\" What else could be the title for a book about the productions of Arthur Freed-the man responsible for the MGM musicals 'Singin' in the Rain ,' 'An American in Paris ,' and 'Gig i' -themselves a recital of America 's dream? \" - The Kirkus Reviews . We follow the properties from their inception , learn the problems that were involved in shooting many famous film segments and watch as temperaments and egos clash both on the set and behind-the - scenes. It's all here-for the first time . Publishers Weekly says : \" It is a jam packed behind- the-scenes account of the movies Freed made , of the lives and careers he touched and often shaped . . .. This isn't tinsel-goss ip but a turbulent, documented film-by-film narrative derived from Freed's own archives and innumerable interviews .\" 576 pp ., over 300 photo- graphs and facsimile letters , $15.00 at all booksellers .
FILIVI C IO IM IMIEIN IT published by THE FILM SOCIETY OF LI NCOLN CENTER VOLUME 11 NUMBER 4 JULY-AUGUST 1975 STAFF CONTENTS editor The Passenger RICHARD CORLISS Men and Landscapes by Ted Perry assistant editor page 2 BROOKS RILEY Antonioni Speaks-and Li ste ns interview by Renee Epste in director of finance & production page 7 SUZANNE CHARITY Jerry lewis graphi c design by Jean -Pierre Co ursodon GEORGE SILLAS pa ge 9 SUSAN DOBBIS lerry Lewis, p. 9 Film Maudit Dossier contri buting writers M arce l Ophuls ' THE MEMORY OF JU STICE RAYMOND DURGNAT statements by Jay Cocks, Dav id Denby, Barbara Epstein , Lilli an Hellm an, Mike Nichols, Frank Ri ch, John Simon, Susan So nta g, Telford Tayl or STEPHEN FARBER page 16 ROGER GREENSPUN The Sil encin g of Serge Paradj anov JONATHAN ROSENBAUM by Antonin Li ehm page 18 RICHARD ROUD Film Censors hip in Yugoslavia ANDREW SARRIS by Dusa n Makavejev page 19 AMOS VOGEL ROBIN WOOD Populism and Social Realism by Raymond Durgnat contributing editor page 20 STUART BYRON Midsection ad verti sin g manager The Indu stry: Paul Sarlat on Acto rs' Sa laries TONY IMPAVIDO page 30 Television: Larry Li chty o n Clos in g Night for the Vietnam War research assistant page 32 MARY CORLI SS Guest Co lumn : James McCourt on PROMISED LANDS page 36 Th e opini ons expressed i n FILM CO MME N T Independents: Amos Vogel on Film Structures are th ose of the indi vidu al authors and do not page 37 necessa ril y re presen t Film Soc iety Popul ism and Social Real ism, p. 20 Alain Resnais of Linco ln Center policy or th e opin ions \" Th ere Isn't Eno ugh Time\" interv iew by James Monaco of th e eC\"iilor o r staff of th e magazine. page 38 FILM COMME N T, luly-AuguSl 1975 , volume 11 number 4, STAVI SKY: Facts into Fi cti o n published bimo nthl y by the Fi lm Soc iety o f Linco ln Center, interview by Richard Seaver page 41 1865 Broadway, N .Y. 10023 U SA . In Defense of Art Seco nd cl a ss postage paid a l New York, New York a nd add iti o nal mailin g by Robin Wood page 44 offices. Copyri ght © 1975 by Th e Film Soc iety of Lin co ln Center. All rights reserved . Thi s publicat io n is fully protected by do mes ti c and i nterna tional George Stevens Three Wartime Comed ies co pyri ght. 11 is for bi dden to duplica te an y pari of thi s publ icati o n in any by Bru ce Petri way withour prior w ritt en permi ssio n fro m the publi shers. page 52 Subscri ptio n rates in th e United Sta tes: The Happy Booker $9 fo r six num bers, $ 17 for twe lve numbers. El sewhere : $10.50 fo r six numbers, $20.00 fo r twelve num bers, payable in U S fund s o nl y. New George Mansour, Jr \" interviewed by Janet Masl in subscribers pl ease in clude your occupation and zip code. Subscripti o n page 57 and back issue co rrespondence: FILM COMME N T, 1865 Broadway, Alain Resnais, p. 38 Back Page New York , N .Y. 10023 U SA . page 64 Editorial co rres po ndence: FILM COMMEN T, 1865 Broa dway, New Yo rk, NY 10023 U SA . Please send manuscript s upon request o nl y and include a stamped self-addressed envelo pe. Microfi lm editions avai labl e from Uni ve rsity Microfilm s, Ann Arbor MI 48106 . Print ed in U SA by Acme Printing, M edford, MA . Di stribut ed in th e U SA by Eastern News Co mpany. 155 West 15th Stree t, New Yo rk N Y 10011 . Intern ati o nal distributi on by W orldw ide M edia Service, 386 Park Ave nue South, New York, NY 10016 USA . FILM CO MME NT parti cipates in th e FI AF periodi cal indexi ng plan. ISSN: 0015-11 9X. library of Congress c ard number 76- 498. o n the cover: Jack Nicholso n in THE PA SSENGER photo: M GM on thi s page: Michelange lo Ant onioni (photo: MGM); Jerry Lewis (ph oto: MOMA/ Film Still s); Joel M cCrea and Veroni ca Lake in SULLI VAN ' S TRA VELS (photo: MOMA/Fi lm Still s); Alain Resnais (ph oto: New Yo rk Film Fes ti val).
Anronlonl:t THE PA/lEnGER' In the beginning of Antonioni's IL curiosity, since Knight is assembling a not suspect it has happened until the cam- GRIDO, the male protagonist has every- documentary portrait as a way to re- era goes back to discover what has trans- thing he needs--a home, a child, a woman member Locke, and Robertson was pre- pired. he loves, a job. Suddenly all of these are sumably one of the last persons to have wre nched away from him and he wanders seen the journalist alive. But Rachel finds Some similar structures are more com- through the bleak Po river valley, from the changed photograph in Locke's plex, as when Locke brings Robertson into unhappy moment to unhappy moment, passport, and the pursuit becomes more his room and puts the body on the bed. never able again to restore the sense of be- intense . Meanwhile, although Locke does There follows a cut to a dose shot of the longing which he had at the beginning of not know it, Achebe has been captured dead man's arm; then the camera pulls the film. Finally he returns to his fanner by the secret police, who are also pur- back to reveal first that Locke is putting on home town , only to discover that it too is suing the man the y think is Robertson . Robertson's watch (a Pulsar, just to about to be destroyed by the building of a Indeed , they follow Rachel, assuming suggest that even the sense of time is new airfield. Faced with this final and ul- that sh.e will lead them to Robertson. changed when trading identities) and then timate picture of dislocation, he falls to his far enough back to reveal that there has death. In order to elude Martin Knight at one been an ellipsis during which Locke has point, Locke seeks the aid of a woman, completely changed clothes with The form of IL GRIDO is inverted in An- Maria Schneider, someone he has just Robertson . What seemed to have been a tonioni's latest film , THE PASSENGER The met, and she joins him in following direct cut turns out to have involved a protagonist begins in frustration, finds a Robertson's itinerary and fleeing the pur- lapse of time . In other parts of the film, the way of entering into a world which seems suers. Eventually everyone catches up sudden intrusion of one of Locke's filmed at first carefree and simple, only to find with Locke-police, Rachel, and Achebe's interviews, being looked at by Knight on that this Elysium is elusive and temporary, kidnappers. The latter arrive first, one of an editing table (Steenbeck), again breaks ending in death. them enters the room (his shadow is dimly the continuity and asks, subsequently, seen screen right of the window), and the that the viewer adjust a prior impression. The actual working out of this journey assum ption is tha t he causes Locke 's In numerous instances, then, the film con- takes the fonn of an extraordinarily beauti- death, thinking he is Robertson . tinually asks the viewer to change a previ- ful film , its plot deceptivel y simple. A ous understanding. jo urnalist, David Locke (Jack Nicholson), If the viewer finds the narrative confus- is on assignment in North Africa, trying to ing at times, that is less a function of an un- Perhaps the most extreme fonn of this make a television film about the United clear story line and more the result of cer- retroactive experience occurs when Locke Libera tion Front, a guerilla movement tain specific strategies in the film, particu- is changing the passport pictures and the which is fighting the established govern- larly one in which the viewer is asked con- soundtrack introduces a meeting of Locke me nt. Arriving back at his hotel, defeated stantly to modify his understanding in the and Robertson . A continuous camera in the attempt to contact the guerillas, he light of new information. Sometimes this movement joins Locke in the present with ciiscovers that David Robertson, another modification is extremely simple, asking Locke and Robertson in the past, during white man staying in the same hotel, has only that we readjust our understanding of their first meeting. At the end of the se- died of a heart attack. By changing pictures the viewpoint represented by a shot. An quence, another continuous camera in the two passports, movin g the body to image which seems at first to be imper- movement joins that past encounter with his own room, and changing clothes with sonal, or objective, turns out to be a par- Locke in the present, working on the the dea d man , David Locke trades iden- ticular person's point of view while passports. Then the camera reveals that tities with David Robertson . Then he sets another image, supposedly representing the entire soundtrack for the past meeting out halfheartedly and casually to follow the gaze of some specific person , is is being played at the present time on the dead man's itinerary. Initially there are changed by having that person actually Locke's tape recorder. even moments when he follows only his enter the frame . own whims, driving behind a white wed- Such a strategy is not a new one for An- ding carriage and stepping into the back of In other cases, this modification of the tonioni. Throughout his work the viewer a chapel in Munich, where a wedding has viewer's understanding is a little more finds himself involved in this kind of retro- just taken place. In the now-deserted complex, involving the discovery that an active experience with a film. Indeed, as chapel, he is met by agents of the guerilla event has happened off-screen. Early in early as CRONACA DI UN AMORE, his first movement he had attempted to contact in the film , for instance, the camera pans back feature film , the viewer was confronted Africa, and realizes that the man with to Locke's Land Rover, only to discover with a sound track which dealt almost en- whom he has traded identities was to s up- that during the interim a young black man tirely with past events. One rarely saw the ply arms to Achebe, a leader in the United has climbed into the vehicle. Elsewhere, people talking about what was happening Liberation Movement. David Locke is standing beside at the moment. It was a film where almost Robertson's dead body; he looks upward at no action happened on the screen-just Simultaneously, Locke's wife, Rachel, the ceiling fan overhead and the camera as, in THE PASSENGER (notably in the long and his television producer, Martin tilts up to follow his gaze. When the cam- take that moves out of Locke's room at the Knight, begin to try and find Robertson, era tilts back down again, Locke has put on Hotel de la Gloria) crucial events happen not knowing that Locke has traded places Robertson's blue shirt In both of these offscreen . In other films, such as LA NOTTE, with him . At first their only impetus is cases, and repeatedly throughout the film , ECLIPSE, and RED DESERT, the strategy was an event happens off-screen, and we do supplemented by presenting the viewer 2 JULY-AUGUST 1975
by Ted Perry with images where perspective and scale Robertson says he likes landscapes. \"I pre- ALL PHOTOS: MGM were indeterminate. Only when a human fer men to landscapes,\" replies Locke . being or some other recognizable object where a man is executed by the sea. At one entered the frame could the viewer decide It is the same assertive, independent point, for instance, the camera pans over precisely what he had been looking at in camera which tilts up the white wall, pass- part of the scene, moving from the execu- the first frames of the shot ing a black bug and following an electrical tion post backed by drums to the nearby wire, in the room of Locke's African hotel. sea. Thus the narrative parts of the film Regardless of the precise way in which Almost the same shot is repeated near the and the news footage share a common this retroactive strategy manifests itself, end of the film, in the Hotel de la Gloria, form at times, lending to the fictive ele- the viewer is constantly presented with a following a wire above Locke's bed to a pic- ments the quality inherent in news foot- film in which he is constitutively involved, ture of trees, water, flowers, and vegeta- age: the observation of fact past perceptions having to be reinter- tion which are quite out of place in this preted in the light of new information . The \" dusty\" site, as Maria Schneider calls it. Antonioni used a similar strategy in mysterious, the unexplainable, the The same kind of assertive style is present L' AVVENTURA when the camera searched paradoxical, even what seems initially in the Munich chapel when the camera out, on its own, parts of the island where coherent, must be subsequently reshaped. cuts without warning to a part of the wall Anna had disappeared, and when it cut to We are, for instance, several minutes into and window, then tilts down to David document such facts as a water spout in THE PASSENGER before finding out that Locke. Similarly, in another part of the the water near the island . The same feeling David Locke is a journalist and what he is film , the camera cuts to a sign that reads is present during Jeanne Moreau's long doing in North Africa. Until these facts are \"Plaza de la Iglesia,\" then pans right and walk in LA NOTTE. And the use of riot foot- known all of his actions seem strange, dis- down, then back to the left to discover age in ZA BRISKIE POINT accomplished located. When the facts become known, Locke's car. Another independent move- much the same thing. In THE PASSENGER the events take on coherence. Thus, by ment of the camera occurs when the car there are numerous pieces of documentary withholding some key exposition, the film pulls up to the curb in front of the hotel in news footage-two interviews and an causes the viewer to share the same sense Almeria. execution. They are seen on the Steenbeck of frustration and futility that David Locke and also full screen. In one scene the fac- himself feels as he fails in his attempts, The film is filled with such cuts and cam- tual nature of the image is heightened by pounding his fist on a rock and beating his era movements in which the camera is having the camera abruptly turned upon stuck Land Rover with a shovel. neither mimetic (representing a particular Locke himself. This extensive use of the as- person's point of view) nor following an ac- sertive camera and the news footage af- THE PASSENGER is also filled with shots in tion. In this respect, parts of the film have fects the fictive world, distancing the which the camera asserts itself, moving in the feeling of documentary and newsreel viewer at times and everywhere making directions not initiated by any action on the footage . Indeed, the same kind of assertive the fictive elements seem more factual and screen or following any person's view- camera is seen in Locke's own news foot- inevitable. Because of these devices, the point. David Locke, his Land Rover age, most noticeably in the sequence viewer is no doubt more willing to accept bogged down in the brown sand of the des- the numerous coincidences that pervade ert, cries out\" All right, I don't care,\" and the film . falls to the ground. The camera, without any prom pting by his gaze, beginS to move away from him, scanning the barren desert suspended beneath the blue sky. More than once the camera cuts to different parts of the desert, studying the terrain as if the film were a documentary . The character of one such shot changes when the camera pans over to reveal Locke and a black man climbing up a slope. In another instance, the camera slowly pans the quiet desert, ending on what seems to be a road. The si- lence is gradually broken, however, and the shot becomes directly involved with the narrative as the sound of a vehicle ap- proaches off-screen. Then the Land Rover whizzes into frame and goes off down the road. Throughout Antonioni's work there is a desire to hold on the background be- fore it becomes a direct part of the narra- tive, and after the narrative has ended, thus giving as much weight to objects and landscapes as to people and feelings. FILM COMMENT 3
THE PAS SENGER . Left : Locke Uack N ichol so n), a journalist, follow s a guide into the desert mountains in search of guerillas. Center: Locke, stranded , cries out, \" All right, I don't care! \" Right : Locke assumes the identity of the dead man Robertson , and report s \" Locke' s\" death to the desk clerk . What is also apparent about such asser- window, turns back to follow people who the world as \"other.\" As the action of the tive cutting and camera movement is that enter the hotel, then finally peers back into film progresses, there is some respite from the area off-screen becomes dynamized. the same room where Locke's body lies on this pain, usually in the form of a simple Throughout THE PASSENGER the viewer is the bed. It is a beautiful shot, involving an love affair which momentarily assuages led to anticipate that something surely extremely complex choreography of the distress but ultimately proves fragile must exist off-screen which, when it finally people, cars, and camera . The film' s effort and hopeless, returning the character or appears, will restore the narrative focus of to assert the camera' s -presence, to characters to his or her own individual the film. One of the most specific examples dynamize the off-screen space, to mix sub- plight. That is the basic structure of of this occurs at the Munich airport where jective and objective views, finally be- CRONACA DI UN AMORE , L' AVVENTURA, we watch several events, all of which seem comes exalted in this extraordinary long ECLIPSE, and ZABRISKIE POINT. IL GRIDO, unrelated to the story, until finally the take . It embodies the quest to a~swer and LA NOTTE are variants of this same camera pans down the Avis counter to re- Locke's question, to \"see\" what is outside form, differing in that the possibility of veal Locke. In other cases, the area off- the window, to make the window transpa- being united with the world or with screen is brought to life by making it a vir- rent and invisible first by filling the screen another human being is something experi- tual extension of what is being seen in the with the window, so that the two are iden- enced in the past-as at the beginning of IL frame . For instance, when Locke enters his tical, and then pushing past that view to GRIDO, or as represented in the love letter room at the Hotel de la Gloria , he sees incorporate everything both outside and from her husband which Jeanne Moreau Maria Schneider off-screen right. The inside the window . It is therefore a shot reads in LA NOTTE . In RED DESERT, the pos- viewer, however, sees her in the frame , re- which keeps pushing the limits of visual sibility of communion is figured in the Sar- flected by a mirror. Locke asks her what perception until the act of seeing (or know- dinian beach fantasy. she sees. As Maria answers him the viewer ing) itself becomes the subject of the shot . becomes involved in the most complex In all of the films, there is usually some mixture of on-screen and off-screen, visual As this moving camera goes outside extraordinary evocation of what it is like to and aural, experiences: looking at Maria' s Locke' s room , at the Hotel de la Gloria, the be free of the pain of experiencing the mirror image and Locke on-screen, listen- children who cross the grounds call to world as something separate and apart. ing to Maria's off-screen voice describing mind the children playing in Barcelona' s The bell-ringing and Monica Vitti's dance what only she can see further off-screen, Parque Comunal, where the old man had in L' AVVENTURA, Jeanne Moreau's walk in outside the window. said, \"But me, when I watch them, I just LA NOTTE, the African dance and the plane flight in ECLIPSE, the scene with Thomas This last example provides the most po- see the same old tragedy beginning allover and the two women on the purple paper in tent reason for such extensive uses of re- again .\" At the Hotel de la Gloria, the com- BLOWUP, the love-making in the desert and troactive thinking, assertive camera, and bination of the long take, the assertive Mark' s taking off with the plane in ZABRIS- dynamization of off-screen space, for it camera, and a dynamized off-screen space KIE POINT-all of these are fleeting, fragile reminds the viewer that Locke's quest, and in which Locke is killed make the \" same moments of relief from the pain of indi- necessarily the viewer's, has been in- old tragedy\" both more factual and more viduation (a term which William Ar- vol ved with seeing, with trying to reify matter-of-fact. Earlier, in talking to rowsmith has used to describe Giuliana's \"what's outside the window\"-the phrase Robertson, Locke had said, \" However state in RED DESERT). Martin Knight says, used earlier with Robertson when Locke hard you try, it stays so difficult to get speaking of David Locke, \"he had this declared that he and his readers could only away from your own habits.\" Trading sense of detachment.\" Indeed he did, and see what they expected to see. In the Hotel identities with Robertson at first seemed a it was felt most acutely. de la Gloria, as Maria looks out the win- way out of this sense of being caged in dow, Locke twice asks her, \"What do you one's own selfhood, of being able to see THE PASSENGER is again a variation of see?\" After a few moments he tells the only what one expects to see. But even in this central form, except that this time the story of the blind man who, having his trading identities, Locke could not escape distress of being human, unable to ex- sight given to him , killed himself. Pre- the \"old tragedy\" of being human, to be perience the world as anything but habitu- sented just prior to Locke's own death, this trapped by habitual ways of seeing and by ally apart from one's self, is temporarily re- story provides the final verbal metaphor the most inescapable human habit of lieved not so much by a love relationship for how futile his own quest has been. all-dying. • or a fantasy, although the meeting with Maria Schneider is no small part of Locke's The ultimate realization of all these The resemblance noted above, between moments of joy, but by trading identities strategies, and the visual summary of the IL GRIDO and THE PASSENGER, is not unique. with Robertson, thereby hoping to cast film, occurs, of course, in the next to last Many of Antonioni's films have at their aside the past with all its worn out habits, shot of THE PASSENGER, where the camera core a very simple form. The film begins by worn out perceptions, and predictable fu- assertively begins to move across Locke's depicting one or more characters ex- ture_ For a brief moment Locke is free of room in the Hotel de la Gloria, goes out the periencing the pain of being human- those constraints, or so it seems. Thus the dislocated, separated, acutely conscious of 4 JULY-AUGUST 1975
Left: \"Robertson\" pauses in a Munich cemetery on his way to a mysterious assignation. Center : Locke-Robertson spots Mrs. Locke Oenny Runacre) in a Barcelona hotel. RighI: An interlude on the lam, with \" Robertson \" and his fellow-passenger (Maria Schneider). form of the film begins with describing in vehicle, his convertible, as they speed cafe where Locke and Maria are seated. minute detail all of the difficulties and down the beautiful, tree-lined road . Seen frustra tions of Locke's life . The viewer sees But cars, and other vehicles, are the in- the disdain with which the blacks demand at a low angle from the back of the car she struments of freedom and death, mobility his cigarettes, walk out of the room when too seems to float in the air, free of gravity, and rootlessness. Cars, planes, trains, he enters, leave him in the mountainous the green foliage of the trees whipping past ships function in much the same way desert when an unexpected patrol ap- in the background behind her head as she throughout Antonioni's films. In ECLIPSE, pears. The state of his life at that point be- looks past the camera toward the ever re- the car with which the drunk flees into the comes represented by the Land Rover ceding road. In talking with Robertson, night later becomes his underwater tomb. w hen it gets stuck in the sand . Once he has Locke had said, \" Wouldn't it be better if we Giuliana's suicide attempt, in RED DESERT, traded places with Robertson, Locke be- could just forget all the places, forget ev- was made in an automobile. The plane in comes \"unstuck.\" The environment be- erything that happens, just throw it all ZABRISKIE POINT is Mark's means of escape comes more hospitable, filled with flowers away, day by day?\" and exhilaration, and also his coffin. It is (perhaps leading to a meeting with a then no mere coincidence in THE PASS- \"Daisy\" ), vegetation, a beautiful female Like the early Italian Futurist manifes- ENGER that Avis provides Locke with his companion , and striking architectural toes which celebrated the dynamism of first vehicle and also the means by which forms, like the sculpted Gaudi buildings in machines, particularly the automobile, the Martin Knight locates the man he thinks is Barcelona. vehicles in all of Antonioni's films project, at Robertson. Nor is it a piece of insignificant least in part, the idea of freedom. Such im- information when Maria Schneider in- Just as the marooned Land Rover was ages form the very center of THE PASS- forms us that the Spanish architect, Gaudi, the specific representation of Locke being ENGER, reflecting the moments when the was killed by a bus. trapped in his own frustrating life, so are human beings seem most at one with the the most ecstatic moments of his freedom world and with one another. When vehi- And if we are to see the voyage of the portrayed in vehicles. There is the tram, cles have taken on such connotations, it is passenger intimately connected with such moving over Barcelona, with Locke lean- surely a sign of Locke's demise when the vehicles, especially cars, the presence of ing out over the waters and waving his police seize his car and he must go by taxi the driver-training car in the last two shots arms like a freed bird . It is the same gesture to the Hotel de la Gloria , that dusty site of the film provides a further elaboration of which Maria Schneider repeats in another which so much resembles the desert this motif. Moving in and out of the frame where we first met Locke. This similarity is when Locke no longer has a car, circling The version of THE PASSENGER shown at reinforced with a small herd of goats mov- about in the very moment when he is the Cannes Film Festival, and then ing through the foreground of the shot killed, the driver training car suggests that throughout Europe, is some five minutes when the taxi arrives at the Hotel de la the cycle described by the film will begin longer than the American release version. Gloria; a herd of goats was present outside once again. As the children on the same Two sequences have been added. When the African Hotel, when Locke opened grounds also indicated, we are witness to the Jack Nicholson character returns to his Robertson's window and the camera the \" same old tragedy beginning all over London home, he goes inside, notices a panned over the nearby desert. again. \" newspaper obituary about himself (\" David Locke, 37, educated at Columbia Univer- From vehicle stuck in the desert to vehi- As the passenger makes his way from sity . .. \" ), sees a letter taped to the door cle flying over water to vehicle speeding death bed to lovers' bed to death bed, each to his wife from her lover, and rifles down a lushly vegetated road to no vehicle new locale articulates the subtle changes in through the family safe but leaves the in a \" dusty\" place, that is the story of this David Locke's psyche. As he needs more documents intact. passenger. Maria is a passenger, too, ap- and more to be met, actually to become pearing first in London, her green blouse Robertson or someone, the environment The other additional sequence takes blending with the foliage she leans back becomes more and more hostile. Soon he place between Nicholson and Maria against, and later meeting Locke in Bar- is squashing a bug (flower?) on a wall, pound- Schneider in southern Spain. As they relax celona. She may even be the woman in ing its surface in the same kind of frustra- under a tree, Nicholson suddenly shouts, Munich who walks on the sidewalk as the tion he showed in beating the rocks and \"What the fuck are you doing here with wedding carriage passes. She, and the the Land Rover in the first part of the film. me?\" and Schneider coolly replies, man who is British and American , travel Waiting, expecting, Locke is nevertheless \" Which 'me' do you mean?\" She then tries through a myriad of architectural locales, never met by anyone or anything except a to escape from Nicholson in the back of a varied landscapes, and different lan- fleeting romance, a few brief moments of van, but Nicholson catches up with her, guages. Such a sense of traveling is at the flying over blue water, a few hours of and they resume their journey. core of the film, reinforced by such inci- traveling within a green and flowered dents as that in which the camera zip-pans paradise . Stuck in the desert , he is The European title is PROFESSION: REPORTER . back and forth three times to follow cars momentarily reborn, only to return speed- that pass on the road beside the outdoor ily to the desert and death .•:-; FILM COMMENT 5
ANTONIONI ON THE SEVEN-MINUTE SHOT The second-to-Iast take of the film, which with a microphone, and the -assistant trans- dow. Doing without the sphere meant expos- lasts approximately seven minutes, called for mitted them to the actors, extras, cars, and ing ourselves to the vagaries of the weather. the use of a special camera, a Canadian in- everything else which made the \" move- But I had no choice . Furthermore, I had to vention. ment\" in the piazza . shoot between 3 :30 and 5:00 p.m. because of the light, which at other hours would have I also tried other ways of getting the same Behind the hotel there was a huge c-rane, been too strong. You must remember we idea, but all were shown to be less practical more than a hundred feet high, from which came from inside to the outside, and the ratio and more artificial. hung a steel cable. of internal to external light governed the diaphragm opening for the whole shot. The problem was not so much getting out Once the camera was outside the window, of the window, but panning the full semicir- it left the track and was simultaneously Another problem: the camera was a 16mm cle of the piazza to end up before the window hooked onto the cable. Naturally, the shift one. After much discussion, the camera crew again . from a fixed support, like the track, to a was persuaded to try 35mm. They asked me mobile one, such as the cable, caused the to mount a 400-foot reel , but, as I thought, it This was made possible by the use of a camera to bump and sway while a second was not long enough for the sequence. To get camera mounted on a series of gyroscopes. cameraman, experienced in this work, took a thousand-foot reel required a new adjust- Inside the room, the camera moved hanging over. This is where the gyroscopes came in : ment of the whole gyroscopic equilibrium of from a track attached to the ceil ing. The they completely neutral ized the bumping the camera . cameraman pushed it with his hands on the and swaying. large curving handles seen in the photo. The photos show the work we did to get The shooting of this take required eleven the final result. Once the camera arrived at the wrought- days. There were other difficulties, primarily iron grating, the worst problem arose. The the wind. The weather was windy and stormy, A big crowd followed our efforts each day. grating was hinged, and swung open a sec- and a wind storm soon arrived, doing much When, finally, on the eleventh day, we suc- ond after the bars went off-camera at the sides damage. In order to be independent of the ceeded in obtaining two good takes, there of the shot. Obviously, I controlled weather, this special camera normally oper- was a long and moving outburst of applause everything-including commands for the ates in a closed sphere. But the sphere was such as, on the field, greets a player who has zooms and pans-on a monitor that was in a too big, and would not pass through the win- madea goal. van. From here I gave orders to my assistant
My interview with Michelangelo Antonioni M.A.: I know him and have seen some staring into the world of your film , so your camera fixes itself on a particular space, was at 10 A. M. I walked down through Central of his work. seemingly unconcerned with the move- ments of the people operating within that Park. The animals in the Zoo were enjoying their R.E.: I think that what instinctively leads space . The camera no longer has a subor- dinate relation to character or plot. It be- early morning moments of privacy. The white me to make this connection is that both comes a character with a dynamic power of polar bear was bathing himself. He seemed you and Weston are interested in the per- acting upon the audience. more like an overweight child performing aquat- ceptual relationship between the viewer and the represented world of the cinematic Your camera can be very humorous in its ic tricks than a caged animal. frame and the photograph. When llook at disengagement. For example the sequence Antonioni's suite was on the twenty-second a Weston photograph, I often have the un- where Nicholson and Schneider are hav- easy feeling that a human being is present ing lunch in a sidewalk cafe. You open with floor of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. He invited a car moving from right to left and another me to see the view from his window. Looking at car moving from right to left and another the city from this height, I felt like a stranger. The car moving from left to right. The camera then moves back and reveals the bordering city was unrecognizable to me. Antonioni but not immediately visible. I find myself sidewalk where the two of them are seat- ed, two people in a busy street scene. I smiled and said, \"It's beautiful, isn't it?\" searching the landscape, at first with the found myself surprised at seeing them, surprised that they were there at all. Antonioni: I think that it would be in- intention of restoring the human figure's teresting for this interview to take the form central position within it, and then rather Or the sequence when Nicholson of long statement-questions and short ashamedly, allowing the elements to be walked down a street, moving from the answers. It is also the only possible form. I seen as they are in their relationship to one center of the screen and disappearing cannot use words. A director in some way around the corner of the celluloid. I was is a man of action even if this action is intel- another. lectual. My life is divided into two kinds of M.A.: Every audience is tied to certain tempted to peer behind the screen in order experiences, practical and intellectual. to find out where he was going. The cam- They both push me to do something and habits in the way that they look at film . If era is totally detached from its own world. behave in some way, but I don't know they don't have the same articulation of why. It is something unconscious . I can't scene, they get lost. This makes me crazy. M.A.: This was an idea that I had. explain. You know Pirandello? Pirandello Your problem in viewing Weston's photo- Sometimes, I realized that I was following graphs is the same question of habit. this same idea after the sequence was shot. This means that the idea was inside me When °I see THE PASSENGER now, I ask my- and not theoretically formulated. was once asked, \"Why does that character This is a film about someone who is following his destiny, a man watching real- behave like that?\" He replied, \"I don't ity as reported, in the same way that I was watching him, in the same way that you know why, I'm only the author.\" are pursuing me. You could go back and find another camera watching me and Epstein: In thinking about the film this another one watching the other camera. It's surrealistic, isn't it? morning, I had the feeling that I had seen R.E.: What hope is there to get beyond certain scenes before. I realized that it was the images? We see countless photographs in the newspapers of mutilated bodies , of in Camus's The Stranger. Standing by the starving children. We hear the news re- peated over and over again, every fifteen window one Sunday, Meursault records in minutes on the radio. We titillate ourselves his apathetic voice so like Jack Nicholson's, life as it passes by in the street. Also, for the first time, the murder of the Arab achieved a clearer reality for me. I understood Meur- sault's explanation about the five bullets: it was the sun, it was the fact that he was there at that particular moment. M.A.: Someone else also made this comparison. I think that it is fundamen- tally wrong. Meursault has \"existential\" problems, abstract problems. My charac- ter, David Locke, has very concrete prob- lems. He is frustrated with his life . His marriage is a failure . He is not completely by Renee Epstein satisfied with his job even if done success- fully. He is unable to be more committed politically and he does not know why. Locke's situation is not the same as the self why I did a particular scene in that par- Strangers. ticular way. Only after the completion of R.E.: One of the things that struck me the film could I explain why I chose that about the characters in THE PASSENGER is solution to a given sequence. However, that these people live at a distance from- while I am shooting, it is instinct that I fol- themselves and from each other. We are low. The only need that I had was to be free told that Locke and Rachel have a child. with my camera . Usually we follow one However, we never see the child, and person, or the camera moves between two there is no reference made to this child by people in dialogue . In this film, I did not them. Language seems to describe the want to maintain one style. I wanted the character, but the character listening to the technical solution to each problem to come words is a stranger to that description. to me intuitively without any preconcep- M.A.: This is deliberate. Rachel is critical tions. There isn't any unity of style. The of her husband because of this. At the end unity of the film comes from inside the of the film she says that she never knew film, itself, from the relationship between him. Well, perhaps, he never really knew me and the world and between me and my her. They thought of each other in certain characters. terms, but they may have been mistaken. R.E.: You have initiated the audience R.E.: I find myself making tross- into a way of perceiving. We become aware associations with your film. Are you famil- that there is a functional similarity between iar with the photographs of Edward Wes- the eye of the audience and the eye of your ton? camera . As we sit stationary in our seats FILM COMMENT 7
nightly with violence and commercials of- different from the format on the moviola . It the perimeters of the moviola. The reel is fered by television . was as though I was filming the execution suddenly stopped, and Knight apologizes myself. And then it was watched by for upsetting Rachel. We are confronted in your film with an Knight and Rachel on the moviola as film execution . shot by Locke. M.A. My intention was to show some- thing that shocked Locke. M.A. This is a very ambiguous piece of This was a film of an actual execution. film. Locke is doing a documentary film on Please don't ask me anything about it. I R.E. But was it not you that was shock- a guerrilla movement within an African cannot tell you. ed? How do we know what effect that country. He is trying to get more and more shooting had on Locke? We know very politically involved. We can think that he R.E. You often make the audience unex- little about these people. The camera has chooses to shoot the execution because he pectedly adjust the levels of their involve- more of an effect on us than the people. knows that it will be visually impressiYe. ment. The tone of your characterizations He may have chosen to use it for sen- and the apparent disinterest of the camera M.A. You have to believe that scene. sationalism but perhaps not. We don't as it records events create an atmosphere You have to imagine that Locke was know, and perhaps he, himself, did not of distances between the characters and shocked. He is of course a very conven- their world, and our personal relation to tional interviewer and this is what Rachel know what he wanted. I begin the se- that projected reality. And then the execu- accuses him of. We are following Rachel quence with a full screen as though it was tion scene. who is trying to know him better. happening that moment. And then we see We are in the same position as Rachel. Top : Antonioni plans the seven-minute shot. Bottom left : Robertson-Locke (Chuck Mulvehill) and We know no more . We have to imagine. Locke-Robertson. Bottom right: \" Robertson \" and The Girl. R.E. But why do we have to imagine? it viewed by the television producer on the Is it a real execution or is it staged by the You are probing levels of reality. You are moviola for his documentary of David film company? It is left to the audience to dealing with many rninds including the Locke's life as a journalist. This is another choose. We see at first the archetypal audiences' trying to get beyond appear- way that I was able to be free with my image of the martyr. It is only when we see ances that we offer each other day by day, camera. I recorded the execution twice so the final shuddering of his body on the film that condition us through the media, that the audience's perception of that event replayed in the moviola that the horror of through the language that we use to de- would be different each time that they this man's death touches us. The reality scribe reality. And then you say that these watched it. The format on the screen was strangely assumes proportions that defy people are coming closer in their under- standing of one another. Your film closes with Rachel and the girl making state- ments about the dead man on the bed. That man for me lost his identity as David Locke. He had become as exchangeable as the original Robertson, as disengaged from his name as he was from his fonner life. Was this your intention? M.A.: Yes . Things are what they are, they are what you see. We work with im- ages not with words. I cannot use words. That is my problem. R.E. Dialogue is secondary in your film. Language that is used to describe what these people see and feel only achieves a reality when we are visually presented with that world. For example, the last seven minutes of the film. The girl asks, \"What would it be like to be blind?\" and Locke tells the story of the man who re- gains his sight. I thought to myself, why is he doing this, it's so tired and flat. And then suddenly the cliches of our lives be- came very new, after we lived through the concluding moments of the film. The words, themselves, don't say very much about the world. Then we see that world and the language becomes vital and truth- ful. This is one of the interesting ironies. I am trying to use words to re-create your world when your world exists so completely on its own terms, visually. M.A.: Yes. R.E. In the film you sa y that men don't change, only places. Although there was extreme contrast in topography, it seemed as ifit was one unfolding landscape. If man does not change, and if places are more or less alike, then what can we say about the future? M.A. The future? My God! I have noth- ing to say, I am waiting. I can imagine but I can say nothing. ::~ 8 JULY-AUGUST 1975
Jerry Lewis in THE ERRAND BOY. A French critic writing about Jerry Lewis Ten years later, not unexpectedly, I took ed--directors Lewis learned, to a degree, in English for American readers is liable to a much more sympathetic look at Lewis. what to do, but more importantly, and become as schizoid as the subject of his For the record, the following is a transla- even from Tashlin, whatnot to do. Besides, study. In France, where Lewis's genius is tion of the Jerry Lewis entry in Trente Ans de it looks as if he forgot about it all when he practically taken for granted, it is almost Cinema Americain. Being a capsule evalua- switched to the other side of the camera, so mandatory to apologize for expressing tion, it didn't have to bother with either original and aggressively personal his di- anything less than wild enthusiasm about nuances or detailed analyses, and it may rectorial style turned out to be. As we his work; in America such enthusiasm is therefore seem to represent a typically watch his films we are not reminded of regarded with the mixture of disbelief, \"French\" pro-Lewis slant. Yet, I still more Chaplin or Keaton or any other director- amusement, and hostility reserved for or less stand by it today, although with comedian, but rather of a Bresson (de- highbrow aberrations of a particularly some considerable reservations . Its inclu- dramatization, ellipses), or a Godard (film- foreign nature. sion here is chiefly intended to give ic fiction redefined and reborn through its perspective to an article that largely con- own destruction) . Like today's most ad- To complicate matters, this Frenchman's centrates on the reservations. After all, it vanced filmmakers, Lewis questions the response to Lewis has notably changed would be pointless to be so demanding of traditional relationship of audience to film . since a 1%0 putdown of the comedian as Lewis and so critical of his work if such More than most, he trusts the spectators \"the lowest degree of physical, moral and severity was not warranted by the high intelligence to establish the required con- intellectual abasement to which an actor level of achievement he has, at times, nections between images and supply the can descend\"-a rather sweeping state- proved capable of reaching, and by the intermediary information he boldly skips ment which Raymond Durgnat picked up equally high expectations he has thus over. Laughter must be deserved, he in The Crazy Mirror, thus making it more aroused. seems to tell us; let's meet halfway. His is a difficult to forget about than if it had re- modern approach, which frustrates our mained buried in the pages of the \"An auteur is born . Underneath the expectations the better to satisfy them later magazine that first harbored it. Although clown's makeup there lay, well concealed, on, emphasizes the obvious only to spring written before the release of the first not a broken heart-although that is a pos- the unexpected out of it, dismantles or con- Lewis-directed film, the remark was cer- sibility too-but a sturdy comic mind, a jures away gags, tampers with traditional tainly unfair, an emotional reaction rather long-frustrated master of the film form . structures and slyly warps them. But while than a critically weighted one. From his various-and variously talent- FILM COMMENT 9
his hand may be trumped up, he plays it in Paramount agreed to leave him entirely in long fluid takes. The combination of set J all fairness , with his cards on the table: free provided he came up with some film design and camera movement for comedy Don't you believe it, he insists, it's only a for the summer. purposes is perhaps most brilliantly ef- movie (which wards off identification and fected in the opening sequence-in which dubious sentimentality) . In order to THE BELLBOY may not be Lewis 's the camera moves up from a doseup of a achieve an even higher degree of distanc- masterpiece-most of his admirers would road sign (\" Milltown, a very nervous ing, Lewis keeps switching disguises, mul- rather single out THE NUlTY PROFESSOR or city\"), sweeps over a deserted town square tiplies himself by two, three, or seven, con- THE PATSY-but it is quite possibly his fun- set, zeroes in on a lone elderly lady walk- fronts his own self or his opposite, or even niest picture: an outpouring of highly ing briskly down Main Street, tracks later- introduces Lewis the man himself, as he idiosyncratic comedy ideas in an atmos- ally to accompany her and record the cata- provocatively did in the first film he di- phere of unpretentious, yet far from un- strophic chain effects of a loud greeting as rected. This is inside joking, to be sure, but ambitious relaxation. In joyful celebration they pile up in quick succession. it all points to ethical, or at the very least of his newly acquired freedom (not only thematic, content. Of course, the attrac- was he, for the first time, his own director, Yet the lavishness of the production ul- tiveness of Lewis's themes and style tends but also his own and sole writer), Lewis jet- timately backfires on Lewis, and the film to obscure a most vital question, that of tisoned a number of traditional encum- slowly disintegrates during the second comic content, for it is a fact that these fas- brances and turned out a picture with no half, which runs out of steam through cinating films are not always very funny. plot and virtually no dialogue-a daring sheer repetitiousness. One of the problems But their originality lies precisely in the fact and healthy reaction to three decades of is that Lewis is doing too little with too that, while nominally slapstick comedies, over-plotted, too-talky comedies. Indeed, much. The big set and the three dozen girls they so transcend categories that laughter his approach in THE BELLBOY harks back to who people it turn out to be little more in their case ceases to be the test of success the old silent-comedy principle of sys- than a backdrop for spare routines involv- or failure . There doesn't seem to be any tematically exploiting the comic pos- ing Jerry's dealings with one character (the reason, incidentally, why Lewis should be sibilities of a given locale (in this case a \"hat scene\" with Buddy Lester, the George denied a kind of excuse that has been Miami hotel), so that gags are not subser- Raft cameo), or with some objects (a col- used-and not always too justifiably at vient to a plot, but are the direct outcome of lapsing bed whose resilient mattress en- that-in Chaplin's favor for the past fifty those possibilities . gulfs him like quicksand, a butterfly case years. \" from which the butterflies escape when he The feeling of easy-going improvisation attempts to dust it, priceless glassware and Now that a few more years have is deceptive, however (Lewis has said his vases which he invariably shatters in rec- elapsed, I would tend to feel that this flare shooting script was 170 pages long). ord time) . The most elaborate sequence of enthusiasm, although quite sincere, was Loosely structured as the film is, there is (the TV show) doesn't really come off and unduly influenced by the general excite- nothing haphazard about its comic- con- looks too elaborate in terms of the few ment over Lewis among French critics at tent. In fact, it turns out to be a complete laughs it yields. the time . Not that there is any ground for catalogue of the raw material for Lewis's retracting the claims of originality and subsequent movies: \"eluded\" gags (the Another problem is the plotlessness, \"modernism\" made for his cinematic style. off-screen aerial stunt); game-playing with which worked so well for THE BELLBOY but No one could deny today that Lewis is an time and space (an empty cafeteria sud- tends to become burdensome here. One auteur, and a completely personal one. denly becomes crowded with customers; longs for some kind of story-line-no mat- Watching his films again, however (only hundred of chairs are arranged in neat ter how slender-onto which gags could the ones he has directed are taken into ac- rows by the diligent bellboy in less time be hung, and that would lead the film count here), one more than ever notices than it took his boss to give him the order); somewhere. There is no build-up, no how contrived and, at times, counter- camera-work used as gag (the variation on progression, no climax. Instead there is a productive their formal sophistication can the old silent-comedy routine with dozen moral of sorts, the film's \"message\"- be. Too, their frequent unfunniness of people coming out of a small car); and something about feeling needed and being shouldn't have been so breezily dismissed inspired flights of poetic nonsense (a flash really needed-which a \" nice\" girl (for as irrelevant; comedy is probably the last bulb turns night into day). In 1960 THE whom the audience doesn't care, as she genre left today in which a filmmaker can't BELLBOY looked like an interesting oddity, has been inadequately characterized ear- get along on style alone, and Lewis is cer- a one-shot unlikely to lead to anything lier) somewhat solemnly enunciates in a tainly no exception. Moreover, a certain else. It proved to have been the most logi- degree of retroactive disenchantment has cal of first steps, a film whose every gag, as cloying little speech to her callous fellow- been made unavoidable by the brutal de- Leutrat and Simonci put it in their little boarders. But though this bit of moralizing terioration Lewis's inspiration has under- book on Lewis, was to become more sig- does weaken the film' s ending, it's too per- nificant with the release of each new Lewis functorily handled to become annoying, gone since this eulogy was written . (THE film . as will happen in later films. BIG MOUTH and WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT? are very personal and very unfunny ef- Although the comedy in THE LADIES ' Although THE ERRAND BOY (1962) de- forts.) Since his career now seems both at a MAN (1961) is very much in the same spirit velops and systematizes ideas already at turning-point and at a standstill, the time as THE BELLBOY, the two films are quite dif- work in the earlier films, it is arguably the may be ripe for a reappraisal. Fortunately, ferent, and the latter one more clearly slightest of Lewis's six directorial efforts at due to Lewis's late blooming as a full- points to some further developments. Paramount. It is structurally similar to THE fledged cineaste, it is possible, even within Whereas the black-and-white BELLBOY had BELLBOY and THE LADIES' MAN-that is, to- limited space, to review his entire output a wonderful slapdash, un-Hollywoodian tally episodic-but it lacks both the spon- as a director and give individual attention quality about it, THE LADIES' MAN is a taneity and inventiveness of the former to each of the films. glossy, expensive, technicolored, carefully and the visual impact of the latter. Senti- engineered studio product that flaunts its mentality once again rears its mawkish According to his own account, Lewis' production values with almost nouveau head, and even more obtrUSively than in directorial debut was quite accidental. THE fiche insistance. THE LADIES' MAN. Moreover, one would BELLBOY was undertaken on short notice expect the cornic potentialities of a movie early in 1960 in order to provide To be sure, these production values are studio to be greater than those of a hotel or Paramount with a Jerry Lewis picture for not just that. Lewis uses them functionally boarding house, especially given Lewis's summer release, as the comedian felt that and creatively, especially the huge open- flair for fooling around with audio-visual the just-completed CINDERFELLA should be faced interior set, and the elaborate crane equipment; but, possibly as a result of his held up until the Christmas season. shots which follow characters in and out of reluctance to do the obvious, little use is ac- rooms, up and down stairs and corridors 10 JULY-AUGUST 1975
tually made of these possibilities. tions on what was to emerge as Lewis' star. The attempt fails miserably until Stan- favorite, and obsessive, theme (split per- ley finally breaks away from his mentors' In THE LADIES' MAN, the \"fantasy se- stifling tutelage and becomes a hit by doing quence\" was weirdly surreal, not to say sonality), the film utilizes the most tradi- his own thing. It is again a film about re- downright kinky: an unsuspecting Lewis tional reference available-the Jekyll and birth, about the struggle to cast off the walking into a white-on-white \"forbid- Hyde motif-and manages to succeed on slough of inadequacies and frustrations den\" room inhabited by a black-clad, its own terms, as comedy rather than mere while remaining true to one's own self. vampire-like female and the entire Harry James orchestra. In THE ERRAND BOY , it parody. As in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR, the split consists of a cute conversation between the Yet, despite Lewis's virtuosity as both personality motif is central to the film, and hero and a puppet ostrich; \"I love you and I again involves an entertainer (all artists are believe in you,\" whimpers a dewy-eyed writer-director and performer, one can't schizoid, Lewis seems to be saying), with Lewis, stickily rephrasing a philosophy help feeling that he has tried to handle all sorts of attendant paradoxes and ironies more forcibly stated earlier in the \"If You more than he was capable of, more, (famous comedian plays failing comedian; Believe\" number from Frank Tashlin's perhaps, than could be handled by anyone being unfunny in a funny way, etc.) . There Martin and Lewis picture, ARTISTS AND in a comedy. The delineation of the two is a total reversal in the treatment of the MODELS . personae (Kelp, the timid, blundering pro- theme, however. Whereas Kelp was a fail- fessor, and Buddy Love, the macho, ure at his job-at least the \"performing\" Faithful to the oblique approach inaugu- egotistical pop singer), the paradox ofJerry (teaching) side of it-and became success- rated in THE BELLBOY, Lewis gives gags a Lewis playing the part of a Dean Martinish ful after his transformation, Stanley is minimal build-up and concentrates on crooner, and Lewis's necessarily ambiva- \" naturally\" funny as himself but flops comic consequences rather than on comic lent attitude toward the character (Buddy when required to use comic material un- action. Thus, in the car wash scene-in Love must be at the same time plausible suited to his personality (an obvious com- and comical, the real thing and its carica- ment on the mediocre material Lewis was often forced to accept). Moreover, whereas Left: Lewis and his sorority on the four-storey open set of THE LADIES MAN. Right: Lewis directing on the Kelp was, like Jekyll, his own Pygmalion, \" Paramutual \" set ofTHE ERRAND BOY. Stanley is a puppet in the hands of his promoters until they give him up as hope- which both car and driver get sprayed- ture), the jarring overlapping of the two less and he then comes into his own. and in the film-within-the-film party personalities and the rather confusing rela- sequence ruined by a ubiquitous Morty (a tionship between them, the gradual shift- The nature of the split is far more gag already used in the TV sequence of THE ing of the girl's feelings and her continu- subtle-although less radical-in THE LADIES' MAN), we are only shown the ef- ingly ambiguous attitude toward both PATSY. What took place in THE NUTTY PROF- fects of Morty's blunders as the car leaves Kelp and Love-all these subtle com- ESSOR was a total psychological and physi- the garage, and as dismayed studio execu- plexities tend to get in the way of gag de- cal upheaval. Stanley's personality, on the tives watch a screening of the ruined se- velopment and blunt the film's comic im- other hand, is not actually \"split\" at all, his quence. This \"before-after\" gag structure pact. The problem extends beyond the two \"sides\" are only professional aspects does fit in with the looseness of the overall realm of the classic \"plot vs. gags\" dilem- of the same individual. Although THE construction, but one gets the definite ma (one all creative film comedians have PATSY, like all the other Lewis films, deals feeling-although this is admittedly had to confront one way or the other) for, with some of the seemingly endless ava- hindSight-that the film exhausts the pos- in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR, it becomes clear tars of the character's protean persona, it s~bilities of the format and that Lewis for the first time that Lewis is after some- does so in a more specific, almost auto- would have to move on to more structured thing else beside getting laughs, some- biographical way, as Stanley's ordeal can constructions in latter films. Which of thing that involves both the spinning out only be interpreted as a dramatized history course he did with THE NUTTY PROFESSOR of thematic intricacies and the exhilarating ofthe growth ofJerry Lewis the comedian. (1963) . exercise of mise-en-scene for its own sake. The comic quality of THE PATSY Lewis' fourth film is the first one to com- Consciously or not, Lewis must have unfortunately fails to match its thematic bine the \"production values\" of THE sensed the nature of his predicament, for coherence. As a direct consequence of the LADIES' MAN (color, expensive sets, sophis- he used the making and evolution of a film's premise, the comedy branches out ticated special effects) with story elements comedian as the subject of his next film . In into two distinct, almost opposite direc- that had been absent from the earlier films: that respect, THE PATSY (1964) may be con- tions. The grooming of Stanley provides a complex plot complete with traditional sidered his most ambitious picture, as it an ideal showcase for traditional Jerry \"love interest.\" In contrast to the episodic tackles the crucial question: What is funny? structure that had become the Lewis How do you make people laugh? A popu- Lewis routines relying on the character's trademark, each sequence in THE NUTTY lar comedian dies; his staff try to turn a clumsiness and incompetence; and while PROFESSOR performs a speCific narrative daffy bellboy (called Stanley, as in THE there are some highlights (the sequence BELLBOY) into a duplicate of their demised with Hans Conreid as Stanley'S hapless function . As the first in a series of vari- voice coach, for example), those routines are on the whole fairly predictable and simple-minded . The comedy in the \"per- forming scenes,\" on the other hand, is much less obvious and includes what may be the most sophisticated routines ever devised by Lewis, especially the climactic \"Ed Sullivan\" sequence . I shall return to this scene and give it special consideration further on, for I feel that what Lewis achieves and fails to achieve in it, and the reasons why, provide a clue to the nature of his comedy, its virtues and limitations. In THE FAMILY JEWELS (1965), Lewis dis- carded the linear construction of THE NUTTY PROFESSOR and THE PATSY to revert FILM COMMENT 11
to a looseness of structure more reminis- fails to frighten children-are deliberately the impersonations, with the result that a cent of his earlier films. A brilliantly com- offbeat, even sinister, rather than funny sizable portion of the footage is devoted to plex, often very funn y picture, and characterizations, and bring a not- non-comedy scenes that do little beyond perhaps (with THE PATSY) hi s most ac- unwelcome touch of uneasiness in the conveying information. complished directorial work, THE FAMILY midst of all the slapstick. JEWELS is the ultimate in schizoid comedy, Still, it is quite a personal film , and all with Lewis playing seven different parts. Finally, Lewis concludes the film by sorts of profundities-real or imagined- bringing the six uncles together, and the can be read into its psychonanalytical The format has its drawbacks and its ad- effortless mastery with which he handles premise. Auteurist critics certainly did not vantages. The film is a series of sketches the task directorially makes up for the fail to praise its most glaring weaknesses. strung together by a slim story-line (a mil- stickiness of the obligatory piece of senti- Thus Jean Louis Comolli in Cahiers du lionaire orphan girl must decide which of ment. All in all, even if one agrees with Cinema argued that THREE ON ACOUCH was her six uncles will become her guardian), Andrew Sarris's judgment that Lewis \"has \"the most constructed of Lewis's films, the and a certain spottiness is consequently never put one brilliant comedy together one in which the comic system best coin- unavoidable. On the other hand, the vari- from fade-in to fade-out,\" one must admit cides with the dramatic system\"-thereby ety of comic characters involved allows for that THE FAMILY JEWELS comes reasonably reasserting, in his own modish way, the such a wide range of activities, locales, and close to being just that. traditional belief that the highest form of props that the supply of gags never runs comedy is the one with the least comedy in dry. Moreover, Willard, th e little girl's • it. faithful chauffeur (also played by Lewis) gives the film cohesion b y his presence THE FAMILY JEWELS was Lewis's thirty- Outwardly, THE BIG MOUTIf (1967) might throughout. The character is not merely fourth and next-to-last Paramount picture seem to be a return to Lewis's earlier brand functional, neither is it a \"straight\" part (the last one, BOEING BOEING, was released of comedy, which makes its failure all the (the way the hero of THREE ON ACOUCH will six months later) , and it turned out to be more disappointing. He was reunited with be). Although Willard, unlike the uncles, is the last of his major comedies as well. Bill Richmond, who had CO-Scripted with not a broad caricature, and therefore From 1966 on he was to work either as star him all the Lewis-directed Paramount pic- stands apart from them, he nevertheless or director, or both, for Columbia, Fox, tures except THE BELLBOY (in which, how- gets his share of the comedy, and actually Warners and United Artists . Whether be- ever, Richmond does a walk-on as Stan cause of the change in working conditions, Laurel, Lewis's comedy idol) . This time around, Richmond provided the original The Two Juliuses : in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (left) and THE FAMILY JEWELS (ri ght) . story as well as help in the writing. Still, almost everything about the picture goes walks away with some of the best scenes in the loss of some favorite collaborators, or wrong. The trouble has a lot to do with the the film (such as the smoothly directed the fact that, with one exception, he no story-line, a mere pretext but this time a opening sequence in which Willard unwit- longer wrote his own scripts, he never re- decidedly cumbersome one. Lewis and tingly foils a carefully planned robbery by captured the inspired brilliance of his brief Richmond use one of the most hackneyed simply retrieving a stray baseball; or his comedy premises in the book (the hero is a superbly choreographed disruption of a great period. dead ringer for a dangerous gangster), and military parade) . He directed himself in a straight role in fail-indeed don't even attempt-to do anything new with it. The other premise THE FAMILY JEWELS contains some of the THREE ON A COUCH (1966), his first non- on which the entire film is supposedly finest displays of physical clumsiness in Paramount picture. Although the more based (the hero, a vacationer who has Lewis's work, particularly a devastating traditional Lewis is allowed to manifest fished a murdered frogman out of the pool game by the detective uncle, and a himself in a series of comic impersona- Pacific, can't get the police or anybody else long scene recording the fumblings of a tions, the film is banal, with only an occa- to listen to his story) is one that can't possi- hopelessly unfocused fashion photog- sional flash of directorial invention. One of bly be sustained through more than a few rapher. Clumsiness is not the unique the impersonations (a girl-shy insect col- initial scenes, yet Lewis keeps restating it source of comedy, however. One uncle, lector reminiscent of the two Juliuses: Kelp again and again throughout the film, thus for instance-a tugboat captain seen in a from THE NUTTY PROFESSOR and the stressing the story's basic flaw. flashback as a WWII navy enlistee- photographer from THE FAMILY JEWELS) is successfully disconnects the fuses of a tor- vintage Lewis, but the others are either THE BIG MOUTH is weakened by the kind pedo and removes it from the hulk of the tastelessly low-brow (a protracted skit in of minimal motivations, slapdash transi- ship into which it had lodged itself (of drag), or confused and pointless (the tions and shaky logic one expects from an course the gap thus left open in the hulk cigar-smoking, tall-talking Texan) . Lewis average silent comedy short, but which immediately causes the ship to sink). uses the straight plot-about an artist just won't do in a 1967 sound feature . Few Other uncles-a gloomy clown who hates whose psychiatrist fiancee (Janet Leigh) films have ever been as simpled-minded in his job and a would-be gangster who even can't marry him because she is too busy concept and as confused in execution. The with her patients-as a framing device for Lewis touch has deteriorated into a perva- sive looseness that sometimes verges on sheer amateurism. Scenes that might have been funny misfire completely because of poor writing, inadequate direction, or sloppy editing. At times the comedy be- comes unbearably childish, as when Jer- ry's pursuers (they don't recognize him, thanks to his disguise) describe to him what they'll do if they catch him (\"We'll beat him up, break his arm, hang him, shoot him, etc .... \"), as he cringes and grimaces in fearful anticipation. Like THREE ON ACOUCH, though, THE BIG MOUTIf is fascinating in all sorts of marginal ways to anyone who is interested in how Lewis's mind works: the film as a 12 JULY-AUGUST 1975
metaphor about the struggle between the necessarily protracted opening sequence is laughter-but does it really? And, if and creator and his creatures; the thematic rela- followed first by animated credits, then by when it does, how good a laugh does it tion of the water motif, which runs more expository material, as Byers meets throughout the film , to the motif of artistic three other Army rejects and each of them yield? creation (the film begins and ends on the explains in a flashback why he desperately In THE ERRAND BOY Lewis has a routine Pacific shore, several scenes take place in wants to enlist. When the show finally gets San Diego's Marine World, Lewis pulls his on the road, the comedy turns out to con- on a ladder with a huge glass jar which, own double out of the ocean-an sist mostly of Lewis's broad burlesque of a against all expectations, he never drops . evolutionist's view of creation?-and the German general, a routine that quickly be- The scene is a variation on an old joke: in a entire cast jumps into the same ocean at candy-store, one kid after another asks for the end in mad pursuit of that same, comes tiresome. a penny's worth of bubble-gum; after each indestructible double). Lewis has even As in THE BIG MOUTH, most of the com- purchase, the storekeeper returns the jar to equipped the film with his own version of its top-shelf, only to have to take it down a Greek chorus: a narrator who, in a pre- edy rests upon shaky foundations. The again for the next kid in line. The audience credit sequence, is discovered , fully impersonation of Kesselring, for instance, knows exactly how the routine is sup- dressed and attache case in hand, standing inevitably raises the problem of language, posed to unfold. The only surprise lies in ankle-deep in the ocean surf. (He, too, will and Byers does try to learn German from the absence of a punch-line, either verbal return to the sea in the end, still carrying records at an early stage in his prepara- or visual. Nothing happens, and that, the his attache case, but this time wearing tions, yet Lewis later adopts the more con- Lewis fans argue, is the gag-since who polka-dot underpants in acknowledgment venient convention of an English-speaking needs to be told (or shown) what one al- of the basic nuttiness of a story he had in- German army, so that he can rely on comic ready knows? They may have a point, yet elocution-English rasped and squealed what Lewis is doing is reminiscent of the with a mock teutonic accent-for most of his story about the comedians' convention sisted throughout the film was \"com- effects. where they gave well-known jokes num- Now, we don' t expect \"realism,\" nor bers and called out the numbers instead of pletely true .\") telling the jokes. Very clever, but wouldn't While the thematic paraphernalia does even verissimilitude, from a Jerry Lewis you rather hear a new joke told? comedy; Byers' \"private\" war is an out- impart the film with a semblance of struc- rageous proposition to begin with, yet we The elimination principle ma y be tural coherence, it does little to dispel the have no trouble accepting it as a premise. applied to entire sequences; thus the gloom engendered by the rnirthlessness of No matter how wild and nonsensical a airplane routine from THE BELLBOY, the the comedy. Beyond the irony of the title, comedy may get, however, there is one whole point of which is that no use what- the ultimate irony of the film is that this thing it can't get away with, and that's con- soever is made of the hero's incompetence \"tragic meditation on the theme of in- tradicting its own premises , which is at flying a plane. All Lewis wanted from communicability\" (as one French critic put exactly what Lewis does about his lan- the scene, apart from the trick played upon it) is Lewis's first total failure to communi- guage problem. But then, this kind of con- our expectation, was a fine but minute cate with his audience in his chosen idiom, tradiction is so pervasive in the film that it sound effect of the DC-8 roaring over the that of comedy and laughter. can hardly be accidental. It is probably hotel as the manager, who has just been naive to speak of \"mistakes\" in the face of told on the phone about what's going on, ONE MORE TIME (1970), which I confess I such deliberate disregard, not only for shouts a horrified \"What?\" into the re- have not seen, should be of interest to stu- consistency but for the very concept of nar- ceiver. (\"We cut the sequence thirty times dents of Lewis as the only film he ever di- rative. At the same time, the film remains before finally deCiding to drop two rected without acting in it. If one is to be- at least superficially indebted to that frames,\" Lewis comments in his book, \"it lieve the all but unanimous reports, how- ever , this sequel to SALT AND PEPPER merely proved that Lewis's work as a di- concept-hence its vulnerability. (One was that critical. \" ) Next thing we know, rector is meaningful only in relation to his couldn't very well direct similar criticism Stanley and the DC-8 are safely back upon own comedy style. As for WHICH WAY TO against, say, BLAZING SADDLES , whose the ground. We haven't seen them once in THE FRONT? (1970), his latest and bleakest structural principle is the non sequitur.) flight. Lewis's conceit does get a smile (it is comedy, it comes very close to being a total What Lewis's evolution has led to with certainly better than a hackneyed trea t- disaster , and may be viewed as an ad- WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT? is this most ment of a hackneyed situation), but the ef- vanced step on the way to suicidal self- perverse of \"modern\" artifacts, a comedy fect is like cracking nuts with a sledge- fulfillment. that keeps destroying the very conditions hammer-hardly commensurate with the of its functiOning. effort. Underneath our pleasure at being Like THE BIG MOUTH, it is a study in frus- tricked and our recognition of the direc- tration, but with megalomaniac overtones • tor's cleverness, we experience real frustra- added . The hero, Brendan Byers III (who tion at a letdown which, although inten- happens to be the richest man in the It may seem paradoxical to view Lewis's tional, remains a letdown nonetheless. world), literally can't stand rejection. The failure to make the Pantheon of very word brings him to the verge of comedian-cineastes as a consequence of As a method of comedy-making, \"play- epilepsy. However, his immense wealth his being too clever a film stylist. Yet he ing tricks\" upon the spectators is a hazard- enables him to bypass rejection and rear- does seem to have, so to speak, directed ous practice, for it may turn out to merely range the world to his liking. Since the himself into a comer. In this, as in almost confuse them. All film comedians seem to Army won't have him, he sets up his own any other respect, Lewis is the antithesis of agree that, in order for a comedy scene or mini-army to fight his own private war a Buster Keaton. Whereas Keaton's mise- gag to work, the audience must be pro- against Nazi Germany. Byers imperson- en-scene was a natural extension of his vided with all the relevant data: motiva- ates Kesselring, changes the course of his- comedy (and vice versa), Lewis's formal tions, background to the situation, loca- tory and even subdues Hitler himself. It is concepts often tend to defeat the very pur- tion, spatial layout, etc . We should be an intriguing conceit, and an ambitious pose of all comedy. His roundabout ap- made able to register all these readily and one-shades of Chaplin and Lubitsch- proach to gags is a case in point. The next effortlessly; otherwise we become puz- but the film is a dismal affair. Lewis seems logical step to \"suggesting\" gags, after all, zled, the underlying principle being that to have had little confidence in his material is to eliminate them entirely. It would be one can't ask oneself questions and laugh and surrounded himself with a bunch of absurd to suggest that this technique led to at the same time. One of Lewis's most other comedians, a generous but aes- his eventual discarding of comedy for famous comedy sequences-the silent thetically dubious decision. drama, yet there must be some kind of con- routine at the end of THE PATSY-boldly The action starts sluggishly and takes nection. In Lewis's comedies, the \"eluded disregards this principle. ages to get under way. A straight, un- gag\" is evidently meant to produce In this scene, Lewis pulls a neat trick FILM COMMENT 13
upon the audience. The hero, Stanley Belt, JEWELS , the eschewing of traditional narra- Lewis's own performing style, and the has been groomed for months to become a tive and gag structure was leading Lewis osmotic patterns that ensue. Thus, Charlie comedy star, but until now with dismal re- toward an increasingly formal and com- Callas's gibberish and nervous tics in THE sults. His press agent has managed to get plex type of comedy, with stylistics taking BIG MOUTH are reminiscent of any number him a booking on the Ed Sullivan Show, over from slapstick. Conflict between what of previous Lewis routines, and are more but his whole staff is so convinced he is he was doing as a comedian and what he or less reprised in WHICH WAY TO THE going to fl op that they walk out on him. was doing as a filmmaker was therefore in- FRONT? by Lewis himself, whose outbursts Stanley gets their letter of resignation in his evitable. His more recent efforts, however, are in tum faithfully mimicked by Jan Mur- dressing-room fifteen minutes before have indicated that there is no Jekyll- ray in a subsequent scene of the same film . going on the air. He walks out of the build- and-Hyde dichotomy between the two, as Again in WHICH WAY, Steve Franken- ing, looking disconsolate. A block away the director's tendency to deplete comedy looking remarkably like Lewis as a hen- from the TV studio, guests are filing into a content and spirit away gags is now pecked husband and son-is put through theater for a first night gala performance. echoed by the performer's reluctance to a typically Lewisian scene of slavish sub- Stanley watches the crowd while, at the mission to female tyranny (played with same time, Sullivan is going through his rely upon his traditional image as funny Kathleen Freeman, the perennial mother- introductory speech for him on TV. A man man. For quite some time he had been de- image of Lewis's films) . In recent inter- and his wife walk out of the theater having vising ways of dissociating himself from views, Lewis has claimed that he wants to an argument. The wife throws her ticket the \"idiot,\" either by playing a straight part \"bring the audience relief from watching on the pavement and walks away. Stanley and relegating the clowning to impersona- me all the time. \" But the purpose-if in- picks up the ticket and walks to the en- tion skits (THREE ON A COUCH), or by ap- deed this is his purpose-is obviously de- trance, but the ticket taker refuses to admit pearing only in impersonations (THE FAM- him because he is wearing jeans and sneakers. Stanley sneaks into a blind alley Lewis, in gangster guise, directing THE FAMILY JEWELS. in back of the theater and, using some black paint, transforms his outfit into ILY JEWELS), thus canceling out the Lewis feated as we are reminded of rather than something quite convincingly resembling character through the multiplicity of his distracted from him by what amounts to a a tuxedo. He is thus able to enter the thea- own disguises. series of impersonations of Jerry Lewis by ter without any trouble. Only at that point assorted second- and third-string comics. do we realize that Stanley had not given up A new approach to this phasing-out going on the Ed Sullivan Show, and that strategy was introduced in his last two re- The yearning for self-obliteration tran- the whole routine we have just watched leased films, in which Lewis diverts our at- spires in the very anecdotes of the late pic- was actually his act for the show. tention away from himself on to various tures. Jerry Clamson, the hero of THE BIG other performers. Something of the kind MOUTH, lives in limbo throughout the film . Deliberately, Lewis has made it almost had already been suggested in THE PATSY, To one group of characters (the gangsters) impossible for us to grasp the true nature which featured a quintet of well-known he can only be a ghost: they mistake him of the routine at a first viewing. The clues character actors, but theirs remained es- for his look-alike, whom they have he has planted, if and when we notice sentially straight parts, and Lewis was still painstakingly slaughtered. The rest of the them at all, are too ambiguous to do more in charge of all the comedy. In THE BIG world ignores Jerry so consistently that he than perplex us. Cuts to Sullivan and his MOUTH and WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT?, is unable to. convey to anybody the infor- staff watching a TV screen (which we can- however, important comedy bits have mation he is burning to reveal. Only by re- not see) are particularly confusing. They been handed to a number of associate com- nouncing his personality and assuming a hint that Stanley's routine may be part of ics whose apparent function was to take false identity does he eventually succeed in the show, but the logistics of the whole the load off Jerry's shoulders and allow establishing some degree of contact with thing escape us. (One of several possible him to keep as Iowa comedy profile as the outside world. conjectures is that TV cameras started film- possible. ing Stanley, unbeknown to him , after The millionaire hero of WHICH WAY TO someone on Sullivan's staff noticed him This eagerness to delegate authority is at THE FRONT? is another limbo character doing funny things on his own back in that once emphaSized and contradicted by the forced into a vicarious mode of existence as alley.) glaring similarity between these bits and a result of rejection. When his only desire Another source of puzzlement-if we take the routine for what it is, a performance -is that Stanley's pantomime is so polished, so perfectly timed and executed, whereas he had proved a complete flop at each preceding rehearsal and perfor- mance . Of course, this is the very point Lewis wants to make: Stanley becomes successful once he gets a chance to \" be himself.\" But there is an essential differ- ence between the unintentional funniness of Stanley the Bellboy-a typical Jerry Lewis \"idiot\" with his hopeless clumsiness-and the highly professional, graceful funniness of the TV routine. If Stanley were really to be \"himself,\" he would never be able to perform such an act. The sequence is a tangle of am- biguities, obscurities, and inconsistencies that work as jamming devices to distort Lewis's modest message just as they de- activate his comedy. At the time of THE PATSY and THE FAMILY 14 JULY-AUGUST 1975
(joining the army) is denied him, he buys himself the means to act out an elaborate fantasy-involving, again, the adoption of Rig ht, top to bottom: THE LAD IE S MAN; a star i s a false identity - in which no less than the groomed in THE PATSY ; kooky Kabuki in THE BIG outcome of World War II is at stake. Byers MOUTH; with Sidney Miller as Hitler in WH ICH WAY is thus reduced (reduces himself) to his TO THE FRO NT? function as buyer. Characteristically, his first \"purchase\" is a trio of surrogates (he promises them $100,000 each to go along evolution of mo vie attendance in the with his scheme) , each of whom repre- past couple of decades ma y already sents a facet of the Lewis persona. Rather have made his kind of universality ob- than a \"character\" in the usual sense, Byers solete. Once the archetypal lowbrow is a projection of Lewis the producer- comic with enormous lowbrow appeal, director putting a show together-for that Lewis now seems to have lost touch is what his contribution to the war really with the masses, and finds himself iron- looks like: a super-show backed, cast, de- ically cast in the role o f misunderstood signed, staged, and performed by himself. artist. Commiserating about the lack of Lewis's evolution, then, is quite lOgical, recognition Lewis receives from his fel- no matter how paradoxical it may seem . low Americans has become a traditional The withdrawal syndrome has combined routine . (Item: On a recent Mike Douglas with directorial deviousness to create con- Show whose guests included Lewis and ditions in which laughter is seriously im- Marcel Marceau, the host at one point paired, or even becomes impossible. urged the latter-with somewhat exces- Under such circumstances, it was also logi- sive eagerness, as though Lewis were a cal that Lewis should lose much of his au- has-been in dire need of any kind of dience. He has attributed the commercial plug- : \" Tell the audience how the y failure of WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT? to love this man in your country!\") Warners' lack of interest in it (the film was Btit how could Lewis not feel some re- indeed inadequately promoted and re- sentment about the shabby treatment leased), but it is unlikely that a more he has always received at the hands of thoughtful handling would have turned it American critics? Once all the necessary into a hit. After all, yo u can't work that reservations have been duly entered hard at destroying your own image and (Sarris's eleven-count indictment in Th e still expect to retain your old following . American Cin ema takes care of the most The switch to straight drama in the film familiar ones), and once it has been that followed-the still unreleased THE recognized that Lewis's work, as a re- DAY THE CLOWN CRIED-is an equally logi- sult of its inner contradictions, imposes cal, although startling, development. We some serious limitations upon itself, the already suspected that the clown of THE unescapable fact remains-and one FAMILY JEWELS, who hated \"the make-up, must bring it up again at the risk of be- the faces, the screaming kids,\" was expres- laboring the obvious-that Lewis was sing one side of Lewis's ambiguous feel- the only Hollywood comedian to rise ings about his work. Ironically, the hero of from mere performer to (in his own, quite THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED is a clown who accurate phrase) \"total filmmaker\" during finds himself in such a situation that he can the sound era. The uniqueness of this only hate his job-which consists in keep- achievement alone deserved sympathetic ing the children in a concentration camp attention rather than the hostility or occupied as they wait to be taken to the gas indifference it met with. chamber. While it is not surprising that Yet one can see why this very unique- Lewis should finally come round to dis- ness worked against Lewis . Critics were close a fondness for pathos shared by so not prepared to deal with a personal many comedians (there had been warning cinematic approach of physical comedy hints in earlier pictures), his selection of because the patterns for that kind of such a painfully bizarre theme does come thing had been set thirty or forty years as a bit of a shock. Clowns may all be closet earlier by the great silent comedians. sentimentalists, but this is strutting, not Lewis stood alone , and there just sneaking, out of the closet. wasn't any yardstick available by which Still, one should refrain from condemn- to evaluate his contribution. The merit ing the film in advance on the face of its of the French critics, auteurist excesses subject-matter. Although the odds against notwithstanding, was their willingness it are staggering, itmight turn out to be sub- to look at what Lewis was doing as a lime. Indeed, it would have to be sublime filmmaker for what it was, rather than not to be ridiculous, or simply embarassing with some preconception of what film beyond endurance. At the very least, one comedy should be. This willingness is must admit that making the film at all took all the more commendable as, in many guts, and that Lewis didn't opt for any easy cases, it had to be conquered over an way out of his creative problems. ingrained-and far from unfounded- Unlike a Woody Allen and Mel prejudice against the Lewis of the Dean Brooks, Lewis has always strived for Martin period, a prejudice few people the universality achieved by the great here seem to have overcome, or even silent comedians . Unfortunately, the reconsidered. ~~:
FILM MAUDIT DOSSIER There are several varieties of films be the case with Ralph Bakshi's flagrant examples of state or corporate maudits - films over which hang some COONSKIN). And if another company offers censorship-and no matter that the dread curse, whether of state censorship,. charges against the filmmakers involved to buy the film in question (as film booker range from breach of contract to formalism producer's interference, distributor indif- to trafficking in stolen art objects! Inevita- ference, or plain bad luck. Sometimes part George Mansour, Jr. , indicates happened bly, our contributors express aesthetic or all of a director's career can be maudit; judgments even as they voice libertarian one thinks of Stroheim and Welles in the with Paul Bartel's PRIVATE PARTS) , the first concern, for these filmmakers are artists as West, and most of the major Soviet studio may decide that its own failure with well as victims. But the writers here are not filmmakers in Stalin's Russia. Sometimes a the film would be less embarrassing than telling us what to see in thesefilms maudits. studio will suppress a film in the sacred someone else's success with it-and keeps They are simply pleading, with passion na me of \" tax write-offs, \" or bow to the and eloquence: Let them be seen! demands of pressure groups (as seems to the film moldering in its va ults. The road to film maudit is paved with power plays and cowardice. These·four pages document some recent, MEMORIES OF 'JUSTICE' Telfo rd Tay lor and M arcel Ophul s during the editing ofTHE MEMORY OF JUSTICE . Jay Cocks the concern of most of the Western World. David Denby He calls THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE \"a film film critic, Time about the impossibility of judgment versus editor, Film 73-74 the necessity for judgment,\" a question, a With its political issues, THE MEMORY OF struggle, that Ophuls contrives both to Marcel Ophuls' troubles on THE MEMORY JUSTICE is also-perhaps most deeply- unversalize and particularize, within him- OF JUSTICE result from the widespread re-· aboutthe act and process of conscience. All self. sistance to accepting documentary as a that it sa ys about history, the judgments form of personal expression. It is unfortu- the film weighs, become finally subordi- SO THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE is extraordi- nately true that the form has served as the nate to the evolution and definition of nary, the sort of film that offers the possi- refuge for a great many timid and Ophuls' morality. THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE bility of change. It has been seen, so far, mediocre filmmakers; among these a high asked him to reexamine a part of his own only by the few people represented on percentage have all too willingly embraced life . Ophuls shows the principles estab- these pages. We form a sort of tiny club to the notion that documentary's authority lished at the Nuremberg trials deflected which none of us would like to belong lies in \"objectivity\" -one of the most per- from the contemporary German con- without, of course, significantly expand- sistent fallacies in the hi story of aesthetic sciousness, most particularly, and from ing the membership. delusions. To paraphrase Harold Rosen- 16 JULY-AUGUST 1975
berg's famous mot, objectivity is simply film might be Marcel Ophuls' favorite line very private and variable within a larger, one of fifty-seven varieties of subjectivity. from Philip Barry, \"The time to make up perhaps immutable scheme. Ophuls per- But because Ophuls' right to his personal your mind about people is never.\" ceives guilt down to its very finest grada- view and method was insufficiently re- tions, like the abstract expressionists who spected by his producers, they saw no Frank Rich can paint black on black. He distinguishes reason why he couldn't be dumped and among rich varieties of guilt, from bestial replaced by another man when they found film critic, New Times him personally intransigent. (No matter to ironic, from avoidable to inevitable, how much money-men may distrust him, Marcel Ophuls' documentary, THE MEM- from thoughtless to excogitated, from in- Robert Altman will never suffer from the ORY OF JUSTICE, at once sums up this histor- tensely guilty to all but guiltless. same kind of insulting treatment .) After ical moment and looks beyond it: it's a film all, what is a documentary but a series of that bridges the gap between the inevitable Yet he is not a pessimist. He sees cour- interviews and newsreels placed in some climax of our Southeast Asian disaster and age, generosity, and self-sacrifice as sweet, sort of intelligible order? Needless to say, it that postwar epilogue which is finally ours sad, lovely little weeds springing up in the could be infinitely more . THE SORROW AND to make of what we will. Like THE SORROW midst of the luxurious flower beds of evil, THE PITY was not only a major act of histori- AND THE PITY, MEMORY is a four-and-a- and his work takes it all in with as much cal reconstruction, it was one of the out- half-hour exploration of the legacy of impartiality as is possible for someone who standingly beautiful moral statements of World War II, but it has its own special prefers decency to criminality, bravery to recent years; THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE is focus. Ophuls is now seeking to under- cowardice, good sense to madness, in clearly a continuation of that work. stand how the justice dispensed at ways that have become quite unfashiona- Nuremberg in 1945 holds up against the ble, if not obsolete. What other film about The movie asks the question: How is it test of time-and how the legal and moral Nazi Germany, for instance, is so con- possible to judge a nation's conduct? Do principles established then might bear on cerned with the role of the artists, or of the we have the right? Have we lost the right the Allied powers' adventures in Dresden, parents-child relationship, or of the at- by sinning in Vietnam? The interview Hiroshima, Algeria, and Vietnam. Ophuls titudes of the simplest, most ordinary material is extraordinarily detailed and doesn't have glib answers to such ques- people, in the making or undoing of a to- bold, the system of organization complex tions-his movie is rich in contradictions, talitarian ethos? and richly digressive beyond any easy difficult nuances, anguish, and doubt- summary. As always, in Ophuls films , we and he constructs his ultimately pro- The inquiries about Nazism, Algeria, arrive at a double view of man as historical Nuremberg argument with a scrupu- and Vietnam here are extraordinarily pa- actor; he is both free to choose and con- lous and painstaking respect for all permu- tien t, min ute, sedulous - nothing is ditioned by circumstance. Neither free- tations of the truth. feared more than an easy answer. dom nor circumstance rules absolutely, Throughout, one is aware of the film- which is why nearly all moral judgments in By weaving together old archive and maker's sensibility: always informed by a Ophuls films are attained only after the newsreel footage with dozens of inter- profound creative curiosity, open to all most arduous and responsible exercise of views (among the subjects: Telford Taylor, possibilities as it delves toward truths that the ethical sense. Included in this sweep- Beate Klarsfeld, Karl Donitz, Co\\. Anthony become progressively more unfamiliar, ing civil process is the filmmaker himself, Herbert, Sir Hartley Shawcross, Edgar and never relinquishing a basic, subtle placed inside history and clearly present in Faure, Yehudi Menuhin, Marie Claude smile. A smile, not of superiority, but of the film as an alert but fallible inquirer. The Vaillant-Couturier, Dan Ellsberg, Richard melancholy yet bright-eyed awareness: clear invitation to the viewer to do the Falk, Dr. Howard Levy, and Barbara Keat- not forgiving everything, which is impos- same-to use his moral intelligence and ing), Ophuls covers a large plot of histori- sible, but trying to understand it all , see what there is to see-emerges as one cal ground, but he doesn't go in for slam- which, though equally impossible, Ophuls of the few imperatives in recent documen- bang cross-cutting that might allow him accomplishes to an astounding degree. taries we can receive without indifference cheap ironies; instead he chooses to let the or contempt. material breathe so his interviewees can (as Susan Sontag he puts it) \"quit being caricatures and Barbara Epstein symbols and become people.\" The film Against Interpretation , PROMISED LANDS finds its shape as it goes along, its style re- co-editor, The New York Review of Books flecting the density and complexity of the Both as a filmmaker and as a moviegoer, issues the filmmaker raises. What finally I'm appalled by the sabotaging of Marcel I am appalled that Marcel Ophuls' brave, makes MEMORY so exciting is our sense that Ophuls' new film. If THE MEMORY OF JUs- serious, important film on Nuremberg is we are reliving Ophuls' own process of in- TICE were not as absorbing and important being suppressed. vestigation and synthesis, and, for that as it is, there would be reason enough for reason, the movie generates that same indignation. But the film 's great merits Lillian Hellman exhilaration of discovery and revelation we make the treatment seem particularly out- associate with the best fiction films. Once rageous. The Little Faxes, Pentimento again Marcel Ophuls has given us a classic documentary-a standard against which Telford Taylor I think THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE is as brilliant all other non-fiction cinema must be mea- and important a picture as one would ex- sured. Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy pect from Marcel Ophuls, who is one of the great filmmakers of the world. John Simon Marcel Ophuls' film THE MEMORY OF JUs- TICE shows the same probing and compas- film critic, Esquire sionate approach which made THE SORROW AND THE PITY one of the greatest documen- Mike Nichols Guilt is beginning to catch up with evil in taries in motion picture history. He deals sheer banality. What this means is simply with problems to which there are no THE GRADUATE, THE FORTUNE that self-hate is becoming as rampant as \"answers,\" and portrays human beings hate, and there is hardly a national cinema under the stress of conflicting values and THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE is a disturbing and left that does not exhibit films in which the emotions, sometimes torn by the tensions finally deeply moving film that throughout guilt of the particular nation is paraded of which they are painfully aware, and its length fascinates, and does not permit other times struggling desperately to con- judgment of anyone of the many human with nouveau-nche pride. What makes Mar- ceal the issues from themselves. Viewers beings who are woven throughout its com- cel Ophuls' THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE so re- of this latest Ophuls creation are unlikely plicated texture. A fitting epigraph for the markable is that it sees guilt as something ever to forget the experience.~~, FILM COMMENT 17
ACERTAIN first time of the existence of the film with Andrei Tarkovski, leading a second SHADOWS OF OUR FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS, golden age of Soviet cinema which could match that of Eisenstein and Dovzhen- COWARDICE by an Armenian director, born in Georgia kO-given the right conditions.\" in 1924 and working in the Ukraine since his studies after the war with the heir of The only official response to SAYAT-NOVA Dovzhenko, the late Igor Savchenko. were some articles in the specialized press by Antonin Liehm It didn't take long for the fame of Serge warning against the wave of \"difficult films \"-\"films that are poetic parables, ~ Paradjanov to spread beyond the frontiers generalized metaphors and [that] deal of the Soviet Union. His film made the tour with universal concepts of good and evil ~u. and not class or Partymindedness . There is a flow of difficult films and now they grow of Europe, received in triumph by the crit- 'more difficult and still more difficult' \" (T. Ivanov, Sov. Ekran No . 24, 1969). Again no ~ ics. It won the prize for best production at work for Paradjanov. Until the eve of his ~ the Festival of Mar del Plata in 1965 and arrest, when Soviet television accepted his project to bring to the small screen some 'o,\".. was shown at the 1965 San Francisco Festi- tales of Hans Christian Andersen . Too late. '5: val and in 1966 in Montreal. It was released One would have expected that the arrest and conviction of the most important Z and widely acclaimed in the U.S . But no Soviet filmmaker of today would provoke a flood of protests throughout the world; one had ever met its author, to whom the that a campaign would be organized for his immediate liberation, that the world of the authorities had constantly refused permis- Soviet dissidents in the country and abroad would launch an appeal to the con- sion to accompany his films abroad or to go science of the representatives of world cul- ture, to the cineastes of all continents; that there in response to the numerous invita- the Soviet authorities would be pressed for public evidence to support their charges . tions which flocked in before long. Then But nothing happened. Or almost noth- ing. After the news of the arrest of Parad- there began the pilgrimage to Paradjanov. janov there was a protest signed with the celebrated names of the European cinema, Serge Paradjanov's SHADOWS OF OUR FORGOTTEN Cineastes, writers, artists, official delegates, a few of whom later tried to disappear, to restrict their signatures, pretending to be- ANCESTORS (U .S. release title: WILD HORSES OF and tourists gathered in his little apart- lieve that it was truly a question relating to FIRE ). criminal law. After the conviction, not a ment in one of the new buildings in Kiev. word. Silence . It was a year ago that the greatest living His compa triots also came flocking: The other day I explained to a group of friends how the language of SHADOWS and genius of the Soviet cinema, Serge Parad- cineastes or not, young, old, Ukrainians, of SAYAT-NOvA-the exaltation of the val- ues of the national tradition, of those an- janov, was condemned in Kiev to six years Russians, Georgians, Armenians. Parad- cestors Ukrainian, Armenian, and others -was an intolerable challenge not only to imprisonment. Arrested in the train while janov had discovered a language, a source the dismal conformism of the official art and cinema. One of those present turned returning from Moscow where he had of inspiration . An enormous force ema- to me, ironically, \"You aren't going to say that they sent him to prison for his aesthe- gone for the funeral of his old friend, the nated from him; it inspired others. tics?\" set designer 1. M. Rivos, he was tried and He worked prodigiously. Scenario after No, I don't assert that. No more than Pushkin was killed for his aesthetics. Or condemned practically in camera. (Of all scenario left his work table . THE Lermontov. Or Mayakovsky ...But then? his associates and friends only his old CONFESSION-on the return of a man \"of a The \"non-aesthetic\" problems of Serge Paradjanov began several years ago in cameraman Yuri llyenko was authorized to certain age\" to the quarter of old Tbilisi Minsk. There he declared in a public as- sembly that the Ukrainian leadership was assist at the proceedings.) In an article at where he was born. THE INTERMEZZO - composed of imbeciles whom he had al- ways known how to fool until then and the time of his arrest, the Ukranian journal after the Ukrainian classic of Kotsiwbinski that he hoped to succeed also in the future. From that time the difficulties began, with Vecherni Kiev violently accused Paradjnov {which had already inspired him for more and more seriousness. At the same time the films of Paradjanov, and, with of terrible crimes: speculation in art ob- SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS. THE them, their author, became more and more the symbols of this new flowering of truly jects, speculation in foreign currency, DEMON-after Lermontov; THE FOUNTAIN national art which manifested itself in all the Soviet republics and not just in the spreading venereal disease, homosexual- OF BAKHCHISARAI-after Pushkin; and his cinema. Paradjanov isn't a political man, but he is a man . As such he refused to ity, and coercion to a homosexualliason. great cherished project, the ancient Rus- make the autocritiques in which the most prudent always excel. And he allied him- Moreover, the police had circulated an sian epic THE LAY OF IGOR'S CAMPAIGN. In outrageous story. The son of a high Ukrain- total, ten of his scenarios were refused in ian functionary-who belonged to a circle the ten years which followed the triumph of Paradjanov's friends-had killed him- of SHADOWS OF OUR FORGOTTEN ANCES- self. Near his body they found a letter ac- TORS . cusing Paradjanov of having forced him to He shot his next and last film in Ar- have sexual relations with him, having menia, inspired by the life and work of a thereby infected him with syphilis. (Natu- great poetof the past, Sayat-Nova, entitled rally, no one except the police had ever COLOR OF POMEGRANATES. Shotin 1969, the seen the letter). If retained, such charges film waited three years until its release- would have won for Paradjanov at least a without any publicity-in a limited fifteen-year prison sentence. The court fi- number of theaters; at the outset three nally only retained a single charge: the prints in all were made. This time, though, first, traffic in art objects. (It is difficult to not only its author but also the film no know in what way the verdict was influ- longer left Soviet territory. Again the pil- enced by the accusation of homosexuality, grimages began-to the author of course, which in itself doesn't constitute a criminal but especially to the work. offense according to Soviet law.) That, nevertheless, was enough for a more than Professor Herbert Marshall, a friend and severe sentence: six years in prison. pupil of S. M. Eisenstein and the English translator of his theoretical work, gives this There the official police horror story account: \"In a visit last summer to the stops-an affair, one could say, dependent Soviet Union I discovered an entirely new on criminal law. Let's try now to look cinematic genius who is being treated by further. the authorities in exactly the same matter I remember arriving in Moscow in the as his now famous predecessors . His summer of 1964. The first of the Soviet COLOR OF POMEGRANATES has been shelved cineastes I met, old Mark Donskoi, hurried since 1969 but was shown last year in a up to me: \"Anton Antonich, thanks be to third-circuit Moscow cinema after being God, a genius is born in the Soviet re-edited against Paradjanov's cinema.\" It was thus that I learned for the wishes .. .In my view Paradjanov is, along 18 JULY-AUGUST 1975
self with the persecuted, even signing peti- Film eensorship tions in their favor. inYugoslavia In ten years he had shot two film s. They by Dusan Makavejev had refused ten of his scenarios. They didn' t let him work . He lived thanks to the What about censorship in Yugoslavia? WR wave, perhaps going much further but not help of friends who offered him small act- has been prosecuted, we know, but what are the at all isolated. Ma ny film s questioned the ing roles, a collaboration on a script here relationship between politics and sex, pri- and there . Surrounded by all this popular standards for obscenity and pornography in that va te life and politics, crime and politics, art which he knew and loved, he made and other related subj ects. It was a very gifts. If he sold for reasons of his own, we particular Socialist country? How did Yugoslav free period; Yugoslav films seemed to open don ' t know anything about it. But films deal with sex before your own broke new in all kind of directions. \"speculator\"? ground? Many other films were stopped a t the Above all, he didn' t avoid provoca tion. Quite early, in 1950, there was a Yugos- sa me time WR was, and somethin g be- In the realm of conformism this is an un- lav film , the first to deal with a rather risky tween twenty a nd thirty films were pardonable crime. Herbert Marshall subject, set in a kind of pre-communist soc- blacklisted. Zelimir Zilnik's DAS KAPITAL writes: \"More seriously his natural Arme- iety, that featured in one scene some o ne nian ebullience and enthusiasm have led hundred naked girls! It was called HOJA, was stopped som e ten days before comple- some critical colleagues to say 'He's crazy, LERO! and it was made by an ex-partisan, tion , and he was n' t allowed to mix it. of course,' or 'He's kind of mad'- Vjeko Afrie, who during the war had run a There was La za r StojanoviC's PLASTIC dangerous words in a state where theater in Tito's headquarters. It was quite JESUS, his diploma work for the film school, psychiatry seems to form an arm of op- naive and very charming, if you under- of which he had only a working print. The presison . An instance of his 'craziness' stand it as a sex dream of an ex-partisan. film was never released but some two given me was thaton one of his films when Can you imagine, after three years of a years after it was finished they dug it out smoke was needed and there were no kind of military communism, seeing on a and he was taken to court where he got smoke bombs available, Paradjanov tore cinema screen a hundred naked girls on a first two years, and then three-he's still in off a piece of trouser leg and set fire to it to beach? The film was not especially success- jail, now serving his second year. The film provide the effect.\" ful. itself is a kind of very free-wheeling collage of fantasy and politics in a very youthful Homosexual! What horror! And what is There was another filmmaker, another vein . It is not itself very militant, but h e more, what do we know about it? His ex-partisan and a hero of underground him self was , and th ey u se d the film in friend of many years, since the class of youth movements, called Voja Nanovic, order to frame him. Savchenko, the director Henry Gaba y re- who was more successful. He did several counts: \"At the beginning of the Fifties he very free things in films, among them an May and June '68 were of course the married a girl little suited for him, from a adaptation from one of our literary classics, great explosion, and a couple of years of family of solid bureaucrats who had even KoStana by Bora Stankovie. The film's title incredibly free filmmaking were still served abroad. For him it was mad love. was CIGANKA (THE GYPSY WOMAN) and it in- ahead, many of the films then made They were married in Tbilisi, at Serge's cluded one quite frank striptease sequence springing from that '68 experience. There mother's home . A son was born to them, that took place in Serbia in the nineteenth was a renewal of free expression in all Syrenchik . But the parents of his wife century-a rather exhibitionistic scene forms of art. It all lasted until ' 71. The action never accepted him . After two years the where a barebreasted young woman against liberalization in the arts was a kind marriage was shipwrecked. I have often dances for Old Man Mitke. He's crying for of top-of-the-iceberg. The main problems seen Serge sad, plunged in the memory of his lost youth and she does for him a very were economic and political, as well as Svetlana and of the little one who now beautiful and sexually explicit belly dance rivalry between different regions of the lived in a large apartment where he wasn' t called cocek. It was very Oriental, in the country. For the moment mainly children admitted.\" Not even Stalin had insisted on finest sense of the word-sensual and nos- films are being made, or very naive war the sexual habits of S. M. Eisenstein. talgic. I also remember the time when epics. Many people have been replaced in Slavko Vorkapich came back from Hol- important positions in publishing, televi- To what does all this lead us? An artist of lywood, wanting to make \"the film of his sion, filmmaking; there is a tightening cal- genius is in prison. They first reduced him life .\" (I had been influenced by his LIFE led \"reunification\"-fighting against to silence and stopped him from working. AND DEATH OF A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA in a technocracy, liberalism and all. They slandered him. They proved noth- short called THE SEAL, my first film experi- ing. They arrested him, tried him and con- ence back in 1954.) His \"big Yugoslav film\" Anyhow, any criticism of a situation like demned him in secret. And the world is si- was a very sensual story set in Bosnia that this is very hard to make in terms of black lent. His colleagues, his admirers, even the finally included only one sensual touch: and white. The current pressure on any irreducible victims of the same police. the girl's lying dead and you can see one creative artistic expression goes together Why? Because the man wasn't like others, bare breast. with a reorganization of the country, because he was difficult to classify, \" natur- which was threatened by very serious ally crazy.\" All of this happened in the early Fifties. dangers. One million people had gone to Afterwards we became freer about stories work abroad in less than five years-that's And the rest of us-are we always and treatment, and in the Sixties, when I one third of the army, you know. It's a sad ready to say nothing with cowardly relief started, freedom kept increasing until thing to say, but this period of open fron- that they offer us some acceptable excuse? around '68 and '69 almost every film had tiers and great freedom in the arts created Or do we believe, along with Herbert Mar- its share of satire and political criticism, as many boomerang effects. Even if I am a shall, that even \"all that which happens to well as nudity and explicit sex scenes. At victim of this tightening of control, it is dif- the Soviet artists concerns us-just as ev- that time there was no age limit, so even ficult for me to make a negative criticism of erything which happens to American ar- children could see all these movies: some- it without putting my own feelings in tists and others concerns the Soviets also . thing quite nice. WR came on top of this perspective . ';\"{j All that they create belongs to us as well as to them. The genius belongs to humanity. And art belongs to all those who inhabit the earth\"? He is speaking of Serge Paradjanov. It is high time that we begin to speak also. In a very loud voice. ~ FILM COMMENT 19
GENRE: POPULISM AND SOCAL REALSM by Raymond Durgnat ALL PHO TOS: MOMN FILM STI LLS
I. WHEN IS A GENRE NOT A GENRE? attempting to wish away Westerns which sufficient emotional charge, sufficient con- The word genre sometimes (as when like DUEL IN THE SUN and THE OUTLAW had tent, to subordinate the nonspecific already reacted against certain characteris- characteristics to the genre and even to in- used of the Western) implies a conjunction tics which were rendering the genre crea- tegrate the wide variety of subgenres of subject matter and stylizations. Themes, tively dead. within one Western convention. 1 situations, interests, and values are shared by diverse auteurs, in a way resembling Genres, like ideologies, are a manner of This succeeds in excluding our contem- the anonymous creations of myth. Predic- concealing inner tensions. A near- porary para-Westerns from the genre. The tability becomes hallowed as ritua\\. Con- synonym for \" sophisticated comedy\" is Western's cluster of \"superficial\" trappings ventions enable the rapid or subtle reading \"screwball comedy.\" The first, currently is responsible for a great deal of its \"es- of deviations. The genre may diversify or most popular phrase, suggests connec- sence.\" It has a heavy exoskeleton, and is evolve, but from a sense that the status quo tions with Lubitsch highlife, and the always in danger of rigidity. Although represents a tradition. maintenance, despite threats, of a certain BROKEN LANCE \"is\" HOUSE OF STRANGERS style or poise. The second emphaSizes the transposed, it is so only in the sense that But the word genre often describes a threat, or promise, of chaos, and connec- HOUSE OF STRANGERS \"is\" King Lear (with motley crew of categories. \" Documen- tions with genres like the crazy comedy of brothers instead of sisters). The transposi- tary,\" \"musical,\" \"slapstick,\" refer to styli- the Marx Brothers movies or HELLZAPOP- tion becomes a new composition. If the zations rather than subject matter. But the PIN . More exactly, it brackets DUCK SOUP Western is a subgenre of the adventure war and horror genres are primarily de- with BRINGING UP BABY (which is thus both film, it may still be more important than fined by subject matter and no genre- a sophisticated comedy and a crazy com- the genre. unifying stylizations are present. edy). The representative of social poise in BRINGING UP BABY is Katharine Hepburn, Yet not even the Western is mutually ex- Film nair is sometimes called a genre, but but in DUCK SOUP it is Groucho, Chico, and clusive of other genres. Arthur Mayer and it's a moot point whether it's normally Harpo (another dumb animal) as well as Richard Griffith quote Gene Autry West- used for a perennial mood (a gloomy cyni- the polite insanities. erns, which were also musicals and fea- cism) , or restricted to a particular historical tured a never-never land where six-guns epoch (around the Forties); whether it's a A mature genre theory would have to co-existed with airplanes, radio stations, certain kind of thriller, or whether it in- analyze the complementary relationships and cowboys-turned-filmstars who re- cludes Westerns, domestic dramas, and between genres: for instance, Western and turned to the ranch in disgust. After such normally unclassified fil ms (CITI ZEN gangster movies as two faces of American \"country-and-Western\" Westerns, it's less KANE). Thus nair could signify an attitude, violence. It would have to consider the fac- easy to exclude the anachronisms of the or a cycle, or a subgenre, or a tonality. tual realities and the spiritual possibilities para-Westerns. Thus, the train in BAD DAY which each cluster of conventions AT BLACK ROCK is merely more modern \"Sophisticated comedy\" sounds like a excludes, aRd those which contrive to be- than that of HIGH NOON; its Molotov description of mode, but usually refers to a come lost between the genres (e.g. the cocktails correspond to the sticks of dyna- certain subject matter. Thus THE LADY EVE \"pastoral\" acceptance of violence as an mite in RIO BRAVO; and its writer, Millard is clearly a sophisticated comedy, whose everyday feature of the city). Kaufman, reputedly intended a retort to sophisticated style is appropriate to its HIGH NOON. (Hence Spencer Tracy is phys- sophisticated people. But we might be less The Western provides a vivid idee-type ically as well as metaphorically single- sure about CHRISTMAS IN JULY , whose of genre. Nonetheless we risk crediting it handed, and presents his badge to the characters are less sophisticated. And we with certain moral, ethical, and aesthetic town's citizens instead of throwing it in the normally restrict the term to American characteristics which saturate Hollywood movies of the Thirties and Forties. THE IT- anyway. Thus the rapid recognition of a dust.) Maybe its post-World War n refer- ALIAN STRAW HAT, RULES OF THE GAME, character type by physiognomy isn't OCCUPE-TOI D'AMELIE, and EDOUARD ET Western-specific. The same actors play ences disrupt the Western references, CAROLINE are undoubtedly sophisticated similar types in different genres, and the more forcefully than the Autry moder- and comic, and resemble the American lingua franca of star and character actor nisms do; but it virtually superimposes films in speed and sense of style. But we'd loomed large throughout what, given the Western and contemporary categories. I'm tend to group them as a collateral French looser use of genre, we could fairly call not sure that analogous arguments don't genre, referring to their own set of tradi- \"the Hollywood genre. \" Similarly, the apply to modern TV series, which mingle tions, styles, and conventions. Western's emotionology (to coin a variant domesticated-Romantic macho trappings of \"ideology\") closely resembles that of the with an approach to emotional problem- On the other hand, Italian Westerns sea story, or the pirate film, or the North- solving whose root is clearly suburban clearly belong to the Western genre. west Frontier film, or the industrial melod- soap-operas (already apparent in the Perhaps it's because they're a reaction to ra maoFor THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON, \"mixed-up adolescents\" of MAN WITHOUT (and against) the American Westerns. the analogue would be LIVES OF A BENGAL A STAR, BLACK HORSE CANYON, etc.) Simi- Genre, in the narrow sense, implies a con- LANCER; for RED RIVER, MUTINY ON THE larly, HIGH SOCIETY is both a musical and a tinuous development, and isn't simply a BOUNTY; for the realism of COWBOY, that of sophisticated comedy (and not a \"musical mode-descriptive classification. TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST; for a (so far as comedy\"). I know, hypothetical) Western about The Western constitutes an unusually exploited ranch-hands, HELL DRIVERS; for a CITIZEN KANE poses some useful per- \\1omogenous genre. But narrow defini- Pony Express story, THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT. plexities of classification. It's undoubt- tions, like Robert Warshow's in his famous One could even classify the Western as a edly a liberal muckraking film, related to essay on The Western, can't cope with the subgenre of the adventure film, and this the line trom I AM AFUGITIVE FROM ACHAIN genre's variety, and Warshow was surely would suit many para-Western contem- GANG to THE GRAPES OF WRATH . Probably its porary subjects: THE TREASURE OF THE closest relative within that line is SULLI- What genre is CITIZEN KANE (opposite page, center)? SIERRA MADRE and THE MISFITS. VAN'S TRAVELS, with its New Deal cynicism. Is it an old-dark-house Gothic tale, like DR . CYCLOPS In form, however, it's a mystery (private- (top lef!) ? An acerbic answer to MR . SMITH GOES TO Nonetheless, the Western retains a clus- eye newshound misses clue: Rosebud WASHINGTON (middle left)? A liberal mu ckraking ter of genre-specific characteristics: dress, dunnit). Pauline Kael relates it to news- film , like I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG landscape, historical associations, the paper comedies like THE FRONT PAGE . It (bottom left)? A example of New Deal cynicism, like etiquette of instant and obsessive gunplay. also relates to the Gothic tale, with its old SULLIVAN 'S TRAVELS (top center)? A newspaper com- However superficial such trappings may dark house, Kane's monster-type pate (Or- edy, like THE FRONT PAGE (bottom center)? A con- seem-by relation to theme, psychology, temporary horror story, like SUNSET BOULEVARD (top morality, and so on-they in fact generate 1. Once again, we need to query Literature-based assump - righ!)? A critical national epic , like YOUNG MR. LIN- ti o ns w hereby \"them e\" es tablishes mOre of a film 's co nte nt COLN (middle right)? A \" herbivorous\" political film , than \"superficial\" matt ers like dress, settings, etc. like THE LAST HURRAH (bottom right)? All or none of the above ? FILM COMMENT 21
lac, Dr. Cyclops), its sinister butler, and its and the Capra, Ford, and Henry King films genres. Indeed, popular usage virtually death-atmosphere. The horror film was in suggest that politics may be not merely a consecrates the analogously vague genre, fact evolving in this direction, away from Hollywood theme but a Hollywood genre. the \"love film,\" and the demotic terminol- anti-Xanadus like ZaraH's island in THE At one sector it links with the thriller (ON ogy is refined by Henri Agel's Romance MOST DANGEROUS GAME and period set- THE WATERFRONT, CHINATOWN). Polanski's ammcaine. If we continue to allow genres tings like SVENGALI (and Kane is also a cruel film-\"Watergate\" indeed-relates to the based on mode or tonality to jostle with singing-master) and toward contempor- current conspiracy cycle, along with THE genre in the narrower sense, there seems ary settings(e.g., REBECCA, where the dead PARALLAX VIEW and EXECUTIVE ACTION. no compelling reason to disallow more also dominate the living, and SUNSET These refer us back to movies predating \"abstract\" themes, which specify much of BOULEVARD, which is CITIZEN KANE'S the Kennedy assassination (SUDDENLY, THE the content quite as well as \"thriller\" or closest relative within that genre). MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE). There, the \" horror\" genres. political film crossbreeds with the film nair, KANE is also a critical national epic, and as in DR. STRANGELOVE . The alternative op- Nonetheless, our reluctance to multiply as such related to Vidor's AN AMERICAN RO- tion, of tonally open-ended realistic in- nebulous genres may drive us back to bas- MANCE, Henry King's WILSON and Ford's trigue, brings us to \"herbivorous\" films ing our notions of genre on that relative YOUNG MR. LINCOLN-insofar as Kane fails like SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, ADVISE AND CON- bedrock, the Western. It may be, however, to be the magnate with a human touch, the SENT, and THE BEST MAN. Their Presidential that the Western genre is sui generis, or at world's panjandrum for peace, or the connections enable us to annex YOUNG MR. least unrivaled, as to the intensity of ritual Progressivist equivalent of a Populist Pres- LINCOLN, whose grass roots ease us gently and convention . Definitions based on it ident. In aesthetic style it evokes Eisen- down toward THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT and would then define several other well- stein's IVAN THE TERRIBLE for its \"expres- THE LAST HURRAH. Ford's two films enable accepted and important genres out of exis- sionist\" visuals, or paranoid megalomania, us to form a mayor-or-equivalent-office tence. There was, after all, only one Wild and HENRY v, for the chronicle aspects of its quartet whose other voices belong to Pres- West; nothing else in American history narrative, and its changing styles. It's cer- ton Sturges (THE GREAT MCGINTY) and praved so magnetic to themes of every tainly a nair modulation of Thirties biog- Melville Shavelson (BEAU JAMES) . Steve kind. raphies (Hearst at one remove) and as such Handzo suggests more mayoral movies: a close relative of THE AMAZING DR . CLIT- Alfred Werker's THE MAN WHO DARED, Upper-middle-c lass reali sm: Trevor Howard and Celia TERHOUSE. (Thirties intellectual father- John H. Auer's WHEEL OF FORTUNE, Lew Johnson in BRIEF ENCOUNTER. figures tend to be benign and ultimately Seiler's ANGELS WASH THEIR FACES , John triumph, but they modulate toward Farrow's ALIAS NICK BEAL.2 To put the question another way: are malignity and torment as we approach there genres which allow a maximum of McCarthy anti-intellectualism, i.e., the If we allow such thematic-historic variety and invention, even in superfiCial reaction against New Deal liberalism). similarities to constitute a genre, in the trappings? For example, the Western loose sense, can we then exclude the ex- genre itself is even looser than the gangster Perhaps we can group Welles, Sturges, ploration of ecclesiastical politics, whether genre, if we follow certain critics in exclud- and Huston as \"progressive,\" balanced be- at \" Presidential\" level (in which THE CAR- ing from the latter category Sternberg'S tween cynical reformism and cynical DINAL resembles ADVISE AND CONSENT), or UNDERWORLD and THUNDEBOLT. Both films exuberance (in Huston, the ironic laughter at grass roots (in which THE BELLS OF ST. anticipate the LITTLE CAESAR-PUBLIC concluding THE TREASURE OF THE MARY'S is quasi-Capra)? And can we ENEMY-SCARFACE trio in centering on the SIERRA MADRE). Their kindred spirits range exclude intrigue in business, from EXEC- monster-gangster (perhaps the latter form from Groucho Marx, an urban populist, to UTIVE SUITE, THE MAN IN THE GREY FLANNEL a subgenre of the monster cycle?) and are Billy Wilder, the ultra-Sturges . The SUIT, and PATTERNS through THE APART- the source films for some conspicuous school's acerbic laughter complements and MENT to HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS gangster-motifs (Will Thunderbolt soften yet counters the trusting affirmations of WITHOUT REALLY TRYING (perhaps even in Death Row? anticipates ANGELS WITH populists like Capra and McCarey. For THE PAJAMA GAME and , supernatu- DIRTY FACES) . Sternberg's exclusion seems \"Citizen Kane Goes to Town,\" Welles sub- rally, DAMN YANKEES)? An all-inclusive to me to be motivated by a regressive pre- stitutes \" Mr. Kane Withdraws from \"power intrigue\" genre would wax as the ference for stereotypy. I would not only Washington.\" reformer biopics of the Thirties wane. Its press for Sternberg's inclusion within any yin-yang relationship to them would paral- gangster genre worth having, but seri- CrrIZEN KANE also exemplifies a genre lel the relationship of the permissive film ously consider whether we don't also need rare in Hollywood but well established (De Mille's and Stroheim's orgies, BOB AND a genre which will accommodate street CAROL AND TED AND ALICE) with the inti- gangs along with racket gangsterism, thus outside it. (Genre frontiers never coincide mate romance (Garbo, Borzage). Neither including EASY STREET, making a better ac- with media.) It's an epic in the Brechtian would altogether oust the other and each counting of the street gang-big gangster sense, or at least a functional equivalent of would bear traces of the other. Both sets relationship in ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES it. Its flashback structure and everyone's are subgenres of a genre. and DEAD END . We must also account for unlovableness correspond to alienation ef- fects. For Mother Courage, Father Philan- There are obvious problems in postulat- thropy. It's unlikely that Welles was una- ing genres on such abstract topics, and ware of Brecht's work. Many aspects of perhaps we should speak of \" thematic CITIZEN KANE anticipate Losey' s harsh- categories.\" But the \"intrigue\" category is ness, his severe sense of moral conse- clearly an important one, and to exclude it quence, his disillusionments, and his pre- from the ranks of genre is to admit that ference for identification-repulsion over such categories are more important- simple identification. However, criticism sociologically, aesthetically and has buried CITIZEN KANE'S sociopolitical re- commercially-than the majority of levance under pure aesthetic ca tegoriza tions - \" expressionis m\" or 2.The las t intro du ces the dev il, a nd crossbreeds w ith the pseudo-auteurist confusions of Welles n on h or ror s upe rnatural ca tego ry (A LL TH AT MO N EY CA N BU Y, with Kane. Similarly, Seventies criticism DE ATH TAKES A H OLID AY, TOP PER ). TH E HAU N TI NG a nd TH E celebrates the conservative Populism of EXO RCIST certainl y es tabli sh a cross-m edi a ge nre w ith lore Capra, McCarey, and Ford, while remain- qu ite as definite as th e Wes tern s (ghos t lore), although their ing stonily indifferent to the complex spirit ter atology co uld be claimed to be different in kind (rom FRAN- of the New Deal. KE NSTEI N, a nd gia nt a nts. Des pite DR AC UL A as a n overl a p ca tegory, the g hos t film 's o nl y affinit y w ith mo ns ter film s is The antitheses between CITIZEN KANE by mood . And is that adequate to co mprise a ge nre? 22 JULY-AUGUST 1975
the nonmonster gangsters of Phil This is the Wittgensteinian logic which way undermine the notion of realism . At- Karlson's currently overestimated THE enables us to speak of THE CRIME OF MON- tempts to separate realism from the genres PHENIXCITY STORY. SIEUR LANGE as 100 percent Renoir and 100 must condemn notions of both realism and percent Prevert. Their visions accommo- genre to remain as stilted as that of \" por- We need to establish a close, intra-genre date each other, point for point, since the trait\" would be if we knew about icons but relationship between the gangster film and meaning of a point is normally ambiguous . nothing about drawings from life or the crime film . Crime here, really means The Renoir-Prevert film also belongs to photography. Unfortunately, genre at-least-partly underworld crime. A dotted both the populist and social realist genres theory, like extended auteurism, has ye t to line runs through the delinquent film; or subgenres, as we shall describe them, overcome a certain diffidence, perhaps in- \"crime\" includes KNOCK ON ANY DOOR and and to genres which will only obliquely spired by the liberal sermonizing of yore, THE YOUNG SAVAGES, but usually excludes concern us: those of political Populism and against genres closely related to everyda y the delinquent film 's intersection with ideological populism. reality. middle-class drama (REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and THE YOUNG STRANGER) . The Ultimatel y, the idea of a genre corre- II. FOR THE LOVE OF THE COMMON crime film as an overall genre possesses a PEOPLE set of requirements sufficiently tight to sponds to that of a breed, or of a species. constitute a genre in the medium-to-tight Some films are pure Westerns just as some -D. Everly,P. Everly sense, but is less laden with the ritualesque unity of the Western's trappings. The dogs are pure Dalmatians . But many films The word \" populism\" is almost extinct crime genre's subcategories would include are hybrids, just as most dogs are mon- in Anglo-Saxon film criticism, although such subgenres as the gangster film , the grels. Mongrels ma y have breed-specific alive and well in Italy and France. In its planned-robbery film , and the police- parts (Dalmatian ears and bulldog legs) or classic-or most easily identifiable--sense, centered film-which fits, since cop and merge characteristics more smoothly and populism deSignates movies whose pro- gangster go together as naturally as lone unidentifiably. Most mongrels-or tagonists are ordinary people, and whose cowboy and Indian brave, and shouldn't litters!-are one-offs, but if enough one- fair share of extraordinary or wishfulfill- be placed in separate genres. 3 offs of a particular kind are in demand it ment passions are related to ordinary life. becomes a new breed. A genre, like a \" Ordinary\" means more like the people If closer inspection confirms our feeling species, responds to changes in its envi- constituting most of the cinema's audi- that the crime film, though looser than the ronment. It may evolve, or acquire a new ence, as opposed to the fringe groups on Western, is also an overriding genre, then ecological niche (the Western briefly be- which seventy-five per cent of entertain- the way is clear for still looser genres like comes a hicktown-and-children's genre), ment centers (playboys, cowboys, crimi- the political film,4 or populism , or social or become extinct. nals; or housewives and chorus girls realism . whose life-styles are highly glamourized, Our concern to dilate and derigidify the romanticized, or slapstruck). Mitigating Such laxity may be distreSSing, since it notion of genre is neither solipsistic nor wishfulfillment pleasures of identification makes it impossible to classify many films skeptical nor a stalking horse for relating up (or down, e.g. to saddletramps), it unambiguously, or to conceive a genre as a every Hollywood movie to one or several compensates with the pleasures of every- structuralist entity, or even of genres as a genres (though this does become pOSSible, day familiarity, the surprise of recognition. set with an independent structure. The if only when one ceases to consider genre Its stylizations are predominantly senti- examples of Gene Autry and CITIZEN KANE as a bag into which a film can in toto be mental, or resilient, or comic, or compla- suggest that the clusters of characteristics placed). Genres may correspond to cent. which define a genre may also describe as- cultural-ideological lines of force, but as pects of individual films. In other words, such they intersect and disturb each other. The populist ordinary extends from the genre is a way of grouping films by parts of Our concern is to establish precedents for middle-middle classes right on down . It themselves-significant parts, but only considering two, or rather one-and-a-half, includes-in Renoir's THE CRIME OF MON- parts. Thus, what is true of auteurism is genres: the one being populism, the one- SIEUR LANGE, for instance-white-collar true of genres (indeed, auteurism is a spe- half being those aspects of social realism workers like Lange; small shopkeepers like cial form of genre-the \"John Ford\" genre which closely relate to populism. Since no his Valentine with her laundry; the shabby or the \"Greta Garbo\" genre) .5 We recog- reliable or agreed terminology exists, we genteel, suggested by ex-Inspector Juliani; nize a film as \"a film by x\" or as \"an x-type shall speak of genres and subgenres, the labor aristocracy like Batala's foreman; film \" by the presence of a sufficient rather than attempt to sort out genres, cy- them working-classes (Estelle); unskilled nllmber of traits typical of x , and not by the cle, modes, tonalities, common aspects , and casual labor; and members of the pro- absence of anything which is non-x (al- common topics, or just plain groups, letariat: tramps, down-and-outs, fallen though non-x shouldn't be so conspicuous kinds, and categories . If normal usage is aristocrats. as to disrupt the normal play of the any guide-as I suspect it has to be, since x-cluster) . several equally satisfactory definitions Although criminals and the rich repre- could be invented-genre is, in fact, an in- sent the genre's boundaries, neither are 3. But t hey may be sepa ra ble by subge nres-t he India n consistent, illogical word. Its purpose is to excluded. The populist here may be a burg- Wes tern as di s tinct fro m the tow n~s h oot- out Wes tern . Th e stress evolutionary connections within lar (like Gabin in LES BAS-FONDS) or a pros- sea rch for co rres ponde nces of s ubge nre be twee n ge nres ca n those categories which happen to have titute (like Valentine before LANGE begins) , be merely .fo rm alist. For c ultura l fu nctio ns-ce nsors hip, au - them . Often it is no more than a descrip- It's welcome aboard to fellow-travelers like di e nce bias. mys ti Hca ti o n, e tc.- wi ll se ri ously di srupt th e m, tive, bill-of-fare word, like \" love\" film or the playboy shareholder who backs up as w ill the ge nres' diffe ring su bject matte r. Some logicall y \" horror\" film , or \" thriller,\" referring to au- and mucks in with Lange's co-op and poss ible a nd c ulturall y impo rta nt s trea ms will be sys te mati- dience expectations of fairly vague topics, drives Lange and Valentine to the frontier; ca ll y n ega t ed-film s c h a mpi onin g o r t o le ra tin g th e tones, and kinds of experiences. or like Chaplin's millionaire mate in CITY gan gs ter - or appea r o nl y a s o ptio na l und e rt o nes within LIGHTS. But their presence is subordinate co nse nsus ambiguities. So far genre theory has restricted itself to to that sense, that style, which w<?uld in- conspicuously stylized genres, partly be- clude, say, Gabin in LE JOUR SE LEVE but 4. Curre ntl y th e phrase \" p oli tica l film \" wo n' t be assum ed cause they' re (excessively?) convenient as exclude Scarface (never mind that both to mea n a \" film about politica l processes,\" d es pite its gram- starting points, partly because their par- come from ordinary families and die in matical iso morphis m with \" Wes tern film .\" It' ll be take n to ticular kinds of stylization needed estab- fortress-rooms after crimes of excessive mea n \" pro paga nda film ,\" We clea rl y need a phrase to dis tin- lishing against those kinds which tend to jealousy). Sous LES TOITS DE PARIS indi- g uis h political film s in the firs t se nse from pro paga nd a film s, be accepted as \" realism .\" We hope to show cates the perspective: street-singer, girl- eve n if ma ny film s will belo ng to both ge nres, as w hen they that \"realism\"-is it a \" supergenre,\" like wait, pickpocket, and even the gangleader co me on like the first b ut involun taril y Or oth er wise fun cti o n \"Hollywood\" ?-involves varied but in- like the second. teracting genres. Their stylizations in no 5. At first sig ht a n a uteur's ind ividua lity mig ht see m to exclude the ge nre qu a lit y of s ha red ass umpti o ns. But a n a u - teur direc tor may s hare ass umpti o ns with a ut e ur- s ta r Or a ut eur- scriptw riter. And auteurs like Ford a nd G rierso n e n- ge ndered imitatio ns a nd sch ools w hi ch certainl y a nswe r all o ur definitio ns of ge nre. FILM COMMENT 23
all frequent the same streets and cafe- but typically so, and dwelling side by side) . I'd certainly want to withdraw that term as ever favorite populist trappings. Less obvious populist references inspire soon as such films become hermetic and the title of SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY exclusivist, like PEYTON PLACE, whose use Populism proper requires an everyday MORNING. The title suggests the weekly of its principal lower-class character as setting, although one can certainly distin- scapegoat is anti-populist. guish a populist-spirited war film like A cycle which everyone lives, but also (a) the WALK IN THE SUN from PATTON. MILLIONS times late buses don't run-just when Anglo-Saxon criticism hides populism LIKE us is populist whereas MRS. MINIVER is weekend revelers want them-and (b) the under social realism. But this provokes not. Celia Johnson in BRIEF ENCOUNTER week' s peak periods for sexual inter- three problems. Social realism must in- sends her son to prep school, and so must course. 1T ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY offers a clude not only much \"middle-class\" drama be upper-middle-class, though she would disabused comment on the workingman's but completely eccentric life-styles. claim to be \" ordinary\" middle class. The one leisure day, and therefore on the social (LONELY BOY, about Paul Anka , certainly film's style (stressing the glamourlessness weather (Juliette Greco's song \"Je Hais les qualifies as social realism but can't be of affluence) and settings give it strong Dimanches\" ). populist.) Second, liberal social conscious- populist overtones-the drab railway sta- ness has endowed \"Social Realism\" with a tion suggests everyone's wartime part- Despite its title's isomorphism, even as special relationship to certain kinds of so- ings. It's certainly realistic as opposed to to irony, with LONDON BELONGS TO ME, cial process (those which preoccupied the glamorized. But it's basically an example of Rivette 's PARIS BELONGS TO us is non- documentarists of a certain era), with over- upper-middle-class realism, which in- populist. This is not because its theme tones of liberal moral earnestness, and cludes the theatrical genre of \"middle class with a narrow stylistic mode (fictional drama .\" It runs from Ibsen through Death is paranoid alienation, intra-city exile, but equivalents of reconstructed documen- of a Salesman to A Streetcar Named Desire. because its (potential) community, the tary). But the populist film may also be so- (Despite the low-class aspects of its setting, theatre troupe, is largely from an elite (stu- cially unconscious, morally insouciant (or Streetcar's perspective is that of \" sunken dents, actors) whom the film as well as the indeed cynical or misanthropic) and middle-class .\") It runs on to THE GRADUATE protagonists places somewhat apart. It's otherwise stylized in its idiom . When we and SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY. In the phrase artist-elitist, though not snobbishly so. An describe, as \" populist,\" films normally \" middle-class drama,\" \" middle-class \" individual's name like MARTY has populist classified under social realism, it is not (like Celia Johnson's \" ordinary\" ) means implications, but the recent rash of one- necessarily to exclude that classification, \" upper-middle-class .\" It often possesses a name titles has competing motives. nor to minimize a genre which, on the con- sense of enclosure, or cherishes family or trary, we would like to see freed from the individual uniqueness as a sacred trust, A sense of the strange lonelinesses and zealously narrow associations of liberal so- rather than as a matter-of-fact human alienations intruding into everyday life in- cial realism and style. Our concern is with characteristic in which all families and in- spires the title of an undoubtedly populist the human interest of social realism, not its dividuals resemble one another. Upper- film, THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON_MAN- social conscience . middle-class realism certainly becomes IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS which is also a populism when moved one social notch transposition of upper-middle-class Should we reserve the term \"populism\" down, as when A KIND OF LOVING , BILLY realism onto a lower social level. If some for films which aren't socially realistic- LIAR, WOMAN IN A DRESSING GOWN, COME women's films-domestic dramas given the looseness with which, say, THE BACK LITTLE SHEBA and THE ROSE TATTOO -stylized themselves out of the populist GRAPES OF WRATH and INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN bracket the same none-too-definite de- genre into the soap-opera (like THE BLUE were socially realistic? To do so is, in a marcation line of middle-middle and VEIL, with Jane Wyman as a cleaning lady), sense, as negative as if we were to define upper-working class. we could usefully reclaim some Bette social realism by the absence of the socially Davis performances for the populist genre unconscious friendliness which motivates Even when the action centers on one (THE CATERED AFFAIR). It's a moot point populism. But to make no distinction at all particular person, a sense of familiarity whether to include, as \"populist,\" middle leaves us with an overlap so massive that it may be enough to assert populism's nor- to upper-middle-class anti-populist pieces may confuse all our attempts to disen- mal sense of a cross-section, of individual- like OF HUMAN BONDAGE (\"working class tangle the two impulses. Laurel and Hardy ity existing within a context (neighborhood waitresses are sluts\") . By the standards of are arguably populist, but they're not ar- and not just district), egalitarianism, re- wish-fulfillment, plastic, realistic everyday guably social-realist. semblance, or perhaps just exasperation behavior may seem \" merely\" eccentric (of a democratic rather than an elitist kind). (like Gena Rowlands' A WOMAN UNDER A variety of courses are open to us . We This distinguishes populism from films THE INFLUENCE); and the critic may need to could decide to accept and extend the cur- which espouse the perspectives of eccen- stress the difference between populism rent sense of social realism, or to redefine tric individuals on low social levels . In and mere stereotypicality. social realism in a more satisfactory way. populist films, a character's eccentricity or Thus, a Marxist might want to shift LISTEN love of privacy or rebellion or indi- An interesting problem is posed when, TO BRITAIN and ADIARY FOR TIMOTHY from vidualism are felt-to be in the pattern. But after 1945, and particularly in the USA, a the social-realist to the populist genre. Or DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY isn't the populist general access to middle-class affluence we might decide that what distinguishes lifted some hitherto \"populist\" classes up social realism from populism is the term so- category. to an upper-middle-class style . Certainly cial, emphaSizing issues involving social The sense of cross-section may be rein- THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, A LETTER TO class, economic category, class life-style, THREE WIVES and PICNIC could all pass for and so on. Or we might decide that what forced by certain stylistic trapping (or upper-middle class. But in some areas of distinguishes social realism from populism tropes?), such as Rene Clair's camera mov- the U.S. this class is the most populous is the term realism -and that populism ing from window to window during sous class. And though those films heavily over- applies to less straightforward, serious de- LES TorTS DE PARIS, or establishing shots of lap with middle-class drama, they also pictions, more to sentimental comedy or semi-detached streets or tower blocks (All carry a sense of being about Middle certain stylizations. Or we might give so- in th e Family). Titles suggestive of America, about ordinary suburban people. cial realism a maximal double definition, populism include THIS HAPPY BREAD It's intensified by their story construction. admitting only what is both a social issue (though it wouldn't be populist if the fam- Their strong cross-section characteristics and realistic. Or we might give it a minimal ily were on the social level of GOODBYE MR . become visually apparent in the decor and double definition, admiting anything CHIPS), MILLIONS LIKE us, 80, 000 SUSPECTS, mise-en-scene of two other \"amphibious\" which is either a social issue or realistic. WATERLOO ROAD (though not PRIVATE films , REAR WINDOW and THE LADIES' MAN . The maximal definition would push poetic ROAD), and LONDON BELONGS TO ME (which Perhaps these films exist at an overlap of realism - most Renoir, Prevert-Carne, is ironic: its characters are lonely and lost both genres; perhaps we can concoct a special term: \"middle-class populism.\" But 24 JULY-AUGUST 1975
BlnER RICE: Glamourous foreground , \" realistic\" background. Mickey RooneylJudy Garland comedies to certain TV shows (like Good Times , though Vigo-underpopulism; the second would studio decor of Clair, Vigo, and Prevert- I Love Lucy is too abstract to be populist) . leave it where it is at present. All ways Carne, and described them as \"poetic work perfectly well, and could be used realism.\" Whether or not poetic realism is In accepting certain musicals as \"essen- complementarily, since overlaps and un- their phrase for populism, it's not a very tially\" realistic, Siegfried Kracauer, in his certainties are inevitable whatever one clear one. Used of the cinema, what is poe- much-abused Theon) of Film, is onto some- does. tic, what is prose? Why restrict \"prose\" to thing. Perhaps it wasn't, as he argued, to social issues? Wha t of those documentaries Anglo-Saxon liberalism has tended to which used poetry (NIGHT MAIL, THE do with the nature of a photographic exclude cynicism, misanthropy, and de- medium, but more to do with the connec- spair, as underlying attitudes, from the RIVER)? And so on. What now seems clear realistic spectrum. This has enfeebled is that realism, adequately defined, can ac- tions between certain fantasies, populism, realism. In France, however, writers like commodate a variety of personal or \"po- and, indirectly, social realism. His real Baudelaire and the Goncourts associated etic\" preoccupations. Thus Buiiuel's MEXI- realism with an exotic or melancholy fasci- CAN BUSRIDE is (a) a Buiiuel film, (b) a \"clas- theme might be redefined as connections nation with lowlife vices and miseries. The sic\" populist omnibus film, and (c) a between social and related realisms: physi- Expressionist playwrights also favored picaresque film inheriting a grassroots cal, scientific, perceptual-visual, thieves and prostitutes as symbols for the communal anarchism traceable to the psychological. 6 degradation, or denudation, of Everyman. fueros of tenth-century Spain. For both groups, suicide had a general 6. Obviously our triad, social realism/populisml human significance, rather than seeming Once realism has included such styliza- middle-class realism, dearly co-exists with stylistic freakish or anomalous or anti-humanist tions as Vigo's-and the fantastic neo- categories like documentary, cinema-verite, etc., or and therefore anti-populist. In the same realism of MIRACLE OF MILAN-there's no categories imported from literary criticism; spirit, s~cides feature importantly in De- good reason for excluding certain musi- naturalism, Socialist Realism, critical realism, and so llues FlEVRES, Cavalcanti's RIEN QUE LES cals, such as Lewis Milestone's HAL- forth. HEURES, Ruttmann's BERLIN-and even in LELUJAH I'M A BUM, or a cycle which, ap- Busby Berkeley's \"Lullaby of Broadway\" propriately enough, synchronizes with Literary realism has several points of origin, number (in America, too, times were bad) . neo-realism: ON THE TOWN, IT'S ALWAYS springing from documentary journalism in Defoe FAIR WEATHER, perhaps the unjustly for- and Mayhew, from lowlife exoticism in Baudelaire Renoir's (populist) TONI and LA CHIENNE gotten GIVE A GIRL A BREAK, certainly THE and the Goncourts, and from romanticism . (Their end as badly as LE JOUR SE LEVE and QUAI PAJAMA GAME and probably BELLS ARE common roots are admirably exemplified by the DES BRUMES (which liberalism thought RINGING. Though they raise real problems program which Wordsworth and Coleridge drew up rather morbid) . Populism's misanthropic about glamourization, they're really deal- for their Lyrical Ballads .) Not until much later did or despairing elements are conspicuous in, ing in a form of affectionate sentimentality; romanticism and realism seem antithetical to each for example, Clouzot's LE CORBEAU, and, for reasons to be clarified la ter, I other. The antithesis was heavily reinforced, for lib- Duvivier's sous LE CIEL DE PARIS (where would even affiliate to the genre such eral critics, by Hollywood glamour and escapism. separate stories intersect disastrously), Busby Berkeley numbers as \"Shuffle Off to Clement's GERVAISE (faithful to Zola), and Buffalo,\" \"Forty-Second Street,\" \"I Only But behind French poetic realism of the Thirties o LUCKY MAN, which straddles the frontiers Have Eyes for You, \" \"Dames,\" and \"Re- one can sense mutual reinforcement by a network of of the picaresque (its sawtooth itinerary) member My Forgotten Man.\" realisms-involving Courbet, and Zola, Degas and and populist community-though Toulouse-Latrec, and Simenon, whose detective perhaps it represents the overlap between Under populism one has to include stories are much less rigidly formularized, much the two. stylizations like Laurel and Hardy (though more open to everyday reality and drama, than their some Land H's are more populist than Anglo-Saxon counterparts in popularity. Documentary-centered critics were un- others) and sentimentalities thoroughly easy about the personal concerns and repugnant to social realism-from the In English literature, populism is anticipated or paralleled by, for example, James Joyce's Dubliners, D.H. Lawrence's first three plays, George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London , Graham Greene's It 's a Battlefield, the Mass Observation Movement, Dy lan Thomas 's Under Milk Wood and Kingsle y Amis's That Uncertain Feeling. Relevant American artists include Sherwood An- dersC)il (Winesburg, Ohio), John Dos Passos (U .S.A.) , Thornton Wilder (Our Town), John Steinbeck, Damon Runyon (for the urban-pastoral-sentimental genre) , james Agee (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), John Hersey (Hiroshima) and Norman Mailer (The White Negro) . Photography constitutes an extremely important collateral medium. Fellow-traveling pain- ters include Ben Shahn, and Robert Koehler whose The Strike (1886) apparently embarrased its posses- sors. Populism in our sense is a suborc1inate but impor- tant streak in pop music. Apart from folk music, it's identifiable in The Tenement Symphony or David Ec- cles' \"Montana Song\" (representing urban and rural populism respectively). Alan Price's album \" Be- tween Yesterday and Today\" is populist and social- realist. Urban pastorals include the Beatles' \"Penny Lane\" and the Kinks' \"Waterloo Sunset\" . Other populist hit singles include Cat Stevens' \"Matthew and Son\" (for all its anti-Semitic ovetones). Des Lane's \"Sac1ie the Cleaning Lady\", Bernard Cribbins' \"Gossip Calypso\", Mike Sarne's \"Come Outside\", Flanagan and Allen's \"Underneath the Arches\" and Lonnie Donegan's \"My Old Man's A Dustman\" (En- glish for garbage collector). The Rolling Stones con- tribute \"Salt of the Earth\" and \" Factory Girl\", though it's difficult to feel confident that their irony is within populism's affectionate-derisive range al- though that can be very sharp, particularly in Bri- tain: a verse of the convivial Cockney song, \" Knees Up Mother Brown\", runs, \"Isn't this a rotten song,! And a rotten Singer too. \" The Sgt . Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band song- cycle finds a very strange, successful, and perhaps populist mixture of realistic vignettes and ironic whimsies. Abbey Road characters like Mean Mr. Mus- tard and Polythene Pam seem to come somewhere between George Grosz and Lewis Carroll. FILM COMMENT 25
III. A WORKING CLASS HERO IS A populist genre remains intense. The post- consciousness from the purlieus of screen ulation of a tolerant co-existence, even a populism. For in the first place it isn't FINE THING TO BE. -J. Lennon rough-and-ready fraternity, between dif- specific to political extremes. Thus MIRA- ferent classes, is often part of a genre's CLE IN MILAN has pitying but waspish The principal snag wi th the term pleas ure . It explains w hy social realism things to say about Paolo Stoppa, whose populism is the confusion arising from and populism tend to converse during bowler hat, two-storey shack, thrift, long- capital-P Populism as a political movement periods of national unity: the French Popu- ing for a top hat, and snobbish but cringing and its diffusion into a small-p ideological lar Front of the Thirties, Britain during the style clearly mark him as a middle class current. Jeffrey Richards has enlighten- war and the postwar Labour landslide. Be- character who thinks he's too good for the ingly related American Populism to the tween crises, this might seem enough to rabble. THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE has films of Capra, McCarey, and Ford. To this eject most populist film s from the category its analagous couple, the porter and his list one may well want to add King Vidor, of social realism, as even mildly leftist lib- wife, who despise the common laun- William Wellman, and maybe Henry King. erals might define it. Similarly, the Marxist drygirl, trust the boss Batala, resent the One might even want to make more of stress on the proletariat and its longed-for cooperative however much help they get Populism's left-wing aspects, which in- dictatorship might seem to oppose Marx- from it, and dream of imperialist happi- spired early sneers at \"hayseed Socialists.\" ism and populism. ness (\"Tonkin,\" i.e. Vietnam) while clear- Sidney Lens, in The Labour Wars, can de- ing out the drains. scribe unionism as a parallel movement to In any case, both left and right tend to be Populism, involving considerable cross- more nuanced . Leftist liberals regularl y IV. LET'S DRINK TO THE SALT OF influence, and populism does contribute to tended to underes timate the fierc e and THE EARTH certain New Deal impulses. For George complex tensions intermittently opposing McKenna, Sixties radicalism is populist- the petty bourgeoiSie, the labor aristocracy, -M. Jagger, K. Richard rooted, and he describes it as \"left-wing and \" the great unwashed .\"7 And c1ass- populism .\" Certainly non-American unconscious populist ideologues have Liberal criticism recognized four golden movements normally called populist could been known to exclude such lower-class ages for the screen's celebration of the be left-wing. Thus a French Socialist- subgroups as urban immigrants, union- common people. But, in the general con- anarchist tradition surfaces intermittently organizers, Socialists, and blacks.8 If class sensus, each is isolated from its origins, robustly in THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANGE, tensions loom as small in screen populism, succession, and affinities. The golden ages stiffly in TOUT VA BIEN. Ideological and even social realism, as they do, it's are: populism can also be imbued with a sense probably because class-warmongers tend of particular folk, race, or nation, and take to have, or affect, an idealistic side, apd to (1) French poetic realism from about on Poujadist or even Fascistic colorations. advocate both tactical collaboration and ul- 1930 until 1950. To the obvious names timate reconciliation. Historically, con- (Clair, Renoir, Prevert-Carne, Duvivier, Capra's LOST HORIZON wouldn't belong ciliatory rhetoric has virtually been a condi- Vigo, Pagnol) one may add important primarily to our populist genre, although it tion of left-wing class-consciousn ess films by Clouzot (LE CORBEAU, QUAI DES undoubtedly expresses a version of reaching the screen at all, even in Renoir's ORFEVRES) , Becker (ANTOINE ET AN- populist ideology. It's love that Capra in- Communist-financed LA VIE EST A NOUS TOINETTE), Clement (LA BATAILLE DU RAIL), tends for his planeload of free-worlders as and his union-financed LA MARSEILLAISE. Malraux (L'ESPOIR), Tati (JOUR DE FETE) , a cross-section of folk, or democracy, or Daquin (LE POINT DU JOUR) and Pagliero even humanity. But its human interest is It wouldn't seem reasonable, though, to (UN HOMME MARCHE DANS LA VILLE) . Con- clearly thinner than in such street-level exclude even an uncompromising c1a ss- tinuing into the fifties, the cycle becomes movies as IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT. SO I'd more disabused and prosaic (GER- classify it as an ideolOgical uplift film . It re- 7. English and American social historians (G.D .H . VAISE, KNAVE OF HEARTS, LA TRAVERSEE DE lates partly to the Utopian visions which Cole, Sidney Lens) provide innumerable examples PARIS) and it had virtually ceased to regis- fascinated the Populists, partly to the of the skilled unions' determination to disassociate ter as a genre in critical minds even before World War II crisis of conscience, its themselves from the non-uni onized unskilled ,or of the New Wave submerged such stragglers \"fantasy-conscience\" subgenre (STAIRWAY populist level distinction s between th e \" respecta- as Jean Dew ewe r's Renoiresgue LES TO HEAVEN, THEY CAME TO A CITY, and, by ble\" and th e \"common. \" HONNEURS DE LA GUERRE .9 ironic variation, Lubitsch's HEAVEN CAN WAIT) . These conscience fantasies relate 8. Recent attempts at fully-integrated TV soap Silent precursors of the golden age in- more closely to the populist genre when opera failed . And a big English si ngles hit, Blue clude Zecca, Delluc, Kirsanov-in whose the supernatural quietly insinuates itself Mink's Melti ng Pot , apparently proved unacceptable MENILMONTANT Zola meets Griffith meets into a populist milieu (THE PASSING OF THE in the U.S.A. on account of such sentiments as: avant-garde impressiOnism-and Feyder's THIRD FLOOR BACK, THE HALFWAY HOUSE, \"Take a pinch of white man!Wrap it up in black sin! CRAINQUEBILLE, of which Griffith said: Wellman's THE NEXT VOICE YOU HEAR). Add a touch of blue bloodJand a little bitty bit of Red \"I've seen a film which symbolizes Paris for Indian boy/Curi it up and kink itlMix with yellow me! That man pushing a wheelbarrow, The place which populist thought in- chinkies/And you got a recipe for a ge t-alo n g termittently accords a s trong leader is scen e/What a beautiful dreamt ...What we need is a 9. Perhaps it has waned to the waxing of an appa- made explicit in OUR DAILY BREAD, and in- great big melting p otlBig enough to take the world rently unrelated genre, the comedy of nervous volves further problems. In its light, and all its got/Keep it stirring for a hundred years or twi tch . The latter's best known star is Louis de movies as different as SERGEANT YORK , morelAnd turn out coffee-colored people by the Funes, its best specimens are the grotesque-sarcastic WALKING TALL, and BILLY JACK may seem score ...\" AnaJagous sentiments concerning relig- cross-sections of J.P. Mocky, and its overlap with more an assertion of \"us\" and \"ours\" than ion and class culminate in: \"We should all get to- art-house fare is exemplified by Marco Ferreri's LA outsiders suspect, and could of course lead gether in a lovi ng machin e/ l gotta rin g up th e GRANDE BOUFFE, the la s t two Bufiuels, and the Populism to Fascism. Conversely, a preoc- Queen\". floor-polisher sequence of THE LITTLE THEATER OF cupation with the individual rather than JEAN RENOIR . It's as if the stress of rapid social his community may lead to a reading of the The extremi sm of the lyrics is provoca tive-ironic. change has broken up the warm and earthy charac- MAXIM GORKI and APU trilogies simply as Another tonality of populist irony, analagous to terization of backward France in the Thirties, giving stories of unusually sensitive artists, with- Brecht's (which I take to be inverted Expressionism, way to rootless eccentricities. Such an evolution out noticing the films' espousal of these not Populist at all). is exemplified by the an onymous parallels the role of Jacques Tati as link-man between artists-and responsiveness towards, and urban ditty sung by Derek Lamb on Folkways FW the epochs. JOUR DE FETE suggests a Pagnolesque vil- reverence for, their ordinary, \" ungifted\" 8707: lage life, but MON ONCLE maroons M. Hulot amidst a companions. Mocky-like suburb. This evolution-or degenera- \"They 're moving Granpa's grave to build a sewerl tion-also helps explain the French passion for Jerry The question of class antagonisms in the . . .They're moving his remains to put in nine-inch Lewis. But the genre has some older roots-e.g. drains/That run to so me pos h bloke's residen cel early French slapstick and THE ITALIAN STRAW HAT. . . .\" But grandpa never was a quitter and, now \"he' Perhaps it resembles screwball comedy which could haunt the washroom seat in his winding sheet/And reflect the culture-shock-ridden evolution of U.S. theylI only sleep at night when he11 allowl .\"A society, as well as Depression frustrations . form of sabotage strengthening my suggestion, in A Mirror for Englilnd, that English working-class ineffi- ciency is a sudden, and if anything more bother- some, counterpart of a sizeable Communist Party. 26 JULY-AUGUST 1975
loaded with vegetables-what a strong, and De Santis (BITTER RICE). French and The late Forties were a tortuous period. Litvak's THE LONG NIGHT (a remake of LE gripping image!\" Griffith's sense of sym- Italian critics, like Lizzani's critical role, JOUR SE LEVE) seemed merely an epilogue to a Thirties crime-populism cycle (FURY bolism illustrates the idiom linking with stress their intimate connection with neo- and THE GRAPES OF WRATH) . English critics first spotted the populist undertow of populism the very fertile French documen- realism. Whether one postulates direct in- Ray's THEY LIVE BY NIGHT and Tetzlaff's THE WINDOW, By and large, however, liberalism tary school, from CavaJcanti's REIN QUE LES fluence, or simply similar solutions to simi- was caught between end-of-ideology op- timism on one hand and McCarthyism on HEURES through LA ZONE and A PROPOS DE lar problems , one can find similarities the other. NICE to Carne's NOGENT, ELDORADO DU DI- of tactics and style between some Italian The first mood inspired a cycle involving THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES and such Dore MANCHE. Epstein's Grierson-like topics and Third World genres: neo-realism and Schary productions as CROSSFIRE at RKO and, later, at MGM, his softer-centered mix with Breton mysticism to generate a MANDABI; THE HUNCHBACK OF ROME and movies like IT'S A BIG COUNTRY, BRIGHT ROAD and GLORY ALLEY. The pessimistic re- \"folk populism\" in LA FEMME DU BOUT DU THE HARDER THEY COME; Sergio Leone and sponse inspired uncomfortable, underes- timated movies by Dmytryk (GIVE US THIS MONDE . Post-war manifestations range ANTONIO DAS MORTES . Fellini' s films DAY) , Enfield (COME AND GET ME) and Losey. THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR is an un- from Menegoz (MA JEANETTE ET MES CO- exemplify an overlap of neo-realism and easy balance of Schary optimism and Losey dourness. His flawed and fascinat- PA!NS) to Agnes Varda 's extraordinary poetic realism, though their lingering con- ing THE BIG NIGHT connects urban populism with a Puritan soul-fight and a OPERA-MOUFFE. nection with religious metaphysics gener- still-modern sense of interaction among community, alienation, and moral con- (2) The ground for England's wartime ates a palpable difference from the secular, sciousness. STRANGER ON THE PROWL at- tempts to engineer a rendezvous between populism was prepared not only by the humanist sense of \"poetic\" in \"poetic Italian neo-realism and all those movies in which Paul Muni and Edward G , Robin- documentary movement but also by ele- realism.\" son had focused on U .S . ambivalences about immigrant father-figures-from ments in a range of fiction features: Another mutation of neo-realism, the LITTLE CAESAR, through the Warners biopics, to HOUSE OF STRANGERS and A BLACKMAIL, Dupont's PICCADILLY , John \"rosy realism\" of ANGELINA M.P. and BREAD HOLE IN THE HEAD . Ba xter's DOSS HOUSE , Brian Desmond LOVE AND DREAMS, steadly resumes the ac- Liberal criticism had some feelings for auteur and genre, but its successors were Hurst's ON THE NIGHT OF THE FIRE. My quiescent populism of the pre-war uninterested in references to reality. All three schools concurred in the auteur/ book A Mirror for England offers only a pre- strapaese school (\"the village, nothing but genre ascription of Cukor to sophisticated comedy, thus obscuring -or reducing to liminary history of the omnibus-and- the village\"). Blasetti's FOUR STEPS IN THE \" homage\" inconsequentiality-all the similarities between Cukor's THE MARRY- episode cycle. Ealing's PASSPORT TO PIM- CLOUDS was sold abroad as a neo-realist ING KIND and THE CROWD (in both films a lower-middle-class city couple affably LICO and EUREKA STOCKADE are SO milit- comedy, although in fact it was made dream, but suffer the loss of their child); or between Cukor's film and MARTY (which it antly anti-bureaucratic as to qualify for under Mussolini. The resurgence of neo- anticipates); or between IT SHOULD HAP- PEN TO YOU and CHRISTMAS IN JULY (in political populism-somewhere between realism after 1960 involves Visconti's both, an ordinary young couple is shaken by the ambition-and-publicity syndrome); Capra and Poujade. There seems to be a ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS, Pasolini's AC- or between BORN YESTERDAY and political-populist comedy along Capra loose relationship between populism and CATTONE, and Bolognini's METELLO; the lines. 12 crazy-but- unsophisticated comedy. Eng- surprise is that so many of its Marxists re- Although American populism was con- stantly adulterated by Hollywood, the for- land's line of populist comics includes main bourgeoisie-bound. Simultaneouly, ties produced such films as A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, SUNDAY DINNER FOR A SOL- Gracie Fields, George Formby, Will Hay, the rosy comedies modulate to sarcasm; DIER, and THE CLOCK. Many versatile vete- rans achieved success in the genre: Wyler and Norman Wisdom, and two collectives: Germi's SEDUCED AND ABANDONED and DI- with DETECTIVE STORY, Kazan with PANIC IN THE STREETS . Robert Wise played the Crazy Gang and the CARRY ON com- VORCE ITALIAN-STYLE correspond not so populist themes in three keys: sombre (THE SET UP), Chayefskyan (TWO FOR THE pany (although not when their subjects' much to Italian Ealing (as I once wrote) as SEESAW) and rainbow (WEST SIDE STORY). It parodaic elements outweight the populist to Italian-village Sturges. 11 12. It's also c urious that critics ico nized and id o lized Jo hn Way ne, but rarely me ntione d the artistically far mo re com- ones) .10 (4) Liberal critics applauded an Ameri- plex and intricate pe rsonalit y and ro les of Burt Lancas te r, w hose re lations hip to rea lities was so much closer. can social consciousness running from THE CROWD and STREET SCENE through THE GRAPES OF WRATH to the Chayefsky cycle. Liberalism was rightly embattled against Hollywood's wishfulfillment formulae, and one can only sympathize with liberal critics who detested HALLELUJAH I'M ABUM and the modern theme of ROMAN SCAN- DALs; the populism there wasn't so much rosy as idiotic. But liberal critics stressed social conscience, and thus relegated to socially-unconscious or auteurist cate- gories such films as GREED , some silent Sternbergs (of which more later), THE WIND or TOL'ABLE DAVID (relating to rural populism), OUR TOWN (relating to Puritan folklore), SUNRISE, LONESOME, Wellman's BEGGARS OF LIFE, or what Molly Haskell has (3) Neo-realism, if it's a genre rather called Borzage's \"Italian Catholic Romanti- than a movement or a cycle, isn't fully de- cism.\" The effect was to wipe American scribed by the everyday subjects em- populism out of consciousness. phasized by Rossellini, De Sica and early 11. Such a mix of Italian and Holly wood genres Visconti in Italy, Ferreri in Spain, Satyajit might seem baroque, or even impossible, but Ray in India, and, by partial reaction, documentary thrillers like Das sin's THE NAKED CITY Bunuel's LOS OLVIDADOs in Mexico. had quite independently inclicated a way. De Sica Anglo-Saxon critics dismissed a cycle of had wanted Henry Fonda for THE BICYCLE THIEF . bravura melodramas by Lattuada (SENZA With INDISCRETION OF AN AMERICAN WIFE Selznick PIETA), Lizzani (THE HUNCHBACK OF ROME) and de Sica were at least within striking distance of BRIEF ENCOUNTER. When , eventually, Lizzani and 10. Nor does populism provide a hangar for Monty Rosi came to the U .S.A. they tried to crosss the Python's Flying Circus. It relates principally to absur- gangster movie with social consciousness. Both dist and upper and middle class experience, and CRAZY JOE and LUCKY LUOANO gave trouble, but in evokes the line of \"upper bureaucracy\" comedies in- their reality sense they ' re nearer to THE volving such character actors as Richard Wattis and GODFATHER-which crosses the gangster movie Wilfrid Hyde-White. Like them, it has a populist re- with power intrigue and ethnic middle-class gister, but it doesn't dominate the instrument. drama-than the LITTI.E CAESAR trio. FILM COMMENT 27
isn't merely academic to notice the populist which Chayefsky had shown affinities in hans, Fritz Lang, Victor Trivas, Karl links with Kazan's VIVA ZAPATA and A THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY). How- Froelich, and Slaten Dudow.!5 STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE . Chayefsky's rise ever, comparison with Jack Gold's THE NA- parallels a new populist/muckrating im- TIONAL HEALTH (which is thorough (2) Despite the links with documentary pulse (THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, ON THE populism) reveals the HOSPITAL as \"pixi- through Free Cinema, criticism has pre- WATERFRONT). lated liberal social realism. \" It sees its world ferred to see the English kitchen-sink from an administrative, upper-middle school as \" protest\" by a generation of au- John Ford achieves a populist/poetic class point of view; it corresponds to te urs, rather than as an expression of those realist success with THE LONG VOYAGE British burea ucra tic comedies; and popular attitudes-whether \" protest\" or HOME and fails , aesthetically at least, with perhaps we can link Chayefsky with our merely grumbling-which did, after all, the equally episodic THE RISING OF THE ambivalently progressive school. 14 provide it with an inspirational MOON (1957). If its subject smacks of the catchment-area and a substantial box- Forties, the film strongly resembles an Eal- V. LEFTOVER PEOPLE office constituency. Protest generation and ing movie, complete with Dearden-Relph auteur theories also fail to explain camera-angles and an episode-and- -A. Price kitchen-sink movies by older filmmakers omnibus format. Its omnibus is a rural (Lee Thompson's NO TREES IN THE STREET train, and its predicament-stuck in a sta- If some populis\"t subgenres were hon- and WOMAN IN A DRESSING GOWN, the tion where various love-knots tie and ored only in part, others earned scarcely a BoultingS' THE FAMILY WAY), or unaligned untie-makes it a yokely mini-BRIEF EN- nod of recognition. films like the Canadian Sidney Furie's THE COUNTER. THE QUIET MAN belongs to the BOYS and THE LEATHER BOYS . Nor can they same genre. Its thick-ear elements don't (1) Studies of the German film 's Gold- distinguish, but relate, the variety of prevent it from being a bucolic comedy, en Age concentrated on Expressionism ideological positions: leftish (Reisz, An- and are appropriate to an Irish-American (or on a reaction against it: the neue sach- derson, Richardson), moral traditionalist equivalent of Pagnol (marital tiffs involve a lichkeit) . This reduced the populist/social- (ALFIE), and \"low Tory\" (ROOM AT THE TOP, whole village). Only instead of THE BAKER'S realist streak that ran through it to one Bryan Forbes). The downbeat tonality of WIFE it's \"The Wife of the Quiet man: G.W. Pabst. YetBAcKSTAIRSandnm certain pioneers (Lee Thompson, Clayton, American\"-or better of the Ugly Ameri- LAST LAUGH are heavily populist in in- Richardson, Reisz, Anderson, Schlesing- can.!3 terest. Kracauer celebrates screenwriter er, Forbes, Furie) has continued through Carl Mayer's robust realism as antithesis to POOR COW and KES . In the new American cinema the nearly everybody else's psychosocial dec- populist urge is vigorous. Such films as adence, but Mayer's themes and construc- To have an easier target, criticism de- STUDS LO NIGAN, SOMETHING WILD , THE tion often recall screenwriter C~sare tached kitchen-sink cinema from the re- LANDLORD modulate established styles . Zavattini's-a lost bicycle and a man's lated upsurge of working-class comedy John Cassavetes hoed his own row from morale; a lost uniform and a man's morale. (SAILOR BEWARE), from less heavily-toned SHADOWS. Subsequently, such films as Coppola's populist-picaresque THE RAIN The overlap with populism is a main- movies (ALFIE, UP THE JUNCTION), and from PEOPLE, Huston's FAT CITY (one of the rare spring of Expressionist drama, where, the more cheerful strain evident in SOME non-crime boxing movies), Martin Scorse- Marxists helping, it's been steadily oc- PEOPLE (Clive Donner), THE KNACK (Dick se's BOXCAR BERTHA and MEAN cluded by critical stress on Expressionism Lester), as well as from Norman Cohen's STREETS, George Lucas's AMERICAN GRAF- as subjective vision. The same fate befell charming and nostalgic spin-offs from TV FITI , and John Berry's CLAUDINE all have Sternberg'S THE SALVATION HUNTERS and comedy: the idealogically enbattled TILL strong populist aspects. CLAUDINE and A THE LAST COMMAND, a companion piece to DEATH DO us PART and DAD'S ARMY. In- WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE both fea- THE LAST LAUGH . The Expressionism- deed, British TV comedy helped nudge ture garbagemen as heroes. That such a tinted populism of Vidor's THE CROWD is U .S . TV towards a cautious populism (Till profession is intended as a liberating in- matched b y Phil Jutzi's BERLIN ALEXAN- Death Do Us Part begat All in the Family, souciance versus wishfulfillment conven- DERPLATZ and Joe May's ASPHALT. Pis- Steptoe and Son begat Sanford and Son, and tions is suggested by Barbara Loden's re- cator's REVOLT OF THE FISHERMAN borrows Love Thy Ne ig hbour begat Love Thy mark that American arthouses will watch from Eisenstein to participate in the lyrical Neighbor) . In fact the very cheerfulness of Italian workers but not American ones, use of montage widespread through East- British kitchen-sink all but begat American and by John Hug hes' recollection that ern Europe (Ozep's MURDER OF DMITRI black comedy (Sanford and Son , Love Thy shots of manual labor often triggered un- KARAMAZOV, Machaty' s ECSTASY). Docu- Neighbor, Good Times, The Jeffersons, That's easy laughter in American arthouses . mentary and neo-realism are anticipated My Mama). The parallels between The Bev- Concurrently, populist material has made b y the anti-idyllic PEOPLE ON SUNDAY erly Hillbillies and The Jeffersons reveal an extensive inroads into TV comedies. All in (Wilder-Siodmak-Ulmer-Zinnemann) . unfortunately countervailing U .S. influ- the Family, Sanford and Son, and Good Times THREE ON A FILLING STATION exemplifies ence. Nonetheless, the British connection, are several notches nearer reality than any rosy populism. or maybe Simply parallel, seems fortified U .S . predecessors . by THE EDUCATION OF SONNY CARSON This variety of idioms s uggests that (whose lyrical vehemence intermittently Arthur Hiller's and Paddy Chayefsky's realism was rather more vigorous than the evokes Richardson and THE LONELINESS OF THE HOSPITAL constitutes an interesting Anglo-Saxon perspective supposes, and THE LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER), while John case. Its plot could seem purely in The German Realist Cin ema Ray mond Berry's CLAUDINE relates to the TV series, eccentric-a preacher turned mass mur- Borde, Freddie Bouache, and Fran\\ois to kitchen-sink comedy-drama, and to the derer renders an underfunded hospital's Courtade add movies by Lupu Pick, Karl vindication of \"feckless immorality\" in confusions worse confounded. However, Grune, Gerhard Lampecht, Bruno Rahn, Joan Littlewood's SPARROWS CAN'T SING, as he virtually informs us that he personifies Leo Mittler, Robert Siodmak, Carl Jung- well as to American precedents like John the chaotic impersonality of the way things are. Moreover, THE HOSPITAL has several 14. TELL ME WHERE IT HURTS , with Peter Sellers as a 15. I haven ' t been able to trace a film , seen many characteristics of the cross-section film . venal hospital director has entertaining affinities years ago, made in the late Thirties, and predomin- Revealing social life as sadly dysfunctional, with THE HOSPITAL . Other (intermittent) \" pro· a ntly German, although billed as a Franco-German it secularizes and dazzle-camouflages the gressives\" include Darryl Zanuck (whose interest in co-production. A hulking giant, reminiscent of Len- bleakness of OUR TOWN . Its crazy-quilt sar- the man at the desk recurs in THE YOUNG LIONS , and nie in OF MICE AN D MEN, but thoroughl y vicious, casm revives the Sturges spirit (with Martin Rill (CONRACK, SOUNDER). John Ford some· lusts for the folk sy middle-class heroine, and has to times strays from Democratic populism into prog· be reprimanded by the middle-class hero, although 13. Bot h fi l mS-UGLY an d QUIET- fit int o o ur ressive propositions: F.D.R's double in THE GRAPES there's still a sense in which he's a neighbour and polit ica l and propaga ndi st genres. OF WRATH , Edward G. Robinson inspired by Lincoln fri end . One can't but s uspect a National Socialist in CHEYENNE AUTUMN. populism . Any suggestions as to title and director? 28 JULY-AUGUST 1975
Berry's own Forties films (FROM THIS DAY British anarcho-populism: Marcello Mastroianni in LEO THE LAST. FORWARD) and tragi-comedy like THE MAR- CARABINIERS is an anti-populist film-two motifs taken from THE CROWD), the Reisz- RYING KIND. universal soldiers in a De Sica-type shack. Richardson MOMMA DON'T ALLOW. Reciprocally, transatlantic affinities At least Godard has given us the produc- tion line of BRITISH SOUNDS and the strike of (3) Aubades. The process of getting up dominate John Boorman 's LEO THE LAST. 16 TOUT VA BIEN . But the populism interwo- in the morning evokes the daily grind. It Adapting a play set in New York, and ven with modern radicalism is more may be dreary, like the maid's in UMBERTO partly inspired by the U.S . ghetto riots, generous in LEO THE LAST, in Bo Wider- 0, or Gabin' s in GAS-OIL, or Peter Sellers' in Boorman transposed the action into to- berg's ADALAN 31 and JOE HILL. ONLY TWO CAN PLAY; or it ma y be rosy, like day's post-immigration London I7 Lon- the chorus girls' in DAMES and the actresses don's aboriginal Cockneys are reduced to VI. I'M JUST SITTING ON A FENCE in THE LADIES' MAN. one boldly eccentric old lady, an African girl's intermittent accent, and an am- -M. Jagger, K. Richard (4) Visible cross-sections---whether of biguity of casting-Kenneth Warren, play- tenement windows seen from outside, or ing one Kowalski, retains irreducible Aside from the various groups already dissolved into a spatially magic unison. Cockney overtones. The final confronta- mentioned, subgenres or subthemes in- Thus: sous LES TOITS DE PARIS, Vidor's tion occurs between an alliance of upper- volved in overlapping with populism and STREET SCENE, LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE class Anglo smarties with old-fashioned social realism include: (with Gracie Fields), LE JOUR SE LEVE (with Eastern Europeans (surely fled from the its ivory tower of locked-in lonely people), final scenes of ASHES AND DIAMONDS) (1) Song of the city. Sometimes people OUR TOWN, REAR WINDOW, NO TREES IN THE must move to the city's rhythms: RIEN QUE against a lumpen as romantically unified as LES HEURES (impressionist-expressionist- STREET, the Laugh-In \"crazy windows\" set, futurist-cubist) , BERLIN (neue-sachlichkeit, that of MIRACLE IN MILAN. This fascinating cubo-futurist), THE CROWD (for its open- the boarding-house set of THE LADIES' movie all but blends liberal sympathies plan office and its moving scene, when, to MAN, LEO THE LAST, TOUT VA BIEN . 42ND ST with radical tendencies, the kitchen-sink paraphrase a Futurist title, \"The noise of and DAMES recur here, and it's the mutual with T.S. Eliot and the Beatles, Capra with the traffic interpenetrates the houses\"), reinforcement of the city rhythm sense and De Sica, populist optimism with social and Berkeley's LULLABY OF BROADWAY. But cross-section set-ups which, overriding realism. Its combination of an earnest and sometimes the rhythms are even invigorat- the glamourization, keep the numbers in a hang-up subject (class/race riots) with bold ing, or even pastoral, as in DAMES (futuro- populist category. switches of tone and style confused one constructivist), 42ND STREET, the \"I Only New York student audience, which Have Eyes for You\" number, and Ander- (5) Roofs-and-pigeons (ON THE WATER- couldn't relax enough to notice any of the son's EVERY DAY EXCEPT CHRISTMAS. Diffe- FRONT, LEO THE LAST) . And can' t we recog- jokes, and this probably explains its box- rent essays follow different pipers down nize populist musical motifs: accordions in office failure . But it remains a spiritual flag- the city stree!s: A PROPOS DE NICE, RHYTHM France, cornet and banjo in England, back ship of the late populist line. 18 OF A CITY, OPERA MOUFFE . alley saxophone in the U.S.A? (3) Godard's aesthetic now yokes fonnal (2) City rhythms in \"Sunday films.\" (6) The industrial pastoral-a populist sensitivity to heavy dogmatism. The first Carne's NOGENT, ELDORADO DU DIMANCHE mood that describes certain essays in element seems natural to him; the second (exploring a working-class holiday resort); documentary impressionism better than suggests an over-earnest, unconsciously PEOPLE ON SUNDAY; LE QUATORZE JUILLET; social realism (e.g. DRIFTERS, RHYTHM OF A parodiac modualtion of social realism. Al- PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE; Carol Reed's BANK CITY, MUSCLE BEACH, THE SAVAGE EYE). though Godard's protestations about ex- HOLIDAY; IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY; pressing and reaching the working class Emmer's SUNDAY IN AUGUST. And even- (7) Confrontations of poverty and evokes a populist humanism, he stalls ings out: SUNRISE, THE CROWD, LONESOME, wealth are regularly decried as prop- when it comes to forfeiting his mixture of \"By a Waterfall\" (one of many Berkeley aganda. But it's surely perfectly reasonable two fonns of ultra-radical chic: the heavy that it be an emotion-laden moment, and arguably corresponds to certain Western dogma trip is bizarrely coupled with angst tropes . It's a mainspring in Dickens's A Christmas Carol (through all its screen about every commwlicating medium and idiom from movies to speech. In TOUT vA CONTINUED ON PAGE 63 BIEN the interview with Salumi suggests an underlying affinity with the post-Tati comedy of nervous twitch . LES 16. LEO shares many themes with ZARDOZ, e.g. the affluent discover of how the other seven-eighths live, but apart from other clifferences the movement is overridingly in the reverse direction: Cinderella is a Trojan horse is a Superman; the poor discover the rich . 17. It's all but an Italian movie too, as I tried to in- dicate in Sexual Alienation in the Cinema. Or, \" Bread, Love, and Marienbad .\" Boorman is undoubtedly an auteur, but belong to the category of chameleon- auterus, like Lattuada, Clement, Wyler, Visconti, Dickinson . 18. Boorman may have been misled by the London response to massive immigration, a (even by English standards) curious mixture of nonchalance and be- wildered fury . The first aspect is symbolized by the Blue Mink song \" Melting Pot\"; the second by Alf Garnett (Archie Bunker's prototype, but much more vicious; the Colonel Blimp of the working classes). Certain disconcerting passages of carica tu ral expres- s ionism (a genre established by Grosz) may have seemed sanctioned by public acceptance of a similar streak in the Beatles (\"Mean Mr. Mustard,\" \" I Am the Walrus\"), and by their enigmatic references, which the pop public surprisingly accepted. But constructing its movie equivalent is far from easy. FILM COMMENT 29
THE who descended on Hollywood. After her some night clubs and restaurants, and has immense popular success in MARY POP- bought some gold mines. There are un- IN· PINS, Julie Andrews was not only offered substantiated rumors that his net worth DUS· at least a million dollars for each motion equals seven hundred million, but these picture, but commanded the same ver- are suspect, as they're usually accom- TRY tiginous sum for a one-hour one-woman panied by the claim that he still earns one show on television. If Liz and Dick found million per picture, plus a percentage of ACfORS'SALARIES: security in stone, Andrews found hers in the gross receipts-unlikely in the era of dirt, and her fans need not worry about her BIG JAKE and MCQ. And indeed, those close LET'S MAKE A DEAL financial health now that she no longer oc- to him affirm , if in whispers, that he's a cupies superstar status. The frail Julie, it pretty bad businessman. by Paul Sarlat could be said, kept her feet on the ground, as she converted the major part of her Moving down a generation, the big fi- It's no secret that certain big stars readily short-lived super-earnings into real estate, nancial winner of the past few years is un- obtain absolutely stupefying sums for their mostly in the form of an enormous ranch doubtedly Marlon Brando, whose role in work in a film . Of course, the half-starved that she owns in Hawaii. THE GODFATHER has brought him $1.6 mil- actor who haunts the studio gates, forever lion, while LAST TANGO IN PARIS has earned running after the big prize and then Strangely enough, it was in 1964, the him three million at the very least. Steve settling for the most meager of salaries, is year of MARY POPPINS, that Clint McQueen must be green with envy, as his always with us-and there are many of Eastwood, now worth a million dollars per role in PAPILLON was worth but a mere two them . But those who succeed, those film, was so unknown and badly-paid that million, while Dustin Hoffman, even more whose names come to mean something at he had exiled himself in Italy in order to unfortunate, was granted a paltry million the box office- for those, the acting pro- earn (in films whose titles are cannily apt) a for the same movie. fession remains one of the most lucrative. fistful of dollars . For his first spaghetti Needless to say, some of filmdom's mil- westerns, in fact, he rarely got more than But then there's Charles Bronson, who is lionaires are spendthrifts, squandering $10,000, despite the commercial success of so expensive that his salary is calculated on more than half their earnings each and those Sergio Leone movies; today, he's al- a daily basis: $20,000 to $30,000 per shoot- every year. But-waste not, want not!- lotted a sum more than a hundred times ing day, to which is added $2,500 for ex- the majority of the top-earning stars amass more than those \"few dollars.\" What's penses plus a luxurious car-along with rather comfortable fortunes. more, he doesn't sign a contract without chauffeur-at his disposal all twenty-four being given the power to choose the direc- hours. Considering that his films are now Maybe Hollywood is no longer cinema's tor, the screenwriter and the other big-budgeted and take several months to Mecca, but despite all of its pretensions the actors-at least. shoot, his earnings must work out to a city remains cinema's capital. It is in Hol- flabbergasting amount. The record would lywood that the best-paid stars can still be Large fortunes are not exclusively attri- seem to have broken, except that the latest found . And it's still true that for producers buted to the stars of today. Veteran Bob rumors are that Bronson is trying to over- the gigantic salaries paid out to stars are Hope continues to limp his way to two shoot his own mark and is now demand- really investments: a prestigious name on a million a year, and sometimes more, for his ing not one but two cars at his constant dis- marquee continues to attract the public- infrequent appearances on large and small posal, that he refuses to be put up in any less so than in the past, certainly, and with screens. In the course of his career, he's hotel suite costing less than $400 a day, and more and more numerous and important amassed a two hundred million-dollar that, for good measure, an airplane be exceptions, but nonetheless with regular- pile, and is known in financial circles as placed, at governmental-excuse me! at ity. And along with the public come the one of the richest men in the United States. the production's-expense, at the perma- profits. Bing Crosby's old partner has been known nent disposal of his wife Jill Ireland and his to boast that he's worth five hundred mil- half-dozen business advisers, in order that Under such circumstances, it's hardly lion, but those in the know consider this this little world of his can come and go as surprising that Liz Taylor and Richard Bur- just another way for him to display his he pleases while he is in the midst of shoot- ton were each paid a million dollars per sense of humor. In any case, he wears a big ing. film . The grosses more than compensated smile when he says, whenever anyone for the investments, and the game, as the asks him about it: \" I can remember the Now of course the cinema is an industry saying goes, was worth the candle. At the time when I was happy to earn five bucks a as well as an art- but is there any other time-not so long ago, really-of their night. Now I'm rich . And I don't mean industry which treats its workers so royal- most perfect union, the Burtons took care 'well-off.' I mean 'rich!'\" ly? And naturally the irony is that the per- not to piss away the fantastic sums that son most responsible for the work, i.e. the they were amassing, and invested a good And it's true that Bob Hope has, for a director, despite his role of foreman, earns part of their income in diamonds. After all, very long time, invested most of his money sums infinitely less-to put it mildly- in this kind of work more than in any other, in business dealings-just like Crosby, tidy. one never knows what tomorrow will who has equally garnered a colossal for- bring, and the most smashing triumph is tune. Bing ~s rather quiet about just what If Mr. Bronson's salaries and demands often succeeded, very brutally, by obliv- he's worth, but he's known to own a huge make you flinch, take comfort in the ion. Prudence, in this business, is the ranch in Argentina, a television produc- example of Gene Autrey, another star of mother of insurance! tion company, a music publishing house Westerns whose name once attracted huge and an important orange juice firm . Let's crowds, but who started out by buying his Even at the height of their success a dec- put it this way: he seems to have less and first guitar (for he was a cowboy who sang ade ago, the flashy couple terrible of cinema less need to balance the books by making more than he rode) on credit, paying a dol- didn't hold a monopoly on super-salaries, those rare but very well-paid TV appear- lar and a half per month. And he built a for- and indeed their record-holding status ances that he was doing often enough a tune, but little by little, finally buying sev- was soon shattered by another European few years ago. eral radio and television stations, some ranches, a grand hotel and other profitable John Wayne pretends to be one of Hol- businesses. Yet somehow, his unspectacu- lywood's richest actors, but the Duke is lar enrichment seems deserved. even more discreet-indeed, extremely so-about the exact size of his kitty. All Another show-business king, Frank that seems to be known is that he has a Sinatra-who began his career by getting largish interest in an oil company, owns ten cents a song, on local radio stations-is 30 JULY-AUGUST 1975
now estimated to earn between four and But it should also not be forgotten, as each role. Mireille Darc is still in a position seven million a year, depending on how Dennis Weaver, the CUITent president of to ask for an honorable $80,000. Each one things go. Yet it was hardly more than the Screen Actors Guild (and star of his of the Chariots [a new French comedy twenty years ago that the famous Frank own series, McCloud), puts it, when asked team], goes home with slightly less than was paid only $8,000 for his comeback, about phenomenal star salaries: \"Because that after making a picture; the total sum Oscar-winning role in FROM HERE TO ETER- they hear that Richard Burton or Clint paid to the foursome is $300,000, and it's Eastwood earn a million dollars for a film, split evenly four ways. Another comedian NITY. the public thinks that all Hollywood actors who's coming up fast, Pierre Richard, are rich. How wrong! Overpaid stars rep- gets-as does Franr;:oise Fabian-$60,000 The movies scarcely provide the singer resent, in fact, an infinitesimal minority of to star in a production. of \"Strangers in the Night\" with his sole professional actors. Only four percent of source of revenue, as he is also an astute actors earn more than $25,000 a year, and Can we conclude that all French perfor- businessman and, above all, a singer there are twenty-five percent who earn less mers of any renown need only say \"yes\" in whose concert tours still break records. than $2,500.\" order to have their arms filled with money? There are several actor-singers who can That would be a very big error indeed . If command fortunes for night-club appear- Perhaps the most perplexing thing about our own information is correct, it's still ances . Liza Minnelli gets $200,000 per all this is not the enormity of a few stars' in- easy for a French producer to procure the week (as does pop superstar Alice Cooper, comes, but rather the enormous dispro- services of a true \"box office name\" (that is but with this difference: the star of portion between the highest and lowest to say, one of those actors who, without CABARET is not accompanied by an impor- salaries for Hollywood actors. being a celebrity, is familiar to the public, tant group of musicians whose salaries somewhat known abroad and who helps must come out of her own). One doesn't That which European stars earn can \"sell\" the film) for $300 or $400 a day, or hesitate to offer Ann-Margret one million seem, in comparison, very small. But one even less. Certain very well-known to sing in a Las Vegas palace. If such deals shouldn't forget the veritable gulf which actors-but ones who don't have a swell- are very exceptional, it's still true that Las still separates the cost of living in the U.s . ed head about such matters-will some- Vegas nightclubs-at least the ones in the from that in Europe. It would be quite times agree to work for less than $200 a day big hotels-regularly pay $150,000 per wrong to imagine the stars of the Old when they really like the script. One of the week at the very least to present talent on World as living in misery! England, for actors cited above (but who asked that his the order of Elvis Presley or Dean Martin or example, can pay its actors royally. Christ- name not be used) recently received $80 a Barbra Streisand . Of course, it's the cus- opher Lee, seemingly one of the highest- day from a director he respected who was tomer who really pays-as the champagne paid, is said to be \"worth\" $2,000 per working on a shoestring budget. in such establishments costs as much as shooting day. gold. Another myth which should be de- And in my own country, France? There, stroyed: that actors and actresses get film For its part, American television will \"box-office names\" no longer have much roles via the \"casting couch\" route. Noth- never share the French network's reputa- to complain about. According to Variety, ingcould be less true; if any sort of \"couch\" tion for stinginess. It offers to its stars, in the most \"expensive\" Frenchmen are Alain brings a lot of money to some people, they fact, salaries comparable to those of big- Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Louis de certainly aren't movie actors. Even in the screen super-productions . Lucille Ball's Funes, who command $500,000 per film, U.S., porno stars (and I mean \"porno,\" not garnering of around a hundred million and that's without counting their percen- \"erotic\"-the actors who actually perform came about principally through television. tages of the profits; in addition, the first sexual acts on screen rather than just simu- Others who have amassed fortunes thanks two of these actors often produce the late them) are paid nothing near the to the small screen: Raymond Burr (Iron- movies in which they star. Yves Montand, amounts known in the \"normal\" cinema. side), Elizabeth Montgomery (Bewitched), per the same source of information, garn- Linda Lovelace, the star of DEEP THROAT, Robert Stack (The Untouchables), David ers $160,000 for a film (but not for just any was paid $1,250; the film itself has surpas- Janssen (The Fugitive), William Conrad film, he now tells me), while Annie Girar- sed eighteen million dollars in earnings in (Cannon), and many more. dot, at $250,000 comes in slightly ahead of the U.s . alone . In France, where the de- Catherine Deneuve, who's worth mands on actors in audacious films are far For each episode of Mannix, Mike Con- $200,000. more delicate, the salaries are even smaller. nors pockets 27,500 round dollars. Rock Stars of films sexy rarely earn more than Hudson undoubtedly credits his popular- Marlene Jobert, France's latest youth $100 a day, and the average rate oscillates ity as a star in theatrical films for the fact sensation, currently asks for a neat between $50 and $60 for an actress. that he earns $50,000 per episode of McMil- $180,000. Jean Cabin, Simone Signoret lan and Wife. But the current record-holder and Jean-Louis Trintignant are also in the Finally, in France, where the cult of the is none other than a performer who hereto- \"bankable\" category, taking in $160,000 per director (or of the auteur, as it's fashionable fore was classed among the \"medium- movie . Michel Piccoli and Lino Ventura to call it nowadays) little by little over- priced\" actors, Peter Falk: each episode of each receive around $120,000. If Variety is to shadow that of the actor, certain superstar Columbo means $125,000 in his wallet. And be believed, that puts them a bit ahead of directors have reached an equal footing it's still worth repeating, in this context, Philippe Noiret and Brigitte Bardot (the lat- that certain episodes of television series are ter at one time incontestably the highest- CONTINUED ON PAGE 37 turned out in a single day in the U.S. paid French star), who pocket $100,000 for BLff-td \",., -IOK-\" ME Before they made $1,000,000 a picture: Clint East- wood, Elizabeth Taylor, Charles Bronson. FILM COMMENT 31
TELE- treating troops dominated, then orphans with the military doing an incredible job of and the \"baby lift,\" then the evacuation of getting out the loose ends, the leadership VISION Americans and Vietnamese. of the Congress rejoices that it is now too late to take action. I think it would be a very TIlE NIGHT AT THE April2Bth good day for Congressmen to keep hum- END OF TIlE TUNNEL bly quiet.\" On April 28, 1975, Harry Reasoner by Larry Lichty began by saying that \"it appears tonight All but one (twenty-three of twenty- that the battle for Saigon has begun.\" Dan four) of the film or video tape stories on the It is dawn in Washington, evening in Saigon. Rather (for Walter Cronkite) said that three network newscasts on April 29th From either place you can finally see the light at \"maybe the final battle for Saigon has be- were about the evacuation. Both ABC and the end of the tunnel. gun,\" and John Chancellor reported that NBC led with audio reports from BBC re- -Bruce Morton, CBS the \"western defenses of Saigon are under porters remaining in Saigon. For CBS, Ike Morning News, April 29, 1975 attack tonight.\" On CBS, Rather reported Pappas at the Pentagon and Bob Schieffer that the objective of the attacks appeared to at the White House gave the clearest The end when it came was illuminated with be to close the airport to stop the evacua- chronology of what had happened. Only tion of Vietnamese and Americans. While NBC had film of the fighting in Saigon; the red flares , because there at the end of the tunnel ~eter Collins, on CBS, told us that \"in prac- other reporters were on US carriers and tical terms the war is over and the com- could not get their film stories out. Arthur there was no other light. munists have won,\" there were still no Lord had been at Tan Son Nhut that night -David Brinkley, NBC predictions that the end would come so to ship film, was stranded, and caught a Nightly News , April 29, 1975 soon. flight to Thailand. From there he filed film and live reports that were essentially the In Vietnam we h(f()e finally reached the end of Only a week before the end came, WaI- same on the Today program, on the even- ter Cronkite opened a live conversation ing news, and on an NBC special later this the tunnel a/1d there is no light there. with President Ford saying that battle- same night. -Walter Cronkite, Vietnam: A equipped Marines \"have left Hawaii by War That Is Finished, April 29, 1975 air.\" Ford said that \"we are exploring with Among more than sixty journalists, re- a number of governments negotiating op- porters, correspondents or bureau mana- No story so dominated television news portunities\" but seemed to be saying the gers evacuated to three ships that day as the Indochina war. On the first Today end was near because of \"the failure of the were: Kevin Delaney, Ken Kashihawara, newscast with Frank Blair in January 14, Congress to appropriate the military aid and Hilary Brown for ABC; Keith Kay, 1952, he read of the fighting in Vietnam. requested.\" Peter Collins, Ed Bradley, Bob Simon, And he read of continued fighting on his Bryan Ellis, Richard Threlkeld for CBS; last appearance on the show twenty-three Morning News, April 29th David Butler, Don Harris, George Lewis years later. and Robert Weiner for NBC; and about People watching the CBS Morning News three crews of cameramen and soundmen During the week January 22 through 26, on television heard Hughes Rudd describe for each network. Others such as Bill 1973, more than half of all stories on the Vietnam as a \"mess .\" On Today , John Plante of CBS, Don Oliver and Garrick three network evening newscasts were Hart, who earlier had Rudd's seat but now Utley of NBC had left just a day or two be- about the peace agreement. Two weeks la- was in Vietnam, said, \"The American fore. No regular network American cor- ter, February 12 through 16, more than people gave up on Vietnam without telling respondent stayed but there were stringers sixty per cent of the stories on those same Vietnam.\" Those watching NBC-TV that and some other bureau personnel who programs were about the return of the morning again heard Hubert Humphrey chose to remain. paws. Only the release of a tape transcript talk on and on about the delay getting the and the resignation of a President had oc- Americans out. In many ways the style of reporting the cupied more time on network news in a end of the war was not much different single week: seventy-eight per cent of all Humphrey said if elected instead of than it had been for a decade. Following reporter stories during the week of August Nixon he would have gotten us out of the first segment of news, the commerdals 5 through 9, 1974. Vietnam faster. He added, \"I suppose that on NBC Nightly News were for Reader's Di- people will say that's easy to say now.\" gest and Geritol. For nearly two years it seemed that the When Barbara Walters introduced Senator war in our living rooms was over. In De- Humphrey she said that if it had not been It was not until the next day, April 3D, cember 1974 there were only five film re- for Vietnam, he might \"now be in his that the network evening news programs ports from Vietnam on all three network seventh year as President of the United showed film reports of the evacuation. But evening news programs. In January and States.\" But would Johnson have chosen February 1975, gains by the \"communists\" not to run in 1968 had it not been ...? April 16, 1975: Walter Cronkite explains the Saigon were mentioned and some film reports fighting, as he had for battles in Phnom Penh, Israel, were shown. But for the most part, by Also on April 29, at about 5:20 (all times Oakto, la Orang Valley, and Washington . early 1975 ABC, NBC, and to a lesser ex- are EDT), two networks (but not all af- tent CBS, had reduced their Saigon filiates since it was station time) carried a bureaus and were relying on one corres- press conference by Henry Kissinger. pondent or sometimes stringers. Evening News, April 29th Then suddenly, for five weeks-March Harry Reasoner, ending the ABC Even- 31 through May 2, 1975-nearly two- thirds of the \"reports\" (those by reporters ing News noted the comments of several or correspondents rather than the transi- congressmen and concluded: \"We are at tions, introductions, and shorter stories the apparent end of a period at which the read by anchormen) were about Vietnam. American military messed us up. But a First, pictures of fleeing refugees and re- period at which at any time the American Congress with its final and overwhelming power of the purse could have imposed the national will. Faced with this clear chance and responsibility, the Congress chose year after year to be a clown. Today 32 JULY-AUGUST 1975
each did an \"instant special\" on the complicated. I recently passed the office of fighting. There should have been at least 29th-the night at the end of the tunnel. one of America's important newspapers. one film report by a correspondent from On display were more than a score of \"im- Khe Sanh, instead of just the short excerpt CBS: Vietnam: A War That Is Finished portant\" front pages. All were of disasters, shown, and mention that Igor Oganesoff For three weeks Russell Bensley had wars, and other sensational stories. There was wounded. Russell Bensley, producer was not a slow news day in the lot. of this program, was himself injured in the been preparing a summary of the film re- area, then hit again as he lay in the hospi- ports from Vietnam, 1964-1975. Bensley, There is no way to recreate the impact of tal, but this was not mentioned. formerly as producer of the Evening News those reports . The following are high- had supervised the editing of many of lights. For twelve weeks, January 29 to April 19, these reports when they were originally during the 1968 Tet offensive, CBS broad- broadcast. Correspondents and camera- Walter Cronkite (1965) on a B-57 bomber cast more than twice as many film reports men who had worked in Vietnam offered flight out of Da Nang: \"One, two, three, from Khe Sanh as ABC and NBC com- suggestions for what should be included. four we dropped our bombs and now a bined. Some critics thought that CBS made Beginning with a list of \"a few hundred tremendous G load as we come out of that too much of the battle, and unduly risked stories\" from the film library and the dive. Oh, I know something of what those reporters and camermen flying into the \"video tape insert reel,\" more than thirty astronauts must go through. Wow.\" base. were chosen for the program-a two and Morley Safer (1965) at the village of Cam Charles Collingwood in Hanoi on the one-half hour special, 8:30-noo, hosted by Ne. Cameraman Ha Thuc Can had photo- North Vietnamese and the U.S. bombing: graphed a marine setting the roof of a \" .. .in the late afternoon when they think Cronkite, who appeared stiff and sat espe- hooch on fire with a Zippo lighter. Arthur the danger of bombing has become less cially upright during the entire program. Sylvester of the Pentagon was incensed acute, they tow the pontoons up and put He had been off the Evening News for sev- and complained to CBS. Safer was told to them into place. It takes an hour and a half eral days, including this one, with a walk backward because he was more likely from the time the sections leave the river wrenched back. His doctors tried to stop to get a bullet in the back than the front by bank until the bridge is assembled . They him from doing the special, a doctor and some military: \"It first appeared that the put it together and take it apart like this nurse were on hand, but he could not be marines had been sniped at and that a few every day. \" kept out of the historic moment. houses were made to pay. Shortly after, an officer told me he had orders to go and John Laurence distinguished himself as About thirty minutes were devoted to a level the string of hamlets that surrounded a reporter by letting the GIs talk for them- summary of the evacuation: Bob Schieffer Cam Ne village.\" selves. His \" Air Cav\" report, September live at the White House on the evacuation 11, 1967, done with camerman Keith Kay of the last Marines, Bill Plante live from Morley Safer buying black market should have been included, but the film Hong Kong, a video tape of Bruce Dun- USAID milk in Saigon, photographed by a was lost. ning about evacuees on Guam, and Terry hidden camera (1966). Drinkwater on film with South Viet- Bob Simon at a small-fire fight; ARVN namese at Camp Pendleton. (It should be Mike Wallace with a huge plow used to troops pull a wounded soldier out of a noted here that except for a few interviews clear the land (1967): \" . .. the jungle hole, kill him; then civilians come down recorded at studios in Saigon, no portable around Phu Chang has been knocked the road but it is mined and women and video tape was ever produced for the net- down, it's gone. And so's the Viet Cong, babies are killed (1972). \"By evening gov- works in Vietna m. The first use came at the they had no place to hide. But the dozers ernment spokesmen are saying another end with a number of stories filed by Dun- do more than knock things down, they grand victory has been won in Quang Tri ning, like the above.) help to build too.\" province, the situation has once again stabilized. But there will be more fighting Then came a ninety-minute retrospec- Robert Schakne with a pile of enemy and more words. Words spoken by gener- tive of film reports. It was the first time any dead: \"In combat there are no niceties. A als, journalists, politicians. But here on network had given such a comprehensive, dead enemy soldier is simply an object to Route One, it's difficult to imagine what introspective summary. John O'Conner in be examined for documents, then re- those words can be. There's nothing left to the New York Times said it was \"too close to moved as quickly as possible, sometimes say about this war. There's just nothing left being a commercial for CBS News.\" This is crudely. No one says a prayer here or holds to say.\" unjust. It was a balanced, important re- a funeral service. These had been living, view of films of the fighting. TV news al- breathing men yesterday. Today they are Bruce Dunning on a plane to Danang to ways gave preference to the \"bang, bang\" just a sanitation problem.\" pick up refugees (1975): \" .. .men clamored over the \"other war\" and analysis. That is over one another pushing aside women the nature of news-at once simple and There was nothing from the fighting and children in their panic stricken around Oak To in the fall of 1967-NBC did a better overall job of covering that April 30: ARVN-manned U.S. helicopters crash near April 6: Wounded child on ABC Evening News. April 18: Cronkite. (\" Many of us . ..came half-circle the U.S. carrier Blue Ridge. around.\") FILM COMMENT 33
fury . . .the heavily armed men were and a satellite report from Thailand. There sang \"The Times They Are A Changing.\" menacing. They left their wives, their chil- was a film review of the last offensive, a re- After McGovern won the California pri- dren, their aged parents on the runway view of the history of the war, and a re- mary in June 1972 we had heard Bob Dylan while they forced their own way on board capitulation of recent film stories . There singing the same message on NBC. .. .seven men fell off as the plane reached were technical difficulties several times. heights of a thousand feet or more . ..268 Chancellor said: \"It is a complicated busi- ABC: Vietnam: Lessons Learned, Prices people were on board among them five ness putting on these programs, some- Paid women and two or three children.\" times what you plan for very carefully doesn't work out.\" That is true, of course, The ABC special of the evening replaced Murray Fromson on the crash of a C5A but tonight the mistakes seemed all the Wide World of Entertainment offering ninety flight of South Vietnamese children (1975): more unfortunate by comparison with the minutes of film and discussion . There \"Two hours ago I watched this plane take CBS program. were films of the recent fighting and sev- off from Tan Son Nhut. It was a perfect eral follow-up stories. Anchorman Harry take off, carrying those orphans to the As David Brinkley's commentary Reasoner also noted that Vietnam was United States. What can one say-except ended, the zoom back revealed him stand- watched every night on TV and was called wh~n w ill the misery of this country ever ing among the graves of the Arlington \" a television war. \" But there were only stop?\" Cemetery: \" So when some future politi- several, not very important excerpts of cian for some reason feels the need to drag earlier TV film reports. The most dramatic Mike Wallace concluded a summary of this country into a war, he might come out was by Don North of a Marine dying at the recent weeks. Then in a true-to-life here to Arlington and stand, maybe right Con Thien. (Ironically, North, later with ending that almost any novelist would over there somewhere, to make his an- NBC and now with CTV in Canada, won avoid as contrived, Walter Cronkite adlib- nouncement and tell what he has in mind. awards for the radio version of this.) There bed a transition and read a bulletin: If he can attract public support speaking were interviews with disabled veterans, \"Whatever the cause in South Vietnam, it from a place like this, then his reasons for draft-board members saying they would is now a lost one . A bulletin has just come starting a new war would have to be good not have served if they had known, and a in from Saigon. The war is over .. . Big ones.\" wounded GI from the 1966 ABC documen- Minh has announced an unconditional tary \"To Save A Soldier\"-he now said the surrender to the Viet Cong.\" The NBC program had a much shorter war was a waste. There were comments by \" distin- montage of past film reports . Chancellor, Near the end of the program Reasoner guished\" Americans on the meaning of the as Cronkite had, mentioned the TV cover- discussed a conclusion with Ted Koppel, end, and a short discussion by CBS corre- age of the war saying: \"What made the Steve Bell, and Roger Peterson: \"From the spondents, but it was all anticlimactic. The Vietnam war most strange, unique, is our time I first talked to a couple of American surrender it seemed, came more as the seeing it and hearing it. Every evening for officers in a Saigon bar in 1953, officers conclusion to the film reports on the pro- more than ten years at family time the war who said, if we could only get rid of the gram than from the events of the past few was in our living room. What we saw is French we could end this in six months, days . It was exciting television-dramatic, impossible to forget and necessary to re- until .. .tonight I've run into a lot of visual, immediate-embodying all that is member.\" Americans who were wrong about Viet- good and bad with broadcast journalism. nam but very few who were venal or vi- The program ended with Walter Cronkite These film reports included Dean Bre- cious. We meant well but we did it wrong. saying: \" Many of us, myself included, in lis's (December 13, 1965) on Col. Michael What we ought to get out of a national ex- our:-private, personal opinions of the Yunck who was hit in the leg as he flew perience like that is compassion and wis- rightness of this course, came half circle over a village in a helicopter directing air dom. Bitterness among ourselves would around. And perhaps that is our big lesson support. Seeing women and children, he be the most bitter fruit. We should learn from Vietnam: the necessity for ca ndor. We decided not to call in an air attack . He from experience. But we should remember the American people, the world's admired talked as a surgeon amputated his leg. that Mark Twain said experience is a lim- democracy, cannot ever again allow our- ited teacher. The cat who sits on a hot stove selves to be misinformed, manipulated, There was another dramatic report, also lid, Twain noted, will never sit on a hot and misled into disastrous foreign adven- reported by Brelis, of the fighting near Dak stove lid again. But on the other hand, it tures. The government must share with To. The film, by Vo Suu and Vo Huynh, of will never sit on a cold stove lid either. But the people the making of policy, the big de- the shooting of a Viet Cong suspect by for tOnight it is reasonable just to be over- cisions. In Vietnam we have finally Saigon police chief Loan was repeated. whelmingly sad.\" reached the end of the tunnel and there is Possibly characteristic of the problems of no light there. What is there, perhaps, was TV coverage and film in general, is that the The ABC special ended with film of a best said by President Ford: a war that is dramatic footage of the shooting has not battle on near Xuan Loc on Route One, finished . And ahead, again to quote the won a single award. Yet the still of the \"The Street Without Joy.\" Refugees were President, the time has come to look for- same killing, by Eddie Adams of AP, has shown moving back and forth, caught in ward to an agenda for the future, to unify, won every major press award. crossfire. It was not really important film. It to bind up the nation's wounds, and to re- did not tell much about the war. It did not store its health and its optimistic self- But none of these films, and the several explain. The film served only to fill the confidence .\" 1 other short excerpts included in this mon- screen for Reasoner's closing thought: tage were identified; the reporters were \" Now all this will end. It was all so sad.\" It NBC: 7,382 Days in Vietnam not seen or heard. The films, as dramatic as was an ending too much like the middle The special on NBC 10-11 EDT, a much they were, seemed out of place. Unless and the beginning. you knew of or remembered these specific more traditional \"instant special\" was film \" moments,\" they did not add to that Typical of television journalism, few got composed primarily of the latest to see both the NBC and CBS versions reports-an audio report from the NBC night's knowledge. since they were opposite each other. The reporter remaining in Saigon, live reports At the end of the montage, Chancellor ABC special was not carried in Madison, from the White House and the Pentagon, Wisconsin, but instead viewers saw the concluded: \"There is not [cutl said about 1952 Martin and Lewis movie, JUMPING 'CBS intends to make a condensed version of the Vietnam, and the war, and the sorrow, ex- JACKS, \"zany paratroopers cause chaos in program available for purchase or rental. Write: cept to say, thank God it's over.\" But it was an Army camp.\" Murray Benson, CBS/Publishing Group, 383 Madi- not over. There was an audio report by son Ave ., New York lOOlZ Laurie in Saigon giving Minh' s an- nouncement of surrender. Returning, Chancellor said, \" .. .and that such as it is, is our program for this evening.\" Under the credits, Peter, Paul and Mary 34 JULY-AUGUST 1975
PBS presented a video tape of the earlier Top left: John Chancellor, NBC anchorman, March 19, 1975. Top right : Harry Reasoner, ABC anchorman, March 27, Kissinger press conference and a short dis- with map of fallen provinces. Middle left: Bruce Dunning of CBS reports the storming of a rescue plane by South cussion afterwards. I suppose this was a Vietnamese troops, March 29. Middle right: President Ford with Vietnamese orphan arriving in U.S. , April 6: Bot- good service for those who might not have tom left: David Brinkley at Arlington Cemetery, April 29. Bottom right: \" Vietnam: A WarThat Is Finished,\" Apfl129 . seen it-but missing it was not important. It was hardly a fitting end-nothing more television war as a film war. A forgotten, nam. ror the politicians it was an epic-the than Kissinger's recap of the last few but important flock of correspondents, twin foes were the Chinese and com- hours. It was a long way from earlier cameramen, soundrnen, producers, and munism, the goals were freedom and NETIPBS efforts such as \"Good Bye and editors produced the record. CBS remem- democracy. But television seemed to re- Good Luck\" or \" Last Reflection on A bered and honored some of them. But in veal best the little picture. Armies may War.\"* many ways, the war's narrator was always have battles on maps but young men die Walter Cronkite. There were others, but horrible deaths. Each dies alone. B-52s The ABC effort fell between NBC and none so respected, none so important. bomb cities. A child dies. The war was not CBS-part an \"instant\" account of the covered by television. It was reported by breaking story, part retrospective. NBC of- Undoubtedly, through the film on tele- teams of cameramen and soundmen, and fered little more than twice-told historical vision we \"experienced\" the Vietnam war by individuals writing in dirty notebooks. summaries without real analysis or intro- as we have never experienced war before. spection. Some of it had been presented in Those who watched, especially CBS on The pictures and sounds that remain in a similar summary just a few weeks before. April 29, 1975, experienced some of that our heads are not the symbols on a map of To be sure, NBC told us what was happen- again, others for the first time. It was a Vietnam but the single GI with a zippo ing now-and ordinarily that might be wrenching experience. But many more lighter, the scream for a medic, a naked girl enough. CBS told us where we had been were watching S.W.A .T., Caribe, and a running from napalm, a man shot through and that night of all nights we needed to movie rerun. The real effect of television the head, a GI without arms or legs. It is know. The best part of the NBC program on the war, and the effect of the coverage too trite but true. If we are at the end of the was the montage at the end. But we were on Americans may someday be better tunnel, there is little light. Television has not told when or where-what did it known. To understand more about this, given us the experience. Now it must in- mean? we might begin with the two disjointed terpret, explain, and illuminate. If we are pictures that seemed to represent Viet- lucky there will be no television war. ~~~ In his closing Walter Cronkite confes- sed, a bit too quickly and easily, his own @lawrence w. Lichty 1975 change on the war. One suspects that he felt betrayed by the government officials FILM COMMENT 35 and, especially, military friends that he trusted. He concluded that our lesson was that the government should have more candor-not tell lies. But what of the faults of the press? Ted Koppel said that the press never once was stopped from doing its duty. That is not entirely true. More im- portantly, there was too often duty shirked. This ending, again like the middle and the beginning, was just too easy. On WBBM, Chicago, John Madigan referred to David Brinkley's commentary as \"too tidy an end to the experience.\" On NBC Radio, May 1, Edwin Newman had similar thoughts: \" . .. There is altogether too much being wise after the event. Far too many politicians and far too many jour- nalists and far too many news organiza- tions are commenting on the failure of American policy in Indochina without acknowledging their own contribution to the formation of that policy. Far too many are seeing the situation clearly when they did not see it dearly before.\" What then have we learned at the end? First, it should not be the end but the be- ginning. We have some of the facts but lit- tle real interpretation of what it all means. At the moment, the discredited domino theory looks very good. On May 12,1975, Eric Sevareid said they were not dominoes but a single big domino-a distinction without a difference. Second, it is too early and there has been too much going on to sum up the war so easily. In many ways it was not so much a 'Subsequently (on June 3), PBS broadcast a superior documentary wrapup on the War, \"The End of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. \"
.. dence, taking pictures. She is silent, unob- The Jews, the choric narrator insists, do trusive and in dead earnest. not understand the meaning of tragedy. In The \"people\" of PROMISED LANDS, apart a similar way there is no Christian tragedy: GlTEST from the three mediating \"narrators\"-a life is hell but heaven is next. The Jewish COLlTMN liberal novelist, a Zionist physicist, and a heaven is now and it's called Israel, and it PROl\\11SED bizarre army psychiatrist who is so works and it is a triumph of Jewish LANDS frightening it is tempting to fantasize his realism-a boon won by living through by James McCourt deadpan recitation a performance by a two thousand years of torment, won by A demanding, perplexing film about confusions - between and among cunning Brechtian actor, who rattles on dint of a real belief in the promise of the tragedy, black farce, political melodrama, psychodrama, polemic, politics (manipu- sounding like a mechanic trying to retrieve God of Abraham and Isaac. The state of Is- lation by power-blocs,) and the hideous task of war. An anti-ode to a land traduced auto wrecks and soup them up for resale in rael is triumph, and no tragedy. by Western culture, tainted with ultra- nationalism, PROMISED LANDS is, as its some used-car emporium called The But Israel is not the Promised Land. Is- subheading avows, a look at the human condition in its most exasperating terms, State-are grinning/weeping soldiers, off rael is a client state and is superimposed in the terms of territorial conflict. to war, back from the front, truculent Arab a politically cavalier way on someplace else Israel or Palestine? \"This land is your land; This land is my refugees, subcitizens being examined and called Palestine. The tragedy is what is land; This land was made for you and me .\" So promises the naive, hopeful, \"some shuttled across Gaza from nowhere to happening in the country, which is not Is- day ...\" American song. Like \"next year in Jerusalem,\" it is an eschatological yearning nowhere else, a gaggle of very strange rael and not Palestine, neither and both, expressed in dream terms. Political reality turns every such dream into a killing echt-British puppet-people commemorat- referred to in global terms as The Area- nightmare. \"This land is my land; this land is my land; this land was made for me and ing the days of the Empire's protectorate of these many square miles of territory. The mine .\" is the silent song all children first learn, and learn to play out in the sandbox, Palestine, appropriately in a cemetery, and novelist is sardonic, and he makes a quiet before they have the ability to construct a rhetorical sentence to justify their victories, waxwork-puppet figures of some of the statement, he offers a challenge, to the Is- deny their humiliating defeats. The eye of this chilling, beautiful film is like the eye of heroes and villains of the Israeli accession raelis (from whom he occasionally is made a very wise grownup looking on in an- guish at such a sandbox full of the children and domination: Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, to seem separate), and to his Arab friends, of close relatives acting out fantasies of dominion. The grownup has no familiar Eichmann, Dayan. There are the \"elder\" whose \"cleverness\" he clearly admires, political power, but she feels a desperate attempt to define-or at least attempt to Jews at the Wailing Wall-the orphans of and whose ways he evidently knows (in a define, even provisionally-a program for sharing, for the beginnings of civilized the earth who have come from its ends and way that the film does not.) He is provoca- community. She begins to gather evi- out of its hells to call on God in his aSSigned tive and seems to be keeping something role as perhaps all-knowing, but certainly from the audience-tilting the ambiva- not all-telling father, and there are the new lence, by shrugging in a rather theatrical Jews who have built Tel Aviv into a gleam- way, saying the situation is probably hope- ing neo-Nineveh, turning centuries of es- less, and reminding the audient viewer chatological vision into the very here- that one way to get results is to say that and-now consumer lookout, a point of nothing can be done, and wait for the re- view the antithesis of yearning. And there sultant surge of purpose. This is the mes- are the dead, the one common race with sage, the argument of PROMISED LANDS. It the one common ground, some lying de- is a lamentation, full of the iconography of cently under it, many fly-blown, stretched three religions and the world's strongest out in the desert like Antigone's brother fourth, materialism, whose minaret/cupola Polynices. is a TV antenna. It is a tentative, suspici- Talking of the Greeks and their inven- ous, beseeching film, made by a woman tion of tragedy, the liberal novelist, a choric and made possible by another woman. It figure, proposes that what is happening in howls for peace. the country is Tragedy, which the Jews do The alternates to peace are \"narrated\" not understand. Like a choric figure he nar- by the physicist, whose belief in the pres- rates , in conversation with the listening ear ence of evil lurking is as palpable as the sci- behind the eye of the film . As he narrates, entist's pathetic fidelity to substance, and the ear picks up not his words alone, but by that disturbing psychiatrist who tells us the frantic distortions of syllable and it is the job of the medics and of Israeli soci- sound broadcast on transistors and tele- ety to patch up the wounded and fight the vised by weather forecasters, rock war and win it and send the soldiers who (homogenized) singers, propagandists, survive, scarred and mutilated, sick at and newspeakers bleating bulletins. The heart, manipulated, bruised, back home in viewer experiences anxiety, an unbodied good enough condition (human?) to beget dread . The film is setting about its most the next generation. One hears the reluc- unsettling work .... tant cries of the unborn as loud as the rock music on the radios. The whole final scene, which is in proper coda fashion a quick and terrifying recapitulation of the argument, shows a soldier-read Israel-in shock, being rehabilitated. Not healed. The eye and the ear and the voice of PROMISED LANDS (a voice which talks in pictures, prompting ...) is the voice of reason, de- ~ manding healing commence. u:: The film marshals information; it selects; ~~ it is a graphic record of the facts of life and !2 death in a war zone (comrades weeping z!!: over fresh graves while tourists and pil- grims saunter or process down the Via 8 Dolorosa), but it presumes no conclusion. ~ Provocation, and not proving, is its airn . ~·
INDE- methodology into film analysis . Metz, ment of faddism-particularl y in inex- PEND- Eco , Barthes, Koch, Rohdie, Burch, perienced or untalented hands-is un- ENTS Michelson, Bettetini, Wollen-who, a few years ago, would have known deniable. More important, however, are THE STRUCI1JRALIST them? And how many are today ac- the theoretical results achieved by the INCURSION quainted with Mouton, the Dutch pub- best minds, and the fact that the move - lishing house, with its catalog of books, ment is a clear extension into cinema of (1): The Setting journals, and monography in semiotics an international phenomenon of fir s t and linguistics? magnitude: the rise of structuralism as a by Amos Vogel new methodology in an ever increasing The new vocabulary-as always, tool number of disciplines. Since this is a column on indepen- dent cinema, it appears necessary to of analysis as well as protective shield This brief introduction to a large new discuss the emergence of an \"indepen- of radical new approaches-creates par- development quite intentionally stays dent\" new approach to film analysis ticular difficulties for minds steeped in away from the substance of the struc- which, a trickle at first, has now so familiar, more comfortable terminology. turalist argument itself, instead position- seriously invaded the field internation- Mise-en-scene, camera movement, ing the movement within contemporary ally that it has become impossible to close-ups, jump cuts (even tonal mon- cinema to draw the attention of prac- read or do research without being ac- tage or references to the cubist influ- titioners and theorists of independent quainted with its aims, analytic proce- ence in cinema) are easier to take than film. Subsequent pieces will enter into dures, and vocabulary. I refer to formal the sudden incursion of terms such as its ideology and offer bibliographies. or structuralist analysis of film. diegesis and heurism, the signifier and Lurking in the backgrounci is a confron- the significate, syntagmic relations and tation also with the entire question of Depending on your age, length, and diachrony, reifica tion, synesthesia, structural, minimal, an ti-illusionist, type of previous formation in film , isomorphism, the eidetic-or even the anti-narrative, conceptual, formal academic or professional stake, or na- elevation of the \"invisible film space\" cinema . As this movement is a signific- ture of your concern with the medium, existing beyond the frame and behind ant part of the avant-garde, the circle you will be either appalled, enthu- the camera into an integral component will be closed and we shall have truly siastic, indifferent, or non-knowing. This of the film itself and hence of its returned to the exploration of indepen- article-while accepting the possibility dent cinema, the purpose of this col- of the first three reactions-con tends analysis . that the fourth has become unaccepta- Such vocabulary indeed often umn .\"\";. ble for any serious film person: the body of significant writing in this new hides-in its hermetic elitism-the CONTINUED FROM PAGE 31 language can now be disregarded only inner emptiness or fatuousness of many at the price of being a provincial. of these analyses, their talmudic split- with actors when it comes to making ting of hairs either invisible or irrelev- money. All of us are acquainted with the ant, their torturous and \"scientific\" usual sociological, psychological, histori- exegeses that-after fifty pages-reveal, According to Variety, Gerard Oury is first cal, and literary approaches to film with considerable difficulty, tiny, hard in line with $200,000 per film. In addition, criticism-not to speak of content pellets of constipated excrement; their he got thirty-four per cent of the net profits analysis, auteurism, philosophies of existence is indubitable but the exertion of T1IE MAD ADVENTURES OF \" RABBI\" JACOB montage, or other systems that em- simply was not worth the outcome, and once it recouped its four million-dollar phasize as primary, analytic elements, budget. the star system, the narrative, the a feeling of having been cheated is in- camerawork or decor. We also know of evitable. Claude Lelouch and Jean Yanne, each of film \"appreciation,\" that many-tongued whom acts as his own producer, receive monster specializing in adjectives and Yet there can, in 1975, be no further $360,000 apiece in their dual capacities . impressionism, its revelations further doubt that their new tendency has also Claude Sautet comes after them with adumbrated by puns, knife-throwing, brought with it some of the more per- $252,000, and he's followed by Henri Ver- stylistic finesse, gossip, esoteric dates or ceptive, more stimulating new insights neui!, who's worth $230,000. Claude Zidi names of supporting players in B-filrns. into film-film as such and film as seen has gone in no time to $200,000, exactly in individual examples. In their best double that earned by Michel Audiard or Unbeknownst to many of the adhe- creations, these writers appear to offer Andre Cayatte ($100,000), who in tum is rents of the above tendencies, film possibilities of analysis and cognition followed by Claude Chabrol ($90,000) . magazines and film circles here and previously unavailable or never as con- ChabroI's co-staffer from the days when (primarily) abroad are beginning to stir cisely generalized . It is significant that they were both critics, Fran<;ois Truffaut, uneasily (as if torn from heavy sleep) their strength is concentrated particu- gets the same amount, but Truffaut is his with the philosophical-aesthetic rumina- larly among the younger generation; own producer and so also receives a per- tions of the new breed of structuralists, that they primarily consist-in their top centage of the gross. Yves Boisset, Pierre drawing on the inSights of pioneers echelons-of people of relatively wider Richard (as a director this time, not as an such as de Saussure, Levi-Strauss, than just cinematic culture; that their actor) and Philippe Labro are estimated at Jakobson, and the Russian Formalists. roots are often in other diSciplines (lin- $60,000 for their toil in confecting a movie, They are introducing new names and, guistics, art history, psychology, an- and Pierre Granier-Deferre, at $25,000, more important, a new vocabulary and thropology) and that, at least abroad, completes the list of the best-paid they are associated with neo-Marxism . filmmakers. They have begun to contribute to or even take over film magazines , film All of these amounts, Varieh) cautions, schools, film organizations; they have are approximate, and never official; they started their own centers. They have shouldn 't be taken literally. They are become inescapable. nonetheless revealing when it comes to the high salaries earned by stars (actors and di- Many adherents of previous rectors), and give some idea of the fashion methodologies (or what have been pas- in which some people in this industry put sing for such) would prefer to see the together colossal fortunes. new crowd go away and pronounce them a passing fancy for reasons of Translated by Stuart Byron from CineRevue Vol. 54, conviction or self-protection . The ele- No . 49 (D ecember 5, 1974). Copyright 1974 by CineRevue. Reprinted with permission . FILM COMMENT 37
CONVERSATIONS WITH RESNAIS THERE ISN'T ENOUGH TIME an interview by James Monaco Alain Resnais hadn' t made a film for more wasn't any real improvisation. The time is A.R.: No, I did not have the feeling that than five years when, he finally got behind a too precious. there was a curse, but I was very worried camera again and started shooting STAVISKY. ... because it's impossible to survive just ask- He had been busy all that time with a series of J.M.: You once said, I think, that you ing friends to lend you money. It's very projects, none of which had proved attractive to couldn't make a film about the present be- depressing. I didn't have the feeling that it financial backers. While he had a reputation as cause by the time the film was released it was a curse because all the projects that one of the most interesting directors of the Six- would be out of date . ... weren't realized were very expensive. If I ties, his last film , JE T'AIME, JE T'AIME, had not could have found a script that could have made any mone y. HIROSHIMA, MO N AMOUR, A.R.: Yes, that's a big problem. When been made for less than half a million dol- LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, and MURrEL had estab- you decide that there is enough material to lars and nobody cared to produce it, then I lished Resnais's credentials as an intellectual, make a film of a certain subject sometimes would have felt there was a curse. \"difficult\" director, but only LA GUERRE EST FINIE, two years elapse between, and that's a lot. made in 1965, had been really popular with gen- Even if it's not a film based in the present. I J.M.: For the record, what were those eral audiences. At a time of tightened budgets in had a project on the life of the Marquis de projects? the film world, he did not seem like a \"safe bet\" Sade three or four years ago and now, to the moneymen . even if a producer would give me the A.R.: There was a project with Richard money to shoot that film it would have to Seaver, the translator of Beckett and STAVISKY ..., it turns out, is a lot more com- be completely rewritten because what we editor, who wrote for me a life of the Mar- plicated and resonant than it at first appears; it could say about the Marquis de Sade four quis de Sade which was called \"Delivrez does have some of the density and irony that years ago is now. , . demode, in a way. Nous de Bien,\" and Dirk Bogarde said all first endeared Resnais with critics ten or fifteen right but his name was not powerful years ago; but it also has the kind of mythic qual- J.M.: Do you feel that pressure a lot enough to raise two million dollars . I spent ities which up till now had been generally lack- when you are filming? one year on that. After that there was Stan ing in Resnais's movies and which are going to Lee's project and that took another year, make it an unusually popular film (for him) . The A.R.: Yes . As STAVISKY ... was a period with the same result-till now. I had a pro- best of both worlds, finally: a profitable movie film I was less anxious, but I was wrong. I ject of a documentary on the life of H. P. and an interesting one. discovered just one month before STAVISKY . .. was completed that there were many Lovecraft; and William Friedkin and Resnais, as one might expect from his films, is films where the action was taking place in Warner Brothers seemed to be the backers, a kindly, thoughtful man who thinks hard be- the Thirties. And when I read in Le Monde but after all, nothing happened and Wil- fore he answers questions about his work. He four pages which were very violent and liam Friedkin had to begin the shooting of wants, above all, to make sense, to be under- aggressive about films which were not THE EXORCIST. I had another project with stood . Having lived in New York for a year and a made of the present time, I was afraid that Penelope Mortimer called \"Zero\" (?), but half several years ago, he speaks English well, the reception would not be too good. If the producer gave-how you call a check but with a certain French reticence, often-how STAVISKY .. . had been completed three when it bounce?-a bad check! yo u say?-suggesting a word modestly, rather months earlier, I think that would have than imposing it. Needless to say, it is always the been better because I would have been on J.M.: Yuu talk often of the real business precise word needed . We talked in English. the crest of the wave instead of the trough. of filmmaking being in the editing process. MONACO: You work very closely with J.M.: I know a couple of projects that A.R.: It's true that I am very proud you've been working on for the last five or when I can say I did not throwaway much your screenwriters and I'm wondering if six years, but were you beginning to get material. I think for STAVISKY... maybe worried that you'd never get back, that thirty seconds were thrown away. But the you ever make any changes during shoot- there was a curse? editing must be in the shooting script. ing, or do you follow the script very close- J.M.: You must save a lot of money in film stock! ly? A.R. Yes . No. Well, I don't save a lot of RESNAIS: Making big changes is very money because I like to work without much speed. I have exactly the Francqis awkward when you are shooting because Truffaut speed. Where other directors could make a film in five weeks, I need ten it costs money . If a film did not cost too or twelve. But I don't throwaway much. I think it's important for me to have the feel- much money, I would love to improvise, ing that I haven't shot too much. and if I had the freedom, to shoot for six J.M. You've mentioned several times months and try different things. But as to the \"process\"-that you want everyone who makes the film to feel he has a part in make a film is to keep within a budget I feel it, that there was a kind of biological rela- tionship between you and Jorge Semprun it's more important to be in complete and the character-I don't know whether agreement with the producer, with the we could call it dialectics . . .. screen writer, with all the actors . That's A.R.: We could call it dialectics! J.M.: Well, this is what fascinates me why beginning shooting Ialways show the about your films, Do you feel yourself in complete script to every actor, even if it's a this dialectical relationship with your film S?. small part, and I always talk with him about the complete product, and if there' s something he says that is interesting I will ask the screenwriter to rework the script, to give the product the feeling that it has been made and criticized by everyone. J.M.: Did much of that happen with STAVISKY ... ? A.R.: Oh, yes. Of course Semprun did not have the time to fully complete every scene before we started shooting, but there 38 JULY-AUGUST 1975
A.R.: In a way, yes. and memory-and write about your J.M.: Yes, well that's the kind of nar- J.M.: I think the structure of your fihns, films that way, almost ignoring the rative irony that's in STAVISKY.. . because they deal with time, so often makes people think this way-of contrasts character. A.R.: Yes, that's because for me IE and balance, and so forth. A.R.: Yes. The flashforward in LA T' AIME , IE T' AIME is a very ironical A.R.: I work like that, but it's very dif- film-with a lot of sadness, that's true, ficult to talk about it because it's not com- GUERRE EST FINIE, for example, was for but I would have preferred to hear pletely conscious and I am sure that I don't me the simplest way to give the feeling people laugh more. want it to become too conscious for me be- of premonition that that life implied . I cause when I try to write the shooting did not go to Semprun telling him, \"I J.M.: I want to ask you a particular script I try to just let the images come to my want you to write something with question about MURIEL, too, which still mind and not to have any second flashforwards .\" But when Diego's fascinates me now ten years after it was thoughts. character began to emerge I said I think made . The color is astonishing. That we should use the flashforward for was a period of time when people were J.M.: Do you think about this film in Diego because he seems to be the kind just beginning to do interesting things relation to your other films? Do you of guy who has that kind of image in with color. The technology was de- bother to think that way? his mind , Maybe we should have used veloping. How did you get that liques- it more! We were a little too shy, I cent, transparent color? A.R.: I never think about that. I think. But for Stavisky it's different be- think I have decided not to think about cause Stavisky is always thinking about A.R.: In the simplest way. We de- that too much because that would be the money he has . He's anxious about cided with Sacha Vierny that we would dangerous . That would be contemplat- death in general, but he' s not anxious stick with realistic light and that we ing oneself as a kind of monument! about what will happen to him. would shoot the film exactly where the Stavisky could never imagine that he action would have taken place in J.M.: I ask because STAVISKY . .. is would be put in jail a second time . Boulogne-sur-mer and we would not not as consciously intellectually complex try to change the slightest thing for the as, say, LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD or IE T' AIME, JE T'AIME. l .-L A.R.: Yes, but LA GUERRE EST FINIE Left : Emmanuelle Ri va and Eiji Okada in HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR. Right : Claude Rich in JE T'AIME , JE T'AIME. was not complex. My idea is that the complexity of the structure of the film J.M.: In the other films I think it's color. If it was raining, there would be comes-must come-from the characters more the way the people in the films rain . If there was sun there would be of the story. If, in MURIEL, the charac- saw their lives , while in STA VIS KY ... sun. We wouldn't pay any attention to ters are very complex, everybody is it's more the way we saw him. that. That's very simple. thinking a lot, and so it leads to a very complicated structure. But in LA GUERRE A.R. : Yes . I think in STAVISKY ... we J.M .: No special treatment for the EST FINIE, Diego is a kind of-not too are looking at people and in LA GUERRE film stock? simple-but not very subtle character. EST FINIE we were \"walking\" with He has two or three motivations, but Diego and all the film was seen by A.R. : Absolutely not. No filters, noth- he is not a mysterious character at all. Diego himself. Except the last five mi- ing. Just complete simplicity. But it was Yves Montand as Diego is clear, so it nutes. But I have not made a fade-out, in a way too because we had the feel- would have been silly to impose a kind fade-in and I made a mistake with LA ing that in real life there are a lot of of complicated structure with LA GUERRE GUERRE EST FINIE, I should have made colors that we don't perceive and that EST FINIE. In a way, maybe the same one at the end, just to show that we in MURIEL because of the editing (there thing with STAVISKY. .. , I don't know. were leaving Diego and we were chang- are a lot of shots, nearly a thousand) ing our point of view. we would get some kind of effect. I J.M.: How do you react to all the wasn' t sure what, but I had the feeling complicated theories that people work J.M.: Do you have any second that the color would become sometimes up about your films? thoughts about JE T' AIME, IE T'AIME? very aggressive, and so. A.R.: I don't know. I don't think A.R.: Well, it was not at all a com- J.M.: If you had to pick another film they are so complicated, do you? My mercial success, but I have the feeling for color at that time it would be RED reaction would be that I am \"flabber- that it is better than we thought! DESERT and there was Antonioni going gasted\" to see that everything you do around painting the leaves and then during the shooting is always perceived J.M.: Well, I like it very much. The painting the film! by somebody! Now I know that every de- only thing that I don' t like was that tail will be understood by somebody, you thought it necessary to have the A.R.:Yes, it was exactly the opposite. and I am very surprised, that's why I science-fiction framework. And the same thing with the sets, too, am \"fastidious\" or meticulous when I because when I was in Boulogne-sur- am shooting. I have understood that A.R.: Maybe it was because I like mer I visited an apartment and I de- even the title of a book in a library be- pulp literature and so I thought it was cided that it would be that apartment hind Yves Montand or \"Claude Ridder\" fun to have the film beginning as a \"B\" that Helene Aughain would live in; it [in IE T' AIME, IE T' AIME] will be \" de- was in the real building you see when ciphered.\" (That's Stan Lee's vocabul- movie or a \"z\" movie! Like a kind of we were shooting in the street. And so ary.) And so I have to have the right book that he could have read and bad serial, but maybe that was a little many little details like that, and it's the too perverted. same thing with camera movements, the lighting. Really, I can't complain be- cause a lot of people have understood what I have tried to convey. But it's a big surprise. J.M.: SO you're saying that for you it always comes from the character while a lot of people prefer to regard you as a theorist-complicated ideas about time FILM COMMENT 39
Left: Delphine Seyrig, Nita Klein , and Jean·Pierre Kerien in MURIEL. Right: Girogio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig in LAST YEAR AT MARIEN BAD. our set designer rebuilt exactly that to say would be more effective in a anything. empty apartment in the studio and he book or a newspaper, -you have to J.M.: Godard once identified you and painted the walls as white as they were admit it. in reality. For color, it's very difficult to Demy and Varda and Marker as the shoot white, but Sacha Vierny, who J.M.: Truffaut said in 1961 or 1962 at \"left-bank\" new wave, because you also photographed STAVISKY ... said, \" I the time a lot of you were being were more literary. enjoy the challenge. I want it to be criticized for not being political enpugh white and see what happens.\" But no- that he, for instance, could never make A.R.:I admire Godard a lot, but I thing with the laboratory, to get back to a film about Hitler because he would think I have only met him twice in my become fascinated by the fact that he life. But it's true I'm a friend of Jacques your question. seldom slept or that he had trouble Demy, of Chris Marker, and of Agnes J.M.: Let's shift to politics. You have with his stomach-the character would Varda. We see each other. Sometimes take over. Did you feel close to the we talk about our films, but I think we a reputation for being political; that is, people who worked for Cahiers du talk more about food or books or paint- you' ve made films that always seem to Cinema and then went on to make ing. I think in a way we are a little bit films? afraid to speak about film when we are have some political content. together. A.R.:Well, at the same time a lot of A.R.:Well, I did not know them, but J.M.: Critics seldom talk about the people have been \"shocked\" that there I felt close to what they were writing . people who influenced you . Was there was never a clear political message in Especially the way they were thinking anyone in particular? my films. I think maybe you can try to that American directors were not barba- have that in a documentary, but if you rians. Because that was a very strong A.R.:Oh, a lot of them. I discovered deal with fiction it's very difficult, be- idea in France, that if there was some- Jean Epstein's book just before the war cause if you have some respect for thing beautiful in an American film, it and I am sure that I was very stimu- character the character very often takes was just by sheer luck. And thanks to lated by his writings. And Griffith, of over. In HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR, for Cahiers du Cin ema we learned that course, and Pudovkin and Eisenstein example, there were three or four lines American directors were just human be- and their theories about editing. And that were more clear politically, and ings and that maybe Vincente Minnelli Karel Reisz's book, The Technique of Film which Marguerite Duras (the author) knew more about art than any French Editing-I am sure that Karel Reisz was and myself enjoyed . But when they director who was so proud of his cul- my real teacher. I took a lot of things were spoken by the actor it did not fit ture! I knew Fran,>ois Truffaut, I had from his book. I am not ashamed to with the character; it became silly be- met him, but I don't remember us dis- say that. cause we had the feeling that it was cussing film very seriously. like a commentary and it did not work. J.M.: Now, on the other hand, there We discovered that a character becomes J.M.: Didn't you work on one of his have been quite a few people influ- a real character when he begins to do enced by you. You almost have a things we don' t approve. So that's a short films? \"schoo!,\" so many of your screenwriters big problem. Especially in MURIEL it's A.R.:Oh , there is a kind of legend have later become filmmakers, directors. true that I don' t approve of the charac- ters but Jean Cayrol, the screenwriter, about that! The first time Fran,>ois Truf- A.R.:Well, I think that's because I and I could not make them act faut made a film-it was about ten was not choosing those screenwriters differently-and I think we have to ac- minutes-he showed it to me and because they were writers but because cept that. I have nothing against very maybe for one afternoon I just said well they had a hidden desire to make films! politically oriented pictures but I think it maybe we could make the cut here in- So I enjoyed seeing them make films has to come from the script. But at the stead of there-I spent a very good af- after, because that was the proof for me same time, when you are not shooting ternoon! And after that Truffaut said, tha t I was right. a documentary, I am slightly skeptical. I \"Resnais has given me fantastic advice!\" think, you have TV, you have news- J.M.:Would you have made more papers, you have books, and sometimes J.M.: He even put your name in the films if you could? I suppose that's a when you feel that the thing you have credits. stupid question. Did you ever write any criticism A.R.:Yes, I am very disappointed by the fact that I have made only six films yourself? A.R.:No, never. I've never written 40 JULY-AUGUST 1975
in fifteen years . I don't know what it is, FACTS INTO FICTION whether it's the traffic, or because I spend too much time trying to answer an interview by Richard Seaver mail, or because it's that if you live in a big city, nobody has enough time. Wherever Alain Resnais' STAVISKY . .. especially when I see two parts of the brain That's the big problem with screenwrit- has opened outside the director's native that seem to be out of synch, as in the case ers, if you need them. They are not av- France, it has been received with generally of Serge Alexandre. But the period, the ailable seven days a week. It's neces- rave reviews and excellent public reaction. historical situation in which Stavisky lived sary for them to do another thing and In France itself, although the film had also fascinated us: there were clearly screenwriting can only be secondary. So perhaps the best box office of any Resnais strong parallels between his time and our they work only on Saturday and Sun- film, it was received with mixed reviews. own. It was a time of political instability, a day, something like that. We asked the director of HIROSHIMA, MON time when societies were living beyond AMOUR and LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD if he their means. We were also interested in J.M.:Did you ever try to write a knew any reason for this disparity. exploring the mechanisms of that society, how it \"uses\" at the same time as it is being script yourself? Resnais: I think the answer is really very \"used.\" Stavisky took good advantage of A.R.:No, I never did . Of course, it simple. In France the name \"Stavisky\" still his opportunities, but the world in which evoked memories for many people. Even he operated flattered and encouraged him, would be more practical, but to write a though the scandal went back forty years, until such time as it judged he had ex- film myself I would need maybe three there are a great number of people who ceeded the limits, at which point it coldly or four years. I don't enjoy very much still react emotionally to the name, who suppressed him . to direct something I have written . I perhaps were hurt financially by the affair, don't know why, but it's no fun for who were involved politically on one side R.S.: You're implying he was murdered me. It bores me a little. Or maybe it's or the other. For them, any film on by the police sent to capture him in because I am hiding from responsibility. Stavisky would have to deal with the Chamonix? Who knows? realities of the affair, present the facts as they occurred . A.R.: Whether Stavisky was shot by the J.M.: What are you working on right police or killed himself remains unsolved Seaver: Didn't you present the facts? to this day. What we do know is that when now? A.R. Any film is a fiction, at least for me. the police went up to the Vieux Logis they A.R.:It's a very ambitious project and Unless of course one sets out to make a made no effort to conceal their presence . documentary, such as Jean-Michel Char- It's a small, three-bedroom chalet, with a I'm afraid that it's a little too ambitious . rier made on the same subject for French cellar beneath . It deals with the way the brain works. TV. That was an excellent documentary, So a third of the picture would be a but its concept and goal were totally differ- R.S.: Is that the real Vieux Logis we see in lecture by a French biologist called ent from ours. But going on the premise the film? Henri Labori; his books have very in- that the length of a film is from an hour and teresting ideas about how our mind a half to two hours, it is absolutely absurd A.R.: Absolutely, with its little red cur- works-and does not work, especially . to think that in that space of time one can tains that you see and say to yourself, \"you And this would be interwoven with the properly present the historical reality of can't use those, they're too red to be true .\" other two thirds of the film which such a complex event. This said, the facts But the fact is, when reality has the air ot a would be fiction . in our STAVISKY ... are all historically exact, stage set, it doesn't bother me to use it, as so far as I know. But they were the bases in this case . . .. But about the question of J.M.: What do you do when you for our \"fiction,\" points of departure rather murder, the police took a good hour to aren't making films? Do you miss it? than ends in themselves. search this rather small house, during R.S.: If your film was so clearly fiction, which time Stavisky was locked in one of A.R.:It's very difficult to answer, be- why did Stavisky's son try to get an injunc- the bedrooms. They knew full well he was cause I have the feeling that if there tion against it? suicidally inclined. So whether Sacha put was no problem of money I could very A.R.: On the grounds that it was de- the bullet in his head, or the police did, easily spend my life without making famatory, that it slandered his mother's seems rather academic: either way, it's any films. But maybe I am wrong; name. murder. What was more, after he was maybe I would miss it. I hate the prep- R.S.: Arlette Stavisky is still alive? shot, they waited two full hours before tak- aration work. I hate the writing period. A.R.: I believe so. In fact, I seem to re- ing him to the hospital. There are those But I enjoy very much the shooting. member that she's living in America. who maintain that if he had been taken Even the editing period. But every day R.S.: I take it the injunction was not immediately, he might have been saved. is too short for me. I never manage to granted. do what I want in one day, so some- A.R.: No . In fact, the tribunal stated that times I have the feeling that moviemak- far from defaming the Stavisky name, the ing is taking too much of my time . I film constituted \"a veritable rehabilitation\" only think that if I want to read or lis- of that admittedly dubious character. ten to alll the music I do before I die , R.S .: Was that your intent, to rehabili- my time is full! Eh? If you consider that tate Stavisky? Josef Haydn has written one hundred A.R.: Not really. Neither Semprun symphonies and about thirty quartets [Jorge] nor I set out to whitewash Stavisky, and about fifty concertos for differen t any more than we wanted to blacken his instruments, and I have just discovered name. What did interest us was the man's one month ago Josef Haydn, you see personality: on one hand, an enormous that just listening to two symphonies a generosity, a theatricality, a strong life im- day my year will be full till December! I pulse; and on the other, an almost inexora- had a friend who once looked at his ble thrust toward death. I'm always in- library and discovered that even if he terested in what goes on inside our brain, stopped completely filmmaking-he was a filmmaker too-and just decided to \"1975 The Viking Press (A Richard Seaver Book) read the books he had in his library, it would take him until he was one hundred years old. He was a little bit panicked. But he was courageous. He went out of his house. He went to the bookstore. And he bought ten books! :{~ FILM COMMENT 41
R.S.: The point being that under no cir- bring is a kind of abstract form , a struc- mondo is undoubtedly the most sought- cumstances was he to be saved, simply be- ture . after actor in France. He must receive two cause he knew too much. or three scripts a day. So he is naturally R.S.: How long was it from the time you wary. \"Does Resnais want me because he A.R.: That's the clear implication, and saw the first draft until you had a finished thinks I'm the best person for the role, or the basis for much of the resulting scandal. script? because of what my name will mean to the Cover-up: it's not a new story. film?\" But the fact is, he was the actor I A.R. (laughing): About a year. Georges wanted. R.S.: I seem to remember your once hav- had figured he could write it in about three ing declared that you were incapable of months, but I know that was unrealistic, R.S .: What about the fact of using a making an \"his torical\" film , one that re- for several reasons. For one thing he badly \"name\" actor? quires reconstituting the past in any way. underestimated the editing time he would And yet with STAVISKY ... you have, for it is need on his own film , LES DEUX MEMOIREs . A.R.: That doesn' t bother me . In fact, nonetheless a film of the Thirties . He expected to be finished in a couple of since we were dealing with a public weeks. And for months I would receive figure-Stavisky-the notion of superim- A.R.: The problem for me in making a phone calls from Georges, from the editing posing another public figure- film that isn' t contemporary is that it seems room, saying, ''I' m still here, but we Belmondo-rather intrigued me. But once to call for a suspension of belief: the crea- should be finished next Sunday. Let's having settled on that concept, I wanted to tion of an illusion you know is false. But meet on Monday. \" Then Monday, another buttress his presence with other \"name\" Semprun and I were in agreement right call, ''I'm still here, Alain, but it should be actors. I feel it's better to have all un- from the start that STAVISKY ... would be an only a few more days. \" Also, I mentioned knowns or the contrary, that is if you have anti-illusionist film. that however much the film is fiction it is Belmondo, then it makes sense to have grounded in strict reality. There are about Charles Boyer, Fran<;ois Perier, for exam- R.S.: By which you mean? ten books on the Stavisky affair, all of ple . It's in a way less shocking, more A.R.: Simply that we didn 't for one which we read and assimilated. The best of natural. moment set out to try and make people be- them from our point of view was Joseph lieve that, since we were using actors, they Kessel's Stavisky, l'homme que j'ai connu, R.S.: How did you get Boyer? were anything but actors. I was, I won't say published in 1934, at the height of the A.R. I've always wanted to do a film inspired by, but certainly had in the back of scandal. Kessel had known 'Stavisky, and with Boyer, whom I greatly admire. In fact, my mind, the way in which Sacha Guitry unlike most of his contemporaries who, as Semprun said, \"All Resnais wants to do is played Louis XV-or Louis XIV or XVI. He soon as the bubble burst acted as though make a film starring Belmondo and Boyer, always made the spectator aware that it they had never laid eyes on the man, had with music by Stephen Sondheim. He was he-Sacha Guitry-playing the king. the courage to come out and paint a- fair couldn't care less what the subject is, so R.S.: Could you tell us a little about the portrait. \"I knew him, I wined and dined long as he has those three elements in it. \" genesis of the project? Whose idea was it to with him,\" Kessel proclaimed, adding, He's exaggerating of course, but there's a make a film on Stavisky? Was it yours? \"and for those whose memories are short, I kernel of truth there .... In any case, Boyer A.R.: No. I was in the States at the time . would like to remind the world that Sacha is semi-retired, living in Switzerland. But Semprun and his producer had talked Stavisky was an uncommonly charming when I contacted him he agreed to come to about the idea but in a vague way. When I man .\" I might add, parenthetically, that Paris to discuss the project. I spent three came back to Paris Semprun and I had after the script was finished we showed it hours trying to convince him. dinner one night, during which we to Kessel, to see whether he felt we had brought each other up to date. Semprun, been unfair in any way to the subject, and R.S. How about Fran<;ois Perier? He cer- of course, had already written one film I his response was: \"That's it, that's the way tainly ranks as one of France's leading ac- made, LA GUERRE EST FINIE, and had said he was. You've really captured the essence tors. How did you persuade him to play that he wanted to be the first writer to col- of the man .\" And while most of the press Borelli? laborate a second time with me. He men- and some professional colleagues raised tioned Stavisky as a possible future project their eyebrows over our choice of Bel- A.R. Perier is a great actor, and I was that he might do after he had finished the mondo to play the lead, when Kessel very lucky to have him in that role. With two films he was working on-one his heard it he said: \"An exce llent choice.\" him it wasn't a question of persuading; he own documentary on Spain, and the other wanted the part. It's all the more remarka- entitled L' ATTENTAT , another rather R.S. What about the commission's rec- ble because when you read the script documentary film on the kidnapping of ords? Did yo u use them for source mate- Borelli seems to be a non-role . But he read Ben Barka. But I don't think he had me in rial? and liked the script, and that was enough. mind as a director at that point. Since, I've found, at least in Europe, that when however, no director had been decided on, A.R.: Oh yes. Semprun steeped himself actors really like a film , or a part, they'll do I told him the subject intrigued me, so long in them, and conSidering the thousands of almost anything to play in it. as it was clear we would treat it as fiction. pages involved, it is understandable why it When a few days later Semprun' s agent, took longer to write the script than we had R.S. And Anny Duperey? Gerard Leibovici, called me to ask if I was envisaged. A.R. I remembered her in Godard's serious about directing the Stavisky, I told TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER, him I was, but reiterated my concerns R.S.: You mentioned Belmondo. How where I thought she was very good. Then I about any historical film . If Georges [Jorge] did you decide on him? went to see her in a play, Moliere' s The could give me a short first draft, I said, I Misanthrope. Her Celimene impressed me could get a much better idea whether or A.R.: The same way I try to decide on all greatly, especially the way she could mag- not it was feasible. As soon as he did, I my actors. I have a mental file of the pos- netize the public. It was a matinee, and the knew it was something I could do . sibilities for each part. Then when I have a theater was filled with school kids who finished script I read each scene trying to were not exactly models of decorum . But R.S.: I note that the French edition of the visualize who among them best works for whenever they would begin to get out of script published by Gallimard bears the it. Then I add up the totals. In the case of hand she would tum a withering gaze out title Alain Resnais's Stavisky. Does that Stavisky, the Belmondo total was over- at them, and within seconds the theater mean that you wrote the script with Sem- whelming. would be totally quiet. Arlette was a beaut- prun, or that it's more yours than his? iful, liberated, magnetic personality- R.S.: What was his reaction when you anyone who could mesmerize Stavisky A.R.: Not at all. That's Georges' way of contacted him about it? had to be magnetic-and Anny Duperey saying, I suppose, the vision was mine, if struck me as perfect for the role . you will. But I've never, never written a A.R.: Cautious. I might say under- R.S. Speaking of mesmerizing, one script, nor provided a subject. What I can standably cautious. senses that you, or Semprun, or doubtless R.S.: Why? A.R.: For the simple reason that Bel- 42 JULY-AUGUST 1975
both of you, were rather mesmerized by Foreign Affairs to make a thorough report but ultimately the epitome of respecta- your subject. bility . Also, the symbol of the person on one Serge Alexandre, alias Sacha who is overwhelmed by the cir- A.R. By the subject matter, orthe person Stavisky, was the same man who had been cumstances, who unders tands o nl y im- of Stavisky? assigned to keep a close watch on Trotsky perfectly what is happening to him. during part of his stay in France. That was R.S. By Stavisky himself. the link that clinched it, and Gagneux be- R.S. : Earlier you mentioned Stephen A.R. No question. It's not as though we came our Inspector Gardet. But there were Sondheim . Can we talk a little about planned it that way, however. I think what other buttressing parallels that we liked: intrigued both Georges and me initially both Trotsky and Stavisky were Russian the music? How yo u decided on Sond- was what I might tenn the \" mechanism of Jews; both were, in different ways, exiles; heim, and why? fraud,\" how it worked and how society, both magnetic; both lost. In the eyes of the including some of its most powerful-and French, both were \" mHeques\" -lousy A.R.: That's a qu es tion th e film 's presumably upstanding-members, foreigners, and one of the feelings we were producer, Alexandre Mnouchkine, could not only condone it but become trying to convey-and which the Trotsky asked me more than once: \"Alain, wh y deeply and inextricably involved in it. But subplot helped illustrate-was the scope make things more complicated than the deeper we went into it the more I and depth of xenophobia then prevalent in they already are? Why do you have to found myself captivated by the character. France . In the Thirties, the French seemed have an American composer for a Originally Stavisky did not occupy as pre- convinced that whatever misfortunes they French film? And, to boot, someon e ponderant a place in the script as he ulti- were suffering could be blamed on outside who has neve r written any music for mately did. All I can say is that his prolifer- forces and influences. The two most com- films before? .. .\" ation in the film happened naturally, and mon prejudices were anti-Semitism on in a way might be considered the cinematic one hand and anglophobia on the other. I R.S.: What made you think he equivalent of what had happened forty think Ophuls's THE SORROW AND THE PITY should? years earlier in Stavisky's life. The fact is, was the first post-war film to document neither Semprun nor I were able to resist forcefully the depth of that double- A . R. : I knew all Sondheim's music , Stavisky's charm, and if we have been prejudice . If the Germans \"succeeded,\" if but the deeper I got into the Stavisky, criticized for making him too \"sympathe- one can use the term, so well in their Oc- the more I knew his music was perfect. tic,\" can't it also be looked on as the same cupation of France, it was beca use so many I remembered in particular one scene in kind of \"fraud\" he perpetrated so well in French people felt that way. After Dun- Follies that has always remained with reality? In any case, since it did happen or- kirk, the average Frenchman figured that me: a scene that begins in gaiety and ganically, we thought we ought to respect between the German \"enemy\" and the high spirits, with John MacMartin in it. English \"enemy\" there was really very lit- white tuxedo and top hat singing and tle choice. And if in the waning days of dancing, a sce ne full of joy and hope, R.S. Was that the major criticism of the Stavisky's life the Trotskys and the Erna when all of a sudden the music d e- film in France? Wolfgangs could still find refuge in France, teriorates, the lighting turns funereal, the threads of the future were beginning to the girls collapse and dissolve, and he, A.R. That, plus the fact that we hadn' t come together, and the brutal truth to MacMartin, can no longer remember dealt with the heart of the matter, namely which Borelli gives voice at the Theatre de the words or music. It's devastating, a the scandal itself. For most French people l'Empire, toward the end of the film, is scene I've never forgotten. The worm in the Stavisky affair begins where our film what lay in the hearts and minds of most the apple, death in th e mid s t of life. ends, that is with Staviskys death. What French people at the time . For essentially that's the story of they wanted to see were the repercus- Stavisky: a man condemned to death, sions, the riots in the Place de la Concorde, R.S.: Is Baron Raoul the spokesman fully aware of it, yet madly in love with the behind-the-scenes political intrigues of that sentiment? life. In the middle of preparing the trying to keep the government from fall- shooting script I picked up the phone ing, the attempt of the Right to capitalize A.R.: In a sense, because it is also from Paris and called Sondheirn in New on the situation. All of which is of course a true that most of the people who had York. totally different film, which I'm incapable those admittedly base feelings were not of making. really evil, or bad. I remember a cousin To give you an idea how important of mine, a decent, well-meaning Breton, Sondheim's music was to me , when R.S. Speaking of politics, where did the who in 1949 or '50, when he learned writing the shooting script I conceived idea of juxtaposing the Trotsky subplot that I was breaking into films, came up certain key scenes rhythmically, in originate? to me and said, with a comforting air: terms of his music. And on the first \" I really feel sorry for you. I know how day of shooting, I had my tape recorder A.R. We were looking for a subplot, hard it must be for you to break into hand y, with key passages of A Little parallel plot, call it what you will, which the movie business.\" I asked him what Night Music constantly in my ear, to would help situate the time and the world he meant. \"Well, \" he said, \"w ith all make sure that the rhythm of the scene in which Stavisky's actions were taking those Jews who control everything, it coincided with Sondheim's music. That place. We considered any number of must be impossible to break in .\" And involved the speed with which the ac- possibilities-we could have used Mistin- when I said to him: \"Thank God for tors walked, Baron Raoul's gestures, the guette or Maurice Chavalier, to name but the Jewish producers, without whom it whole scene with the white airplane two-and Semprun came up with the would be impossible for me to break outside Biarritz. ... Trotsky idea . Semprun's novel, The Second through,\" I suspect he thought I had Death of Ramon Mercader , dealt with lost my marbles. And my cousin, I has- R.S.: Can we talk about technique for Trotsky in exile, so he was especially famil- ten to repeat, was not a bad man: sim- a moment? Some American critics have iar with the details of Trotsky'S sojourn in ply ignorant. .. . But to come back to compared STAVISKY to THE GREAT GATSBY France, which coincided with Stavisky's Raoul, he is obviously a composite por- rise and fall. But even so it was only one trait, at once the symbol of French -I realize the comparison is superficial among several possibilities until one day, smugness and also the typical kind of -and found that you captured the feel in reading the investigative commission's person that Stavisky loved to have of the time the way GATS BY didn ' t. report-as Semprun says, \"in volume 6, around him: impeccable credentials and Forgetting the comparison, one does get on page 4,749 to be exact\"-Georges dis- lineage, perhaps dubious motives and from STAVISKY a real feeling of the Thir- covered that a Chief Inspector Gagneux of reasons for orbiting in Stavisky's circle, ties , and especially of the films of the the Surete, who in December 1933 had Thirties. How did yo u achieve that feel- been urgently requested by the Ministry of ing? A.R.: I decided from the outset that we would make STAVISKY . .. , from a technical viewpoint, as though it were FILM COMMENT 43
being made in the Thirties. By that I IN DEFENSE OFART mean that our set-ups and our shot by Robin Wood angles would be those that, technically, could have been made with equipment Godard 's WIND FROM THE EAS T: \" wo rk of art\" or \" re vol utionary tool \"? available to Thirties' directors. With the colors, too: I felt that to convey the feel- In October The Gordon Fraser Gal- around, another of my acquaintances has ing of 1934 I couldn' t use realistic 1974 lery (London) will bring out Personal become a pod. colors. Sacha Vierny [Director of Photo- Views: Explorations in Style, a book of es- graphy] and I decided to take the says by Robin Wood. Almost all of the \"Everyone\" is of course a somewhat ab- risk-and it was a calculated risk-to material has never before been pub- surd exaggeration. The Marxist-semiolo- try to simulate the style and colors of lished. The following is an excerpt from gists (not all of them are necessarily Marx- the Patheorama films of the Thirties, li- one of the essays. ists, and not all are committed to semiol- mited ourselves to a minimum of col- ogy, but the generic title is difficult to ors. Ideally we would have liked to And what rough beast, its hour make a bi-chrome film , that is one in come round at last, avoid) form, after all, quite a small group. which the only two colors would have They are, however, by far the most active, been dark brown and red. That proved Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? the most assertive, the most dogmatic, the technically impossible, but we nonethe- -W.B. Yeats, \"The Second Coming\" most impressive, and the most organized less worked in that direction. What we group currently operating. Besides, the also did was steep ourselves in the pic- I have never felt myself a part of any crit- torial magazines of the period, which ical establishment, sub-establishment, or history of British film criticism in the past helped us orient our characters' pace anti-establishment; I have tried to be my- generation has been largely a matter of and positions. By the way , the issue of self, and to go my own way. Yet I always small groups overlapping, displacing, the Peti t Journal you see in the picture, seemed to get on easily enough with my superseding one another, each centered the one whose cover depicts Stavisky's fellows in different camps, despite my in- on a magazine: the Sequence group, the arrest at Marly, is the actual 1936 iss ue . termittent tendency to insult some of them Movie group, the Monogram group, the And, obviously, our filmed depiction of in print. Then I went to Canada for three Screen group. that scene, and Sacha's arrest, were in- years, and when I came back, everything fluenced by those Thirties' graphics. had s ubtly changed, to an extent that I What is so impressive, and so daunting, have only gradually begun to measure. about the last is the impression it gives of R.S.: Are colors symbolic for you? Everyone had read books I had never impregnable organization; the sense of cer- One can' t help remarking the almost heard of, in diSCiplines I scarcely knew titude it exudes, as though opposition postcard summer warmth of the open- existed; everyone was talking about were superfluous---outmoded, as it were, ing scene, moving to the browns and semiology, and about \"bourgeois ideol- by definition; the strength it draws from grays of fall at Barbizon and the deathly ogy\"; everyone gradually became revealed resting upon a formidable body of doc- white of Chamonix. But the colors red, as, more or less, a Marxist. trine, a full y articulated ideological sub- black, and white predominate. structure, as well as upon a science with its I have never felt exactly taken to the own elabora ted vocabulary and its own ex- A.R.: Their use is intentional, of heart (or hearts-it has undergone several tensive bibliography. All must feel intimi- course, thoug h m y goal is to make transplants) of the English critical frater- da ted, as they never were by Mo vie or them inobtrusive. What I am striving nity, but I have never felt so little welcome, Monogram; the commonest reactions seem for in a film is to try to construct a kind so alien and alienated, or so vieux jeu, as I to be to submit humbly, or to try, uneasily, of compact object in which all the have since my return. The atmosphere en- to laugh it all off. Neither strikes me as pieces or elements interrelate, but in courages any paranoid tendencies one h e a l t h y. isolation seem irrational. What I'm try- ma y already possess; they germinate and ing to create are different kinds of har- flourish in it. If I sound at times like Kevin The problems of grappling with it all are, monics, which taken together will make McCarthy in the later stages of INVASION however, immense; to do so adequately an emotional impact. OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, the reader's for- would require an intimacy with both the giveness is asked in advance. It does seem ideology and the science that I don't pos- R.S .: One final question: could you to me sometimes as if, every time I turn sess. What follows will scarcely worry the tell us what the small stone p yramid is exponents and champions of the new criti- that recurs, I believe, twice in the film? cism, who will not regard it as an effective challenge. I offer, at most, a series of skir- A.R.: It's one of those irrational but mishes, not a major battle. My aim is to not meaningless elements I just men- tioned . The p y ramid is located in the Parc Monceau in Paris , and no one, in- cluding the guide books, seems to be able to account for its origin. All they see m to know is that it was there as ea rly as the eighteenth century. Then too , Stavisky lived near the Parc Monceau-another irrational but in- teresting coincidence, and as Dr. Mezy notes at one point, Alexandre' s yo uth is full of m ys teries. So one can dream of the yo ung Sacha walking in the park, passing that m ysterious pyramid. There's something funereal about that p yram id, and STAVISKY . . .is ultimately about death. And there is as well, as I suggested, something mysterious and enigmatic about it, just as the life-and death-of Stavisky were mys terious and enigmatic. ::.. 44 JULY-AUGUST 1975
voice doubts, questions, and anxieties that the opening shot lasts three minutes ity from their meticulous precision; the term \"impressionistic\" cannot pOSSibly do rather than to demolish. and twenty-five seconds, and that justice to either. Both books demonstrate that it is possible to present precisely de- I do not believe, however, that I am con- \"panorama\" is somewhat misleading as it fined and arguable propositions about films and still write what the general cerned merely with the peripheral. On the suggests a panning shot; less pedantic to reader can recognize as the English lan- guage . One can imagine readers of Brit- contrary, the tendencies and implications point out that, just after the explosion is ain's weekly \"journalist\" criticism learning to master Harcourt and Perkins-and that most worry me are so deeply embed- heard offscreen, Welles cuts to a shot of the learning, as a corollary, to reject most of the journalism-but they couldn't master a ded in the process we are experiencing as blazing car (it would have been difficult to great proportion of recent issues of Screen without substantially re-educating them- seldom to rise to the surface in the form of do otherwise without actually blowing up selves. This may be, as most Screen editors and writers would claim, because Har- explicit admission. My attitude to the two actors) on which he then zooms in . court and Perkins both write \"within the prevailing ideology.\" movement as a whole, and to any of its A few pages later we find Farber sum- The implication-that one cannot make major components (Marxism, semiology, ming up the \"reso nance \" of WEEKEND oneself generally intelligible without thereby becoming \" bourgeois\" -is an the recent work of Godard, the investiga- thus: \"These hopped-up nuts wandering alarming one, and relates interestingly to Godard's present quandary as a film- tion of the Hollywood cinema, the decon- in an Everglades, drumming along the maker. I am less pessimistic, perhaps be- cause I am a bourgeois myself. It seems to struction of Realism), is far from simple. I Mohawk, something about Light in Au- me that semiologically oriented criticism may in time, after its necessary period of hope the series of probes that follows- gust, a funny section where Anne intensive consolidation, learn to move from a WIND FROM THE EAST phase to a deliberately discontinuous, allowing me Wiazemsky is just sitting in grass, thumb TOUT VA BIEN phase. Meanwhile, my quar- relis less with what itis actually doing than opportunities for digression, qualification, in mouth, reading a book.\" The term \"im- with its arrogant self-assertion: the com- mon assumption that any alternative is approach from different angles-will be pressionistic\" has particular felicity now discredited and made obsolete by its example. found ultimately to have its own unity as applied to writing like this: the sentence Franz Schubert, by Bacchi. the expression of a complex but not in- evokes a generalized impression of Jean- II. SCHUBERT REPLIES TO COLIN coherent position. Luc Godard movies with which the casual McARTHUR reader (and viewer) is assumed to be satis- In The Tribune last July, Colin McArthur reviewed Peter Harcourt's Six European fied . There were funny scenes in WEEKEND Directors-and summarized Marxist- semiological objections to traditional film (though whether Farber means funny- criticism. It is significant and symptomatic, I think, that, while granting the book a cer- peculiar or funny ha-ha I'm not sure); there tain intelligence, McArthur nowhere at- tempts to grapple with its arguments. He was a shot in which Anne Wiazemsky sat simply rejects its position on ideological grounds--the intelligence being, appa- by a lake reading a book, though it is dif- rently, neither here nor there. That quality is no longer a relevant concern is an as- ficultto see what Farber found funny about suni.ption one encounters in many forms it. She was, in fact, smoking a cigarette, but perhaps she was also sucking her thumb in another movie, or perhaps that was Anna Karina somewhere else, or perhaps Farber (having discussed THE BIG SLEEP a few pages earlier) was confusing her with Carmen Sternwood, and Godard said somewhere that MADE IN USA was a remake of THE BIG SLEEP, so it all sort of links up, so what the hell? The whole chapter, with its extraordi- nary associational processes, comes very close at times to stream-of-consciousness, and is worth looking up as an example of I. AGAINST IMPRESSIONISTIC what you can get away with, with a bit of CRITICISM swagger. Such \"impressionism\" says as Semiology is commonly proposed as the much about Farber's assumptions about answer to \"impressionistic\" criticism. No his readers as it does about his own per- one who has tried to write on film with any ceptions and his way of experiencing films . precision will doubt for a moment the need It is assumed that they won't know the for analytical tools that can help guard films very well either, but won't feel this as against vagueness and lapses of memory much of a handicap in attending to discus- and make impossible the sort of useless sions of them so vague as to be unchal- disordered casual jottings that frequently lengeable. pass for perceptive criticism. Faced with writing like Farber'S, one's One could illustrate what is meant by sympathy for semiology certainly in- \"impressionism\" in this context, and so creases. The trouble is that the claims made give force to these assertions, from a for it as the alternative to this kind of thing superabundance of sources-including rest on a use of the word \"impressionistic\" much of my own past work. I choose to cover pretty well everything from Sight Manny Farber's Negative Space partly be- and Sound's Guide to Current Releases to cause the book is highly regarded in some VF. Perkins' Film as Film : if it isn't quarters, partly because of its general air of semiological then it's impressionistic. The confidence and the apparent precision of term becomes a means of vilifying every- many of Farber's observations. For striking thing indiscriminately by blurring all dis- examples one need look no further than tinctions. the introduction. Peter Harcourt's studies of Six European Here is Farber on Orson Welles' TOUCH Directors are (though also prone to descrip- OF EVIL: \"A five-minute street panorama tive errors) in a different class from Farber's develops logically behind the credits, \"impressions,\" offering the precise and without one cut, just to arrive at a spectacu- cogent articulation of responses to central lar reverse zoom away from a bombed features of the directors' work. The Cadillac.\" Pedantic, perhaps, to point out analyses in Perkins' book gain their valid- FILM COMMENT 45
nowadays . At its base seems to be a sense found the way to relate the two images: the cinates our mind, becomes a part of our that the notion of quality is itself public, activist life and the private, daily consciousness and of our unconscious--a \"bourgeois.\" life . One might expect from this descrip- part of ourselves. Repeatedly, through life, tion that the second shot would show her I've found myself living with a particular Afte r placing Harcourt's book within a sitting before the fire with her bourgeois work, or the works of a particular artist, \" liberal/bourgeois/romantic view of the parents darning the family stockings. Not over a period of time, with the greatest in- world utterly at odds with the materialist at all : we see her relaxing with some tensity and growing intimacy. At present view,\" McArthur writes: \" Mr. Harcourt's it's Schubert's Wintereise, which I've re- romantic commitment to the personal re- fellow-students in what looks like a cently discovered. It's not just that I want sponse of the critic is paralleled by his ul- communal home. repeatedly to listen to it-it's part of my timate commihnent to the notion of per- breakfast every morning, it runs through sonal artistry . . .the ma terialist critic would Now what, one may ask, does Godard my dreams at night, it's with me while I do offer an alternative model of the critical ac- want the poor girl to do? Can't she sit and the cooking or fiddle about the garden. tivity. Naturally, he would pay scant heed chat with her friends? Must life be one long Gradually, I feel it becoming a part of me, to his own (or anyone else's) personal re- conscious (and self-conscious) deconstruc- and the obsession begins to diminish . sponse to a film since, from the materialist tion? There is, of course, a real quandary From there on, I need to experience it less, perspective, personal responses are not here, to which one cannot but be sym- because it's absorbed into my life, it's in my personal at all but are culturally and class- pathetic: to revolutionize the whole of so- bloodstream. determined .\" ciety must be to revolutionize every aspect of one' s own life. Yet the damage this must This kind of assimilation-of which I've The surprising thing about that last re- inevitably do to the human personality given an extreme example, for we aren't mark is the triumphant way McArthur scarcely bears thinking of. Yeats' s lines on capable of \" living\" every work of art we brings it out, playing it like a trum p card, as fanatics come aptly to mind; they haunt me encounter at such a pitch of intensity- if he had just discovered it. But has anyone continually when I watch recent Godard: seems to me fundamental to any under- ever doubted that our responses are con- standing of what art is and what art is for. ditioned by our upbringing, background, Hearts with one purpose alone The process of absorption I've described is environment, by a vast intricate network of Through winter and summer seem clearly not only-perhaps not even influences consciously or unconsciously Enchanted to a stone primarily-a process of conscious under- assimilated? Could it conceivably be To trouble the living stream. standing and of intellectual exploration; otherwise? And how does this suddenly I have been told, on very good authority, it's a process engaging the emotions and make them not personal? If I sit next to that I am an \"anti-intellectual,\" because instincts as much as the mind . It becomes someone from roughly the same cultural my work conSistently implies a refusal to impossible without some degree of trust: background as m yself watching TOKYO separate my emotional life from my intel- trust of Qur own response, trust of the art- STORY, RIO BRAVO , or DIAMO NDS ARE lectuallife. Such a separation, in my .view, ist and the work. It's easy to see that, from FOREVER, am I to assume that our re- can only contribute to the detriment and the Marxist viewpoint, this trust is itself an impoverishment of both. aspect of bourgeois ideology, or, rather, sponses are identical? That there is no per- There is a third, related objection to the the means whereby that ideology can per- sonal ''1'' and \"he\" who might be relating position implicit in McArthur's review petuate itself. Yet if we deny it, it seems to to the film in radically different ways? Or is (and, I believe, in the pages of SCreel1): it me that we deny our own humanity and the assumption (which I find profoundly appears to lack any sense of the function of deny art-as Godard has done, or at least sinister) rather that the personal \" I\" and art. The review continues: \"He [the tried to do. \" he\" no longer matter, are irrelevant to materialist critic] would be concerned with what life and art are really about, and had the cinema as a social process and with At the same time, such trust has to be better be discounted or obliterated? producing knowledge about that process, counterbalanced by its opposite, by the which implies knowing equally about achievement of critical distance, by ques- There are a number of objections to be socio-economic structures and aesthetic tions of choice and value. The process by made to McArthur' s objection, though the structures and posing relationships be- which we decide what works of art we will critical (and ideological) position it implies tween them.\" live with-what we shall allow to affect, in- is today very common among the \" intellec- Let me say at once that the posing of re- fluence , and modify our sensibilities-is tuals\" of film criticism. First, his position lationships between socio-economic struc- obviously a complex one. When the deci- seem s to depend on an extremely tures and aesthetic structures seems to me sion becomes exclusively one of the intel- simplified and crude notion of the term an admirable and potentially very reward- lect and the will-when it is determined, \"response. \" He appears to conceive per- ing critical pursuit. Also, there could be no that is, by a rigidly held body of dogma al- sonal response as a subjective and mind- possible objection to anyone's examining legiance to which demands that our spon- less emotional gush, not as the delicate and the cinema as a social process. This cannot, taneous responses be suppressed-then complex intercourse between emotion and however, logically be considered a substi- we do both ourselves and art an injury. intellect that I have always taken it to be . tute for the traditional relationship be- Second, McArthur's position frighteningly tween art and criticism . The fact remains III. SCREEN'S DIRTY WORDS implies, logically, a rejection of feeling it- that artists don't create works of art in The general attack on traditional aes- self. For if our responses to art are to be dis- order to provide SOCiologists with data. cussed as \" culturally and class- Works of art, like everything else, berome thetics of which Screen has placed itself determined,\" then surely our responses to potential sociological data , and it is per- in the front line is characterized by the other people, and to situations in life, must fectly valid to explore their significance emergence of a whole new vocabulary of be so too? The only solution would be a from that point of view. But without a \"dirty words\"-terms which scarcely need willed inhibition of all emotion as we sense of the creative process on the one to be defined or examined, but can be re- ruthlessly deconstruct ourselves , our hand and the experience of art on the lied upon, apparently, to elicit an instant friends, and our relationships. other-in other words, of personal artistry stock response from readers. My own and personal response-the critic cannot readers can test their positions, perhaps, I am reminded of a brief passage-two talk about art as art; indeed, he is denying by asking themselves at what point in the shots-in Godard' s VLADIMIR AND ROSA it its original, central, and defining func- following list they begin to feel surprise which I also find somewhat chilling. We tion. Ultimately, an exclusive approach that the words should be automatically ac- are shown Juliet Berto as activist and mili- that in effect reduces the arts to a heap of cepted as terms of abuse: bourgeois ideol- tant (a close shot of her in a tense, defiant data can only be destructive of art. ogy, liberal, humanist, elitist, Romantic pose), then a shot typifying the way she A work of art affects our emotions, fas- lives. Meanwhile, the voice-overcommen- tary informs us sternly that she hasn't yet 46 JULY-AUGUST 1975
Fra Filippo Lippi ' s The Annunciation, in London ' s National Gallery. \" anything that can' t be fully appreciated by anyone, irres pective of background, aesthetics, genius, personal artistry, you have to learn to appreciate. But the training, and ed ucation, \" th en all art is emphasis, surely, must always be on self- elitist. As soon as one allows for the de- expressivity, creativity. education--or, at the very least, on active sirability of discrimination, then elitism My aim here is not to attack the positive cooperation between pupil and teacher creeps in . What, for that matter, could be more elitist than Godard's politicized achievements of Screen and the movement No merely passive (let alone hostile) pupil movies on the one hand and semiological it represents, but to raise questions about can be made to learn to understand and discourse on the other? Of the former, what is being recklessly swept away, and evaluate works of art. Our elite, then, con- Christopher Williams writes in Screen : about the implications--for art, for society, sists of people who either spontaneously \"The [Dziga Vertov] group itself stresses for life-of its hypothetical annihilation . want, or deliberately choose to want, to that the films are not intended for large au- My own reaction to these terms isn't sim- educate themselves . (I am not, of course, diences, but for small groups conscious of ple, as I hope the following annotations talking about those who cultivate the arts ideological questions. \" You can't get more will suggest. as some kind of social performance, for elitist than that. cocktail party repartee; I presume the ar- Bourgeois Ideology. For most of us, the gument is not about them.) It is a closed The paradox-that it is those very critics term \"bourgeois\" evokes suburban elite only in so far as social (\" bourgeois\") who talk contemptuously about elitist art streets, privet hedges, a narrow moral pressures encourage philistinism. It is not and elitist positions who also champion code, values based on material posses- a club with exclusive conditions of mem- the most elitist of all art-can be explained sions. None of us wants to be thought bership. but not very satisfactorily resolved . \"bourgeois.\" In Marxist criticism, the term Avant-garde art (any avant-garde art, one inevitably retains these overtones but, by a I have spent fifteen years educating my- infers from the remarkable chapter Peter process of insidious synecdoche, comes to self to respond to and feel at home with the Wollen added for the second edition of cover a great deal more. Hence its useful- Schonberg quartets, a process at first pain- Signs and Meaning in the Cinema) is valuable ness as a means of effecting recoil over a full y frustrating, ultimately deeply reward- because it is \" progressive .\" The work of remarkably wide front. The position of ing. I can now \"hear\" the Third Quartet Godard/Gorin is of course the center of at- WIND FROM THE EAST, for example, comes (reputedly the most difficult) almost as traction; but even when the art is not speci- to appear impregnable. Since the term naturally as I hear the Beethoven Third fically revolutionary in the political sense, \"bourgeois ideology\" can be made virtu- Symphony. This places me among a very its tendency is to undermine and destroy ally all-inclusive, covering everything out- small minority, but I am not aware of any \"bourgeois\" forms and \" bourgeois\" as- side Marxist-Maoist doctrine, any objec- self-congratulatory feelings of superiority. sumptions. tions to the film can be easily \"exposed\" as I am not particularly musical, have had no its product or its means of self-defense. training, and quite fail to grasp the techni- The avant-garde, in other words, is ad- cal intricacies of twelve-tone composition. The instincts (except the instinct to de- The experience I get from Schonberg mirable only in the bourgeois context, as a structive action) and the emotions (except seems to me to be open to anyone who means to an end. When the revolution that of anger) appear to be a part of wants it. If I feel no pride because I enjoy comes and a Marxist society establishes it- \"bourgeois ideology.\" Impulses of love, allegedly elitist art, I also feel no guilt. self, it will automatically become redun- generosity, and tolerance, all readiness to dant. WIND FROM THE EAST, it is worth listen to other points of view, everything It does seem to me, however, that the pointing out, although it was very difficult we have learned to call, in the finest sense, development of any full response to sig- to make within the bourgeOis-capitalist \"human\"-all these are aspects of nificant art demands effort, discipline, and context, would be impossible to make out- \" bourgeOis ideology\" and its means of patience . There are great works of art- side it. Its method, style, peculiar qualities, perpetuating itself. I do not think we plenty of them-which have been enjoyed are all directly dependent on the difficul- should allow ourselves to be intimidated readily by the general public, but a condi- ties. by this; whenever we encounter the term tion of this enjoyment seems to be that \"bourgeOiS ideology\" in art or criticism it is they are not perceived as art. One is glad So what sort of art will be able to exist in necessary to determine carefully exactly that MY DARLING CLEMENTINE and RIO our corning Marxist utopia? What is the al- what it indicates. To offset the emotive BRAvo were commercial successes, but ternative to the elitist art that is being dis- overtones, one might mentally substitute don't let us kid ourselves: the audiences credited? I find m yself unable to supply the word \"traditional\" for \"bourgeOiS.\" that enjoyed them made no Significant dis- any answer, but don't wish to imply that tinction between them and GUNFIGHT AT there necessarily isn't one. (I may be too Elitist. Another word with (in any THE OK CORRAL and HIGH NOON (unless, in much determined by and enclosed in tradi- democratic tradition) emotive overtones the case of last, they felt they were seeing tional ideology to be capable of imagining that tend to get in the way of what it is ac- something more serious and important, it.) It can't, obviously, be anything that tually being made to stand for; it implies with a Message) . suggests the traditional (\"bourgeois\" ) snobbery and exclusivity. When con- aesthetic, which will be anathema, and it fronted with generalized denunciations of The (Marxist) editors of Cahiers du can' t be anything avant-garde, which will the \"elitist\" view of art, one must begin by Cinema have demonstrated very convinc- be redundant. The problem with all asking for a definition of the \"elite\" in ingly that YOUNG MR. LINCOLN is every bit utopias is that once you've got there, question. What constitutes it, what are the as \"difficult\" a film as PERSONA or PIERROT there's nothing to be progressive about conditions for membership? The answer LE FOU. If the term \"elitist\" is defined as anymore. appears to be education; \"elitist\" art is art In the same light, I think the interest of Marxist critics in traditional art needs to be examined, and fundamental questions asked. The most interesting and stimulat- ing Marxist criticism is clearly that in which the impulse is not to denounce and reject but to salvage. Lurking in the background of the Cahiers text on YOUNG MR . LINCOLN-and necessarily suppressed, but implicit in the article's own gaps and dislocations--one senses the quandary of critics who grew up loving Ford's movies, FILM COMMENT 47
became converted to Marxism after the substitute for an individual work of art, her, the dove, the herbage, the lily-are events of May 1968, and were faced with just as there is no substitute, no possible present in another Annunciation, by \"a fol- the task of restructuring their own past al- replacement, for an individual human be- lower of Fra Angelico,\" that hangs in the legiances. (It is striking that the change in ing. same room, probably painted slightly ear- ideology has not been accompanied by any lier. The effect is very different: to my untu- significant change in the works and direc- Fra Filippo Lippi's beautiful Annuncia- tored eyes much clumsier, lacking the ex- tors admired; the pantheon is the same, tion, that hangs in Room III of London's traordinary delicacy and refinement, the but the gods have to be reinterpreted.) National Gallery, reproduces emblemati- precisions of balance, of symmetry and cally a traditional Christian myth, and in asymmetry, of the Lippi. The solution of the Cai1iers editors is doing so draws on an intricate system of highly intelligent and sophisticated. The aesthetic and iconographical codes and I have no wish to denigrate scholarship; film is examined, and implicitly admired, conventions that determine not only the I am sure that my response to this painting for precisely those features which would placing and treatment of the figures but could be refined and deepened through a appear flaws or failures of realization from govern every detail of the painting down more meticulous knowledge of the con- a traditional viewpoint: \"gaps,\" \"disloca- to the execution of the smallest leaf. Yet I ventions within which the artist worked. tions,\" inner contradictions that disrupt see no way of accounting for the totality of Yet I dare assert that both the picture's and subvert the film's ostensible (con- the picture's effect but in terms of the indi- \"conventionality\" and its unique quality scious) purposes, and that finally present vidual sensibility and skill (the latter in- can be part-deduced, part-intuited by Lincoln as a \"monster.\" I am not at all sure separable from the former, as its means of simply studying it in the context the what is left of YOUNG MR . LINCOLN as a expression) of a particular painter. National Gallery provides. And I would work of art after the Cai1iers team have make equivalent assertions about a Haydn done with it. Nor is it clear to me that thetJ The painting is structured on an exquis- symphony, or about RIO BRAVO. are sure. ite system of balances and contrasts. The heads of the two female figures, both The crux of this whole critical ideological This has taken us some distance from haloed, are roughly equidistant from the question is clearly the question of indi- my initial defense of the elitist position- center of the frame, but the Angel's is just viduality: whether it exists, and what value which is partly a defense of it against the slightly higher than the Virgin's; behind should be placed on it. The debate about term \"elitist\"-but I hope it is still within the Angel are slim, young tree-trunks, be- personal creativity vs. determinism is in- sight. Before passing on, let me return to it hind the Virgin a wall (right) and the bed of separable from the debate about personal with an obvious but, I hope, provocative childbirth (background). The Virgin holds response vs. scientific knowledge. The question . Can anyone capable of up the folds of her robe with her right animus repeatedly expressed in recent genuinely appreciating and assimilating hand, the Angel with her left. Beneath the criticism against the notion of individual Mozart and Mizoguchi possibly say that he Angel are flowers and foliage, beneath the creativity has as its necessary corollary the is not, in that respect, immeasurably better Virgin tiles; the flowers appear uncrushed, whole massive, formidably organized off than someone whose cultural horizon so that the Angel seems weightless, search for a Scientific-objective criticism, is limited to bingo and T71e Black and White whereas in depiction of the Virgin there is a the purpose of which is to do away with Minstrel Show? The assimilation will not heaviness, a pulling earthward. Im- the individual voice altogether. It is in this necessarily make him a better person (a mediately behind the Virgin a gold robe, light that the language, the vocabulary, the common, and obviously fallacious, as- also seeming to pull downward, is draped tactics of Screen have their real significance. sumption), but it will open to him pos- over the back of a chair; it is balanced al- sibilities that are closed to his less fortunate most symmetrically by the Angel's wings, This is scarcely the place for political de- fellow humans. If that is what is meant by composed of peacock feathers like small bate (and I am scarcely a political thinker), an elite, then I for one shall not willingly arrows pointing upward. Near the base, but it is directly relevant to all my work as a sacrifice my membership of it in the name just left of center, is a lily, forming the bot- critic and teacher that I set supreme value of some perverse and destructive tom point of a near-parallelogram of which on the quality-and individuality-of the egalitarianism. To put it succinctly, noth- the other three points are another lily held individual life; that I cannot contemplate ing is ever going to come between me and as emblem of purity by the Angel, the favorably any form of social organization The Magic Flute. It is not, however, an elite hand from Heaven pointing down, and that doesn't have the preservation and de- from which I would wish anyone to feel the dove representing the Holy Spirit. Cut- velopment of individuality as its end; and excluded; on the contrary, I would like to ting across this parallelogram is the pattern tha t I regard the function and meaning of share my advantages with as many others of looks: the eyes of Angel and Virgin both art as essentially related to that concept. Life as possible. That is why I am a teacher. on the dove, which impregnates the in a society from which belief in personal womb. The notes supplied by the Gallery creativity was banished would necessarily Romantic aesthetics,genius, creativity. speak of the influence of Masaccio, and tell be incapable of transcending the drabbest us that the picture was commissioned by mediocrity. Art would die in it, and with it What is actually under attack here turns the Medici family, whose device of three out always, on inspection, to be some ab- feathers and a ring is incorporated in the all that which in the individual life corre- surd parody-concept that no one today composition. sponds or responds to art . could possibly wish to defend, and which would have looked excessive even at the I choose deliberately here an example Let us be quite clear about this. Without height of the Romantic movement: the no- from a field of which I am largely ignorant. personal creativity (both the concept and tion that works of art are produced by I know little about painting, less about the the fact) there can be no art. There may be some process of immaculate conception background to this particular painting, something else-a sort of game played out of the creativity of an isolated indi- nothing about Lippi as man or artist. Yet I with counters or computers-for which vidual genius. But the opposite notion, feel confident that this picture- some other name would have to be found. that denies the concept of personal creativ- determined on all levels and in every detail Meanwhile, we have art to reckon with, ity and individual genius any validity by the prevailing ideology, by a structure of and artists, in all their complexity and whatever, is no less absurd. Do these critics thought and belief, by an elaborated sys- humanity. really suppose that Ford's or Hawks's films tem of signs and conventions, by the cir- would somehow have come into being by cumstances of its production-is the crea- I have come to feel, during the past few accident if Ford and Hawks had never tion of an individual sensibility. Virtually years, that SANSHO THE BAILIFF and TOKYO existed? Or that some readily interchange- all the same constituents-the central di- STORY may be superior to any American able substitute would have been \"pro- vision, the Angel's wings (peacock feath- film I know-superior even to VERTIGO, to duced\" (\"productivity\" being, apparently, ers), the Virgin's drape suspended behind RIO BRAVO, to LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN the alternative to \"creativity\")? There is no WOMAN-superiorin a greater maturity of vision, and in the completeness and con- scious authority with which that vision is 48 JULY-AUGUST 1975
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