing the films tionate analysis : \" Within its limits, MASTER OF THE HOUSE as well are on thin ice . The differences are too nu- is perfection , with the raw materials of cinema so rigidly merous and detailed to point out in a review , but some pared down and controlled that the faces, gestures, major ones should be noted . and movements become the landscape of the film. \" The two chapters on Dreyer's silent films are the nose- The scripts vary in their degree of difference from gays of the book, full of warmth and sensitivity. the finished films . The ORDET screenplay is the closest to the finished product, perhaps because almost every Milne also dares to skewer some sacred cows. He scene is a plan-sequence. In the film , three scenes resuscitates the unfairly neglected VAMPYR but dis- are transposed for greater suspense and some pruning misses the style of JOAN OF ARC , regrets the handling of the script's dialogue is evident. More surprising is of the mad Johannes in ORDET , and charges Merete the technical vagueness of the JOAN OF AR C screenplay : in DA Y OF WRATH with motiveless malignity. But Milne the shot descriptions don 't mention that almost every betrays a reluctance to argue closely about his dislikes, shot is a close-up . Camera angles and movements go falling back on intuition : JOAN 'S style \" feels like an likewise undescribed. Overall, the script traces the attempt to impose reverence\" ; \" one does not feel this dramatic flow of the film with few changes, but the lo ve so much as grasp it intellectually \" ( italics his) . Of marginal numerals are misleading : no real breakdown course , in this Milne is not alone: film criticism is notably of shots is suppl ied . The VAMPYR script avoids this susceptible to letting the viscera 's verdict be final. But misunderstanding by not numbering any shots, but its with an artist like Dreyer (victim of many critics ' snap plot deviates more widely from the film than any other judgments), trusting wholly to intuition can be an injus- script's. Some fasc inating episodes are absent from tice . Close argu ing is preferable to casual evaluation . the film :' some extra dialogue, a creeping shadow of a house, a funeral procession of silhouettes, a motif Aside from specific points that can be quarreled with , of howling dogs, the sudden snapping of a cello string , the boo k has two flaws . First, the bibliography is dis- and most interesting of all , a finale in which the sinister mayingly cursory , excluding nearly all Dreyer 's essays, ferryman and some children build a fire and sing a many important interviews, and at least one landmark hymn to guide the lovers ' boat to shore . Another crucial critical study , Phillippe Parain's Dreyer: Cadres et difference is that in the script the vampire 's victim dies, Mouvements (Etudes Cinematographiques nos. 53-56, but in the film she survives . The VAMPYR script is a good 1967). More seriously, Milne's interpretations are often introduction to a film wh ich has confused audiences not organic. Although he skilfully highlights main issues since 1932, but it should not be taken as a fa ithful in each film , he never gives one a sense of how the transcript. Finally , wh ile the DA Y OF WRATH script con- parts cohere. Dreyer's films are so formally tight that tains only two major plot additions (a scene in which they demand close analysis, sometimes shot by shot. Anne brushes a speck of dust from Martin's eye and Where Milne finds only \" stylistic uncertainty \" in JOAN a scene of a woman nursing her child), the script' s OF ARC 'S bizarre camera movements and angles , a more shot-numberings are wi ldly different from the actual organic interpretation would pOint out the greater in- shot-breakdown of the film . (For instance, shots two tensity achieved by subjective point-of-view. Again , to through eight in the screenplay are actually one long say that in ORDET , \" Inger resurrects herself for the take in the film. ) In all , the script lists 676 shots ; there husband who 'loved her body too ' \" is to ignore the are 439 in the actual film . Apparently Dreyer conceived cruc ial c ombination of Johannes , little Maren , and Inger the film in montage terms but once on the set decided as the bearers of spontaneous faith . And Milne's meth- that the long take and the moving camera would yi~ld od is at its weakest in the scant seven pages he assigns the heavy rhythm he wanted . Naturally, Dreyer never to GERTRUD : he overlooks both felicities of irony (e .g. , the Fidelia performance, the youth brigade's address to Lidman) and dramatic climaxes (Gertrud's progres- 72 FALL 1971

sive discovery of the power of fate) . This is not to Culture, testifying to the persistence and ded ication demand that a critic write the book the reviewer wants, of both the filmmakers and the critics who have chroni- only to suggest that a critical interpretation should be cled and analyzed the achievements of the American comprehensive and account for every question a film avant-garde through the years. raises . Too often, Milne fails these imperatives. P. Adams Sitney has now put together an anthology In a longer view, both these volumes usefully focus of criticism from Film Culture. His anthology , called the attention on what remains for historians and critics to Film Culture Reader, makes for fascinating reading . A do with Dreyer. We need transcripts to compare with kind of transformation seems to have taken place in these shooting scripts, and we badly need a translation the material. While much of the Reader retains that of the GERTRUD screenplay. The historian could follow sense of struggle, the polemical thrust, the ability to Jean Semolue 's lead in establishing the original version surprise and to challenge , a much more important of JOAN and could examine Dreyer's proposed African quality emerges from this volume . The main impression project, his association with Grierson in the Thirties , in reading the Film Culture Reader now is of a growing the strange, sad story of the JESUS project, and perhaps awareness of the exi stence of a major body of critical most importantly, the relation of Dreyer's development work dedicated to an equally major body of experi- to that of Danish cinema as a whole. Moreover, despite mental film. its many insights, Milne 's book is neither definitive nor exhaustive. Other critics could study Dreyer's relation Sitney has maintained the two important streams of to Danish religion and Scandinavian theatre, analyze critical focus that have appeared in Film Culture. An- the working of his style , and construct auteur surveys drew Sarris is represented by his famous Auteur article of his themes and forms . Finally , it would be interesting of 1962 and , rather unhappily , by an analysis of CITIZEN to test Dreyer's claim that JOAN , DAY OF WRATH , VAMPYR , KANE which he has recently repudiated to some extent. and ORDET are experiments in finding , \" within the cine- There are major excerpts from the Erich von Stroheim ma's framework, the form and style appropriate to issue-enough to recreate the sense of outrage at the tragedy .\" Much , in short, remains to be done if Dreyer's desecration of von Stroheim 's output. There is Ken elusive but sublime art is to be adequately honored. Kelman 's thorough if rather flat analysis of Dreyer and other Kelman analyses of EARTH and SUNRISE . Parker FILM CULTURE READER Tyler's discussion of Orson Welles and the Big Experi- EDITED BY P. ADAMS SITNEY mental Film Cult is present as well as Michael McClure 'S wild and acute paean to Jayne Mansfield. Introduction by the editor; Praeger Publishers, New But it is in the area of the second focus of attention York , 1970; hardcover, $12 .50 ; paperback , $4.95 ; that the Film Culture Reader is of most importance. From Hans Richter's original call to arms to the most 438 pages; illustrated; index. recent essay by Sitney himself, several basic themes emerge. These themes parallel the major concerns of REVIEWED BY BILL SIMON twentieth century modernist art and they constitute a challenge to film to cast aside its origins in nineteenth Bill Simon is a doctoral candidate at NYU. century literature and painting and to join the twentieth century. The first time I read an issue of Film Culture maga- zine is still vivid in my memory . I was at the time a Basically, the themes involve a stand against the neophyte film student, with critical attitudes shaped by plotted narrative and against illusionistic represen- Time, Newsweek, and The Saturday Review. I especially tationalism. The critics in these pages are involved remember being surprised and a little bewildered by in describing and defining-describing what is on the very favorable and serious reviews of John Ford 's THE screen , what we are seeing and hearing , mostly in terms MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE and Howard Hawks' of the forms and levels of abstraction found in the new HATARI , two films that were considered beneath con- films , and defining the nature of cinema that is suggest- tempt by the critics I was then reading. ed by the new films and the modes of perception that the new films demand of spectators. I also remember being puzzled and mildly disturbed by what seemed like some ra(her obscure material in New films seem to require new critical forms and the the same issue-the poetical, polemical writings of Film Culture Readerillustrates various ways of approach- Dziga Vertov and several articles about the aims and ingthetaskofcriticism.There areseveral straightforward accomplishments of something called the New Ameri- analyses: Sitney's attempts to trace formal historical can Cinema. lines of development in his \" Imagism \" and \" Structural I continued to read Film Culture regularly from that Film \" essays ; Gene Youngblood 's descriptive and in- time on and the magazine continued for a long time terpretive analysis of Jordan Belson 's films; and Annette to surprise me and to call into question my assumptions Michelson's treatment of the larger historical context about film . The critical position that first attracted me of experimental film . There are several brief impres- to the magazine-the major reevaluation of the impor- sionistic , poetic documents: Robert Kelly on Stan Brak- tance of the commercial American cinema and its hage, Carolee Schneemann on SCORPIO RISING . There directors-grew quickly into what became known as are three of the most satisfying interviews with film the auteur controversy. Led by Andrew Sarris, the directors (Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, and Harry Smith) auteur critics soon left the pages of Film Culture and ever published . There is a sizeable portion of theoretical went on in a few short years to a period of fame , writing in various forms by both Brakhage , one of the notoriety, and critical dominance, even perhaps already few directors whose capacity for abstraction is equal to a period of decadence. to his ability as an artist , and Dziga Vertov , the \" obs- cure \" filmmaker and theoretician who is now revealed The other stream of critical thought that I detected as the progenitor of much that is modern in film . in my first issue of Film Culture-a concern for the Throughout the pages of the Reader weaves the unique experimental, avant-garde film-has had a much sensibility of Jonas Mekas, whose life story is so inex- tougher time of it. Over the eight or so years that I tricably a part of Film Culture and the New American have been following its fortunes, the New American Cinema. Cinema has seemed to proceed from one struggle to another. Completely isolated from the mainstream of At the New York Film Festival last September , the American film life both commercially and aesthetically, audience tried to scream and yell Robert Nelson's BLEU the experimental filmmakers have been involved in a SHUT off the screen. This past spring, audiences walked continuous fight to have their films viewed and treated out in droves from showings of Brakhage 's and Ken seriously. Their critical support has been maintained Jacobs' works at the Museum of Modern Art. The almost exclusively by Jonas Mekas ' column in The Anthology Film Archive is regularly showing both clas- Village Voice and by Film Culture . The very existence sical and experimental films to largely empty houses. of Film Culture has seemed to parallel the struggle of the New American filmmakers. That sense of struggle What seems clear is that a great deal of the most has conSistently been evident in the pages of Film FILM COMMENT 73

exciting , most innovative filmmaking of our time is going the main job of the film critic is to elucidate meaning , on in virtual isolation . Critics and audiences continue and that films, despite the resistance or indifference to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the works of Brak- of their makers, lend themselves naturally to discus- hage, Kubelka, Snow, Frampton, Jacobs, Sharits, and sions of meaning. This critical approach is useful and , others. The traditional time lag of the avante-garde, given the critics of popular culture, salutary, but only the period it takes the audience to catch up with the up to a point. It's at its best when he argues against truly important art works of a period, persists. the application of the idea of cinema pur to films rich in novelistic meaning like L'AVVENTURA or when he criti- Fortunately, Film Culture continues to exist to cizes VERTIGO for finally not being about anything , after chronicle and elucidate the radical developments in having involved us in the suffering of its hero. Also , the evolution of film language and style . And the Film Pechter does not push his approach so far as to over- Culture Reader exists as a living document, testifying value certain films-like those of Ingmar Bergman to the aspirations and achievements of both the new merely because they lend themselves so readily to filmmakers and their critics. discussions of academically-approved meanings, to statements of serious themes . Pechter is , if anything , TWENTY-FOUR TIMES A SECOND: overcritical of Bergman, but in part because he wants FILMS AND FILM-MAKERS to act as a corrective to fashionable judgments. But BY WILLIAM S. PECHTER he is wrong to reject films which have only fragmentary meaning like PERSONA. One could even argue that the Harper & Row , 1971 ; hardcover, $7 .95 ; 316 pages ; lacunae of meaning in the film add to its psychological indexed . power. At any rate , the point is that the role of meaning has become as problematical in film as it is in the other REVIEWED BY ROBERT CHAPPETTA arts, and more problematical than these essays often Robert Chappetta has contributed to Film Quarterly . seem to grant. The sociological critic says to us, in effect: It is not But the basic problem with Pechter 's approach is I who goes to see the movies; it is the audience. The that it tends to be too \" aesthetic\" in the sense that aesthetic critic says: It is not the movies I go to see; Warshow used the word (quoted at the beginning of it is art. -Robert Warshow this reView) . I hope that Pechter will expand his sense of meaning-as he now seems to be doing in his recent One shouldn 't pretend to be objective in reviewing reviews in Commentary-to include more fully the \" psy- a friend 's book. I don't intend, however, merely to praise chological,\" the \" sociological,\" the \" extra-aesthetic,\" it. Since I absorbed the most illuminating ideas in his to use the pejorative terms that are usually used against essays as they came out , this would be too much like any criticism deserving the name (see Dwight Mac- self-congratulation. Rather, I want to suggest, if only donald on Robert Warshow, Richard Gilman on Andrew glimmeringly in such a limited space as this , the way Sarris). But Pechter does avoid a too narrow definition one can quarrel with a book that has at the same time of what is \" aesthetic ,\" not wanting , like Richard Gilman , added to one 's understanding. to limit the term \"art\" to \"new consciousness \" -a defi- nition which would effectively exclude Hollywood mov- Twenty-four Times a Second is a collection of 23 ies. The films of John Ford, for instance, are simple occasional essays, written over the last ten years. While and traditional in meaning , but , as Pechter argues , we most of the earlier essays are focused on a Single film- lose something by not being able to respond to them . like BREATHLESS, BY, or LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD-most of Within his aesthetic approach , Pechter does give us his recent ones are focused on a director-like Bunuel, a sense of something more than theme by evoking films Renoir, or Godard-the analyses of given films being as whole , wanting , like Agee , to make us see . This is . made in the conte xt of the director 's career . Among the chief value of a major portion of the book-that the other essays in the book are two on film critics-on it brings alive again a vital period of the film, that of Agee , whom he is critical of, and on Warshow , whom the early sixties , in its discussions of such films as- he considers the best American film critic . And there BREATHLESS , LA DOLCE VITA , L'AVVENTURA , BY\" LAST YEAR is also a recent interview with Abraham Polonsky ; an AT MARIENBAD, THE ELUSIVE CORPORAL , THE BIRDS , and earlier one, done while Polonsky was still blacklisted, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. For some of us, and not included in this book , is Pechter 's best known the book will bring back , not only the films themselves, piece; but the second interview, made on the set of but those crazy, endless arguments we had about them . TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE , is more illuminating , giving us the director as auteur-faced with the less-than- MOVIES INTO FILM glamorous, work-a-day problems of directing. BY JOHN SIMON Dial Press , New York , 1971 ; hardcover, $9 .95 ; 448 The title of Pechter's book, Twenty-four Times a pages; index. Second, refers to an epigram in Godard 's LE PETIT SOLDAT : Photography is truth . . and the cinema is truth REVIEWED BY JOHN W . LOCKE twenty-four times a second . The remark is typically Godardian : A passionate response is mocked by being Has anyone ever defended John Simon's critical raised to the level of a pseudo-objective statement. But Godard 's joke is really more than a joke. In Pechter 's style other than John Simon? In Private Screenings he very first essay, which rises above its routine open- ing-Period Piece: Hollywood 1960-he remarks on the said , \" It is not enough to love the good , it is also power of the medium to affect us viscerally on the simple level of un interpreted action-to convince us that necessary to hate the bad . .\" It is this hatred which what we see has not been made up but is real , fact , truth twenty-four times a second. Because films have both marks and mars his critical style . He hates the this power to affect us on a \" mindless \" level , some critics have tended-erroneously-to speak of the face of Glenda Jackson (WOMEN IN LOVE) and the breasts dream quality of the film qua film-w ith the corollary that films should be treated psychoanalytically , and not of Barbara Hershey (LAST SUMMER) , and he says so as in terms of theme . But \" mindlessness \" and \" dreaming \" are not the same thing : An audience can be intensely cruelly as possible . This is indefensible , and it seems if \" mindlessly \" engaged in an awareness of particulars ; it can be unintellectual but surprisingly alert. And if that only Simon would argue to the contrary. The ques- films are enjoyed on a \"mindless\" level, one should not assume , as some critics have done , that films them- tion which interested me as I read through Movies Into selves are \" mindless,\" and not worth discussing on any level of meaning-except the purely sociological Fwrilimti~ga collection of Simon 's criticism and theoretical or psychoanalytic. Contrary to this, Pechter argues that from 1967 through 1970, was whether this style of nastiness was the only defect In hiS Criticism and theory . . Simon has been praised and damned for hiS com- mand of language , but it is always assumed that the correctness of his usage is unimpeachable. However, it seems to me that one of his primary limitations as a thinker is his disrespect for thE: English language. 74 FALL 1971

-..~~---------------------------- One of his basic claims in the \" Introduction \" is that style by associating several films with one man . I wish there are only six American film critics: Dwight Mac- other critics would emulate him. This kind of pedagogy donald , Stanley Kauffmann, Vernon Young , Charles T. has a place in criticism . The ironic thing about this Samuels, Wilfrid Sheed and himself. The linguistic fal- is that Simon is trying to do for c inematographers what lacy here is Simon 's saying that a phrase which had the \" dyed-in-the-wool auteurist\" Roger Greenspun and previously been a descriptive phrase should be the \" auteurish\" Vincent Canby did for directors when changed into a normative one . It is a suggestion to they began writing for The New York Times. In practice restrict the use of a perfectly good phrase to six in- stances of its use. This is obfuscation of the highest Simon 's auteurist enemies Canby, Greenspun , and order. If he wanted to say that he thought these six Sarris are about as fixated on directors as Simon is critics were the best critics, he should have said it on cinematographers. simply and directly, rather than suggesting that we use \"film critics\" for these six and a newly created phrase The strongest aspect of Simon 's criticism is his \"movie critics \" for all other critics. discussion of color. He is more interested in , and more sensitive to color than any other film critic I have read. A second example of Simon's limitations as a thinker Read the piece on THE PASSION OF ANNA or the c omments is his offering of a personal definition of art. When he about color in THEY SHOOT HORSES , DON 'T THEY ? and does this in the \" Introduction \", part of his comment TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE . He is a first rate color is that \" art is the supreme type of entertainment , dif- critic . Perhaps in his next volume of criticism \" color \" ferent from others chiefly by its greater human rele- could be listed in the index, so that we will not have vance or, more simply, truth.\" If he believes this to to read about why we should not have liked all those be an accurate description of art, what happens to the films that we are going to see and apprec iate during status of a Beethoven quartet or a late Mondrian paint- the next three years in order to ferret out Simon 's ing? Does Simon reject both instrumental music and comments on color. non-representational painting as art or would he just manipulate the word \" truth\" the way he had distorted THE FILMS OF HAL ROACH the phrase \" film critic \"? Has Simon no respect for BY WILLIAM K. EVERSON \" truth \"? Before reading these pieces of criticism close- ly, I had thought that John Canaday was the only con- The Museum of Modern Art, New York , 1971 ; paper- temporary American critic who regularly talked of ob- jects not being good enough to be art. Now it appears oack , $2 .50 ; 96 pages; filmography ; bibliography ; that Canaday has company. Simon speaks of a film not reaching the domain of art (THEY SHOOT HORSES, illustrations. DON 'T THEY?) and falling short of being a work of art (z) . His recurrent use of \"genuine art\" may be the REVIEWED BY LEONARD MALTIN eloquent and cultured Simon's only quaint phrasing. Leonard Maltin is the editor of Film Fan Monthly. One of the most striking features of Simon 's criticism He is also the author of Movie Comedy Teams and the is that he doesn't seem to like films. He seldom finds editor of TV Movies, both published by Signet Books. that seeing a film was worthwhile enough to recommend it to his readers. The sad thing about this is that poor There is much to be done in the area of film his- Simon has to suffer through all those awful films. At tory. With the many books and magazines that have least Andrew Sarris enjoys his work. Actually, this fea- emerged in the past few years , surprisingly little ground ture o~ his criticism makes it perfectly appropriate that has been covered . The same subjects are constantly he writes for The New Leader which calls itself \" A rehashed , while innumerable topics worthy of recogni- Biweekly of News and Opinion.\" This is even in contrast tion are ignored. to The New Republic which calls itself \" A Journal of Politics and the Arts .\" The point I am making is that William K. Everson is a trail-blazer, one of the few The New Leader's readers are probably not among the people writing about film history who combines a love most regular filmgoers of our populace . If Simon did and dedication for his subject with perception and recommend a lot of films, he would only be confusing writing skill. Because Hal Roach has been mentioned his readers about which film they should see this month only parenthetically (if at all) in most film books , or perhaps this season. In contrast to this Stanley Everson has broken new ground. Kauffmann will occasionally recommend half a dozen current films and one week last spring , Sarris recom- Hal Roach is one of the true film pioneers . His mended seventeen films and an entire series to his studio, which devoted itself exclusively to the produc- Village Voice readers . The consequence of all this is tion of one and two-reelers, until the 1930s, became that the readers of this magazine would discover upon the greatest comedy factory in Hollywood . Although reading Simon that they had been wasting their time ignored by many film historians, the work done at seeing all those films which they had already seen and Roach by Charley Chase , Laurel and Hardy, George thought they appreciated. What other good reasons Stevens, Leo McCarey, James Parrot, and many others, are there for reading John Simon? remains one of the greatest outpourings of comedy film ever seen . These men ate, slept, and breathed It might be expected that a critic as articulate as comedy; they loved what they were doing , and Hal Simon would be particularly enlightening to read when Roach wisely allowed them to go about their business he was discussing those rare films that he does like. without typical studio pressures. The love that went This is not the case . When he ceases to be nasty, he into the films always showed in the finished product. has difficulty finding anything to say. Look at the brevity of the pieces on BULLITT and PRETTY POISON which he Everson not only reviews Roach 's career, and dis- had the good sense to like. He does have a lot to say cusses the films that made the studio a success, but about the four Bergman films he discusses, but with he goes into detail in analyzing the Hal Roach style ... the exception of the piece on THE PASSION OF ANNA, a very distinctive style that started where Mack Sen- he seems content to elaborate on the plot. It is as if nett's left off, and easily eclipsed Sennett by the he didn't really expect his readers to see these films, mid-1920s. but he thought they should hear the story anyway. There is also a short interview with Roach which, There are two aspects of Simon's criticism which in discussing style , lends support to Everson ' s conten- are admirable . He almost always gives credit to the tions . But because it is difficult to involve Roach in very screenwriter and the Cinematographer, and he often deep discussions about his work during the 1920s and mentions other films by the same Cinematographer . In 30s, many questions are left unanswered . Roach has a sense, Simon seems to realize that his readers have always been an enigmatic figure, a man with a true not developed a memory for Cinematographers' names appreciation for comedy and comic talent, combined and he is trying to help them develop a sense of visual with a peculiar hot-and-cold attitude towards making films himself, and a capricious desire to force his ideas on others (for some fascinating revelations on this point, see John McCabe's Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy). This is hardly a definitive work on Hal Roach . There are so many films to discuss, so many people involved (besides Chase, and Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang, FILM COMMENT 75

Harold Lloyd , Will Rogers, Snub Pollard , Thelma Todd , ary address to all Depression youngsters and collec- Billy Gilbert, Harry Langdon , Irvin S. Cobb, and behind tors of all ages) , and later the rise of customed super- the scenes, Fred Guiol, James Horne, George Marshall, humans from Flash Gordon and The Phantom to Su- Gus Meins, Robert McGowan , to name a few) that an perman and Batman . With a restraint one might employ encyclopedia work on the studio could fill a very thick in a discussion of the imagery in Paradise Lost, Sted- volume. man points out the basically contrasting appeals of Superman and Batman. \" Batman was the thinking- But Everson does not bite off more than he can chew. boy 's hero. Cary Grant could have played him perfect- His aims are modest: to provide an overview of Roach 's ly \"; while Superman 's approach to crime-fighting career and define his niche in the annals of film comedy . \" seemed heavy-handed and art primitive \" by compari- These goals are fulfilled admirably. The illustrations are son . There is also drawn a distinction between comic excellent, including some rare behind-the-scenes books that featured original stories and those which photos, and there is a list of films shown during the were compilations from daily and Sunday newspaper Museum 's si x-week Roach cycle in 1970 , which pro- strips. vides a good cross-section of the Hal Roach output over the years. In his section on radio, Stedman chronicles the phenomenal popularity of Amos 'n ' Andy, The Gold- If anything , The Films of Hal Roach whets one 's bergs, Lum and Abner, Myrt and Marge, and other appetite for more of the same . . . not just on Roach , long-running domestic comedies. His dismissal of the but on others who worked in the early days of screen absurd latter-day accusation that Amos 'n' Andy was comedy. Certainly, more should be written on the sub- racist is rational and most eloquent. He points out \"what ject, and if all the results are as good as this book, would have passed unnoticed by social critics if their then we will have some truly valuable additions to film drama had portrayed white people would be interpreted literature. as misrepresentation of a race because it was about blacks. \" He rightly claims that \" Correll and Gosden THE SERIALS: SUSPENSE AND DRAMA BY IN- may have done as much (or more) to improve under- STALLMENT standing between races\" by taking \" white audiences inside black homes, albeit imag inary ones, to let them BY RAYMOND WILLIAM STEDMAN hear a black father telling a bedtime story to his little girl. \" University of Oklahoma Press; 1971 ; hardcover, $9.95 ; 514 pages; illustrations, appendix, bibliog- Throughout this book, Raymond Stedman's obser- vations are expressed in a beautiful blending of schol- raphy , index. arship and obvious love for the subject. These dual attitudes are not surprising, when one considers that, REVIEWED BY MILES KREUGER like so many superheroes, Mr. Stedman has a dual identity: he is not only a nostalgia buff, but a college Miles Kreuger is writing a book titled The American dean as well. With scholastic propriety, the educator Musical Film which is being published by E. P. Dutton. in Mr. Stedman provides an awesome fifteen-page bibliography; while the nostalgia buff offers an appendix As the spectre of a polluted , mechanized , militaristic , containing detailed facts on the daytime network serials economically unstable world grows increasingly omi- on both radio and television, with premiere dates and nous, the certainty and familiar comforts of the past cast information. become ever more attractive to vast numbers of Ameri- cans . In the last few years , nostalgia has become not Serials are surely not everyone's cup of tea. While merely a passing trend but an urgently needed escape more cerebral (or perhaps just plain pretentious) audi- valve from the growing horrors of life around us. ences may prefer the tidy design of a work that is structured with a clear beginning , middle, and end , it In the wake of America 's preoccupation with its is very likely that the serial format appeals to a mass recent past, hundreds of books have appeared that audience and to children because it is so much like chronicle our movies, comics, pulp magazines, fash- life itself: played out in a seemingly open-end set of ions, and other escapist activities. They vary from su- experiences, without a clearly predictable point of ter- perficial assemblages of photos or drawings accom- mination . panied by swiftly ground-out texts, to serious-minded treatises on the psychological and sociological motiva- Mr. Stedman attributes the riSing interest in comics tions for the nostalgia phenomenon . and nostalgia to an instinct \" to go home.\" He may be right, because this reader at least found this book not The Serials by Raymond William Stedman is one of only useful for reference but a soothing and thoroughly the most distinguished works to emerge as a result appealing time capsule, with heartwarming photos of of this phenomenon . It is a scrupulously researched , yet masked villains, costumed paladins , space ships, fan- entirely entertaining , discussion of installment dramatic magazine covers, radio stars, and young Don Ameche literature: in movie serials, comic books , and radio and years before he discovered the telephone , when he telev ision comedy series and soap operas. was just plain \" Bob\" of Betty and Bob. Writing with meticulous calm , Stedman establishes The maney we spend at the outset his definition of a serial as \" a narrative an Vietnam with continuing characters broken into a series of regu- [auld make fish larly appearing installments.\" He thus rules out the spawn in Lake Erie. Andy Hardy and Blondie movies, because they ap- peared at random and \" audiences did not go to the Help Ameri[a. theater with the idea that there would ever be another such film .\" Write your Congressman today. Mr. Stedman dates the birth of the screen serial from Help Uneen TheW.r, Boxe03. F.D.R. 51.l1on. New York. N. Y.1002;1 Edison's WHAT HAPPENED TO MARY, starring Mary Fuller, in 1912. In guiding the reader up to 1956 and the last theatrically released serial , BLAZING THE OVERLAND TRAIL, the author discusses the dramatic structure, charac- terization, and theme of most of the important examples of this genre, including PATRIA , a World War One thriller starring Irene Castle, and the Tarzan , Flash Gordon , and Buck Jones cycles. There are also capsule biogra- phies of Pearl White, Ruth Roland , and other exponents of this medium. With remarkable facility, Stedman glides from movies to radio (I Love a Mystery, The Shadow) and then to comics. Here we encounter the beloved Big Little Books published by Whitman in Racine , Wisconsin (a legend- 76 FALL 1971

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I E I lEAS vens means by education , learning and scholarship is quite clear to all within AFI : it is the practical knowledge, the To the Editor: \" know-how \" of feature film making. AFI's overall policy The American Film Institute is many things ; it is not, as toward film and the society has always been conveniently vague: encourage innovative films and develop the audi- George Stevens , Jr . suggests, an educational institution . ence to support them . In more concrete terms, what this In the eighteen months I spent with AFI as Research Officer evidently means is disseminating the special artistic knowl- (before being fired in extraordinary overnight \" economy edge necessary to make (and hence appreciate) film art cuts \" ), I found that out. For twelve years or so I've been as widely as possible. This knowledge does not exist in teaching film in various educational organizations; when books (not to mention teachers, critics or university film Stevens hired me personally in London , I had been working departments) , but only in the professional feature film in the British Film Institute for five years as its Deputy maker. At the heart of AFI policy, we therefore have a vulgar Education Officer . I bring some experience to bear in mak- auteurism atwork: individualism carried to its logical extreme ing this judgment. in an elitist 'great men ' theory of art and education . One way of determining the educational character of an Given such a rationale it is clearly 'educational ' to spend institution is by looking at its staff: how many professional millions of dollars for a home for thirty or forty of the nation 's educators, scholars, critics, historians, playa role of any \" cream \" of young film making. The visits of professionals authority? Another is by looking at the organizational struc- lend prestige, making a building into a \" Center for Advanced ture of trustees, managers, departments, and their rela- Film Studies,\" a variety of individuals into \"Faculty,\" a tionship with the professional field . Needless to say, alloca- screening program into a \" curriculum ,\" discussions (often tion of budget and other·resources is central here . By these rambling) into \" Seminars.\" (That the latter, the main input obvious standards, AFI simply doesn't qualify. The Institute at the Center, can be recorded as a source of inexpensive , has made a valuable contribution in certain areas, notably light intellectual entertainment for educational TV , while preservation and grants for independent filmmaking. How- still qualifying as advanced study , is evidently no contra- ever, in the areas of Education , Publications and Research , diction .) The problems such a rationale throws up in terms useful beg innings (which Stevens now lists as proof of his of deployment of resources are immense, and have led to commitment) have been blasted . AFI now has an Education AFI 's present disastrous course: an irresponsible shelving Department Manager but no Department, and a policy of of those commitments proper to a national cultural body, liaison with a confederation of regional associations, modest and a headlong rush into feature film production . However, funding for which evidently frees the Institute of any larger even at more modest levels such as operating the Center, responsibility in the area of formal education . No profes- problems are daunting. Since the knowledge that is being sional Research staff now exist, although again the adminis- \" taught \" is undefined , how can film making exercises be tration of Oral History grants (with funds earmarked for this designed to encourage learning? How can progress be purpose from source) continues. assessed? How can a curriculum be structured around the occasional visits of busy professionals? What principles Would George Stevens pretend that AFI is trying to pro- should determine screening programs? Which film makers vide intellectual leadership for the film education move- have something useful to say? What of other traditions apart ment? No one is very clear about the relationship between from the fiction film? Given a multi-million dollar operation, media study and film study; or the connections between a' location in Hollywood, and a \" student\" group of three filmmaking as an educational tool and film as critical dozen or so , what in such a system is transferable to discipline. We need to evolve film theory, standards for colleges and schools? Rather than confront these ques- scholarship, and more objective methods of analysis; to tions, the Center has improvised around them and the result explore documentary, \" experimental ,\" and television work, has been administrative waste, demoralized staff, and the as well as the fiction film . If there are individuals within most debilitating atmosphere for inquiry into cinema that AFI involved with these areas, it should be clear by now is possible . they are so against the main drift of the organization . George Stevens asks that polemic be put aside; yet he Another standard by which to measure the educational insists on responding politically, rather than substantively, cal ibre of an institution is its attitudes toward staff. It may to every criticism . I find the single most encouraging aspect interest readers of FILM COMMENT, for instance, to know of American film culture today not the existence of AFI, that AFl's current difficulties can be traced in some measure but the principled outcry that its policies have provoked to the brutal firing of a secretary who insisted on her right thoughout the field , the balanced and detailed recommen- to see a Chaplin film during her lunch break (rather than dations from a concerned constituency which AFI , if it runs serve coffee to visitors), so that she could include it in a true to its track record , will almost certainly ignore. study of the director she was writing for an extension course. The girl was re-hired after lengthy, emotional dis- Sincerely yours, cussions in which Research staff took part. Two days later Jim Kitses the firing of this staff-partly economy cut, partly purge, partly ominous warning-followed. Stevens and his admin- coming in the winter issue: istrative assistants would say this account is distorted : the girl was inefficient and this incident provided the occasion articles by Stephen Farber, but not the reason for her firing . Assuming this to be true (although the girl has many defenders), would anyone in Stanley Kauffmann, their right mind expect a body ostensibly committed to film education to allow such a conflict to arise, or actually use Graham Petrie and Andrew Sarris; it to dismiss an employee? Behind its liberal facade as an educational body. AFI has been consistently and utterly interviews with Stanley Kubrick totalitarian in management/ staff relations. and Robert Aldrich. Yet I do think George Stevens really believes the AFI to be an educational institution . In the end, it comes down to what kind of education we are talking about. What Ste- 78 FALL 1971

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f-iIlems~ These listings contain advance programming informa- Surprise Night: Mondays; Independent Films: ~ IC\\A.I tion which is tentative in all case . Specific film titles, Wednesdays; Silent Films: Saturdays. programming changes and more detailed ticket infor- Whitney Museum of American Art mation can be obtained by telephone a few days before 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, New York NY 10021 . 212 / 249-4100 extension 19. Daily at 12 noon , the scheduled start of each prog ram . 2PM & 4PM , and Tuesdays only at 6 & 8PM. Admission to film is free with $1 museum admission . American Film Institute Theatre Programming \" New American Filmmakers Series\" of features and shorts, a new program each week. 429 L'Enfant Plaza Center SW Washington DC 20024. This season starts September 23 with a two-week run of Norman Mailer's MAIDSTONE . 202 / 554-1000. Screenings daily at 8PM ; children 's matinee Toget her w ith rev iew s Df' every featu re fil m Satu rdays and Sundays at 3PM ; special lunchtime program reviewed in Great Britain . the M F8 publ ished Wednesdays and Fridays at noon . Boxoffice hours 2:30- com ple te tech nical credits . a cast list and an accurate plot synopsis . An unbeatable 8PM , members $1 .25, guests $1 .75 , children under com bina tion ot facts and opinions. 14-50¢; memberships $1 O/ year, includes mailed pro- gram ; visitors membership $1 .50 / 30 days. Under- Subscription .4.75 from Britiah Film Inatitute ground parking adjacent. PubliClitiona Department, 81 Dean Street London, WIV, 8AA, Englend. September 10-24: Fall Film Fling. A mixed bag of £!~~i!I~ne~~!ii!]g recent features. Ads Film Comment 100 Walnut Place Brookline MA 02146 September 5-0ctober 6: Polish Film Festival. Cl assified deadline for next issue : 29 October 1971. October 7-11 : A Tribute to Joan Crawford . books and magazines October 12-November 27: British Film Retrospective CINH-IABILIA - NEW YORK'S FIlM BOOK CENfER - CINH-IABILIA 1930-1971 All current and out-of-print titles, periodicals in- cluding back issues , and numerous related materials and November 28-December 11 : Festival Choice. Films ephemera. All publications reviewed in Film COIIIIlent may be ordered through us . Cinemabilia 10 Cornelia (off W from this year's festivals in New York , Los Angeles, 4th &6th Av) NYC 10014 . 212/989- 8519. Open 1- 7 Mon-Sat . Chicago and San Francisco. FIlM-TELEVISION-RADIO-New, current, out-of-print, and Anthology Film Archives foreign books and periodicals on eVEry aspect of film, t elevision and radio . Comprehensive book search service. 425 Lafayette Street New York NY 10003. (One block south Catalog 25¢ . BOOKLORD'S , Dept. FC, PO Box 177, Peter Stuyvesant Station, New York, New York, 10009. of Astor Place) 212 / 677-3197. Screenings Tuesday through Sunday at 6, 8 & 1OPM . Admission : $1 .00. Three different programs are screened each day from the Anthology collection . The entire archive of avant-garde and experimental films is shown in cycles of six weeks each. Anthology mails a monthly program for a service fee of $1 / year . Los Angeles County Museum of Art 5905 Wiltshire Boulevard Los Angeles CA 90036. 213 / 937- 4250 extension 265. Boxoffice hours: Tuesday-Friday 11 AM-4PM . Screenings Friday at 8:30PM . to September 24 : The Films of Frank Capra. November 4-14 : The First Los Angeles Interna- tional Film Exposition [FILMEX] . Some screenings schedule for Grauman 's Chinese Theater. Exact schedule not available at press time. Museum of Modem Art 11 West 53rd Street New York NY 10019. 212 / 956-7094. Daily screenings at various times . Admission to film is free with museum admission of $1 .75. September 3-8: Second Chance. [new films not exhibited widely when first released] September 9-November 12: Sixty-Five Years of Brit- ish Cinema. November 13-28: A selection of films from the Se- maine de La Critique at the 1971 Cannes Film Fes- tival. December (dates not yet known): Otto Preminger Retrospective. CINEPROBE Tuesdays at 5:30PM : October 5: The Death of Fred Hampton. October 19: Kodak Ghost Poems by Andrew Noren . Pacific Film Archives 2621 Durant Avenue Berkeley CA 94720. 415 / 642-1412 , recorded announcement on films: 415 / 642-0808. Screen- ings daily at 7:30 & 9:30PM . Boxoffie hours 6-9 :30PM . Admission 75¢ . September 2-10: Third World Cinema. September 28-December 14: The Films of Fellini. December 2: Edmund Carpenter, media specialiSt. The following regular programs will continue:

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