VOLUME 09 - NUMBER 01 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1973

the niceties that an awful lot of these English actors Williams , and she did it very well. Now, she 's a great expected , tea and umbrellas and folding chairs and admirer of this picture VIXEN. She can see it time so on. There were never enough folding chairs, after time, it's a curious thing , and I think it's the there was never enough tea, never enough umbrel- basis of VIXEN 'S success , because as Edy pointed las. I got caught up in a kangaroo court one night, out, I unwittingly made a film on behalf of Women 's and it was kind of interesting . Lib. I didn 't realize it, I was way before their time. I portrayed a woman calling all the shots. Edy's seen BERKOWITZ : Were you satisfied by all the per- it fifteen times and just eats it up every time she sees it. She says, \" Christ, I' d like to do a sequel formances? to that. \" But I don 't know about that yet. MEYER: No, two did not satisfy me, and I won 't BERKOWITZ: Despite, or perhaps because of go into that except to say that one of the two will VIXEN , how do serious Women 's Liberationists re- probably be the most spectacular person in the film , even though his performance left a lot to be desired . gard you? There's the area where the Moviola, the editing MEYER : I don 't give that Women 's Lib thing a comes into play. I expect this one actor will probably make an enormous impact, and it'll do a lot for his hell of lot of thought. I get a little bit of it around career. I just regret that he could have made it easier home. I think that most of the people who are for me, but for reasons best known to himself, he concerned with Women 's Lib are not all that attrac- did not. tive, and I wonder if it isn 't a crutch or a cop-out, call it whatever you want. I've been on a lot of panels BERKOWITZ: Since you 're the editor . . . with so-called Women 's Libbers, I've been on a TV MEYER: No , I'm not the editor per se. I have an show with Betty Freidan . Frankly, I'm not impressed, editor, Fred Baratta, who worked with me on THE and I don 't give a goddamn what they think about SEVEN MINUTES . It's just a matter of getting used to VIXEN , really . It's like Charles Keating of the Citizens my style , and he's getting used to it. More than that , for Decent Literature. He ' ll take umbrage with any- really . thing I do. To me that indicates a kind of inherent BERKOWITZ : Will BLACKSNAKE! be cut in the same weakness in the individual. For want of something style as THE SEVEN MINUTES, with frequent cuts, and better to do , they will attack something that 's in the no shot lasting longer than a few seconds? public eye, in order to get themselves their own MEYER : Pretty much so. It 's a real rock 'em-sock particular kind of notoriety. 'em kind of thing. I find myself bored with films that are kind of pedestrian . Maybe that's a hang-up, but BERKOWITZ: Don 't you think that Vixen 's sexual my cutting style seems to work . It makes the film move very quickly and informatively. Unlike SEVEN assertiveness is one attractive aspect of Women 's MINUTES-which was a very wordy picture in which Lib? I had to try to keep this same style going-BLAc K SNAKE is an action picture. MEYER: I think women looked at it in a vicarious BERKOWITZ: Did you have a lot of trouble cast- way . I think an awful lot of women would have liked ing this film? to have been able to act like Vi xen a few times in MEYER : No. The girl was a problem , because their lives . To have an afternoon in which they could she's not the typical girl that I've had-the great have laid three guys, have an affair with their best cantilevered structured girl. First of all , I had to have girl friend , that would straighten a lot of people out. a very good actress , which was more important than But for the most part, these women do not have the physical characteristics. Also, I had to have the specific courage to do something of this nature, someone who , like the rest of the cast could speak and I think they kind of lived the whole thing vi- with a British accent, in order to make this thing cariously. One interesting thing about Vi xen is that work. unlike NAKED CAME THE STRANGER , everything she I think that I selected a girl who 's very .. . she's touched was improved . She didn 't destroy, she got a great ass on her, she 's attractive in the same helped. If there was a marriage that was kind of way as Brigitte Bardot. And she 's a good actress. dying on the vine, she injected something into it She even came up with a cockney accent. I really which made it better. went through the list in London to try to find some- body, and it's very difficult to find a real!y spectacu- BERKOWITZ: So you basically approve of what lar girl. Occasionally, you see someone who can 't the character did? act their way out of a paper bag . In my next picture , FOXY, I' m very concerned about who the hell I' ll use. MEYER : Oh , I think that every man at one time BERKOWITZ: 00 you have any idea yet? or another would thoroughly enjoy running into an MEYER : Yes my wife , Edy Williams , will play Foxy. aggressive female like Vi xen . I don 't deny for a But I still haven 't decided whether or not we can moment that I like aggression on the part of an really work together. She looks great, and her acting attractive woman , and I don 't think I'm alone in that has improved enormously. In the last si x months by any means. As for the lesbian scene , it's there she's been studying hard, with Estelle Harmon 's for entertainment, and for no other reason than Workshop, and she wants very much to do the film . entertainment. She was like a switch-hitter. You She has always been associated with Fox or some show this girl as being like a utility outfielder: she other major studio , and I met her when I did BEYOND could cover all the positions. THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS for Fox. She played Edy BERKOWITZ: A lot of people tend to condemn both on-screen sex and violence, considering them to be similar. How do you feel about that? MEYER : In all of my films , I've intermi xed the violence and the sex. I look upon violence and sex FILM COMMENT 49

as two highly entertaining facets of a motion picture. BERKOWITZ: You 're going to try for an R rating, BERKOWITZ : In bringing these two things to the aren 't you? screen, have you found that they have anything else MEYER : I will get one , I must get an R rating , in common beside their entertainment value? there 's no question about it. I now work in a limited partnership arrangement. I have a number of friends MEYER : I don 't know, I don 't get into it that who participate and contribute a small amount of deeply. For example , maybe early in the game, when money , there are maybe si xteen or seventeen peo- I did LORNA , if I did a rape scene it struck me that ple. And the way things go now with X-rated films it was terribly erotic and exciting . Today it would by and large , it's very lim iting. And we must have not strike me the same way. I would probably treat an R-rated film in order to play extensively in drive- it in a much more ludicrous fashion , more outra- ins. So it's strictly a matter of economics. geous. But then again , even then I was doing that, because I always had a woman raped in the most BERKOWITZ: Does it bother you to see that a difficult circumstances , in a swamp , or in six feet of water , o r out in a sand dune. I guess my jibes basically non-violent film like VIXEN will get a stricter at sex have been just exactly that. I've looked upon sex in a kind of a humorous , outrageous way. rating than all kinds of other, possibly more objec- tionable films? BERKOWITZ : Are you tired of using it in your films ? MEYER : Well , you know, I take exception to people who are always hacking at violence. Violence MEYER : No, but I don 't want to get into that is very much a part of our lives. But there 's always hard-core area , having to show ex plicit sex, except that minority that will get up and scream and yell , that I am excited by FOXY as a vehicle to really tax and put down anything except Ross Hunter. my imagination insofar as trying to portray current sex in a more explicit, outrageous way , and yet at BERKOWITZ: So you condemn nothing? the same time in a clever way . MEYER : No, not even Ross Hunter. I'm always on TV shows with Ross Hunter. One time he lost BERKOWITZ: Won 't FOXY also be a kind of psy- his cool and said , \" If I had to make pictures like chological thriller? Russ Meyer makes, I'd go back to teaching junior high school! \" He admitted that on a Merv Griffin MEYER: Yes , I don 't think you could make an- Show. And then I also think he said , \" If I am ever other VI XEN no r would I want to make another VIXEN , on another television show with Russ Meyer, I think just by changing the spots , or the numbers or the I'm gonna walk right out. \" I have no axe to grind people. Again , I'm tuned into violence and mystery, with the guy. and I came up with the idea of the so-called innocent BERKOWITZ: Who are some of the directors black widow , she doesn 't do it herself directly. whose work you admire? MEYER : Peckinpah , I love Peckinpah. Ilike Prem- What happens is that she 's the kind of girl who inger very much too . It's just unfortunate that Prem- chooses her mate. Her sexual needs are gigantic, inger has selected a lot of New York locale films but they do not linger. She uses her male and then that don 't seem to go. These are two of the directors quickly shuns him and goes on to something else. who stand out in my mind . George Roy Hill I like But unfortunately for her love partner, in a very short very much . Don Siegel , very good. He's excellent, time after he's had a relationship with her, he dies just sensational. I thought DIRTY HARRY was a totally in some bizarre way . engrossing film . If I had cut it, I would have tried to make it move a little faster, but I adm ire him The film 's got some exciting things. I've got a enormously. I think Siegel and Preminger and Pec- sequence involving two people balling in the desert kinpah are my favorites. They ' re \" doer \" directors. in a dry arroyo , and standing nearby are two motor- There 's an action thing , a vitality about the three cycles with brain buckets hanging on the handle- of them. bars, and the two people are attacked by a von BERKOWITZ: Isn 't VIXEN an example of how you Richtofen-type character with the square goggles occasionally use your films for the purpose of politi- and the black leather, and this individual is in a cizing? helicopter with a twelve gauge pump gun . So an MEYER: Oh , that was a personal thing . We're interesting chase ensues with two nude people all influenced by things . I was influenced by a couple riding across the desert wearing just brain buckets, of very good friends who kept trying to get me to and the helicopter firing , and of course, getting the join the Communist Party. They took me to a cell guy. They always go to great lengths to avoid shoot- meeting once ... I mean , Jesus Christ, of all people, ing Foxy. One thing that I think will be sign ificant they should have known that I wouldn 't be taken about the film , among other things , is that she 'll by any of that garbage. Not that I was offended , never get a traumatic thing about the killings . She ' ll but I sa id, \" I take it as a personal affront that you never deal with the revelation that, for example, thought I had such a small degree of intelligence she 's made it with so-and-so, and the next morning , and dedication .\" So I storehouse that stuff. she opens her icebo x, and he 's in it. So she ' ll go I am kind of concerned about the Democratic \" Agh! ,\" but pow , she 'll go into some tantalizing ticket though . I've always been a dyed-in-the-wool thing , making it with a crane operator. So it will never Democrat, but I don 't feel terribly sympathetic to linger, otherwise the girl would become traumatic , what they 've put up at home plate. And I'm not in totally and completely wiped out. So she's just the love with Richard Ni xon by any stretch of the imagi- victim of circumstance. It's got to be a light thing , nation . But I' m not about to grind any axes while and I think on the right track with a very exciting premise for a film . 50 JANUARY 1973

I' m waiting for favorable decisions on VIXEN from MEYER : That's exactly right. I can fantasize , and the Supreme Court, th is so-called conservative court. There have been some interesting opinions I think that's what the public wants to see , an hour handed down by a so-called conservative court that indicate no push-button thinking . There have been and a half of escapism , total fantasy. I think that's some very liberal opinions that have been passed down . My attorney Elmer Gertz , in Chicago , was what I have in BLACKSNAKE! . I've taken a very serious telling me that he was very enthused about a number of opinions . So we 'll see what happens. There are subject: intimidation of the human race , cruelty, and going to be some important decisions made in the next three or four months, I believe, about whether outrageousness , and I've treated it in a tongue-in- or not a private citizen in the privacy of his own home can look at anything. Medical photography, cheek manner. The sum total of the film will tell us pornography, anything , you name it. These are terribly tough decisions that the Court has to come whether it's going to be a successful film or not. up with . I don 't know , I'm so close to it at this point , it 's BERKOWITZ : I'm surprised that you 're still wor- ried about that kind of thing. difficult for me to say. MEYER: Well , VIXEN 'S still in the Supreme Court. BERKOWITZ: When will BLACKSNAKE! be re- It's been there for a year. No decision has been reached . Charlie Keating has been pushing this leased? attack on \" the King of the Nudies.\" What has come and gone after VIXEN has no bearing . If they can MEYER : We ' ll release it around Christmas time. get a judgment against VIXEN , literally everything else could fall . Here 's a major flaw in our judicial system , I was just talking to the Chicago distributor, so we'll letting something go on as long as this . And then , say they came out with an adverse decision . Why probably release it there. Uniquely this time, I have there are major films that have things in them that are more explicit than VIXEN . SO it would be , as they four sub-distributors who are investors in the pic- say, a dirty shame. ture , each one of them put in fifteen thousand BERKOWITZ: You don 't really expect an adverse decision, do you? dollars . I've shown them clips , and it's been very MEYER : Well , I don 't know. We have lost in every exciting for me because they 've all responded in court with VIXEN. We 've lost on the city level , the county level , and the state level in Ohio . a very positive way. I'm spending an enormously BERKOWITZ: In your films you 've presented long period of time cutting this, and I want to get characters who were in the vanguard of the new morality, yet your own personal life seems to be fairly away from the editing because it can be a real time- conservative, despite it all. You 're married and you consuming thing . I've got to spend more time in spend a lot of time taking care of your elderly story development and casting , things of that nature. mother. How do you reconcile that apparent contra- diction? But I know that if I do not cut it myself, it will not MEYER: Well , my wife thinks I'm promiscuous, have that same mo xie that all the other Russ Meyer but I can 't convince her that I am following the straight and narrow. I have a great deal of feeling films have. And I'm just blessed by the fact that my for my mother, because I think she was probably the best friend that I ever had. She was strong and films play and play and play, they just keep going. long on momism and all that , but I was strong enough to circumvent that. From the moral stand- And I've got to make that same kind of film . Unfortu- point, I would probably take exception to any friend 's wife who might stray from the straight and nately , SEVEN MINUTES was not that film . narrow, and at the same time, I would take exception to his small or slight deviation . So I suppose in that BERKOWITZ : Is there any chance that your next instance I am kind of a prude , and a lot of that has to reflect back on my upbringing . Yet there 's that film , FOXY, will fall through? kind of paradox with the films I've made, wherein I have glorified the swinger, as in VIXEN-the deceit, MEYER : A very few projects that I've had have which was kind of bland and barefaced. The perfect fool , the husband is totally believing , and totally really fallen through . Every time I depend upon giving , and totally good , but he 's a cuckold . It 's a strange thing , and I suppose my imagination has somebody else it's not so sure, but if I depend upon a lot to do with the whole thing. myself, it's less unsure. My associate and I had two BERKOWITZ : So you see your films as being only fantasies? projects that did not materialize, and in each in- stance, those projects were dependent upon some- one else raising the money. And it was just fortunate that we prepared the third property, BLACKSNAKE ; we had obtained the money, just as I have obtained the money for FOXY, so I will make the picture. I will make it in January, no question about it. I will also do a film called BEYOND BEYOND-it's a two picture package . It will be of the BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS genre. It will be no sequel , but it will be a similar picture. I'm going to use as my central theme a successful rock ' n' roll singer and an older advisor. And this thirtyish young man will have sampled all the fruits of life, and become a kind of recluse. But every now and then he will come out of his shell to throw an exciting party. But there 's a vicious, evil basis for this whole thing . I just think it's a great vehicle to show the drug scene in a pleasant, kind of entertaining light, and sex in a pleasant , entertaining light, and violence in an un- pleasant but very entertaining light, clima xed by maybe a little DOCTOR PHIBES at the end . And you can guess who our man is. Is it Howard Hughes when he was twenty-two or is it Elvis Presley at thirty-one? Who can say? But the basis is there , and I think the audience will associate me and what I've done before. I think it's the basis for a very good film . 11111111 FILM COMMENT 51

An Evening with Meyer and Masoch Aspects of \"Vixen\" and \"Venus in Furs\" by Raymond Durgnat Raymond Durgnat is head of General Studies at instead of letting visual variety run away with itself, as in the run-of-the-mill Hollywood \" montage se- St. Martin 's School of Art in London and is a frequent quence \" -gear it in with narrative or make drama out of documentary material. If the locus classicus contributor to Films and Filming . He is author of of the level style is THE BIG SLEEP , the obvious ex- Films and Feelings, The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood ample of diagonalist rhetoric is Carol Reed 's THE Comedy and the American Image, Nouvelle Vague: THIRD MAN. It's clear that the two styles can dovetail the First Decade, and books on Bufluel, Franju and very nicely, as they do with two generally levelhead- Garbo. ed directors, Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh , who use diagonals freely but softly; and even the maestro ** of pianissimo, Howard Hawks, may depart from his stiff-upper-spirit level to mark just the peak of a The London smut-hound 's lot is not a happy one. climax with a brace of clashing-diagonal-quasi-re- Although outside ordinary censorship jurisdiction, verse-angle close-ups. But the levelers keep such the private cinema clubs aren 't outside the confus- effects in reserve , and even then the diagonals may ingly unpredictable obscenity laws, and to any hint be used more to distinguish face-to-face confronta- of trouble prefer ultra-cautious self-censorship. The tions from any effect of face-on-face melting than soft-halo skinfli x which get public showings fare still to set up a formal dynamism . worse, and pornowise there's little more to the films which get shown (mainly to the repressed business- The burden of Ernest Lindgren 's comments on men trade) than Hitchcock's depiction of a rapist's cutting , camera-angles and composition is that derisory orgasm in FRENZY, which itself comes 13 good film style is diagonalist rather then levelist, but years after its spiritual forerunner in THE VIRGIN Andrew Sarris put this Forties orthodoxy in its place SPRING. Art-lovers get the best of both worlds, first, when he justified Hawks's quiet yet terse style. Just in Cringing London . as diagonalism marks a kind of transition zone between (1) a montage-based cinema and (2) a A publicly-shown double-bill here brackets Russ \" well-constructed drama\" cinema, so it marks a Meyer's VIXEN , cut from 71 minutes to 47 , and transition zone between (3) the cinema of relatively Massimo Dallemano 's VENUS 1M PELZ (VENUS IN FURS) , restricted camera-movement (the camera moving to cut from 87 to 63. Both their remnants are rather follow the action , rather than across or around it) , boring but involve an interesting contrast of subjects which is also the cinema of single-center action (the and styles. True to stereotype, the European film Hollywood orthodoxy's rule of thumb: \" one shot, is sophisticated , languid , perverse, philosophical , one point \"), and (4) what we might call the \" spatial- and the American film extroverted , eupeptic , and (in ist\" cinema. Static spatialism might set a relatively all senses) bounding . The surprises begin once one static camera looking at double- or triple-center ignores the assumption that whatever's porno must action (like deep focus), while mobile spatialism be outside or beneath the usual cultural networks, would keep the camera moving , as so many direc- whereas they're as inextricably a part of it as a quick tors have done since the nouvelle vague. buck is of the dollar system . Levelers and diagonalists both are often bold MEYER'S OLD ANGLES and simple one-central-action men . But diagonal- The Meyer surprised not only by being visually ists tend to be the more sophisticated of the two lively, but by its archaic academicism . With its insofar as space , for them , is beginning to be a emphatic close-ups, bold but simple compositions, complete globe. The camera freely looks along any strong cuttings, steep angles and ebullient acting , radius . And diagonalists tend to be more analytic- it harks back to an idiom whose Hollywood heyday breaking one continuous action into more close-up was the Forties . It might be dubbed the \" diagonalist\" units-than levelers who , in following the action , style, as against the Hawks'-eye-Ievel id iom . In a tend to keep it one. On the other hand, levelers tend sense it's what's left of silent Eisenstein once you to include more of the general surroundings unem- abolish the intellectual meaning of montage and- 52 JANUARY 1973

phatically in the foreground and background than vidualism exerted a kind of spatial contraction diagonalists, who like boldly contrasting close-ups. towards the close-up and the two-shot. European The spatialists also tend to bring surroundings con- films tended to a very much less shallow hierarchy spicuously into the screen-which is why , when between hero-heroine and character actors , as well Bazin began arguing for deep-focus as against as more commonly-and quite knowingly-indulging editing , so the level Hollywood style began to be a relish of atmosphere for its own sake, at the recognized as a style , and not, as Lindgren implies, expense of immediate dramatic intensity and an absence of style. \" punch .\" It may be true to say that if the Russians learned about cinematic tempi from Griffith , the Previously , the level-headed objection to THIRD Americans forgot it, and had to learn it again from MAN-type horizon-tilting was likely to be phrased in the Russians; but what the Americans didn 't forget, caustic craftsman-type terms, like \" if cinemagoers whereas the French did, was a rapid dramatic want to be seasick they should go see MUTINY ON tempo, which the French got from Feydeau and the THE BOUNTY.\" Brunius, shrugging off the \" crick- Americans from vaudeville playlets. American speed necked camera \" in experimental cinema , is criticiz- isn 't based on cutting at all , but on narrative and ing an avant-garde academicism. The Hollywood acting , and the Lindgren-type aesthetics can 't do fear would be that strong , overly-analytical cutting justice to style where the editing respects rather than represents an imposed visual style which , out of dissects the acting (similarly with mise-en-scene and place , can dissolve all dramatic tensions-just as movem ent-with in-the-shot). a \" montage sequence\" dissolves the boundaries of narrative space-time. And it can run a risk of dis- FranGois Truffaut's disdain of the \" well-con- tracting audience attention away from the action to structed \" cinema ought to have brought him to a the images, which are only a medium , and a means disdain of the American cinema, and if it didn 't it's to the end of illusion. Diagonalization runs two further risks : of starting off so emphatically as to because Truffaut's ideas were as incoherent as they VIX EN ' leave nothing in reserve for climaxes , and of imply- were violent. He detested the \" well-constructed \" ing hysteria , which is the opposite of identification cinema when it was French (and even more Erica Ga vi n and sympathy-attracting intensity and strength . furiously if it veered towards progressive social (t op) and Some French and Eastern European films-like criticism), but anything American was magic and Vi nce ne Ozep 's and Machaty 's-show an intriguing mixture immune from criticism . Just as the Americans had Wallace . of diagonalism and (when they accelerate) \" impres- to learn tempo-by-cutting all over again from the all photos: sionism .\" Europeans (which is why Hollywood used a French Eve Productions . term to speak of the montage sequence), so the Although diagonalizing, like elaborate camera French had to relearn tempo-by-narrative from the movements, was commoner in Hollywood in the Americans. One can see the French gradually learn- early Thirties (maybe because of a combined Rus- ing it through the early Thirties . Conversely , Renoir sian and German influence) than Bazin remem- was straining for deep focus (spatial ism ) in BOUDU , bered , the late Thirties saw Hollywood on the whole although Hollywood thought Gregg Toland had in- settle down to the quieter style, not least perhaps vented the idea in the late Thirties . because it was also the cheaper one. Indeed what the French call Ie plan Americain is the epitome of One might think that the mighty De Mille's battle leveling, being two , three or more men in line scenes would at least have inspired a certain spatial- abreast, fully frontal from hat to knee, so that they can meet, chat and split in only one set-up. The diagonalist equivalent takes several set-ups, deep focus at shorter distance, and stronger lighting-and it has you building ceilings before you can say \" Cut! \" The Europeans kept diagonalizing going more strongly. Though they had less money, their costs were lower too , and their infinitely looser stud io system left more leeway for camerabatics . Their lenses were so much worse as to favor close-ups and keep cameras nimble. Their plots and themes were less cut-and.,dried and standardized-which favors diagonalism , for that style can help give intensity quickly to less obvious moods, issues and twists; and the absence of crescendo matters less when the climax isn 't just a long-foreseen inten- sification of straightforward conflicts. So there probably is a very rough correlation between (1) diagonalism, the art-film , and the European influ- ence, and (2) the dead(pan)-Ievel , the entertainment studio-system , and the slick side of Hollywood. Europe has always tended to be more spatialist than Hollywood. The latter's concentration on indi- FILM COMMENT 53

ism . But no . The traditional Hollywood battle scene D'ARC is extremely diagonalist , whereas GERTRUD is is likely to be an alternation of close-up details and no less significantly shallow and level. generalized masses . But your diagonalist is much more likely to become a spatialist and to think in Here it's excusable, I hope, to criss-cross a para- terms of contrasting one action on one plane with graph in Films and Feelings and comment on an another on another, of tracking and panning over again very general link between European space contrasting details and faces in a way which can and sense of groups, and American space and locate the individual-within-the-group without losing sense of individuals, by comparing THE GRAPES OF the unity of the group, and which is neither individu- WRATH ( by one of Hollywood 's most spatialist direc- alistic nor collectivistic. tors) with Giuseppe de Santis 's BITTER RICE . Both are epics of disorganized labor, and both have The French and the English learned American obvious collectivist political connections (the Fox dramatic shaping and tempo at about the same time. film through Steinbeck 's then-Communist beliefs) . The English cinema of the Thirties remains relatively Ford turns it back into a study in heroic ind ividu- unknown, but the French adapted the American alism , with the Joad truck as a covered wagon , any expertise to their softer, subtler, slower, more warm- \" train\" of which it might be part being a rather ly human interests . While I'd agree that a generation incidental thing, like the stagecoach which groups of anti-Hollywood Europhiles were unjust to much people only until they arrive on their own patch of in Hollywood , I would , conservatively and unfash- land . The film abounds in night close-ups . Many of ionably, rate the European cinema as central , and them comprise the domestic antitheses of the an- Hollywood as the sidekick , except for two or three- guished solitudes of the bachelor sailors in the and this is the point-very stylized genres: slapstick, expressionistic exteriors of THE LONG VOYAGE HOME . musicals , action melodramas , westerns . Even then , Throughout his career Ford spirals around 'the idea of the group , and finally all he can find is either VIXEN' the Europeans could often do them better when they the home or the Seventh Cavalry (or some modern wanted ; Clouzot 's LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR is what equivalent thereof). Avoiding anomic individualism , Jo n Evan s none of the Warners industrial melodramas ever had he embraces militarism , although rendering it herbiv- and the guts to be. The Hollywood studios were always orous rather than carnivorous by a kind of elegiac scared : A generalization which isn 't irrelevant to sentimentalizing which is at once outrageous and Erica Gavi n. Russ Meyer's rise to fame, as we shall see . disarming. As we implied in showing how diagonalism dove- De Santis 's movie is a moral ity melodrama about tailed neatly into the peak moments of levelist films , the helplessness of labor when it is individualist any distinction is only a rough-and-ready affair (al- American-style (pin-ups and gangsters) rather than though , I hope, not useless). The Odessa Steps is organized Italian Communist-style. It 's a virtuoso diagonal ist , and Mex ican Bunuel is very level , al- piece of open-air spatialism , with everyth ing from though looked at closely , UN CHIEN ANDALOU is very barracks-room brawls, Busby Berkeley camerawork , much more diagonalist than it feels at first glance. and the girls lined up as if in some Amazonian Pabst is diagonalist (often implying a kind of reces- prefiguration of the spaghetti Western . Leone 's THE sive zig-zag) wh ile Fritz Lang uses broad flat planes GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY is so schematic in its wh ich are nonetheless so strong and set as to be spatialization it's practically Euclidean . Its three- diagonalist in spirit. Dreyer 's LA PASSION DE JEANNE cornered gunfights constitute some ballistico-moral equivalent of Pythagoras's theorem , and after you 've seen it you 've no doubt that it's kicked all the heroic individualism implicit in Old-West mythol- ogy hard in the balls. This is Zane Grey revue et corrigee by Machiavelli . It's HOW THE WEST WAS WON as interpreted , correctly , by Clausewitz. In a reductio ad absurdum of nostalgic anarchism , it observes that the life of the gun-toting , go-getting anarchists was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Maybe the Leone films ' moral is secretly nihilistic or desperate rather than collectivist. Maybe it's the Mafia calling the hired killer black. But I like it because it brings out everything which , as a Euro- pean , I've detested about Western mythology. HIGH NOON , whose screenplay 's criticism of Old-West sentimentality was softened by Zinnemann , is diag- onalist. RIo BRAVO, which is emphatically individu - alist, is levelist. Not that I' m arguing for a general correlation between individualism and levelism , or collectivism and spatialism , for reasons implied by my disagreement with Bazin 's suggestion that deep-focus is democratic ; CITIZEN KANE , although a critic ism of Nietszchean-liberal individualism , il- lustrates just how hierarchically individualistic spa- 54 JANUAR Y 1973

tialism could be if it wanted . So does Leni Riefen- and dispassionate, although this , in its context , produces something more like irony than deadpan . stahl. Sternberg 's camera is a cat, Hawks ' is a trotting I suggested earlier that diagonalists find it easier poodle. to expand into spatialism than levelers. But art is Obviously every auteur's style varies as an ep- capable of an infinity of permutations. Renoir's work is both markedly level and markedly spatialist. The oque's style varies. I wonder how many auteur critics diagonalist register isn 't absent, but it's rather would have distinguished MAN ' S FAVORITE SPORT as weaker than one might expect, particularly by com- Hawks' film on style alone (as opposed to content). parison with his compatriot, Julien Duvivier. Duvivier One might distinguish it from Tashlin 's treatment tilted the camera throughout an episode of UN CAR- of the theme, certainly; but from , say, Michael Gor- NET DE BAL, twelve years before Carol Reed tiptilted don 's? Having seen the credit , one can find Hawks Vienna. He brought the swinging camera back to in it; otherwise , I suspect , one would have to guess Hollywood with THE GREAT WALTZ , delighted the by content. Moreover, as even Cahiers knows by American public (against the Hollywood wisdom) now, Hollywood angles are often the cameraman 's with films using the short-story format of UN CAR NET at least as much as the director 's. So distinctions DE BAL, and eventually returned to France to parody aren't definitive-but they can be suggestive , and his own diagonalist leanings, or penchants, or bias , interesting . in LA F~TE A HENRIETTE-his recognition that , by 1952, diagonalism , creatively , was at the end of its tether. Internal evolution apart , diagonalism fell into eclipse during the Fifties , helped on its way by the I've suggested that through the Thirties the Hol- combination of several factors . First, of course , its lywood balance tilted to the level rather than the degradation by routine over-use. The coup de grace diagonal (a metaphor so hilariously confused that came from TV , whose thrillers are characteristicall y I won 't cross it out). Diagonalism's Hollywood hey- day came with the Forties. If one prefers stressing diagonalist in their angles , flabby in their cutting , VIXEN ! individual influences, one might look to the com- and ultra-Ievelist in their dramatic tone-to the point bined influence of Welles, Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, of implying robotically schizoid mental cond itions Harrison Duvivier and other immigrants. Welles's wide-angle (at least if one treated them as realistic rather than low-angles need no introduction , and of the others stylized; and though to link the two interpretative Page only Duvivier is relatively forgotten , although in his levels may be misleading , it may also be of some time he was looked on as second only to Carne use in diagnosing which kinds of psychoticism a and in doing smoothly and successfully what sensitive- culture encourages more than others). Cinema- Erica Gavin. but-clumsy Jean Renoir kept fumbling four times Scope made cutting softer and more complicated. out of five. It also pushed the cameras back towards long-shots , where diagonals tended to have a less emphatic One might think of diagonalism as a native effect , and where (as Bazin noted) the action be- growth , a carefully limited, extroverted , plain man 's came more synthetic and continuous. 'Scope was expressionism , rather like film noir lighting . Diag- succeeded by better-definition lenses and faster onalist sequences occur in Robert Wise 's THE SET- film , both of which pick up so much more detail UP, Anthony Mann's T-MEN , John Huston 's THE MAL- that the bold old simplicities of cutting have become TESE FALCON , Bernard Vorhaus's SO YOUNG SO BAD quite difficult to retain. In LA RONDE , Ophuls achieved (which I affectionately remember as having a de Santis influence) . Edward Dmytryk 's MURDER MY SWEET is diagonalist (and nearly expressionist) whereas George Marshall 's THE BLUE DAHLIA is very level. It's intriguing to imagine diagonalist and level- ist directors switching assignments: a Gordon Douglas version of THE MALTESE FALCON and a Hus- ton version of RIO BRAvo-a Hawks LADY FROM SHANG- HAI and a Welles THE BIG SLEEP-a Hitchcock GILDA and a Charles Vidor NOTORIOUs-a THIRD MAN with Preminger's very level style and a LAURA from Carol Reed 's creative, diagonalist period. Whale 's BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN is more diagonalist, Tod Brown- ing 's DRACULA more deadpanesque . Within Hollywood, too, of course , the level and diagonalist trends rarely existed in their pure forms . Thus John Ford is diagonalist in his films ' angles , but not in their rhythm ( \" spatialized \" by a Flahertian lyricism), or their dramatic tone (which counter- pOints direct dramatic confrontation by a certain mellowness). Sternberg is expressionist by decor but, and it's well worth stressing , his heroes often out-Hawks Hawks in their deadpan , just as his twists are terser and his mise-en-scene even slicker and speedier. His camera , for long periods , is calm FILM COMMENT 55

an utterly masterful and endlessly fascinating com- derstand the functional requirements of the genre- bination of (1) a throwback to impeccably formal- i.e., bad art isn 't necessarily easier to understand ized , smooth , \" well-constructed \" camera-move- than good art. ) Meyer's small casts and small set- ments as per Murnau and the early Thirties , and tings lend themselves to diagonalism , if only as a (2) a flash-forward to the camera-mobility revived solution to the problems of action in cramped sets , first by TV and then by the nouvelle vague, taking or in the director 's own home, or in bed . in its stride (3) a by-now more generally wide-spread stress on temps-morts, dilatory rhythms , and all In the English version at least, the dramatic mate- sorts of asides-which make for narrative and visual rial is stretched so thin , with so many hiatuses , that \" spatial ism .\" the most efficiently academic style could never have saved it. Maybe the ex cised passages included Seeing Russ Meyer set his whole film in a diago- details so subtle and compulsive that the tensions nalist key was at once nostalgic and hilarious. Hilar- and expectations thus set up transform the sub- ious because he applies it with about as much stance of the intervening passages-although I sus- imagination as a metronome. There 's someth ing pect it might be over-scrupulous to give VIXEN much delightfully surprising in seeing a porno artist work- benefit of the artistic doubt. But it's still worth ing in a genre which even Hollywood finds infra dig, looking at some of the themes which London audi- turning out an old-fashioned , good-little-student ences were kindly allowed to see. academic exercise. Much of the action takes place in and around a light aircraft , and with dreary pre- The film takes its title from the name of a sumptu- dictability Meyer cuts its bold white speeding shape ous young nymphomaniac who 's fond of her bush in whenever he wants to keep the visual rhythm pilot husband Tom but loves to cheat on him when going during the pauses which theory requires him passing hunks of man tickle her fancy by fancying her. If Tom-a tough , outdoor man 's-man-Iooks like VIX EN' to provide between the dramatic tensions and with Randolph Scott, it's no accident. The calm and Robert Aiken which to underline his clima xes. (As Hitchcock cuts assured virility which would guarantee survivability to a God 's-eye-view, Meyer cuts to a shot of the in the Old West is irrelevant to holding one 's own and plane everyone is in .) in the trickier world of domestic cheaters . A con- Erica Gavin. scious adieu to the sinking sun of the Code of the Hollywood would have worked out a subplot to West is emphasized when Vi xen 's first lover reaches interweave with the main one (maybe a comic one). for his clothes and a scarlet splash reveals them But a subplot requires a second set of actors, which as a Mountie 's uniform . Vi xen also has a Wild One Meyer presumably can 't afford. And maybe he feels brother and keeps taunting his buddy Niles, a lustful that the sex-film audience prefers a patch of bore- but vulnerable U.S . Negro who fled over the 49th dom which , at least, doesn 't distract one from the Parallel not because he's a draft dodger plain and concentration on sex which they came to see . simple (as Vi xen pretends she believes) , but on (Some such reason would also explain why London account of a more profound ambivalence about smut-hounds so patiently sit through sex-films all of whether his race 's real enemies are in Vietnam or whose clima xes are missing. At least they 're living the U.S.A. through a film where sex ual indulgence is frankly and consistently on the agenda . It's as easy for The explosion of all sorts of tensions is given critics as for Hollywood formula-peddlers to misun- a different direction by the sudden appearance of a rich and folksy Oirishman whose Celtic, flame-col- ored hair and green clothes suggest a fertility figure in disguise , whose engaging bald patch and whimsically paternal style suggests paganism 's an- swer to Barry Fitzgerald 's testy priest in GOING MY WAY (from Leo McCarey's lamentable Forties period) , and who looks like a cross between S.Z. \" Cuddles \" Sakal I and a Si xties Disney leprechaun. He also looks remarkably like James Robertson Justice 's irascible but lovable father-figure-bully in the English DOCTOR stories , which raised him to star status here-although whether that would register on Russ Meyer's audiences I wouldn 't know. But the foregoing resemblances aren 't insignif- icant. The star system is only the tip of a mountain of characterology, and a \" genealogical \" table of ethnic , temperamental and moral types in the Amer- ican cinema is as outrageously overdue as a shift of semiological attention to characterological types, and away from a preoccupation with syntax (the irony of which is that, apart from odd symbols like the fade-out-which is arguably not a syntactical device so much as a word-type symbol standing for \" once upon another time\" -the cinema has little more synta x than is possessed by the reality which 56 JANUAR Y 1973

it photographs , i.e. none) . At any rate it does racial liberalism with an uneasily relentless libertin- possess a locally highly variable system of charac- age, thus teasing everybody, and annoying nobody terological references and conventions enabling too much-racist puritans being disarmed by the old audiences to read at a glance enough of a character one-two of (1 ) Vi x en 's succulence and (2) the to be prepared for , or, better, surprised by, subse- knowledge that liberal immoralists are being teased quent developments within him. too . The double-edged satire is an old gambit, and Hollywood 's senility is betrayed by the extent to For the first few moments, at least, I cherished which it preferred only absolutely noncontroversial a real hope that (1) the Oirishman 's whimsy would issues. cool the rage of his fellow-non-WASP , Niles, that (2) his combination of affluence and fey wisdom It certainly recaptures that anything-goes happy would fascinate Vi xen , inspiring her to (3) goad him vulgarity which Hollywood had lost not so much out of his avuncular irascibility, so that (4) they'd because of the Hays Code (around which Lubitsch live happily ever after, a parado xical and satisfying ran rings) but because, as America went middle- mi xture of eupeptic and spankable young woman- class, Hollywood 's showmen developed gray-flannel hood and a complacent, randy and formidable old- minds and couldn 't grasp the meaning of the Ameri- world father-figure . Such an outcome promised fas- can success of Vadim 's B.B. (just as they hadn 't cinating hazards and parado xes all the way , grasped the meaning of the American success of particularly in his confrontation with Tom , as a more de Santis ' BITTER RICE) . By the Si xties they had familiar, equally likable rustic. cottoned on . Most Swinging-London movies were made with American money, and once the lessons Alas , the next twist exposes him as not so much were learned they could be applied to the domestic a big little green man from the flying saucers of scene, with movies like THE GRADUATE and CARNAL Oirish fairy folklore as a plain-clothes Red one, straight out of the Malleus Malleficarum of the Mc- KNOWLEDGE. During the Fifties almost the only VENU S Carthyite witch-hunters. Yes, he's a Commie trou- screen icon for the honest cynicism and vulgarity IN FUR S. ble-maker, so cunningly disguised that he talks Tom , which Europeans so long admired or deplored was all photos : Niles and Vixen into flying with him to the U.S.A., Marilyn Monroe. Perhaps that was her uniqueness, British only to pull a gun and order them straight to Cuba. and the public was the first to get the pOint-not Film At first Niles takes his side, but the Commie 's temper the showmen , who began by casting Marilyn as a Institute . gets steadily more despotic until even the Negro tragedy-provoking vamp and a child strangler. chooses freedom American-style. Ambiguity about any domestic controversy is maintained , though : Subsequently Fox had to call in another outsider, instead of addressing himself to the authorities, an indigenous one this time , Russ Meyer, to direct Niles slips across the perimeter fence into the pine the sequel to VALLE Y OF THE DOLLS. In VALLE Y, gray- forest, as if likely to retain his independence in the flannelized Hollywood (dimly aware of being at bay) great American wilderness. Iconographically at suggested that American starlets who make porno least, we 're not too far from the place where Cary movies for seductive and sneaky European so- Grant, Eva-Marie Saint and their CIA father-figure called art-film directors are likely to end up dead. crystallize their mutually respectful incompatibility The foreign director struck me as being an allusion in Hitchcock 's NORTH BY NORTHWEST. And oh , to Roger Vadim ; but the allusion to Jane Fonda those pinesl-cool , pure, virgin , wild , upstanding . was lost on Sharon Tate, who promptly married Meanwhile, Vixen 's husband welcomes a racially mixed couple aboard , and Vi xen , cured of her race- prejudice, licks her shining lips. Still , nobody 's perfect. We ' re just about back with the Mae West morality which briefly prevailed before the Hays Code clamped down . By now, mondanite has reached the backwoods middle- class ; th is is Lubitsch with the kid gloves (and knickers) off. Or from another angle , this is inverted soap-opera , i.e. PEYTON PLACE in a brisk and comic style, rather like the eight-paper comics of the Thir- ties. Or again it's Twenties De Mille without the moralizing. It's a bland BLIND HUSBANDS . It 's the North American backwoods acknowledging its \" Eu- ropean \" immorality. It's much less worried-and therefore much less interesting-than THE GRADUATE and CARNAL KNOWLEDGE . By centering on an im- probably one-dimensional nympho , it banishes itself back to the stag movie line. It reproduces the worst of Hollywoodiana by setting up intimate and moral issues which it ducks as unconvincingly as if Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly , aboard their yacht in HIGH SOCIETY, had suddenly been torpedoed by a Soviet submarine . At least its end is impish , combining FILM COMMENT 57

Roman Polanski. This resentment of (1) eroticism and Vincent Price (as again in the Corman Poe and (2) foreign competition adds up to an oddly series). It's certainly a surprise to find so much racial unshowmanlike refusal to accept box-office evi- and ideological material appearing in what is pur- dence as to the changing tastes of the American portedly only an erotic entertainment, and interna- public. It 's hard to believe that gray-flannel Hol- tional politics providing its climax! ' lywood had become so genuinely puritani- cal-though maybe it had converted itself to a genu- MASOCH'S NEW ASPECTS ine belief in the importance of being hypocritical , As for VENUS IN FURS , one can imagine how Stro- a position not easily tenable since Kinsey. heim in the Twenties would have pretended it was an indignant indictment of the decadence of the Aus- One can't but suspect other, less idealistic mo- tro-Hungarian aristocracy. Masoch 's novel , long the tives . Perhaps Hollywood sensed that , having all but butt of nervous jokes and victim of its datedly ro- lost its respectable family audience to TV , it was mantic style , may be due for revived esteem , at least now threatened by competition better geared to new, if Gilles Oeleuze 's book Presentation de Sacher-Ma- more diversified patterns, whereby the European , soch provokes the response in America which it has art-house, sexpot and roadshow markets all made enjoyed in France. Coincidentally or otherwise, the their different claims. Perhaps VALLEY ' S real protest filmmakers have inverted the sensuous themes is on behalf of Hollywood against the shift of Ameri- which Oeleuze establishes in the novel. The novel's can capital to England and Europe. Thus it would frost, stone and furs give way to the Riviera, speed- ally itself with a Populist puritanism. But earlier ing automobiles and sunsoaked skin . And where Populism had been much less timorous in attacking Masoch 's Venus (not Wanda, but the goodess her- banks and big business, and maybe its Sixties pitch self, in an allegorical prologue) complains of shiver- was queered by (1) the studios' dependence on the ing in these European plains-so bleak beside her warm and pagan Mediterranean-Oallemano's Se- VENU S banks and (2) fear of seeming Communistic. So it's verin is a blue-eyed, eagle-nosed Nordic strolling IN FUR S. left with no resort but tentatively trotting those sardonically through the Mediterranean sun . seductive, decadent Europeans out of the old-bogey One wonders whether the scriptwriters had read closet, feebly, since the film uses Hollywood itself Oeleuze's book. But even though the European to epitomize the emotional decadence within Ameri- movie business is rather less anti-intellectual than ca! But even Russ Meyer's bit of homegrown erotica the best-known , i.e. vulgar , aspects of Hollywood features an old world leprechaun-ex-machina are, it seems improbable, shooting having begun whose only purpose is to prove himself so single- inside a year after the book 's appearance. It's more mindedly nasty that everyone else can unite against likely a genuine concurrence, reminding one that him . As an oddball , older, culturally-alien intellec- even screenwriters sometimes understand what tual , the scapegoat here also conforms to the pat- they 're reading-even when they go on to reverse tern which , in Forties film nair, involved characters it. And maybe critical interpretations , insofar as they like Edward G. Robinson , Clifton Webb in LAURA , only partially describe a book (or a film), amount to rewriting it within the mind of its readers . ' Here 's an idea for the Hollywood or porno right. The traders selling At any rate , the film's Severin strolls in the sun , guns to the Red Indians were all in cahoots with Karl Marx. They severe and unsoftened. This sensuous inversion replaced good old capitalist-type scalp hunting (cut-throat competi- corresponds with two of the problems to which any tion) by guerilla warfare against stagecoaches, squaW-liberation , modern adaptation of Masoch must find an answer. etc., etc. Fir!3t, we have all read just enough Freud to be able to label , and scoff at-or at best adopt a compas- sionately clinical attitude towards-a love of suffering in erotic contexts . In its time it was accept- ed as a profound religious and romantic paradox (both of which of course it is) , and I'm not so sure that we understand the condition any better than those who innocently took Masoch for another Oos- toievski. But after a half-century of our culture's alliance between a puritan rationalism and two-bit psychoanalysis, not even a master-magician of movie style (which Oallemano isn 't) could hope to spellbind your educated moviegoer into allowing an identification with Severin to prevail over moral distance. Second , the masochist is likely to seem so weak , and his woman so monstrous or mer- cenary , as to lose much hope of audience identi- fication . In fact , there 's quite a lot of hope, and just how much begins to appear as one thinks back over a 58 JANUARY 1973

few Hollywood movies. None other than Cecil B. De self-centered even for that. He 's a toughie , and he 's VENU S Mille rises to the challenge in SAMSON AND DELILAH , cool with it. IN FURS . maybe because it's a film noir at heart-or rather, it 's the Old Testament's answer to the film noir, Just how calmly he breaks the social taboos that producing some quick and fancy motivational would paralyze most of us at our best is indicated footwork. Another set of solutions is found in ALL by a neatly-structured little sequence where Severin , THE FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS where, if George Hamilton dressed (by way of humiliation) as his Wanda ' s is distinctly slow in ducking as Susan Kohner has chauffeur, drives his white Rolls (reminding us of a go with her riding crop , it's because (1) he's taken his affluence, i.e. strength) , only to be overtaken by surprise and stunned ; (2) he's tough enough to by an easy rider . He responds by giving chase , and take whatever she can dish out; (3) his generous though we may jump to the conclusion that this is reflex is to study her upset rather than his own pain ; weak , childish pique and (given his expensive ma- and (4) he's one-up anyway, not having lost his cool , chine) unfair, we can all sympathize with road- while she's gone berserk. The mixture of frozen racers. We may like his competitive refusal to be insolence, petrified pride, and fatalistic stoicism also overtaken even though he's richer ; there 's a splen- inspires the basically tragic heroes-and heroine-of did extravagance about racing and risking a Rolls; the late, great Sternberg . The calm , self-frustrating and the unfairness of it attracts our sympathy in just strength of even the losers in MOROCCO and SHANG- the same way as Clifton Webb in SITTING PRETTY HAI EXPRESS reminds us that Marlene 's Svengali built attracts our sympathy by emptying a plate of por- his very influential UNDERWORLD around the gangster ridge over an obstreperous little baby 's head . as heroic father-figure . So Masoch 's Severin isn 't quite as impossible a hero as he may at first appear. Severin'S neat reply to hippiedom 's inverted snobbery develops as he draws level with the be- The film quickly picks up the clinical gauntlet. flummoxed cyclist, winds down the window, and Severin is familiar with the works of Freud , but differentiates his own philosophical and creative .,~ ' explorations from casebook cases, just as Christian Freudians shrug off The Future of an Illusion . Sec- . .... -:4~\"'. ond, Severin , afflicted by depression and rage (which he refuses to connect with his sexual oddi- (keeping immaculately on course) invites the other ties), has consulted a psychologist, and tells his tales aboard, cycle and all-thus winning the status battle, in flashbacks . To admit that his is a \" case \" spikes game, set and match . By the time his Wanda obe- the guns of all those who would dismiss him as diently begins to entice her new traveling compan- merely a \"case .\" His spiritual antagonist is a fat, ion , Severin has proved himself at once the more pugfaced alienist in a white coat , to whose rather competitive , dominant and hospitable, and less pro- repellent mixture of brittle compassion, angry meg- prietorial , of the two-the more calmly effective alomania and rationalistic moralism we naturally breaker of social and sexual taboos . That he starts prefer Severin's passionate and therefore more squirming internally with genuine pain as he human errors. Not that we uncritically identify with watches them in the rear-view mirror doesn 't deprive either. Under probing, Severin has to admit his him of dignity, since he's the manipulator, the pup- increasing impotence, and he ends up mad-which pet-master, God pained by the sins to which , by of course doesn't say much for the clinical psy- predestination , he urged mankind ... chologist either. Even if we can't sympathize with anything as silly as masochism , we have to sympa- In these changing times we 're not quite so certain thize with something as tragic as madness. Madness of what's manly and what's not. So the principal is forceful. issue in Severin 's progress shifts from feminine despotism of which jealousy is a symbol (in the The film counters our fairly natural contempt for losers (perhaps intensified by popular Social Dar- winism) in another way. The novel 's Severin finally opts for being the hammer rather than the anvil , and gets himself a meek and abusable mistress. But the film can 't keep this assertion of lurking sadism in reserve for the final twist, since it needs to procure our respect for the masochist by streSSing that he 's just as willful and cruel towards others as he is to himself. Thus , he's cruelly dismissive to the beautiful maid-servant who comes to his room at night, per- haps looking for rescue from her lesbian friend. In an intriguing episode not in the novel , he takes Wanda to watch a farmer friend set a colt to titillate a mare before releasing the stallion , whose vital strength must be conserved. He then suggests his wife use a young admirer in the same way . If he 's beyond any conscious sadism towards the pair of them , it 's because his masochism is too arrogantly FILM COMMENT 59

novel ) to despotism as a symbol of the infliction of Cobleigh and The World and his Wife and All. The jealousy (in the film) . The former is out of date , but last terms in our series precisely parallel VENUS ' S the latter isn 't , quite. Nonetheless, Severin 's highly ideological coda , with its long sad crocodiles sufferings become an extension of the anti-patriar- of mismatched and miscegenatory couples, con- chal streak in the New Morality. And Vadim 's B.B. templated by the bearded encounter-group instiga- in AND GO D CR EATED WOMAN is clearly evoked when tor with an ambiguously foolish or subversive satis- the film 's trim , amiable , narcissistic Wanda con- faction . Another leprechaun. fesses at the outset that she has never been able to love anyone man for more than a month . The At any rate , the West German film , by linking idea abounds in useful spin-off , enabling her to love masochism with permissiveness rather than with an Severin because he's a feminist who thinks women anti-patriarchal matriarchy, lends itself to some should be free. She then finds that freedom requires speculation about sexual pendulums swinging too her to frustrate her own love and progressively lose far over-from a puritanico-patriarchal sadism to an him , as his malady develops . Her suffering exasper- equal and opposite extreme , whereby a mi xture of ates her to the point of inflicting the authentic anomie and rationalist inhibition reduces the more cruelties he desires . At this point, masochism (how- hysterically aggressive sex to a state of psychopath- ever extremist) reveals its affinity with the New ic passivity . Durkheim and Mailer in their different Morality's inhibition of possessive jealousy. ways equate social alienation with aggression , but in highly manipulated societies it might equally pro- Permissi veness isn 't , after all , the opposite of duce passivity-just as rats in an overcrowding ex- possessiveness. Possessi ve ness needn 't be des- periment refrained from sexual activity, and apa- potic, being indispensible to any but a shallow thetically allowed their slightly less stricken fellows togetherness; and permissiveness may mask be- to gnaw away at them . VENUS trayal. \" I don 't care who you have \" is rather nearer In the mutilated version I saw , it's impossible to IN FUR S a polite indifference than the flattery of persecutory tell how far VENUS IN FURS has striven to parallel rage. And Severin 's \" I need you to have someone the no ve l's slightly Sternbergian mi xture of ultra- else instead of me! \" is both permissive and de- terse psychological interplay and the lyricism of manding , i.e. insulting and flattering . It leaves all masochistic anxiety-which , if Deleuze is right , Wanda's options open-without retaliating , and constitutes an important constituent of the maso- without abandoning her-in a manner all the more chistic sensibility. That mood presumably owes ingeniously bewildering since it is based on her own something to a wish-fulfillment , repetition- principles, and since his acceptance of them as- compulsion , a reenactment of the frustrations and suages the guilt against which, no doubt, her prom- anxieties (\"suspense\" ) which one would expect iscuity is a reaction . Doubtless his masochism is to find commonly contributing to the perversion of merely a counterfeit of permissiveness; but maybe children's sexual sensibilities. And one might well it's no more unflattering than the mi xture of infidelity , lay the stress on frustration and waiting rather than boredom and retaliation and strenuous dishonesty on the correlation with corporal punishment , com- which go on between Bob and Carol and Ted and monly assumed in England (a nd by Kinsey) . If pun- Alice and Tom and Dick and Harry and Uncle Tom ishment is voluptualized , it may be only because it is erotically preferable-as a contact and as a partial reconciliation-to certain combinations of anxious solitude and guilt-inducing contact. Such a formulation would , at least, be compatible with the extent to which corporal punishment flourishes in cultures where eroticized sadism and masochism seem to be rare . Similarly, in England , the conspicuous abandonment of corporal punish- ment has synchronized with an increased interest in \" kink .\" Maybe , given children 's obvious respect for power, a contributing determinant of the sadistic or masoch istic option depends on whether the parent of the same or of the opposite sex seems to have most, and how that relates to a patriarchal dominance (w hereby sexual possession seems an aspect of power) or to sexual equality (where power may be considered obscene). But the Freudian insistence that society abounds in parent-figures carryi ng some of the prestige of the real parents can be given sufficient importance to modify the other Freudian tendency to posit family relationships as sole determinants of sex ual sensibility. Neuroses may arise when the child is hard-pressed by dis- crepancies between his home culture and the soci- ety around . Thus , social rules and morality in an over-stabilized country like England would feed 60 JANUARY 1973

back as authoritarianism and frustration , as would relates the sequences to (1) his mood of vo luptuous competitiveness in America 's under-stabilized melt- suffering , to which he yields as to a Medusa 's ing-pots . Both social conte xts would presumably affect beauty , ( 2) an amoral transcendentalism no less male-female relationships much as they affect kind than the manipulative and unnatural mating to same-sex ones, to produce, depending on social subcultures, sometimes a high degree of ambiva- which man condemns horses, and (3) other miscel- lence (as per the film noir) , sometimes a mind bog- gling schizophrenia (as per the Hays Code)-and , laneous functions such as Severin 's surf-riding , of cou rse , as many responses as there are specific situations. Thus the old-fashioned , highly-stabilized which proves him coolly expert and manly amidst English situation produces low-key old-boy-net feelings , in which male bonding is assumed but perilous intoxications. That the suspension-or scarcely declared-whereas the melting-pots of America's alien and internal immigrations would rather diffusion-of normal dramatic confrontations produce more complicated and volatile mi xtures of competitiveness and friendship , exemplified by the and progressions is the product of this philosophical \" feuding buddies \" of so many Ford and Hawks movies. The interracial quasi-homosexual friend- angle (rather than a dramatic ineptness) is ships diagnosed by Leslie Fiedler may be only a special form thereof, with the antagonisms para- confirmed by the meditative impli cations of the phrased by racial exoticism , and the \" noble savage\" myth wishing inter-ethnic-group violence away. commentary's tone, by the discussions between A gradual move away from the classic Freudian Severin and Wanda and between Severin and the emphasis on childhood misfortunes is indicated by Peter Watkins ' PRIVILEGE -where Jean Shrimpton alienist , as by the frequent disdain of the dramatic discovers that Paul Jones has been flogging himself, presumably in disgust at the spiritual immoralities rule whereby general principles appear first and to which the capitalist establishment has been forc- ing him-and by Joseph Losey 's EVE-where Jeanne primarily as specific narrative issues. Or rather, the Moreau as the honest and lucid prostitute acquires a moral ascendancy over Stanley Baker as the mi xture of philosophical and narrative crystallization scriptwriter who stole his miner-brother's novel , thereby exploiting the suffering of his proletarian is more like that of, say , Hermann Hesse 's Steppen- brother(s) and acquiring a guilty social conscience. wolf than Strindberg 's Miss Julie. So much is missing from the London version of Oallemano 's film that it would be quite unfair to find Whether or not successful , the film 's mi xture of fault with it. But let us assume that most of the cuts center on the erotic enjoyment of flagellation , about lyricism and philosophy is an unusual one . The which British censors have been extremely sensitive since the Profumo-Ward affair . (Thus , in THE COUN- mixture of rich idleness, moral discussion , civilized TERFEITTRAITOR William Holden 's first glimpse of The Whip Girl sitting in her Hamburg window was cut , promiscuity, and masculine creatures of principle although their subsequent, somewhat equivocal, conversation wasn 't-presumably because the latter (who prove unworthy of the potentially deep or was necessary to the story, whose exposition ren- dered the whip-and-Ieather business too incidental decently casual fondness of emancipated women) to need explaining to children , whereas in the win- dow confrontation it presumably wasn 't.) What, to puts one in mind of Kast's LE BEL AGE , whose non-German audiences , is likely to be most dissat- isfying about Oallemano 's film is the fact that his masoch istic romantic proves ineligible for happi- masochism is rationalized by a philosophic purpose , a transcendentalism which , overtly at least, is more ness, and Rohmer'S LA COLLECTIONEUSE. All three idealistic than de Sade 's, since it involves a wor- shipful acquiescence in , and self-abandonment to , are films of arrested libidinal impulse, and of ungen- the cruelty of Nature . At any rate , an English or American film would be more likely to feel obliged erosity masquerad ing as philosophical aloofness to tackle the familial or social origins of Severin 's unfortunate condition . from the banalities of sexual possessiveness. Hence, the English critic who saw the film 's Ironically enough , were VIXEN 'S Tom to find out attempts at lyricism as merely Riviera tourism was partly wrong , I think (although they 're not very what was going on , his options would have included successful and they are indeed also intended to offer tourist interest). Nonetheless , Severin 's voice-over some variant on the Code of the West-which would be either anachronistic or sadistic-or some covertly masochistic or callous position . No wonder Meyer opts for a paranoiad irrelevance, although reverting to a disturbingly cynical joviality. Conversely, the German film capitulates to a healthy orthodoxy (by having Severin go mad) rather than some more challenging final twist (e.g ., the clinician might have persuaded his patient to adopt a more normal atti- tude towards sex and power, his own wife falls for this handsome romantic, with suitably ironic conse- quences) . As it is, the film seems to have suffered from a stalemate between a dramatic impetus and its transcendentalist urge-which perhaps provides a clue to some of the difficulties of the post-War German cinema. The troubled Twenties forced that tendency of philosophical generality into a sense of conflict which yielded expressionism (as its gen- eralizing lyricism) and specific dramatic issues. But the seeds of transcendentalism , falling only on the stony soil of affluence, yield only the stiffness and flatness of Germany's commercial cinema. There may be another reason: the German emphasis on patriarchy and power, so thoroughly instilled be- tween 1870 and 1945, and more \" democratic \" atti- tudes , leading to a constant recitation which be- comes , usually, banal ity of theme-but , in VENUS IN FURS , for once , originality and flatness . I vastly preferred it to Meyer's glib but phony dynamism , with its chicken-hearted leprechaunery. 11I1I1 FILM COMMENT 61

BOOKS differences and similarities of thematic answers.\" Fair enough . But what role do threads as they weave through the films the films play in this game? Are they the JEAN RENOIR: The World of His Films is almost identical to the \" grids \" of the answers , or are they the problems? 11111111 BY LEO BRAUDY English structuralist critics in Cinema : Doubleday & Co ., New York , 1972; hard- remove the numbered outline form and THE WORLD VIEWED: Reflections on the cover $8 .95 ; 286 pages ; illustrations , diagrams from the latter, and one is left Ontology of Film index. with a rather old-fashioned (i f functional ) BY STANLEY CAVELL REVIEWED BY critical methodology. Thematic models JONATHAN ROSENBAUM and overviews have their uses, of course, The Viking Press , New York , 1971 ; hard- but their illumination of the films can only cover $5 .95 ; paperback $1 .95 ; 174 I've often wondered why a dispropor- be partial and fragmentary because they pages. tionate amount of bad film criticism are not bound up in the process of comes from English teachers . One would watching them. Proposing or recognizing REVIEWED BY NOEL CARROLL suppose that anyone devoted to narra- systems after the fact gives the mind Noel Carroll is an Instructor of film at New tive, lyric and dramatic structures would something to play with , yet something in York University. have some sensitivity for and interest in the life of the films becomes deadened- movies , but look at the recent issues of particularly the private laws by which they Philosophy has been a perennial dis- literary magazines like Modern Occa- engender their separate identities . Cage traction and impediment to film study . sion s, Partisan Review and The New York them in a zoo as variants of a single That is not to say philosophy is necessar- Review of Books and see what they species and they wilt, grow indifferent. ily detrimental. (Film raises aesthetic usually have to offer in their \" movie Braudy tells us, for instance, how the issues the likes of which are best tackled chronicles\": bilious, solipsistic profes- \" barren beach \" with its \" hulks of ships \" with an analytic method). Rather , philos- sors who waste the ir time at EAS Y RIDER in THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH is similar to ophy is traditionally abused by film schol- and THE GRADUATE (or DEATH IN VENICE and the one in LE CRIME DE MONSIEUR LANGE; ars . This or that film is declared an in- THE GO-BETWEEN) and then conclude that that \" unlike Tom Keefer in SWAMP WATER stantiation of some \" philosophical \" film is a \" low art \" or an overrated medium or Sam Tucker in THE SOUTHERNER , Tod position : speculation about good and because these works don 't live up to the Butler finds no vitality or self-renewal in evil , determinism , fatalism , existentialism , claims of their publicists . Even a critic like his isolation from society \"; that \" water in the nature of time consciousness, etc. Stanley Kauffmann-who should know WOMAN ON THE BEACH achieves the malev- The net result: the suppression of the better-will compla in (in a recent FILM olent potential it has always had in Ren- experience of the film. Or again , there is COMMENT) that \" a list of memorable oir's films to be an image of social and film theory. Perhaps there is no other foreign films \" for 1970 would only run to personal uncertainty. \" One can agree academic discipline more superficial. three or four titles, implicitly making the with these notions each while one winces There are still arguments about whether assumption that he 's seen all the likely at the way Braudy expresses them , but films (especially documentaries) are candidates: a standard literary proce- somehow the unique bitterness and sav- \" true. \" What does that mean? Truth is dure , at least in America . agery of Renoir 's last American film fails a property of propositions, not objects to come across. Elsewhere, Braudy and events , not chairs or wars , and not Fortunately, Leo Braudy , an English glosses over the weak portrayal of \" the films either. teacher, shares none of the false snob- only .. . real Indian character \" in THE bery and little of the myopia about film RIVER by explaining that \" this sense of Stanley Cavell teaches philosophy at that tends to plague his profession . In alienation from the 'real ' India is surely Harvard. One might anticipate from Ca- fact , his study of Renoir's films is the most Renoir 's point .. . It is as if Reno ir has vell a book on film that would aright at complete we have had so far in English- mingled the isolated house of WOMAN ON least a portion of the conceptual morass judicious, well-balanced, harmonious THE BEACH with the family strength and of film study. This, if only through the and achieved. But the specter of English optimism of THE SOUTHERNER .\" Perhaps application of the logical techniques , and teaching nonetheless hangs over his Renoir has; but this fails to account for the principles of clarity and preciSion writing , and what might have been an the placement of the film 's central mes- espoused by contemporary Anglo-Ameri- indispensable study is instead a reason- sage ( \" Consent \" ) in the mouth of an can philosophy . Yet clarity and preCision able but limited one. unconvincing mannequin. are expletives that describe but a few sections of The World Viewed. The pre- The first and best chapter of his book Ultimately, \" the world \" of Jean Renoir dominant style is convoluted , fragmen- persuasively outlines some of the limita- is a literary notion that can only exist tary , enthymematic , opaque . One might tions of previous Renoir criticism: between the covers of a book; we can say labored or contrived , but that would \" bland \" or \" cultic \" celebrations, over- never see it on a screen . To get into the be as unjust as it is authoritarian . The simplified identifications of Renoir with essentials of what happens in a Renoir book is written in good fa ith and is difficult his painter-father, and narrow or incom- film , one must turn to Noel Burch 's analy- rather than being difficult because it is plete accounts of Renoir's uses of (and sis of NANA in Pra xis du c inema or Andre written in bad faith. attitudes towards) \" nature\" and Bazin 's of LE CRIME ClE MONSIEUR \" theatre. \" Making his way through all of LANGE in his posthumous Reno ir volume That the book is unnecessarily compli- Renoir's available work, Braudy skillfully (both scheduled for publication in En- cated is a criticism of sorts . But this only avoids each of these pitfalls, and turns glish ). Unlike these gentlemen , Braudy says the book is difficult and does not the latter question into the richest single refuses to get hung up on details . Andrew deny its seriousness . Admittedly , concern of his study. But by orbiting Sarris has desc ribed Renoir 's career as \" seriousness \" is an evasive word. Here, Renoir's films around four thematic \" a river of personal expression \"; taking it is used to register respect for the perva- chapters , he manages to minimize the the metaphor literally, Braudy spends his sive intelligence , wit and learning of a singularity of separate works , and the key time sailing up and down the river, with book that seems often wrong as well as subject remains \" the world of his films \" - no final destination : each observation often concerned with issues that are ret- a detailed map of Renoirville-rather than appears to be made only \" in passing .\" rograde in regard to the living tradition the discrete entities that compose this If only the boat would capsize , he 'd at of film . \" Seriousness \" is also tentative oeuvre. least get his feet wet. As he states in his enough to express appreciation for the introduction , his book \" sketches some book while allowing for reservations on Curiously, Braudy's tabulation of the problems and provides some tentative the matter of its significance as a work of film scholarship or philosophy . Unlike much modern philosophy , Ca- vell does not take argumentation , or, at 62 JANUARY 1973

least, the enumeration of premises , and knowledge to the extent that it enables to describe a range of uses of color in the rehearsal of proofs and counter-ex- one to accept the fact that \" the world films . An excellent analysis of VERTIGO amples , as a model of exposition . He is is complete without me .\" affords the basis for the description of discursive and digressive . Major points in the possibility of employing color to one argument may be distributed over Granted film (in general , excepting depict the conflict between private fan- several chapters . Consequently, the na- works like Kubelka 's ARNULF RAINER , etc .) tasy and the reality principle. But more ture of Cavell 's pos ition on a given issue is the re-pre sentation of the past: past exciting than his speculations on the use must sometimes be the result of the events , past states of affairs . To say a of color in films of and about fantasy is reader's speculation. \" world past ,\" however, can only be a Cavell 's claim that the use of color can figurative expression . To move from a imply futurity by displacing the iconog- Cavell calls his book \" a metaphysical figurative sense of \" world \" in regard to raphy of our mode of comprehending memoir. \" By that he means that the book film to a literal sense as Cavell does in interpersonal relationships . That is , we is an investigation into the conditions that regard to his claims about immortality and think of interpersonal relations dramati- his experience of movies satisfied. Why nature is to confuse the terms of the cally , in terms of confl icts and moral such an investigation is \" metaphysical \" argument. Here , Cavell seems prey to the positions . Black and wh ite film plays this rather than psychological or social is almost always illic it use of the word conceptual framework iconographically hard to ascertain . But the point is clear. \" world \" in aesthetic discourse . through a dramatic use of lighting, Tolstoy replaced the question \" What is through contrast, through shadows, art?\" with \" What is the importance of Cavell 's points about the feelings of through the literal opposition between the art?\" Cavell is concerned with account- invisibility and respite from the burden of values of black and white . Color can ing for the importance of movies . response offer a more persuasive psy- suppress this iconography of moral and chological account of the natural power psychological motivation. Human events In alliance with Bazin , Cavell equates of cinema . For here Cavell is in the do not occur in a framework of opposition the film frame with the existent, percepti- process of unraveling a contemporary and high contrast. The suppression of the ble field it reproduces . Bazin claimed that wish for anonymity : to be invisible , with- iconography of our way of comprehend- film re-presented a past, perceptible out responsibility . The form of the viewing ing people may displace our psy- state . Cavell concurs by claiming that the situation recapitulates the form of public chological method for evaluating interac- projection of a film is the projection of neurosis . tions. Thus, through color, a new way of a world (constituents of a world) past. seeing suggests a new way of appre- Film is not a copy of reality . It is reality Cavell also offers a theory of the de- hending action, a new world view. A color differing with the existing world only in velopment of film but not in terms of the film , and here one thinks unavoidably of respect of temporality . Like Bazin , Cavell elaboration of the physical possibilities of RED DESERT, can suggest the future or a claims that to watch a film is to witness , cameras and celluloid . Rather , Cavell future mode of apprehending human ac- through automatic reproduction , that defines the film medium in terms of the tion . which existed in the past. factors (such as stars and genres) that give significance or \" meaning \" to physi- From the American Film Institute Archives Cavell adds to a reconstruction of cal possibilities . Moreover, it is in the Bazin 's position the sophistication of or- sections on stars , genres, supporting THE AMBRICAN dinary language philosophy. He also sup- actors , and individual films that Cavell is PILM ports the Bazin position by means of a strongest. His manner of approach, in HERITAGE corollary argument. He examines the accordance with the aim to account for Foreword by GREGORY PECK claim that films are dreams in order to the power-importance-value of movies , is point out that the way we remember films , often thematically and psychoanalytically ~ abeautiful gift book o including the fact that other people may inflected in a way that is reminiscent , in o assist our memory , is more like the way the best sense , of Parker Tyler's writing we remember events than like the way on Hollywood . One example of this corre- o for anyone who o we remember dreams . spondence is that Cavell , like Tyler , emphasizes the importance of the matu- o loves the movies! o From the premise that films are past ration of stars across films . For instance, events (past states of affairs) Cavell de- of RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, Cavell cla ims Now one magnificent volume cap- duces several aspects of film (all films) \" the pathos of the aging cowboys (Ran- which he claims account , in part, for the dolph Scott and Joel McCrea) depends O tures the early days of America's 0 importance of movies . In films , a past on their being enacted by aging men world (or constituents thereof) is present whom we can remember as young cow- love sffalr with the movies. Told 0 to us while we are not present to it. Events boys.\" occur in front of us without the possibility o through more than 200 photos, many of our intervention for those events or Much of Cavell is based on the Holly- o In full color, selected by The Amerl- 0 actions as such terminated in the past. wood sound tradition , but he is also con- This condition of viewing a past world versant with , at least, the \" classics \" of can Film Inslltute and beckground (the world viewed), Cavell asserts , other traditions . He writes well on THE satisfies certain human needs and fanta- GRAND ILLUSION . He ex plicates the last o explanations recalling the film 0 sies and makes possible recognitions shot of the film , the escape into Switzer- about the self. Films satisfy the desire for land , by describing the film in terms of greats of yesterday . . . from W. C. 0 invisibility; we can see the world on film borders-between classes , between while unseen by it. Also , film allows us countries , between Jew and Gentile. In o Fields, Mary Pickford, Frank Capra, to view the world without the burden of the last shot , the border is physically response . Film realizes the wish for im- represented as an imaginary thing , an LJ Paul Robeson, Thomas H. Ince to 0 mortality because we observe a world illusion . The two French prisoners tra- from which we are absent. And finally the verse a line that is invisible against the Michael Curtlz and many, many situation of viewing makes possible our white snow . But it is a matter of life and acceptance of the world as separate from death . Hence, the grand illusion-to be- o more.. . as well as the treatment 0 us for film shows us that the world is lieve that divisions between people are coherent and that nature survives without mere illusions. of Blacks and Indians In films and 0 our presence . From this , Cavell surmises , that film implies the possibility of self One of the most interesting chapters o the development of techniques that is the one on color. Here Cavell attempts o brought sound and color to the 0 movies. o 184 pages , index , 200 photos (many 0 o in color), printed on rich, elegant 0 paper, deluxe gift cloth edition in o handsome silver sleeve box, 517.50; 0 paperback edition, 54.95 . o Order NOW at your bookstore or 0 ~ ~acr,oiis bhOO~S ltd. ~ u 2400 17th St ., N.W., Wash ., D. C. 20009 0 oo FILM COMMENT 63

A major weakness in Cavell , indeed THE BRAKHAGE LECTURES: George of an oral history. Melies, David Wark Griffith, Theodore Brakhage approaches the filmed the weakness that makes his work prob- Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein images as if they were literal ghosts of lematic in regard to placing it in the BY STAN BRAKHAGE , Foreword by their makers with the potential to reveal Robert Creeley deep-seated psychological origins, for context of contemporary film aesthetics \" an art leaves a record of just exactly The Good Lion, Chicago, 1972; softcover this-and very little else-just exactly this or criticism, is its failure to consider the $4.50; 106 pages, illustrations. process of traumatization before, during, and very shortly after being born.\" corpus of films of New American Cinema. REVIEWED BY PAUL S. ARTHUR Consequently, we are offered a series of Paul Arthur has written about film for stories, to \" extricate the Fates,\" woven This failure , moreover, is surprising on Artforum . from wildly disparate sets of corre- spondences: the affective conflicts be- two counts for Cavell agrees there is a The title of this volume , The Brakhage tween associations in a full name (who Lectures, maintains an insistent, if ulti- except Brakhage would find \" War\" need for the recreation of the film medium mately misleading , double irony; that its smack in the middle of David Wark subject matter is identical with its author , Griffith), physical resemblances (\"none and because Cavell is a man thoroughly and that the formal density and reliance till now have thought to look at the like- on semantic trickery would render these ness between Marie's [Falconetti 's] fea- learned in the tradition of modernism in \" lectures\" incomprehensible in spoken tures and Dreyer's own \" ), bizarre literary form . But while it is undeniable that Brak- parallels (the use of portions of Hans painting . Thus , it is anomalous that Cavell hage fastens only on those aspects of Christian Anderson 's stories in counter- Melies, Griffith, Dreyer, and Eisenstein point to the development of Dreyer's fails to take cognizance of the aspirations that coincide with , find root in , his own career) . obsessions and aspirations , it is equally of filmmakers experimenting with the re- true that the work of each filmmaker His imagination ranges over vast areas emerges with a sense of inevitability quite of artistic motivation, suggesting links creation of their medium in terms of the outside the behest of any \" critical \" meth - between Griffith and Gertrude Stein and odology. And the loosely imagistic form, Scarlatti , explodes small , seemingly indif- tenets of modernism. At this point in the the at times incantatory rhythms , the in- ferent facts-such as Dreyer 's early ca- vocations of magic , and use of historical reer as a journalist-into compelling met- history of film , it seems impossible to phenomena to bolster purely fictional aphors for a whole series of formal suppositions , all evidence the workings choices . Brakhage is capable at once of speak theoretically about film without opening canyons of speculation with a single remark-\" One might best see this considering the living, working avant- mastery of image by projecting INTOLER- garde. This gap in Cavell makes much of his theorizing appear anachronistic . Philosophically, it is perhaps even more difficult to situate The World Viewed. It is not the application of analytic philosophy to film aesthetics that the discipline stands in need of. Nor are the terms of argument it employs the familiar concerns of Anglo-American aesthetics. Rather the book is more of the nature of a meditation : about movies, painting , art, about motives, needs . It is hard to say what the book is. It is easier to say it is alternately challenging , mystifying, in- furiating , wrong , engaging, daring, pro- vocative. 11111111 Now film makers can learn from one of the world's great directors, KING VIDOR, the cinematic principles and techniques that the creator of The Big Parade, Street Scene, Our Daily Bread, Duel in the Sun, and other landmark films has discovered and developed in a career which spans the entire history of film making. KING VIDOR on FILM MAKING \"It is the work of an artist beckoning to every artist who will follow him into the most complex and rewarding of all the arts today.\" - ARTHUR KNIGHT in the Introduction mIMcKAY\\With 32 photographs' $6.95 64 JANUARY 1973

ANCE out-of-focus-it is the first film made became the first film artist to believe in ply said that there is a unity of vision , an which would survive such treatment and totem worship-to create a dance of ani- hold itself up\" -and excising the most mal identification around the fire of movie attention to the eyes, to the act of looking , elaborate readings from minute filmic screen: and to release this fearful energy, passages-the exegesis of every gestural he created fast-cutting.\" which bodies forth swells of the most nuance and detail of costume in Eisen- steins's appearance as the Priest in As if not content with the activities of lyrical description: fictional biography, psychoanalysis , and POTEMKIN . close textual reading, these essays are The actors and actresses often be- studded with commentary on politics , There are certain idiosyncrasies, sexual and otherwise ,-Eisenstein at war came as if suddenly spot-lighted in the \" traps of consciousness, \" displayed in with \"this white-collar corps , this largest these essays which engender reserva- collective with narrowest objective in the attempted escape from prison of each tions. The persistent reduction of black history of the world \" -reflections on and white areas of an image to embodi- creativity-\" for the muse-force only uses his-or-her-se/fand/ orthe acts / theftofan- ments of \" good \" and \" evil\" is always 'reason ' . . . feeds on it from inside out , problematical regardless of the complex- destroying it while assuming its logical other's soul: their (photo-screened) faces ity with which he maps their opposing shape.\" These diversions, if you will , strategies (one is struck by the suspicion function as structural parallels to the often went blank for an instant (in that Brakhage, one of the first truly origi- overriding psychological conceit, that of nal colorists in film history would have schizophrenia , of an artistic personality response to an unrecorded director 's difficulty explicating a filmmaker of similar compounded through divisions based on pursuit). There is, as well , a willingness family , religion , geography, cultural heri- command) and therefore took on (as to propose political excuses for the public tage . Stylistically , this metaphor is articu- unpopularity of formal unevenness of lated by all manner of punning , by illuminated) looks of real looking, actual specific films: (on INTOLERANCE) \" Even separating roots from prefixes-\"George those Americans who most want to look hopes to have power over her equal to searching for expression, action, as if at it find themselves as if looking straight her necessary ability to re-member and into the sun: they shade their eyes there- as Mother, then, to re-store him \" -by the each were possessed of an inner god- from it . .. all its timely truths of national use of a ubiquitous slash , (that prose self-evidence.\" And the kind of schemat- analogue to visual superimposition), join- consciousness (as they had been by ic Freudian linkage unraveled between ing two diffuse words or phrases into a Eisenstein's birth trauma (\" he was born single unit of sense . David's voice) which drove them inside out of a broken bag of streaming water\" ) and the high filmic incidence of death-by- Although there is ample evidence for out. David thus fathered Western tradi- water labors uneasily alongside pas- the citation of prose equivalents to Brak- sages of arresting revelation : \" Thus he hage 's cinematic devices, it is most sim- tional fatality into the movies . .. Brakhage continues to evolve in a state of infinite regressions-encompass- ing all chronological metaphors of sight , all stances toward technique , subject matter, the relation of camera to self, all attempts at aesthetic formulation . In this group of \" talks, \" he selects a point on the field of what is known (the films , small reserves of historical fact) and chooses another just beyond the horizon-line of probability. The terrain described by some mythical intersection of extensions of these two loci constitutes the well- spring of all exploration. The method by which that intersection is achieved can only be considered as radical. 11111111 New Catalog NOW AVAILABLE ~ Zw :E :oE () :E ..J ii: oc 'E Q) E Q) 1/1 I'll Q) ..Q. 1/1 ..Q) ;1/:1 Q) > 'C I'll g ~lluFi Enlerla,nmenr \" om CI Transame\"ca Corpora/IOn C I\".f'~FOR FURTHER INFORMATION WRITE OR PHONE : 729 7th AVENUE , NEW YORK , . , . . . , N.Y. 10019 (2 12) CI 5-6000 FILM COMMENT 65

• GROVE PRESS • THE COMPLETE GREED The Complete Greed consists of of Erich von Stroheim COMPILED AND ANNOTATED WITH A hundreds of photographs (most of them FORWARD BY HERMAN G. WEINBERG : FILMS ON : Arno Press, A New York Times Company, reproduced close to their original size) 1972; hardcover $50.00; illustrated , pages unnumbered. arranged in a continuity that appro xi- • SEXUAL • REVIEWED BY LEWIS JACOBS mates the order of Stroheim 's screen- Lewis Jacobs most recently edited and wrote the introduction to The Compound play. Of the 378 photos used to \" story- Cinema: Selected Writings of Harry Alan •• BEHAVIORThe needs of Women: •••••• Potamkin which was published by Teach- board \" the film , 208 represent scenes • I am Curious (Yellow) ers' College Press, Columbia University • I am Curious (Blue) in Fall, 1972. that were eliminated by the Hollywood •• Something Different Mention the motion picture GREED to editors and have never been seen before a student of film history and the response will be a swift turning of memory to an by the public . These are clearly identified outstanding work made in 1921-23, by one of Hollywood 's most outstanding and and marked as \" cut\" from the present controversial directors. Erich von Stro- heim . This film , held in high regard as an shortened version of the film . Captions artistic undertaking, suffered the ill-fate at its conc lusion of almost total mutilation under the photos , printed in two different by its producers. Because of the direc- tor's distinguished reputation based on type faces, make clear the distinction a record of unusual films , the slashing of this motion picture first from 42 reels between the words taken verbatim from to 18, then further reduced to 10 against ~I The Gay Life: I~ von Stroheim 's will , represented a com- the screenplay and from the novel Mc- The Queen plete usurpation of creative power by Scorpio Rising commercial management. The film's van- Teague upon which the film GREED was dalism became a cause celebre, a symbol of \"Hollywood's\" seizure of creative con- based . An additional 52 candid shots of trol frozen into history as a prime example of the relegating of the director, writer, the cast, crew and director, taken in star , to mere lackeys in production. various locations and situations during Now almost half a century later, when :1 Sexual Politics: I: the heat and excitement of what GREED the production , contribute an informal Tricia's Wedding was meant to be has long since been •••••••••• distilled , and only the truncated version account of the labors and dedication of • Unconventional remains , a surprising new effort in the • Sexual Behavior: form of a book , attempts to redress in Stroheim and his co-workers . In a • Radical Sex Styles part , the mutilation as far as it is possible • S-M to do so on the printed page . This attempt thoughtful foreword , Weinberg examines •• Suppressed Classics: to reconstruct the \" original\" Stroheim • Un Chant D' Amour picture between the covers of a book, is the various and often contradictory a unique and remarkable effort. It was Fuses undertaken by Herman G. Weinberg an aspects of Stroheim's character, supplies eminent motion picture critic and histori- •• Flaming Creatures an , who in 1943 had written an index on the fascinating historical background to the work of von Stroheim for the Index Series of Supplements for Sight and the casting , production and eventual fate Sound. Since the original negative of GREED had long since vanished , Wein- of GREED, and enlarges the perspective berg searched for \" stills \" made during its production . It was common practice in which Stroheim 's mutilated work can in those days to take photos of nearly every scene of a screenplay at the time be viewed. of its shooting . These photos were in- tended for reference in case a scene had An impressive volume , Weinberg has to be re-shot and , ultimately used for publicity. Weinberg worked indefatigably brought both an uncommon scholarship at finding photos of the missing portions of the film to restore what had been and devotion to the tantalizing task he deleted until finally he recreated the orig- inal components of GREED 'S structure. undertook in the problem of GREED ' S res- Now this book that has resulted throws a truer light on the legendary work called toration . His extensive knowledge of by many, \"one of the greatest films of all time. \" Stroheim and his work , which according to the late film archivist Richard Griffith , \" exceeds that of any other scholar in this =1 Sex and Society: 1= country and elsewhere \" has at long last Freedom To Love made it possible for the film world to get the benefit of his dedication to restore to wholeness a celebrated \" artifact\" of Joyful Eroticism: cinema. And as if this was not enough , =1 @ 1=••••••••••••• Erotic Cinema Circus there is also in this book an unusual ·• ••write for free catalogue quality of feeling , an empathy-salutary •of and admirable-that is reflected in Wein- •GROVE PRESS ••FILMS ON berg 's impulse . With rare sensibility, he •SEXUAL ••BEHAVIOR has made The Complete Greed the clos- • ••• est thing possible to an accurate pre- --- sentation of Stroheim 's original intention . •GROVE PRESS FILMS. This publication must be ranked highly among the out-of-the-ordinary contribu- tions of original research, to film history. The physical production of the book- oversize, elaborately printed, custom de- signed and expensively priced , $50.00- clearly places it in the class of publications called \" specials.\" This cate- gory unfortunately shrinks its market and raises a fundamental question: for whom was The Complete Greed intended? Its \" eye and purse catching \" elegance, which seems to equate significance with poundage and packaging , does it a dis- service. The exorbitantly high price keeps it out of reach of those most concerned • •53 E. 11 St., N.Y., N.Y. 10003 and appreciative readers for whom the (212) 677·2400 book was conceived ;and could best be served by Herman Weinberg's valuable contribution . 11111111 66 JANUARY 1973

JEAN VIGO The Hollywood o f 1916 was buzzing wit h excite ment. D. W. Griffith , f resh BY JOHN M. SMITH from prod ucing the mos t successful, in venti ve, and con trove rsia l fil m of all time , was busily constructing a gigantic set ... the largest ever de- Praeger, New York, 1972; hardcover $6.95 ; paperback $2.95 ; 144 pages , signed for a mot ion picture. illustrations, bibliography, filmography. ...D.W. Griffith's r REVIEWED BY PHOEBE COHEN lNID®1G1£i!tl\\N<lH£ ( :::; Phoebe Cohen is a gradua te student of -~ \" \" - film at Ne w York University. Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - Broken Blossoms - The General Good news: at last a book on Vigo in Passion of Joan of Arc - Chaplin in Reperrory - The Blue Ange::I Engl ish. Bad news: Jean Vigo by John M. Smith . Bat tleship FOtemkin (snd. or sid - The Gold Rush The publication in English of an entire lJ..EDIA INTERNATIONAL) book devoted to the films of Jean Vigo should be an occasion for celebration. THIRTY EAST JOHNSON STREET MADISON, WISCONSIN 53703 Unfortunately, we cannot rejoice over John Smith 's book. It does fill an obvious 608-255-3184 gap in the English-language literature on film . But the book's serious flaws vitiate When writing to advertisers please mention FILM COMMENT its potential usefulr'less . Smith 's book suf- fers from the limitations of a c ritical meth- This lapse of cr itical judgment can only An excursion into the od which heavily overemphasizes the be explained by Smith 's admiration for bizarre, sataniC, and thematic content of the films at the ex- Vigo 's film and his abhorrence of Ver- haunting world of pense of stylistic considerations. And an tov 's-which he criticizes for \" excited film phantasmagoria overabundance of unsubstantiated per- and enfeebling aestheticism \" and \" ex- sonal opinion distorts rather than illum i- cessive formalism .\" (page 28) His state- Exp lore with Chris Ste inbrunn er nates Vigo 's work. ment that the montage in A PROPOS DE and Burt Goldblatt fiftee n classics NICE is \" poetic linkage ( Kuleshov and of the incredible - rangi ng from The book consists of si x chapters: an Pudovkin, rather than Eisenstein)\" Melies 's A Trip to the Moon to Don introduction which attempts to situate (pages 34-35) is also debatable , particu- Siege l's Invasio n of the Body Vigo in the larger conte xt of film history ; larly since Smith never even discusses Snatchers - an d in cluding suc h detailed film-by-film accounts of each of the montage of the film per se. rarely viewed films as Freaks , Flash Vigo 's four films ; and a final section con- Gordon and Mad Love. Illustrated taining a chronology of Vigo's life, a de- The chapters on the individual films with more than 350 ph otograph s. scription of unshot material in ZERO DE follow a common pattern; a detailed de- CONDUITE , and the story of the vicissi- scription of the action with concurrent $9.95 , now at your bookstore tudes of L' ATALANTE in commercial dis- interpretations of the thematic material. SATURD AY RE VIE W PRE SS tribution . There is no systematic account of the 380 Madison Ave .. N.Y. C. 100 17 characteristics of Vigo 's style , nor any In the introductory chapter Smith dis- attempt to trace the evolution of that style cusses Chaplin , Sennett, Melies and Clair from film to film . Smith seems to be so at length , taking pains to establish their preoccupied with thematics that he bases connections with Vigo . But Clair is the his judgments on ethical rather than aes- only French filmmaker working in the thetic criteria . For example , he says Twenties-when Vigo came to maturity- about ZERO DE CONDUITE: \" That Vigo 's film mentioned by Smith in this section on is both expressionist and has children as Vigo 's \" essential predecessors .\" Surely its main characters might bring it to its one might expect a few words about , say , knees , were it not for the director's moral Epstein or Delluc . There is no indication robustness , his acute and sensitive per- of the nature of the French cinema of that ception of social values and his faith in time nor any effort to assess Vigo 's posi- the efficacy of human action with in the tion as a transitional figure between the limits with which it is presented .\" (page \" First Wave \" of the Twenties and the 69) Given this lack of concern for the realism of the Thirties. Smith makes only formal properties of film it is not surpris- one brief, deprecating allusion to the ing that dubious interpretations abound. existence of the Twenties avant-garde. Smith seems intent, for example, on play- (page 16) BUrluel is mentioned only fleetingly , surrealism airily dismissed in a phrase . It would appear the French films of the Twenties are totally ignored be- cause of the author's apparent personal dislike of them . Smith's prejudices also affect his eval- uation of the influence of Soviet cinema on Vigo. He acknowledges the undeni- able importance of the Soviet tradition for Vigo. But he seems less interested in presenting a systematic , balanced ap- praisal of those aspects of Soviet style which Vigo assimilated than in proving that \" The connections and similarities between MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA and A PROPOS DE NICE are trivial. (page 57) FILM COMMENT 67

ing down the satirical social-commentary FORTY YEARS IN HOLLYWOOD: of stuff which isn 't good enough. When Portraits of a Golden Age the studio asked me to do this score, I nature of A PROPOS DE NICE. He maintains BY ROMAN FREULICH AND JOAN just went through my trunk, polished up ABRAMSON that \" Vigo 's own description of the film A. S. Barnes and Company, New York, a few things and gave the studio the 1971 ; hardcover $12 .50 ; 201 pages ; il- as ... a 'social documentary' can lead us lustrations, index. score.' (page 73) The musical is probably THE FOX GIRLS CAN'T HELP SINGING though the authors, away from the most permanently interest- BY JAMES ROBERT PARISH with their usual disregard for detail, do Arlington House, New Rochelle , 1971 ; not identify it. ing aspects of the film : its psychological hardcover $14 .95 ; 722 pages ; illustra- tions, filmographies. Such anecdotes, however, comprise and metaphysical meaning.\" (page 27) HOLLYWOOD: The Golden Era only a small portion of the book. The vast BY JACK SPEARS majority of pages are devoted to publicity To establish these meanings the author A. S. Barnes and Company , New York , and production stills that Freulich shot as 1971 ; hardcover $12 .00 ; 440 pages; il- a photographer at Universal and Mono- engages in a festival of unconvincing lustrations, appendi x, index. gram. In these , with their careful illumina- tion and stagey poses , nostalgia is given personal interpretations which add little REVIEWED BY free rein . The same trivialization contin- ues with the intermixing of full page stills to our insight into the film. Similarly, MARSHALL DEUTELBAUM of Estalita Rodrigues, Dale Evans, Turhan Bey, and Jane Frazee with stills of Aaron Smith 's assertion that in ZERO DE CON- As perhaps the ultimate subjective Copeland, James Mason , Gloria Swan- response , nostalgia is an essentially pri- son, and Orson Welles. With the equality DUITE \"His (Vigo 's) methods are almost vate , narcissistic reverie in which one that such treatment suggests among the cherishes and delights far more in the figures , none has much value finally . exclusively those of the classic narrative personal memories and associations trig- gered by an object than in the object The Fox Girls is somewhat better. In- cinema \" (page 70) is at best an oversim- itself. As in so many of the reviews of stead of appealing to a nostalgic interest SUMMER OF '42 , for example , where re- in the ambience of Hollywood , Parish plification. The rigorous use of slow mo- viewers wrote more about their own se x- seems to aim for the movie buffs most ual initiations than about the movie, the interested in the details of individual tion , the loose, sequential construction of object that one begins with quickly be- stars. He devotes separate chapters to comes an excuse for other matters. Thus the biographies, careers, and filmogra- the narrative, the grotesqueries, typage, nostalgia finally subverts what it exam- phies of Theda Bara, Janet Gaynor, Shir- ines by displacing value from an object ley Temple , Alice Faye , Loretta Young , non-naturalistic sound are hardly typical to a set of private feelings; one judges Sonja Henie, Linda Darnell, Betty Grable, the feelings rather than the object which Gene Tierny , Anne Baxter , Carmen of what is normally considered \" classic provokes them. All of this is harmless Miranda, June Haver, Jeanne Crain, enough except when , as in so many of Marilyn Monroe, Sheree North, and Ra- narrative cinema.\" Finally, simplistic par- the recent books about the \" Golden Age of Hollywood,\" the cheapening inherent quel Welch . lor psychoanalysis and gratuitous judg- in the process, yet again , obscures the Parish begins with an interesting history and value of American films . ments on a host of filmmakers unrelated Those who have seen the films know that thesis which suggests that perhaps the they deserve better treatment. studio might be considered an auteur: to Vigo undermine the book's credibility. Fox, which specialized in lavish his- Nostalgia cannot thrive, however, torical spectacles, well-mounted cos- Now that film books in English are unless it can first trivialize the objects tume musicals, and topical message pic- before it and suppress any facts or details tures, required a stable of diverse proliferating so rapidly we hope that Jean that might suggest a greater value in the moldable personalities, girls who would objects than in the subjective responses fall into the studio 's chosen stereotypes Vigo will soon have another chance be- to them . In this light, one can understand and enhance the overall product. why Forty Years In Hollywood begins with (pages 11-12) Unfortunately, the buff's fore the English-speaking public. 11111111 the dubious reassurance that \" each of interest in detail for the mere sake of the stories we relate in this book has detail keeps him from proving the thesis . [Since the above review was written , an- some kind of reality ,\" that \" . .. all have Detail follows detail with an alarming ra- other, better, book on Vi go has been an authenticity-all are true to the spirit pidity and Parish makes no discrimination published in English: Jean Vigo by P. E. of Hollywood during its most flamboyant between the significant and trivial ones. Salles Gomes, University of California and narcissistic age.\" (page 11) The liter- There is little point, for example , in saying Press , Berkeley , 1972; hardback $8 .95 ; al truth , then , of the anecdotes which that Alice Faye \" attended PS 84 , where 256 pages, illustrations, index, appendix, follow does not matter. One anecdote in she maintained good grades and never filmography. -Editor] particular illustrates how important it is was la te .\" (page 152) So many inconse- to pretend that the subject at hand is quential details like this one, however, Now Available in 16&35mm unimportant. The story concerns the run through the book and create a bland the films of music that Jerome Kern composed for a flatness that blurs the identities of the Deanna Durbin film at Universal: stars. The net result is that the actresses RADLEY METZGER seem stereotypes of one another, re- While the film was in production, Kern duced to similar battles over fees , billing , The lickerish Quortet would often come to the studio to watch and vehicles , rather than individuals in- Comille 2000 and to listen to the recording of the sound tended by the studio to fit distinct, though Therese ond Isobelle track and background score. He was stereotyped roles . The thesis could prob- Cormen,Boby asked at one point how he came to write ably be supported if a writer were to focus l,oWomon film scores so quickly and easily. Kern, more carefully than Parish has on the The libertine who had little respect for the movies, relationship between a studio and its contract players. for complete catalog write : replied, 'Every composer has a trunk full Encore Films, 47 River St. In part, Hollywood: The Golden Era Wellesley, Mass. 02181 617/237-6650 68 JANUARY 1973

suffers from the same numbing flow of superficiality of the thematic surveys. refers to it as simply \" an elaborate west- details. Certain chapters-all have been Aside from the intriguing chapters on revised and reprinted from Films In ern .\" It is much more . In addition to the Review-are little more than a long string \" Mary Pickford 's Directors\" and Chap- of movie titles that reflect a common lin 's Collaborators ,\" the most important expressive use he makes of the Mojave theme: \" Comic Strips on the Screen,\" chapter is about the career of Marshall \" Baseball on the Screen ,\" \" The Doctor Neilan , best remembered now for his Desert settings, Neilan captures a grit- on the Screen ,\" and \"The Indian on the flamboyant living, his direction of Mary Screen .\" One , however, \" The Movies of Pickford in seven features , and his quip, tiness and appropriate sense of oppres- World War I,\" is a sensitive reading of reported in \" Photoplay:\" \" an empty taxi such films against the changing attitudes drove up to the studio today and Louis sion through lighting , camera angles , and of Americ a towards war, neutrality, and B. Mayer got out. \" Hopefully, Spears' pacifism . The remaining chapters , deal- essay will help to rehabilitate Neilan 's skillful close-ups . Here, too , as Spears ing with Max Linder, Norma Talmadge , undeservedly meagre reputation. One Colleen Moore, and several directors of film that merits closer attention is THE notes about his other films , the acting is American silents , more than redeem the COUNTRY THAT GOD FORGOT (1916). Per- haps because he hasn 't seen it, Spears quite natural. Neilan can convey emotion from an actor's back or slight gesture. Like Neilan 's films , Hollywood: The Gold- en Age deserves a wider audience than it is likely to get. Yet it would be a shame if Spears' book should be lost amidst the dross that proports to cover the same general material. IIIIIIII Best of If you are reaching for a career in NEW YaK EK)TK Film, Television, (llN\\ (E)TI\\lI\\L Dance or Theatre, A selection of check the school prize-winning shorts that has produced COMING APART ~ Birthplace of Andre Gregory's Obie-winning BRAND X Alice in Wonderland, which returns to the School in the fall along with a new production of Endgame STROKE f Scene of the 32d Annual Student Film Festival , Winner of New York & with $2 ,500 in awards San Francisco Erotic Film Festivals. f Winner of the national Walt Disney Filmwriting Also Contest for 1971 and 1972 REEFER MADNESS f Home of the Alternate Media Center, a funded research program in cable television plus 100 other titles from ~ Holder of the first doctoral program in cinema studies in the country BRESSON to PASOLINI f United States base for Poland's avant-garde WRITE FOR COMPLETE CATALOG director Jerzy Grotowski .alr ft._.rllnl i n \" !!!!- - ~ ~ =- === =::;;:====' ~~ School of the Arts. New York University IIIII liili Uiiil.i'iii Undergraduate work in Acting - Dance - Stage 121 Un ivers ily Place DeSign - Technical Production - Film _ Television New York, N.Y. 10003 - Cinema Studies (212) 675-7460 Graduate work in all the above , plus Directing and Drama When writing to advertisers please mention FILM COMMENT Degrees: B.F.A., M.F.A., A.M. and Ph.D. *; Certificate For information about all degree prog rams and re gistrat io n, write to : I IDavid J. Oppenheim, Dean School of the Arts New Yo rk Un ivers ity 111 Seco nd Avenue , Box E New York , N.Y. 10003 or telephone (212 ) 598- 2407 • A M and Ph D prngrams are In co njunct ion w ith the Graduate School 01 Arts and SCi en c e FILM COMMENT 69

LETTERS MOTION PICTURE LAB DIVISION To the Editor: A gross falsification by John Simon 416 West 45 St. New York 10036 and his very bad manners in his article, PHONE: (212) 245-8900 \" Ingmar Bergman \" (FILM COMMENT, September-October 1972), deserve being WRITE, WIRE, PHONE FOR PRICE LIST rebuked. As the target of that falSification and of an epithet there, \" idiot savant,\" to our readers payable in pounds, are available I would like to testify to the following : in Great ·Britain through Tantivy Press. Make cheques or money orders (1) When I published the statement Film Comment is now being payable to The Tantivy Press quoted by Simon-e.g. , that Bergman distributed to bookstalls in Great and please include your seemed \" disdainful or simply negligent of Britain. If it is not on your occupation: £4.40 for 1 year, stating an uncompromisingly personal bookstall, tell the manager to get £8.50 for 2 years. Remit to: Film version of anything \" -it was 1962 and the in touch with Moore-Harness Comment c / o The Tantivy observation was imbedded in an account Company, London. Press, 108 New Bond Street, of WILD STRAWBERRIES (in my book Clas- London W1 Y OQX England. sics of the Foreign Film) which rated Subscriptions to Film Comment, Bergman very highly as an art ·director; (2), if Simon insisted that those words of mine, even so, are a judgment that may stand outside its context, he should nev- ertheless be aware that in my book Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film (1969), I explicitly stated (having meanwhile seen Bergman 's masterpieces, THE SILENCE and PERSONA) that I had upped my rating of Bergman, writing that \"no one ranks above Bergman today;\" thus Simon's ver- sion of my view of Bergman is either deliberately distortive or inexcusably ab- sent-minded ; (3), the reason I say \" ab- sent-minded \" is that in a letter to me Simon once volunteered the fact that he had acquired the book containing my new estimate of Bergman; even if he overlooked the footnote stating it, he pre- sumably read there the long essay titled \" Masterpieces by Antonioni and Berg- man, \" which no impartial observer could read and still imagine I believed of Berg- man what Simon unqualifyingly imputes to me; lastly (4) , the quoted statement, competently read , merely points to a bad tendency in Bergman , not to any innate incapacity. Sincerely, Parker Tyler and don't forget The Hollywood Screenwriter A Film Comment book, published by Avon, at your bookstore. MOVIE POSTERS PRESSBOOKS-STILLS -PROGRAMS Actual Posters Used By Theatres Thousands of Titles Available CATALOG $1 .00 I Refun ded wi th order) The Cinema Attic - Department GT P.O. Box 7772 - Phila., Pa. 19101 70 JANUARY 1973

coming in If you're thinking Film Comment about saving money, think Camera Mart. Roger Greenspun Now for the first time CAMERA MART offers two complete on Dr. Mabuse; professional reflex 16mm camera systems at a special low price. Robin Wood on Bell & Howell I Angenieux Package Mizoguchi; List Price Bell & Howell Filmo 70 DR Camera .... ... $495. 00 AndreN Sarris, Camart Custom Filter Slot WI Holder ... ... $49.50 Angenieux 17/ 68- 12.2 Raymond Durgnat, Zoom Lens W/ Finder ... .. ........ . ...... $1200.00 Graham Petrie. Entire Pac kage Regularly Sells For ..... . $1744.50 Correction Our Low The last two sentences of Jonathan Price $99500 Rosenbaum 's article \" The Voice and the eaulieu/Angenieux Package Eye \" ( FILM COMMENT, November- December 1972, page 32) should have List Price read \" To have brought off such a scene Cinema Beaulieu R-16 Camera .. ... _. .... $1155.00 without eliciting a single snicker would Angenieux 17/68 12 .2 have required genius. Ye t given the scope of Welles' talent-and the rare energy and Zoom Lens wlo Finder .. . .......... $640.00 enthusiasm with wh ich he attacked his first Hollywood project-can we claim Entire Package Regularly Sells For . . $1795.00 with absolute assurance that he couldn 't have done it?\" Also , the instruction , Our Low \" Feature Wipe ,\" in the middle of the left Price $1,29000 column of page 32, should read Feather Wipe. STATEMENT OF OWN ER SHIP, MANAGEMENT For prices and more information write or phone: AND CIRCULATION (Act of August 12, 1970: Sec- tion 3685 . Title 39. United States Code) 1. title of THE CAMERA MART INC. publication Film Comment 2. date of filing 25 September 1972 3. frequency of issue bimonthly 456 W. 55th ST., NEW YORK, N. Y. 10019 • (212) 757·6977 4 . location of known office of publication 42 Dustin RENTALS 0 SALES 0 SERVICE Street Boston MA 02135 5. location of the head- Hollywood •••_DaD quarters of general business offices of the publish- cinematographer's ers 42 Dustin Street Boston MA 02135 names and filmographies addresses of the publisher, editor and managing editor: publisher and managing editor Austin La- Our superb booklet, The Men mont 42 Dustin Street Boston MA 02135 editor with the Movie Cameras, has Richard Corliss 214 East 11th Street New York complete filmographies of 75 NY 10003 7. owne r Film Comment Publishing Hollywood cameramen, and Corporation 42 Du stin Street Boston MA 02135 eighty photographs_ It's only $1 stockholders Austin Lamont 42 Dustin Street Bos- postpaid. Film Comment, box ton MA 02135 8. known bondholders, mortgagees. and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds. mort- gages or other securities none. 11 . extent and nature of circulation: actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date average number of copies each is- !..-r,~flto.r'f ·~r:.(JAF+oI sue during preceding 12 months ~t. 'C - . 'l ,~ ...~, a. total number copies prin ted 6215 6400 b. paid circ ulation 1. sales through dealers and carriers. street ve ndors and counter sales 2253 2532 2. mail subscriptions 2126 2349 c. total paid circulation 4379 4881 d. free distribution by mail. ca rrier or other means 1. samples. complimentary. and other free copies 500 500 2. copies distributed to ne ws agents but not sold 334 202 e. total distribution 5213 5583 686 Village Station, Brookline MA 02147 USA. f. office use, left-over. unaccounted. spoiled after printing 1002 817 g. total 62156400 FILM COMMENT 71

BACK PAGE Encore Films is the exclusive non-theatrical distributor of the films of FIAF's periodical indexing plan is now Radley Metzger and other Audubon entering its second year of operation. Films releases . Available in both 16 and The plan indexes about 200 film 35mm , the Metz~er films include THE magazines and distributes the index on cards. They have announced the LICKERISH QUARTET, CAMILLE 2000 , THERESA AND ISABELLE and CARMEN , BABY . Rental rates vary from $75 up. For brochure and exact rates , contact Encore Films, 47 River Street, Wellesley MA 02181. 607 / 237-6650 . . . ...... ... .... ·'lqJDOm!q paqS!lqnd 1\\01 ·~Dammoll mil.! o~ 8.laq aql.lasqDS ·SDOI.las ~aB THI S SP ACE CONTRIBUTE D 8Y T HE PUBLI SHE R SEND FIRST CLASS YOUR PERMIT No. 42100 NEW YORK, N.Y. MONEY BUSINESS REPLY MAIL TO COLLEGE. NO POSTAGE STAMP NECESSARY IF MAILED IN UNITED STATES POSTAGE WI LL BE PAID BY - It's needed. Gi ve to the college of your choice. IF IIL I VIIIC IO I VII VIIE IN IT I Now. box 686 Village Station Brookline MA 02147 USA Advertising contributed for the public good . ~m'o ,-c: :.ClO\"l l v 'C nnor l'o:J , r IT C' ---' 11\"'-'11 l a -,..., vo- o ,\"rt l ' ('Ol\". e,\\\" '\" come as 60-minute prog rams and are $125 each or $225 for both. The tapes Bolex has published the first issue of a new magazine for professional and have received excellent reviews in The semi-professional cinematographers and photographers. The publication 's New York Times , Rolling Stone, The title is Paillard Professional Photo and Movie News, and the emphasis is on New Yorker and other publications. what's new in equipment, applications and techniques. The magazi ne is Available from Top Value Television , box available free to Bolex and Hasselblad owners from Pail lard at 1900 Lower 630 San Francisco CA 94101. Road , Linden NJ 07036 . Students may also receive copies. 415 / 928-1686. Back Page deadline for the May-June issue is 1 March 1973. Se nd to Film Comment, bo x 686 Village Station , Brookline MA 02147 USA. 72 JANUARY 1973

[ ] UOlld!J:>sqns leMaua~ 00\"5 ~$ 00\"9$ ,(IUO vsn U! luapnlS [ ] UOlld!J:>sqns MaN OS\"S~$ OO\"O~$ 05\"0 ~$ u6!aJo~ ,(IUO vsn [spun, sn U! I!waJ aseald] OO\"S~$ OO\"l ~$ OO\"S$ $ aSOI:>ua I SJea,( £ sJea,( ~ Jea,( ~ (£lS ~ 46noJ41) SaleJ TH IS SP ACE CO NTR I BUTE D BY THE PUBLI S HE R outside of HAF.'f-n,,_ Pre-publicat ion publication price is $28.00 SEND sets of 1972 cards are also residents add 5% ta x). Write Walt Lee, Inquire of FIAF Periodical Indexing , c l o po bo x 66273, Los Angeles CA 90066. YOUR the Danish Film Museum , Store Those sending a stamped Sondervoldstrasse, 1419 Copenhagen self-addressed long envelope will MONEY K. Denmark. receive a description and sample page . TO New Day Films is a distribution co-op for Conference on Visual Anthropology: COLLEGE. films about women . Already in The 6th Annual COVA will be held at It's needed. distribution are five widely-seen Temple University from March 7-10 Give to th e college of your choice. prize-winning films: ANYTHING YOU WANT 1973. The conference will show stills , TO BE and BETTY TELLS HER STORY, both motion pictures , and video tapes which Now. by Liane Brandon ; GROWING UP FEMALE , portray the human condition . For by Julia Reicher and James Klein ; IT application to attend the conference, m\"Advertising contributed for the public good. HAPPENS TO us and WOO WHO? MAY write Jay Ruby, COVA, room 200 , South ('o ... .. c.'...~ WILSON , both by Amalie Rothschil.d. Hall , Temple University , Philadelphia PA Other films will be added soon. Rental 19122 . 215 / 787-7601 . rates are from $25 to $60 , all films are also for sale , and the filmmaker(s) are Film Comment is now available by available for speaking engagements or subscription , payable in pounds , workshops. Contact New Day Films, 267 through Tantivy Press . Subscribers in West 25th Street, New York NY 10001 . Great Britain and Europe may remit by 212 / 675-5330. cheque or money order (payable to The Tantivy Press) : £ 4.40 for 1 year , £ 8.50 Time-Life Films has begun distribution for 2 years . Please remit to : Film of thirty films made by independent Comment c l o The Tantivy Press , 108 filmmakers under AFI grants and New Bond Street, London W1 Y OQX fellowships. John Korty, Richard Meyers, England. Gerald Malanga, James Herbert, Bruce Baillie , Robert Kaylor and Will Hindle are Focus on Film is now available by among the filmmakers whose films are subscription , payable in dollars, through now available for rental and sales. Film Comment. Subscribers in the Rental rates run about $1 a minute. For United States may remit by check or a descriptive brochure and further money order (Payable to Film information , contact Non-Theatrical Comment): $5 for 1 year , $10 for 2 Department, Time-Life Films , 43 West years . Please remit to : Focus on Film 16th Street, New York NY 10011 . c l o Film Comment, bo x 686 Village 212 / 691-2930 . Station , Brookline MA 02147. Top Value Television (TVTV) announces Bolex has published the first issue of a the availability of videotapes on the new magazine for professional and Democratic and Republican 1972 semi-professional cinematographers Conventions. The 1 / 2 inch tapes both and photographers . The publication 's come as 60-minute programs and are title is Paillard Professional Photo and $125 each or $225 for both. The tapes Mo vie News, and the emphasis is on have received excellent reviews in The what 's new in equipment, applications New York Times, Rolling Stone, The and techniques . The magazine is New Yorker and other publications . available free to Bolex and Hasselblad Available from Top Value Television , box owners from Pail lard at 1900 Lower 630 San Francisco CA 94101 . Road , Linden NJ 07036 . Students may 415 / 928-1686. also receive copies. Back Page deadline for the May-June issue is 1 Marc h 1973. Send to Film Comment , bo x 686 Village Station , Brookl ine MA 02147 USA. 72 JANUARY 1973

The most complete and authoritative book on lilm in print MORE THAN 1,000 ILLUSTRATIONS-160 IN FULL COLOR This mammoth 544-page, 81/2\" noted author, lecturer, and X 11 \" encyclopedia was pre- director. The book contains: pared under the direction of two of the foremost film au- • more than 1,000 alphabetical en- thorities in the world-General tries including biographies of stars, Editor Dr. Roger Manvell ,head directors, producers, and techni- of the Department of Film His- cians; articles on archives and film tory of the London Film preservation, animation, the avant- School, and American Editor garde, censorship, chilClren's films, Professor Lewis Jacobs, cinematography, design and art, di- rection, documentaries, editing, mu- ./'\" sic, publicity, and screenwriting; scores of technical terms; national film histories of the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, Czech- oslovakia, Poland , and many other countries. • a chronological outline of key events in film history • a selected bibliography of histori- cal and critical writing on film • an important section on the growth of film as an art, an industry, a tech- nology, and a major social force • an index of more than 6,500 films • an index of more than 3,000 people THE INTERNATIONAL EN- CYCLOPEDIA OF FILM is the reference book movie buffs will read for fun , and every- one will cite whenever a dif- ference of opinion about any- thing cinematic arises. ------------------1. CROWN PUBLISHERS, Dept. FCO-173 419 Park Ave. South, New York, N.Y. 10016 • •Please send me . . .. copy(ies) of THE INTERNATIONAL •ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM . Enclosed is my check or • money order for $17.95 per copy (New York and New •Jersey res idents please add applicable sales tax) . If not • •complelely satisfied, I may return book(s) within 10 • days for full refund. •• Name _________________________________ ow at your bookstore, or use coupon to order • •• Address _____________________ • •• City_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ -------------------••____________ Zip