IEINI\" $1.50 75p.
MUYBRIDGE, MAN IN MOTION Robert B. Haas The \"godfather of moving pictures ,\" Eadweard Mu ybridge was a more complex and mys teri- ou s man than appears in film histories. His experiments led to incredibly extensive documenta- tion of movement in animals and humans, and gave him his place in the history of moving pictures. But this work was only a small part of Mu ybridge's long and colorful career. He beca me eminent as a still photographer through elegant studies of Yosemite and Central America. He was also the \"official \" photographer for the Modoc War, the last armed con- fli ct with the Indians in the U . S. Haas traces Mu·ybridge's family origins, untangles dif- ferent ve rsions of his work for Leland Stanford, and recounts the sensational events surround- ing his trial for the murder of his beautiful young wife's lover - Muybridge was acquitted. He also discusses th e effects Muybridge's work had on artists. 300' pages, 100 illustrations, $ 17.50 UIfS The Rise 5S0CI~TY and Fall of British A Structural Study of the Western Documentary . Will Wright The Story of the Film Movement Founded by The Western might seem to be not only a well loved but almost too well known film genre. However, most John Grierson earlier books on the Western have been su perficial in approach . This innovative study, applying structur- Elizabeth Sussex alist analysis to Western plots, comes up with novel dis- coveries about Western m ythic forms as they have Sussex has talked with all the evolved from traditional to contemporary patterns. important living figures of the It demonstrates that the analytical techniques of film movement about its com- Propp and Levi-Strauss can have workable application plex conflicts, frustrations , and to a major film genre. The films analyzed are top- missed chances. Her account is grossing Westerns from 1930 to the present. Among tempered, critical, and knowl- the many artistically outstanding films included are: edgeable. The book puts all Stagecoach, Shane, The Searchers, H igh Noon, Johnny previous studies of documen- Guitar, Rio Bravo, The Professionals, True Grit, The tary into a new perspective, and Wild Bunch, and others. will be required reading for anyone concerned with the 232 pages, $10.00 subject. 256 pages, $10.00 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley· Los Angeles· New York· London
FILIVI C IO IMIMIEINIT published by THE FILM SOCI ETY OF LI NCOLN CENTER VOLUME 11 NUMBER 6 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975 STAFF Fassbinder, p. 5 CONTENTS editor Journal RICHARD CORLISS Telluride/Elliott Stein page 2 assoc iate editor BROOKS RILEY Reflections in a Broken Glass page 4 director of finance & production SUZANNE CHARITY Rainer Werner Fassbinder by Manny Farber and Patricia Patterso n graphic design page 5 GEORGE SILLAS Fist-Right of Freedom SUSAN DOBBIS by Roger Greenspun page 8 contributing w riters Why H err R. Ran Amok RAYMOND DURGNAT by John Hughes page 11 STEPHEN FARBER Fassbinder interview ROGER GREENSPUN by John Hughes and Brooks Ril ey JO NATHA N ROSENBAUM page 14 RICHARD ROUD Douglas Sirk ANDREW SARRIS Mel o Maestro by James McCourt AMOS VOGE L page 18 ROBIN WOOD Fassbinder on Sirk page 22 co ntributing editor STU ART BYRON New Cinema at Edinburgh by Robin Wood advertising manager page 25 TONY IMPAVIDO Midsection resea rch assistant The Industry: Wayne Kabak on Four-Walling MARY COR LI SS page 30 New York Film Festival: reviewed Th e op inions exp ressed in FILM COMMEN T by Manny Farber and Patric ia Patterson are those of th e individual aut hors and do no t page 32 New York Film Festival : revi ewed by Elliott Stein necessa ril y represe nt Film Society page 35 of Lin co ln Center poli cy or the opinions Television : Richard Corliss on Media Kidnappings page 38 of th e ed itor or starr of th e magazi ne. Independents: Amos Vogel on Ethnographic Films page 39 FI LM COMMEN T, November-December 19 75, vo lume 11 number 6, publ ished bimonthly by th e Film Society of Li ncoln Center, Ken Russell 1865 Broadway, N.Y. 10023 USA. by Stephen Farber page 40 Second c lass postage paid al New Yo rk, New York and addi t iona l mailing New Cinema in Eastern Europe offIces . Copyri ght © 19 75 by The Film Society of Lin co ln Center. All ri ghts by Graham Petrie reserved. Thi s publi ca tion is full y protected by domestic and interna ti o nal page 48 co pyri ght II is forb idden to dupl ica te an y pa n of Ih is publicat ion in any Marguerite Duras way wi lhaur prior w ritten permi ssio n from th e publi shers. interviewed by Jan Dawson page 52 Subscription rates in the United States: $9 (or six numbers. $17 for twelve numbers. El sewhere: $10.50 (or six Books numbers. $20.00 for twe lve numbers. payable in US funds on ly. New Gerald Weales on the Pyramid movie series subscribers please include you r occ upation and zip code . Subscripti on page 58 and ba c k issue co rrespondence: FI LM COMMENT . 18 65 Broa d way. BookMarks ew York , N .Y. 10023 USA. a column by Richard T. Jameson page 60 Edito rial correspondence: FILM COMM ENT, 186S Broadway, New York, NY 1002 3 USA. Please Back Page page 64 send manusc ripts upon reques t only and include a stamped self-addressed envelo pe. Microfilm ed it ions ava ilable from University Microfi lms. Ann Arbor M I 48106. Print ed in USA b y Acme Printing, Medford, MA . Di stribut ed in the U SA by Eastern News Compan y. t 55 West 15th Street, New York NY 10011 . Interna ti ona l distribut ion by Worldwide Media Service, 386 Park Aven ue South, New Yo rk . NY 10016 USA . FILM COMM ENT part icipates in the FIAF peri odica l Indexing pl an. ISSN: 0015-11 qx . library of Co ngress card number 76-498. on the cover: Georgina H ale in Ken Russell's MAH LER (ph oto : MaMA/Film Stills) on this page: Hanna Schygulla, Wolfgang Schenck, Karl- H ei nz B6hm in R.W . Fa ssbinder's EFFI BRIEST (photo: jan Dawson); Douglas Sirk and Do ro thy Malone on set of THE TARN ISHED ANG EL S (photo : H owa rd Mandelbaum); Robert Powell in Ke n Russell's MAHLER (photo : MOMA) ; Claude Mann and Delphine Seyri g in Ma rguerite Duras' s INDIA SONG (photo: N.Y. Film Fest iva l).
42nd St. under yet a third (BORN TO KILL). was sorry to miss it, but it conflicted with the screening of a Technicolor print of Barely a few minutes into the first reel, its SWEETHEARTS . Elliott Stein protagonist, Warren Oates, makes a vow \"In Memoriam: Technicolor.\" This from TELLURIDE of silence to be maintained until one of his program enthraUed and depressed. De- fowls wins a championship. This does pressed, because it was commemorating JOU~ occur during the last reel; the device may the demise of the one remaining Techni- have worked in the Charles Willeford color processing plant in this country. We saw a radiant test of Katharine Hepburn novel (also did screenplay), but Oates's made in 1934 for a Joan of Arc film never produced; an incredible clip of Dolores del NALS first-person voiceover throughout the pic- Rio lolling in a jungle pool, attended by ture makes for a narrative both cryptic and voyeur dinosaurs; an impeccably pre- crippled: it doesn' t work as an action pic- served three-strip Technicolor copy of Selznick's THE GARDEN OF ALLAH . Sad ture, nor is it involving enough as an inner proof was supplied that today's color films are destined to become day-after-tomor- study. Oates does what he can with the row's faded blobs: the Charity Ball se- quence from GONE WITH THE WIND was first part-a good deal; Millie Perkins and Troy unspooled in the original, full-blooded Technicolor version, then continued as the Until Machu Picchu and Mount Fuji film Donahue sit around drinking coffee in film is currently exhibited, on Eastman stock. The difference in color quality was festivals see the light, Telluride, a spectacu- Georgia and do not help much . As a slice awesome. lar wedge of a town 10,000 feet up in the of grotesque Americana, COCKFIGHTER has Ivan Passer's ACE UP YOUR SLEEVE re- ceived its American premiere. Omar Sharif San Juan Mountains of Colorado, will re- more going for it than HeUman's TWO LANE appears as a shady Viennese stockbroker, Karen Black is some sort of femme fatale, main the most beautiful and altitudinal of BLACKTOP, but lies several notches down less photogenic than the Austrian Alps where the story is set. The picture seems to such events. The supporting program con- from his two unusual early Westerns. have been intended as a kinky caper spoof, yet another third-rate example of which sists of: waterfalls, gold mines , \" cribs\" There were three midnight specials: a we need about as much as another Nixon administration. No one admires INTIMATE (ex-brothels now restaurants) , nearby program of clips from musicals, larded LIGHTING more than I do; I was most recep- tive to Passer's first and fine American prehistoric Indian apartment houses, ath- with fancy dancing and singing by ebul- film, BORN TO WIN. To find ACE UP YOUR SLEEVE simply deplorable is therefore no letic daredevils jumping off heights in lient Albert Johnson; a \"Poetic\" film pro- pleasure. hang gliders, and UFOs (Adrienne Mancia gram elucidated with acumen by Stan The festival was a great popular success. of the Museum of Modern Art Film De- Brakhage; and an all-night \"HoUywood All tickets were sold, all rooms in town were booked well before the opening- partment was greeted by a flying saucer Babylon\" show hosted by Kenneth Anger. indeed, even before the programs had been announced. Lest success become the even before her bags were unpacked) . It consisted of features or excerpt$.. with handmaiden of complacency, it should be noted that the projection of films, dreadful Events organized by the Telluride trium- stars whose scandalous careers are re- last year, was dreadful again this year. At most shows, an outraged woman could be virs-James Card of Eastman House, Tom counted in Anger's book. The manic glee heard wailing: \" Focus, framing, and sound please!\"-all three were out of Luddy of the Pacific Film Archives, and Bill with which the compere-cineaste pranced whack. Herzog's fascinating WOODCARVER STEINER was shown at two speeds: too fast, Pence of Janus Films-are held in the about the opera stage and presented his then too slow. Projection difficulties pre- vented Anger from showing the best film Sheridan Opera House. This great little specimens in celluloid-formaldehyde was on his program. He remarked: ''1'd rather see films well projected in an awful place theater is a movie set in itsel~ (years ago it electrifying and disturbing. Included were: than see them badly projected in the most beautiful place in the world.\" ;}; was the site of the annual Mule Skinners' THE RED KIMONO (1926), produced by Mrs. Ball), and is near the first bank robbed by Wallace Reid (widow of the matinee idol Butch Cassidy and the spot where Wm. morphine addict), an anti-prostitution Jennings Bryan made his \"cross of gold\" tract scripted by Dorothy Arzner, directed speech. by Walter Lang, beautifuUy lit and photo- The honored tributees of this year's fes- graphed but a reasonably unedifying col- tival (the second) were Henry King, lector' s item; Chaplin's marvellous THE Werner Herzog, and Jack Nicholson. At IDLE CLASS, with his child bride Lita Grey eighty-two, King is spry (flew in on his cast as a maid; a belated world premiere of own plane) and articulate, although what LEAP YEAR (1921), an unfunny Fatty Ar- he articulated was old-school Hollywood buckle comedy, the last feature made be- conventional wisdom: paeans to Zanuck fore the actor's \"Wild Party\" ruined his and NunnaUy Johnson; \"I see few films career (it was never released because of the nowadays because of the dirty words, scandal); and sundry other poisoned bon- even the good ones like TOWERlNG IN- bons, all accompanied by the festival hero, FERNO are fulJ of profanity\"; \"Ty Power's organist Michael Ohman, whose musical big mistake was getting a bee in his bonnet improvisations to these silents were the to do that dang fool NIGHTMARE ALLEY most accomplished and fitting I have ever which anyone could ha ve told him heard. TeUuride' s Baptist minister threat- wouldn't make any money,\" etc. The eve- ened a lawsuit to prevent the display of ning of King clips was well-orchestrated by Hollywood Babylon in a bookstore window; James Card, and made memorable by the his Sunday morning sermon against the superb flood sequence from THE WINNING \"Californication of Colorado\" by the festi- OF BARBARA WORTH . val is reported to have been enlightening. I The Herzog films shown (which in- cluded the recent MYSTERY OF KASPAR HAUSER) impressed to varying degrees. The best of all seemed AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, which, inexplicably, has not yet been released in this country. Monte HeUman presided over the first (and last?) public showing of his cut of THE ~ COCKFIGHTER, produced by Roger Corman ~ last year. The film has been seen-as cut ~ and reshuffled by Corman-in Southern ~ 8states with two different titles (WILD DRIFT- ER and GAMBLIN' MAN) and is likely to reach :E 2 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975 THE IDLE CLASS: Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Nana McMurray (Lita Grey's mother), Lita Grey .
\"SUCH A THOROUGH DELIGHT IT LEFT ME FEELING HIGH. DON'T MISS IT!\" -Vincent Canby, THE NEW YORK TIMES \"Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.\" A fUm by Jerry Bruck Jr. I.F. S T O N E ' S WEEKLY-rr Distributed by Open Circle Cinema, P.O. Box )IS, Franklin Lakes, N.oJ. 07417 Tel (201) 8'1·8240
For all their varying visual styles, points rative, attacking old stories with an icono- else, exactly, Stephen Farber explains in of view, obsessions, and crotchets, the graphic thrust home that results in political his career-article on page 40. Russell would filmmakers whose names are woven super-realism. The Fassbinder package be an anomaly in any group of directors, through this issue of FILM COMMENT are all beginning on the opposite page focuses on even the ones represented in this issue. exploring-if not the cin ema different ac- two films: his recent FIST-RIGHT OF FREE- His films are hyper-kinetic, whereas cording to Marguerite Duras-then cer- DOM and one of his earliest, now rejected Duras's are hypno-static; his perfervid fan- tainly a nouveau naratif. In Budapest and works WHY DOES HERR R. RUN AMOK? In tasies reside at the opposite pole from Bavaria, in Paris and even on the lunatic the interview on page 14, Fassbinder Fassbinder's films, which are melodramas fringes of Hollywood, filmmakers are mak- stresses the importance of audience con- as seen through a glazed mirror. But Rus- ing audacious forays toward the Maginot tact with his films, not just as receivers and sell is executing his delirious triple-gainers Line that divides narrative formalism and synthesizers of the films' reality, but as from the same narrative springboard off abstract formalism . workers in a formal exercise (EFFI BRTEST). which Fassbinder, Duras, Werner Herzog, Fassbinder' s quest along the narrative trail Jean-Marie Straub, and other modernist Mme. Duras herself, a militant separatist leads him to a position of conflicting ex- directors are diving-in different direc- in the country of commercial cinema, con- tremes. An agit-prap romanticist, an artist tions, but with the same goal in view: es- tinues to work the narrative-modernist ter- intellectual with proletarian fever, he sees cape. rain, however subversively. It's significant the world as it is by exploring what it wants that, as a novelist, she confronts the same to be. As Stephen Farber writes: \"Although conventions and limitations that have the narrative tradition has broken down, applied to filmmaking: in both media, nar- Where the operatic intensity of Fassbin- filmmakers have not yet discovered any- rativity is a force not to be dispensed with der's later films meets the humid languor thing to replace it.\" This issue of FILM butto be dealt with in a new way . In INDIA of INDIA SONG is in both filmmakers' im- COMMENT traces the attempts of several SONG (which Duras discusses in the in- plicit recognition of (and, in Fassbinder's important directors to discover a resolu- terview on page 52), the narrative has case, explicit obeisance to) the mid-Fifties tion to the conflict between the tendency stepped outside of the movie frame, leav- films of Douglas Sirk. Sirk's jeweler's-eye toward abstraction, fragmenting, and dis- ing within it the visual intensification of irony made him a closet subversive 9f a far tantiation in twentieth-century art and the events, and their mythic place in memory, more devastating nature than that of his narrative-naturalist pull of mainstream rather than an ever-present-tensic con- blacklisted colleagues-a pacific Petronius movies-and the attempts of some equally junction of words and actions. elegantly satirizing all that Hollywood al- adventurous film critics in charting this lowed. newly-explored land. Rainer Werner Fassbinder is more con- cerned with the carcass of traditional nar- Ken Russell is something else-what The Editors RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER HELMER (video-tape); ANGST ESSEN SEELE SONG OF SUMMER: DELIUS. 1970 DANCE AUF (Fear Eats the Soul-Ali); MARTHA. 1974 OF THE SEVEN VEILS (Richard Strauss). (1946- ) FONTANE EFFI BRIEST (Effi Briest); FAUST- lHEATRlCAL FILMS RECHT DER FREIHEIT (Fist-right of Free- 1964 FRENCH DRESSING . 1967 BILLION SHORT FILMS dom) . 1975 MUTTER KUSTERS FAHRT ZUM DOLLAR BRAIN . 1969 WOMEN IN LOVE. 1965 DER STADTSTREICHER (The City Burn) . HIMMEL (Mother Kiisters Goes to Heaven); 1970 THE MUSIC LOVERS. 1971 THE DEVILS; 1966 DAS KLEINE CHAOS (The Small Chaos). ANGST FUR DIE ANGST (Fear of Fear). THE BOY FRIEND. 1972 SAVAGE MESSIAH. 1969 FERNES JAMAICA (Far Away Jamaica). 1974 MAHLER. 1975 TOMMY; LISZTO- KEN RUSSELL (1927- MANIA . FEATURE FILMS TELEVISION FILMS 1969 LIEBE 1ST KALTER ALS DER TOD·(Love is 1959 POET'S LONDON (John Betjeman); MARGUERITE DURAS Colder Than Death); KATZELMACHER; GORDON JACOB; GUITAR CRAZE; (1914- ) GODDER DER PEST (Gods of the Plague); MECHANICAL INSTRUMENTS; PORTRAIT FILMS AS SCREENWRITER WARUM LA.UFT HERR R. AMOK? (Why Does OF A GOON (Spike Milligan) . 1960 BALLET 1957 BARRAGE CONTRE LE PACIFIQUE (The Herr R. Run Amok?). 1970 RIO DAS MORTES; RAMBERT; CRANKS AT WORK Oohn Crank- Sea Wall), dir: Rene Clement. 1959 HIRO- DAS KAFFEHAUS (The Coffeehouse [made on 0); BRASS BANDS; SHELAGH DELANEY; SI-llMA MON AMOUR, dir: Alain Resnais. 1960 video-tape) ); WHITY (Whitey); DIE NIK- DANCE STORY: THE LIGHT FANTASTIC; A MODERATO CANTABILE, dir: Peter Brook. LASHAUSER FAHRT (The Trip to Nik- HOUSE IN BAYSWATER. 1961 MRS. STIR- 1961 UNE AUSSI LONGUE ABSENCE (The lashauser); DER AMERIKANISCHE SOLDAT LING AT OLD BATTERSEA HOUSE; PRO- Long Absence), dir: Henri Colpi . 196610:30 (The American Soldier); WARNUNG VOR KOFIEV; LONDON MOODS; ANTONIO P .M. SUMMER, dir: Jules Dassin; LES EINER HEILIG EN NUTTE (Beware the Holy GAUD!. 1962 LONELY SHORE; POP GOES RIDEAUX BLANCS (The White Curtains), dir: Whore); PIONIERE IN INGOLSTADT (Recruits THE EASEL; MR . CHESHER'S TRACTION Georges Franju. in Ingolstadt). 1971 DER HANDLER DER VIER ENGINES; ELGAR. 1963 WATCH THE BRIDE FILMS AS AUlHOR-OffiECTOR JAHRESZEITEN (The Merchant ()f Four Sea- (photographer David Hum). 1964 BARTOK; 1965 LA MUSICA (co-dir: Paul Seban) . 1970 sons) . 1972 DIE BITTEREN TRANEN DER THE DOTTY WORLD OF JAMES LLOYD. 1965 DETRUIRE DIT-ELLE (Destroy, She Said). 1971 PETRA VON KANT (The Bitter Tears of Petra DEBUSSY; DIARY OF A NOBODY; HENRI JAUNE LE SOLEIL (Yellow the Sun) . 1972 von Kant); WILDWECHSEL (Deer Crossing); DOUANIER ROUSSEAU. 1966 DON' T NATHALIE GRANGER. 1973 LA FEMME OU ACHT STUNDEN SIND KEIN TAG (Eight SHOOT THE COMPOSER (Georges DeJerue); GANGE (Woman of the Ganges). 1975 INDIA Hours Don' t Make a Day [five feature-length ISADORA. 1967 DANTE' S INFERNO: ROS- SONG. ::. films made for television)); BREMER FREIHEIT SETTI AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITES . 1968 A (Bremen Freedom [video-tape)) . 1973 WELT AM DRAHT (World on a Wire); NORA 4 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
It's interesting that the true inheritors of reel wheels in TV-supported Munich But the cool and very contemporary can- early Warhol, the Warhol of CHELSEA GIRLS films, particularly Fassbinder's anti- didness suggests Warhol's deadpan on the and MY HUSTLER, are in Munich, whereas cinema. There is the same painterly ability androgynous underworld. the new Warhol-Morrissey film has gone to hit innocent, insolent colors, using flat, west, i.e. HEAT is a Zap comic book SUNSET boldly simple formats; Warhol' s image is A minor example of Fassbinder parallel- BOULEVARD and FRANKENSTEIN is a sala- more porous, coarse-grained, while ing Warhol: the presence of Viva's cloying, cious child' s version of the James Whale Fassbinder's has a sardonic, fairytale look. nasal whine in Irm Hermann's startling classic. Warhol's idea of a counter-main- The Tartar-faced writer-director-actor has portrait of a peddler' s sneaky wife in stream has to do with reversing the conven- done one film a week (practically) since Fassbinder's THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEA- tions of high-low art rejecting with a gig- 1971, which is up to the early Warhol pace, SONS. In this portrait, which moves back gle Greenberg'S edicts formerly consider- and, in the background of Fassbinder's and forth from thin-lipped petty conven- ed on a par with the Ten Commandments: image, there is the sense of grifters and tionality to moments of sensuality and the artist as a moral superior, integrity of bootlegging, plus the effect in early Warhol spunk, the mocking drawl of Warhol's the painting surface over illusion, the rela- of being tough and able to control such superstar combines with the lower-class tionship of the picture's inside to the edge, anarchy. Fassbinder's Marxist world un- traits out of another world. It's like joining the high vs. kitsch polarities. chained is compressed and delineated; the \"liberated\" Soho with the corner- you know where each form, idea, and nar- Like Genet's polemical stand for the rative sequence starts and stops. cutting uniformity of J. c. Penney . Her- beauty of crime and perversity, Warhol proclaims the wondrousness of monoto- A henpecked boob beats up his wife in a mann's squinty eyes behind dowdy glas- ny, banality, machine-made art, expedi- bedroom tableau which stays on screen ses, her spectacularly lean body inside ence, and an easy mobility from one media without camera change until the remorse- frumpy, printed house dresses . Fassbin- to another. He's a great mover towards less ending, the husband rolling over in a der is not the only member of Germany's facetiousness and flexibility: it's not that he drunken stupor. The agonized, frustrated re-awakened film scene to be in a curious doesn' t work like a bearcat at his dozen drunk beating up his selfish, penny- congruency with Warhol's filmic investiga- professions, but that he tries to imprint a pinching wife is the oldest scene in movies, tions : his gorgeous hermaphrodites not-tha t-taxing air into each new going back to GREED, but this fully-lit, futile (Schroeter), put-on freakiness (Herzog), painting-print-film-interview. explosion in a 1971 Munich movie is a re- the precisionist long takes on a seemingly markable blend of charm and ferocity . unseductive scene (Straub), but he's the By osmosis, Warhol's kinkiness made a Aimed against prissy, middle-class taste, one we're going to deal with here. big dent in the Bavarian beer-bratwurst- the purple overstatements recall WRITTEN Bach film capital, Munich. Probably few of ON THE WIND and another Sirk, ALL THAT Fassbinder' s a mixture of enfant terrible, the Munichers have seen any Warhol, but HEAVEN ALLOWS, which he draws on more burgher, and pimp, whose twenty-four the latter's BIKE BOY, CHELSEA GIRLS are explicitly in the 1974 FEAR EATS THE SOUL. features (since 1967) are mainly sprung out neighbors under the skin to some of the of a camp sensibility. All of his appetites (for the outlandish, vulgar, and banal in matters of taste, the use of old movie con- FILM COMMENT 5
ventions, a no-sweat approach to making of each character are emblematic of between characters and their diminutive, movies, moving easily from one media to Fassbinder's hermetic formalism, even doll-house environment. Wife-child- another, the element of facetiousness and when there is a reverse twist in every husband around table eating baloney- play in terms of style) are those of camp major character. A woman who had cheese is a scene out of Beatrix Potter, and/or Warhol. The point-to dethrone heretofore been all tightness is suddenly people too big for tidy-tiny repetitive exis- the serious, to make artifice and theatrical- exposed in all her white length, being ser- tence. ity an ideal-is evident in an amazing viv- viced from the rear by a stranger whose acity, re-introducing Fable into a Hol- tiny smirk is hung on until its meaning is in 5. Dress and decor: each character has lywood genre, while suggesting a tough your brain. his own type of clothes; Hans wears facile guy manipulating a deck of cards. plaids, Erna dresses like a Hawks heroine, Warhol's ace move, taking anyone and His tough-tender vision is expressed Petra's mute assistant (played as a studied making her a super star, draping her in through ritual, whether the film is a Death slow dance by Irm Hermann) is always in glamor and incandescence, is also in Venice story (PETRA VON KANT) or a work- black, a sepulchral creature whose incredi- Fassbinder's. The same three leggy ing class Babbit gone berserk (WHY DOES ble curtain scene (slowly suitcasing her females appear in most films; Hanna HERR R. RUN AMOK?). Whether the filmed wooden mannequins and taking off in a Schygulla, a halo around her in every event is Petra's hypOcritical phOning, Herr tense, extended silence) is a lovely exam- frame, is the ravishing beauty, the trump R: s pompous tutoring of his little son, the ple of power infighting between two or tramp card in his films . Ali-Emmi dance that opens and closes deity-like personages. Fassbinder's very FEAR, these rituals serve to keep the world eclectic: his people stand before beautiful MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS (the down- in place; other rituals-Han's evening wallpaper like Xmas Lights, mixing styles path of a family black sheep, who goes round of drinks with his buddies-freak and eras within the same tableau. through a Dreiser-ian list of humiliations, them out. and then, as he's beginning to make some A P. T. Barnum using workers and headway and breadway as a fruit-and- His ritualized syntax could be outlined shopkeepers for his entertainers and mak- vegetable hawker, he methodically drinks this way: ing them as luminous and exotic as can- himself to death) is a luminous, inventive delabras, he is actually all over the map movie that is so damn clear about its aims 1. He inserts violence crnd tension be- with a playful larceny. He has taken a and means . The basic idea-the silent neath stupefyingly mundane talk in THE number of tactics from the Sirk melodra- group pressure which causes people to MERCHANT: \"Gee Hans, what a success mas (the flamboyant lighting, designing come through with conventional emotions you are now,\" or extreme sentimentality in decor and costumes that indelibly imprint and behavior, so that every moment gets FEAR: \"Emrni, you not an old woman, you a character's social strata, being patient compromised and discolored-has never a big heart,\" or the chest beating Susan with actors and playing all the movie's before been pinned down so subtly and Hayward style in PETRA: \"I can' t live with- elements into them, backing your dime- constantly. It's not the sodden story of a out her, I can't bear it,\" as she rolls around store story and soap-opera characters all downtrodden, henpecked husband but a on a terrycloth rug, hugging a Jack Daniels the way) and stapled Sirk's lurid whirl- hard portrait of middle-class ritual, circa bottle to her breast. She also screams at her wind into a near silent film style which is 1972. People take turns being mean and daughter and mother: \" Go home, you punctuated with terse noun-verb testi- exploitative in a musical chairs of victor bores, I can't stand the sight of you, I want ness. A good example is Ali's terse re- and victim. As in all his films , Fassbinder is Karin!\" sponse to a sultry hellcat's proposition: pushing melodrama to absurd limits to \"Cock' s bust. \" Bresson's visual economy show how its cliche attitudes and emotions 2. Acting in the PETRA film is feverishly (the delayed reactions by the camera and discolor normal situations. singular. As in Noh theater, it's proto- actor, hanging on walls, doorknobs, or a artificial and al ways trying for the peasant's numb expression) is turned into THE MERCHANT is the work of a medieval emblematic joined with the rich effect of a very prominent rituals. illuminator who has a command of visual sausage bursting its casing. Petra and her ornateness, suggesting the most famous of monosyllabic assistant, in black Edwar- After having said all this, the fact is that hand-painted books: the Duc de Berry's dian gowns, are pugnacious with their Fassbinder's intense shadowless image is Book of Hours . Its radiant people are faced personas. not like anyone else' s, and his movies have close to the camera, in what always seems installed the worker's milieu-their a peak moment. The scene is shadowless, 3. From the endless yammering of Petra, homes, love affairs, family relations, the intensely lit. It has the ecstatic tenderness who runs a dress career from her bed, to wall paper, knick knacks, the slang, food of Fra Angelico but the archetypical charac- the tense, spoken opera in FEAR, it's always and drink, the camaraderie-as a viable ters (the greedy wife, generous sister, the musical incantation. \"Come home, Hans, subject for the Seventies. Whether the innocent daughter, mean-stingy mother, a please come home,\" and he throws a chair filmed event is a fruit vendor yelling sychophantic brother-in-law) are played at his wife's poised body half hidden be- downstairs for his departed wife, or the by an acting troop of vivid dynamic hind the saloon door. Hermann's porce- fascistic business calls that transpire on the hipsters. Fassbinder makes a wholesome lain skin, ruby lips, tightly curled hair has outsized brass bed where a yammering frontal image, in many ways like small Fra the same iconic impact as her pleading in- dress deSigner eats, works, and loves (the Angelico panels: a man in a crisp blue and tonation. His whole acting team- only males in sight being the gigantic white plaid shirt hawking the pale green Hirschmiiller's peddler, Carstensen's nudes on the mural behind her bed), the pears filling a rectangular cart, a humble designer-heroine, Brigitte Mira's scene most often plays in one take, with- action frozen in a shallow-still composi- Emrni-use language for the same taunt- out development, so that his trademark, tion. This unconquering hero sells only ing purpose, as in the arch fox trot by the saftig feistiness , the up-front pugnacity, three bags of pears during the movie. two long-gowned women in PETRA. Danc- always hits with more meat than you ex- ing to \"Oh Yes, I'm the Great Pretender,\" pect, it claws you with churlish aggres- Like a cat burglar feeling out the combi- they never look at each other, which points sions. nation lock on a safe, Fassbinder keeps again to his trademark belief in power turning the knob on a character, working struggles incessantly waged. A nosy neighbor spitefully watches the parsimoniousness with lustfulness in Irm middle-aged Emmi and the handsome Hermann's wife, compassion and cold- 4. He and Kurt Raab (\"the design is done black Ali go up to her apartment. In this blooded frankness in Schygulla's sister, for me by Raab, the guy who plays Herr R. typical tableau a rack focus shot suggests who sticks by the peddler against his dis- I tell him what I need; every color is care- all three, like all Fassbinder's denizens, are approving family and stands for integrity. fully thought out, each image is worked caught in a shifting but nevertheless pain- The clear individualizing and silhouetting on.'') are extraordinary inventors with cap- ful power game of top dogs and under- tive settings-furniture, decor, people dogs. The scene is dominated by aggres- have a captured-inside-a-doll's-house feel- ing. The prime factor in his syntax: the pull 6 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
sive decisions about decor and motiva- TV and his wife and a friendly neighbor to large TV financed films (\"I am a German tions; the camera, positioned directly be- chatter along with the TV sound, he picks making films for the German audience\"), hind the neighbor's helmet-like black up an alabaster base, kills wife-child- he has always retained a hatred of dubbed hairdo, pins the Emmi-Ali lovers behind neighbor. The next morning his amenable dialogue and holds to a theatrical premise, an ornate iron screen that points up a taste- colleagues find him hanging from a latch in a few characters interacting in a stage less magistrate and two rather gentle the office lavatory. space, which keeps his image shallow and rule-breakers. The methodically worked- Scenes like the two friends talking of makes it easier to do sync sound. What an on event displays Fassbinder's radical mix school songs on a funny little sofa look like image! His is the precision of a painter with of snarl and decoration. comic strip: the Katzenjammers, Major space and color: he has a fantastic painter's His strategies often indicate a study of Hoople. This crackup of a petty bourgeois eye (he's Mondrian with a sly funk twist) porn movies, how to get an expanse of flesh across screen with the bluntest im- pact and the least footage. With his cool- eyed use of Brecht's alienation effects, awkward positioning, and a reductive mind that goes straight to the point, he manages to imprint a startling kinky sex without futzing around in the Bertolucci LAST TANGO style. Style is everything in these blunt, motionless tableaux: there is a cunning sense of how much space to place between the candid sexuality and the cam- era, how much lurid, ersatz color needed to give the act a kinky rawness. He seems able to cue you into the licentious effect ofa Thirties film, and still hold the scene in the Seventies by the stylized abandon of his ruthlessly installed temptresses. The lust- fulness of Hermann's long scrawny Haus- frau , the blow-job on Hans, and particu- larly Hanna Schygulla's lazy opportunistic lesbian in PETRA VON KANT. She walks with her hips stuck out in a slow insinuation as drawling as her talk. There is nothing more kinky than her love scenes in a sheet metal slave costume. FEAR EATS THE SOUL: the marriage be- tween a sixty-year-old charwoman, the widow of a Nazi, and a splendid Moroccan column of muscle is endangered because Emmi won' t make couscous for Ali. Given all the possible problems that such a mari- tal miss-match could incur, it shows Fassbinder's perversity that he drives them apart with a cracked wheat stew. Emmi, becoming chauvinistic and compla- ::t cent, tells this catch of the century to go get ~ his couscous elsewhere. The circular struc- = ture evolves back and forth between the ~ Asphalt Pub, a ~ngout for Moroccan pals, ~ their bosomy gals, and Emmi's cozy flat, ~ subjecting the pair to endless prejudice ~ _ _.-_~~-;;:::;::: bouts with the grocer, maitre d', that bitch Z who patrols the hallway, her gross beer- drinking lay-about son-in-law (played by Top, left: Hans Hirschmuller methodically drinks himself to death in THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS. Top, the snarling camp-elion himself: Rainer right: Petra (Margit Carstensen) and Karin (Hanna Schygulla) in THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT . Above, Werner F). This endless series of trivia left: EI Hedi Ben Salem getting beer and sympathy from Barbara Valentin in FEAR EATS THE SOUL-ALI. Above, gates overlorded by bigoted high priests right: Irm Hermann and her \" Tarter-faced writer-director-actor\" Fassbinder in FEAR EATS THE SOUL-ALI. causes Ali's stomach to rip. Fassbinder, done in raw presentation catches most of who knows how to angle a body, how who looks like a Vegas blackjack dealer, what Fassbinder is about. much space is necessary to set it off. But his knows how to get the effects he wants: he 1. Humiliation; daily, hour by hour, in movie sails home on its lighting-color- turns this sweet-sauerkraut into a the shop, at breakfast, humiliation pattern, a frontal, geometric poise that double-edged enthralling movie. everywhere. should make any hip painter envious. In WHAT MAKES HERR R. RUN AMOK?, the 2. The shopkeepers of life treated with- Someday we should love to see the early light is blasting, the sound of people con- out condescension or impatience. grainy black FassbinderS-KAlZEL- versing is early TV play in its grating, 3. Physical and spiritual discomfort: The MACHER, AN AMERICAN SOLDIER, LOVE IS granular stridency, and the plot develops essence of Fassbinder is a nagging physical COLDER THAN DEATH, etc.-which have an accurate catalog of comment in the daily discomfort. come to this coast only once via Tom Lud- round. A draughtsman, Herr R., dully So Fassbinder has two sides, the opera- dy's single-handed championing at the moves through a measured tedium, until tic and the forthright brash. In moving Archives . ©Copyright 1975 Oty Magazine. one night while his glazed eyes are on the from the low-budget, avant-garde movie Reprinted with pennission. FILM COMMENT 7
PHANTOM OF LIBERTY Thoughts on Fassbinder's Fist-Right of Freedom by Roger Greenspun Fox (R. W . Fassbinder) is consoled by hi s sister (Chri sti ane Maybach ). PHOTOS: NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL .. . the strange things in the story happen on plainer manner of filmmaking than say, tion . With its domestic despair, its mock- th e screen , not just in the spectator's head. THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT or heroic tableaux, its unblinking openness Douglas Sirk's films liberate your head. THE AMERICAN SOLDIER or even the gorge- and its ironic vulnerability, its super- ous and stylistically ambivalent THE MER- heated glamor (the hero's sister, the (R. W. Fassbinder on CHANT OF FOUR SEASONS. A plainer manner heartbreaking Hanna Schygulla, and and a rather fanci er matter: FIST-RIGHT is another woman, the cherry-lipped ill- WRITTEN ON THE WINO) the pathetic story of a doomed homosexual fated '10ve of his life\")-it balances with affair. There is less camp and more charac- virtuoso dis-ease the banal and the unreal, Unlike most people r know, r prefer the ter in this film , as if the point of view and which in combination have come to seem the perversity had found an objective cor- the essence of Fassbinder's art. This may latest Fassbinder, FAUSTRECHT DER relative in an open acceptance of what has be no more than to say that Fassbinder's is FREIH;EIT (FIST-RIGHT OF FREEDOM , as always been Fassbinder's proper form, the art of the cinema - bu t the art of the they're calling it here, and as I shall call it domestic tragedy. His mostSirkian movie, cinema made self-conscious. Hanna from now on), 'over the earlier Fassbind- everyone tells me-though I've seen al- Schygulla's pearly teeth, dewy skin, soft er's-up to and including FEAR EATS THE most as much Sirk as everyone else, and I clear eyes, and hair the color of beaten SOUL-ALl, which for some signalled a don' t know exactl y what that means. gold-you have to have dreamed a lot of new naturalism in the director's work, a dreams in movie theaters to understand naturalism that FIST-RIGHT OF FREEDOM I should hate to give up the other the level of labor that is somehow made surely continues. Actually, the naturalism Fassbinder, either the theatrical posturing evident behind the faultless, effortlessly shows up pretty far back, at least in the of PETRA VON KANT, or the darkly flam- magic image on the screen. superb WHY OlD HERR R. RUN AMOK?, made boyant parody of THE AMERICAN SOLDIER, in 1969, which is almost as far back as this or the semi-Straubian rituals of KATZEL- With ALI, and even more with F1ST- prodigious career goes. We began seeing MACHER or RECRUITS IN INGOLSTADT. Even RIGHT OF FREEDOM, banality wins the day. Fassbinder only five years ago, with RE- the iconography of those films seems spe- You no longer have those awkward CRUITS IN INGOLSTADT (we are only now to cial in its emphasis, and their hieratic ar- pauses, the too forthright expression of begin seeing commercially the earliest rangements of actors and spaces form the emotion, the clues and assurances that work: KATZ ELMACHER, THE AMERICAN visual style that we associate with the di- what you are looking at is really a sophisti- SOLDIER, BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE) and I rector's name. In that line, THE MERCHANT cated game. The style has become less as- suspect that nobody has seen enough to OF FOUR SEASONS may be a logical culrnina- sertive, less assertive even than Douglas identify trends very securely. But it does seem that FIST-RIGHT connects with HERR R. and ALI in what looks like a somewhat 8 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
Sirk's. It remains deliberate, mannered, charity and his own distinctly limited re- Cut to Fox lying dead in a Munich sub- addicted to the accidental aids to unusual sources. That's when he is picked up by way station, an empty bottle of Valium perspective (such as staircases) and to the Mercedes, and he makes it his first near his hand, the letters F-O-X spelled out some forced fortuitous ones as well-so it project to amass some money for a lottery in silvery studs across the back of his field is not exactly the eye-level gaze of a How- ticket. He tricks the money away from a jacket. Two kids pass by and begin rifling ard Hawks. But its tropes are the tropes of gullible flower seller-like one of those fix- through his pockets. Two old friends dramatic (or melodramatic) necessity, and tures of an older romantic cinema, the girl appear-the carnival barker and the Mer- it seems to have been subordinated to the in the florist's who wistfully sells the flow- cedes parking-light manipulator. They patterns of ordinary narration. ers that but for a quirk of fate and a differ- look the body over and quickly walk away ent plot line might have been for her. But in fear. The kids return to their work, the Not too ordinary. F1ST- RlGHT OF FREE- this flower seller is a bit pudgy, and his movie ends. DOM is full of jokes, mild enough, but name is \"Fatty\" Schmidt. He's amorous, nevertheless jokes at the expense of the all right. You may have seen him before- I've left out lots, but that is enough of the movies. Interior decor, which follows the actor, Peter Kern-as Count Isidor bare bones . The movie seems of several some dictum of always-too-much in this Palewski in Daniel Schmid's detestable LA minds about Eugen, who is cruel, but not film, stands in special relation to the PALOMA at last year's Film Festival. He is, only cruel. And as I've suggested, Fass- action-usually as much impediment as of course, a joke. A broader joke than binder has been at some pains to cast him- scene setting. So, when an especially either of the cars, or the chandelier, or the self as Fox into a walking provocation. The grandiose apartment is decorated as a love magic lottery ticket; he nevertheless stands nest for the hero and his lover (decorated, at one end of a line of reference that virtu- I at great expense, out of a former lover's a n- ally controls the movie as super-text above tique shop) it features an imposing chan- the sad tale of passion and betrayal at its Top: Fox shares his love-seat with lover Eugen (Peter delier that hangs so low in the living room core. I don't think Fassbinder means to Chatel). Above: Karl-Heinz Biihm, as parking-light that everyone at the housewarming party undercut that tale. But he doesn't offer it manipulator, relaxes at the baths. has to duck slightly to avoid it. Nothing is merely at face value-any more than the really made of the chandelier-the party enthusiastic plot synopses that make up film is nothing if not mixed in its loyalties, itself bursts with significance, but that is his brilliant criticism of Douglas Sirk are and in that mixture lies much of its interest. another matter-but it hangs there rather merely plot synopses. as a glittering reproach to excessive aspira- III tions, or too much taste for elegant self- II None of the protagonists come to see that ev- expression. Lauren Baazll is a surrogate for Robert Stack erything, thoughts, desires, dreams arise di- because he must know he will never be able to rectly from social reality or are manipulated by A car, a Mercedes, figures in the story. lave her, and vice versa. And the father has an It. I know of no other film in which this fact is The first pick-up we see has the hero, Fox oil derrick in his hand which looks like a surro- fonnulated with such precision and with such (Fassbinder himself as holy innocent, a gate cock. And when Dorothy Malone at the desperation. leather-jacketed adventurer ripe for exploi- end, sole surviving member of the family, has (R. W. Fassbinder on IMITATION OF LIFE) tation), seduced by the car, by blinking this cock in her hand it is at least as wretched as Aside from the apartment and the print- come-hither parking lights, by motorized the television set which Jane Wyman [in ALL ing shop, there are a few prime locations windows closing and opening in a game of THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS] gets for Christmas. which the film investigates more not-too-hard-to-get. Later we will have Which is a surrogate for the tuck her children thoroughly than most or to which it re- the same car driving down tree-lined begrudged her just as Dorothy Malone's oil em- turns again and again to regroup the fi- streets. Fox has accepted the challenge, pire is a surrogate for Rock Hudson. I hope she gures in its drama. The men's boutique and he now trades quips with the first of won't make it and will go mad like Marianne where Eugen takes Fox to outfit him for his his affluent companions. The trees are re- Koch in INTERLUDE. For Douglas Sirk, mad- upwardly mobile life will do for one exam- flected in the glass of the front windshield so you can't even see the speakers. It is as if ness is a sign of hope, I think. man and nature were conspiring to create the cinema of Claude Lelouch. (R.W. Fassbinder on Nothing about that car is simple, though WRlTTEN ON THE WIND) nothing is too demandingly complex. It acts, and by acting, it over-acts-perhaps I shan't synopsize FIST-RIGHT OF FREE- the coyest performance in the movie, DOM because I'm no match for Fassbinder which knows about cars, the way it knows and because, devoid of its self-generated about chandeliers, or love seats, or cognac ironies, the film would read like a parody bottles, or any of the few dozen other of itself. Just a bit of the story: Fox wins the objects-turned-obsessions that dot the lottery and with the winnings bails story along the way. Another car, the ex- Eugen's cognac-guzzling dad out of the pensive sporty one that Fox is emotionally hole his printing plant's incipient financial blackmailed into buying when his lover failure has pushed him into. Eugen dis- can't stand to be seen anymore in the misses another lover in order to take up slightly scuffed convertible he had been with Fox, but Fox's lower-class vulgarities driving, figures in the movie too. You more continually get on his nerves. It is impossi- or less know that car can have no other ble not to sympathize with Eugen's feel- function than to contain Fox in his grief ings in this, since Fox never consents to use when the lover, Eugen (Peter Chatel), has a handkerchief nor, after months of in- kicked him out, after separating him from struction from the accomplished Eugen, most of his money. learns not to pour the red wine with the fish. When Fox begins questioning where How Fox gets the money is a tale in it- his money has gone, Eugen reveals the self. A poor carnival attraction-\"Fox, the legal fast ones he has pulled on him, and Talking Head\"; we never see him per- he throws him out of the apartment. Fox form-his act is raided, his then lover, the sinks into despair, compounded by the act's barker, carted off to jail, and he him- fact that when he propositions a couple of self thrown on his blousy sister's non- American soldiers in a bar, they want to know how much he will pay them. FILM COMMENT 9
pie; the gay bar at which Fox introduces his capita\\. Fox is in love; everyone else is ily and friends, and drinks himself dead in Eugen will do for another. The boutique their presence. And the American soldier, may be the Single most exciting location in in business. That may be too simple; Fox's like Fox, meets his end, not quite voluntar- the movie. Most of the young men show ily , but underground. Death is the su- up there-to admire themselves, each bUSiness-initially, selling himself- preme gesture allowed the Fassbinder other, each other's conquests, to display hero, and with Fox, an overtly homosexual and shield the envy and curiosity that cannot compete with the others' more hero, the gesture seems more than an ex- shapes their leisure time. The place be- pression of generalized dismay. It is not comes setting for a marvelous ballet of at- sophisticated business of selling goods and just the negation of a life; it is the comple- titudes, and to match it I think I should tion of a life that possibly has come to have to go back to the early Antonioni of LE services. A lottery player, he has no place know the terms of its entrapment and exc- AMlOiE, where the public drama of dres- lusion. The sense of claustrophobia that at- sing and posing also counterpoints the in this prudent society-though his sexual tends each Fassbinder movie has some private passions of some stylish-in this bearing here, because it is now not only the case, female-friends. brashness may make it seem for a while reason for, but also the meaning of, its drama . The closed system is no longer The bar is more nearly a traditional that he does. He is a little like the film's typ- merely the stultification of middle-class Fassbinder meeting place, descendant of life. For once people's occupations struc- all those joints, beer halls, lounges where ical audience: having gone in to learn ture rather than inhibit their existence, and from THE AMERICAN SOLDIER and BEWARE the social terms that define their worlds are OF AHOLY WHORE on down, the Fassbinder something of homosexual mores, they not so simply repressive. Something characters have gathered to give one deeper defeats them. They are almost all another a hard time. In FIST-RIGHT OF come out with lessons in economics. There beautiful except for Fox, and yet he is cho- FREEDOM it has taken on a character of its sen to enact their drama, and, I suppose, to own, with a smart-assed bartender and a was never such a movie for attention to die for them a death. But if his pathos is small group of lower-bourgeois homosex- exemplary, it is also truly personal. uals to comment on Fox's precarious rise paying. v Though he repeats the fate of so many through fortune. The group as an entity Fassbinder heros before him, he may be has always had considerable importance in The cruelty is that we can understand them the first to die in freedom rather tha n in re- this cinema, and the principal action of the straint. That may be why he is so easy with earliest example I have seen, KATZEL- both, both are right and no one will be able to his money, even-for the kids in the sub- MACHER, consists very largely of groups way station-after death . It is a subtle les- forming and breaking up at leisure, or in help them. Unless we change the world. At this son, probably missed but gracefully given. boredom, like birds on an iron fence rail. It turns out that the fox is susceptible to But the gay bar in FIST-RIGHT has a some- point all of us in the cinema cried. Because civilization. That is what kills him; that is what different function, partly because the why he can choose to die.~:~ film' s society has different functions and changing the world is so difficult. more resources. Everyone now has a pri- vate life, the privacy of which he does not (R.W. Fassbinder on IMITATION OF LIFE) so easily confess. The bar is used for assig- nations, not revelations, and it becomes And yet the passion remains, around the surest guide to everyone's changed or unchanged position in relation to everyone the edges. The barker's farewell kiss for else. Fassbinder's camera approaches it with special respect, noticing its strategic Fox before the police drag him off; Fox's groupings and its potential for dramatic reversal. The film needs just that, a place to real concern with Eugen, and the feelings play and relax in. In this movie everybody has a job, and a position to maintain. of Eugen's other lover, the one he leaves and then comes back to at the end. Mostly there is Fox's own misery, and his suifide. That is the passion of rejection. Or is it? If you have seen enough other Fassbinder movies you will recall that suicide-or vio- lent death approaching self-sacrifice-is more the rule than the exception. Herr R. runs amok, killing his family and then hanging himself in the toilet. Hans, the merchant of four seasons, summons fam- N Above: Fassbinder and Maybach consider their lot. Right: Fox , re-suited to his new-found station. After seeing Douglas Sirk's films I am more cxmvinced than ever that love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of sodal repression . (R. W Fassbinder on INTERLUDE) That may be the most interesting aspect of FIST-RIGHT OF FREEDOM. As you move from antique shop to boutique to bar to printing plant, you visit the cast one by one and you discover that this society is de- fined not only by sexual preference but also by a range of occupations. Everybody earns a living, even Eugen, which is what Fox is all about for him, and ultimately is a major reason why Fox must be dispensed with. The characters are gay, but the values are overwhelmingly conventional middle-class, higher or lower. Eugen's pa- rents don't mind Fox's homosexuality, as they don't mind their son's. They do mind his table manners. Butthey tolerate him for 10 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
WHY HERR R. RAN cAMElK Fassbinder and Modernism by John Hughes PATCH-BREECH: Master, I marvel stand, but spooky nonetheless . The tell jokes about mice and food, the kind how the fishes live in the sea. hand-held, single-take, overexposed color you can hear on the TV or read in the in- modernism of WHY DOES HERR R. RUN ternational edition of Reader's Digest. They FIRST FISHERMAN: Why, as men do AMOK? is light years away from the theatri- disappear at the far end of a neo-realist a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones. cal Sirkian backdrops (equally Brechtian, alley composed of Straubian diagonals. though monumentally classical) that For Raab a journey has begun that will -Shakespeare: Perides Fassbinder now prefers. I, for one, like carry him right to the edge of, and then HERR R. (1969) as much as FIST-RIGHT OF beyond, the boundaries of the flat, inhib- The counterfeit can engulf one's life as FREEDOM (1975), just as I would enjoy a ited world of petit-bourgeois repression much as the \"real thing.\" But \"real\" mad- doublebill of Godard's MY LIFE TO LIVE and and bad faith. ness can be as elusive as \"real\" sanity. Not Sirk's WRITIEN ON THE WIND . Anyway , all who would can be psychotic .. . True film directors are sometimes the worst We cut to a tight shot from behind Raab sanity lies at the other side: the negation of judges of their own earlier creative as he drives his wife home. We can see the psychotic negation of the false original periods. neither of their faces, and this is as it premise. I am not what they say I am, nor should be-for we are not really prepared what I say I am. Certainly, HERR R stands up to any of to glean the undertones of the wife's casual the later films in terms of its awareness of remark about the car accident she has ex- -R.D. Laing: Self and Others the inescapable lonely terrors and hidden perienced earlier in the day. But already compartments of crippling anxiety (of the we can sense the frantic passivity latent in Long before demented maternal types kind that destroys both Herr R. and FIST- the silences that clog Raab's banal and began taking pot shots at Gerald Ford, RIGHT'S Fox) accompanying modern careful questionings. Already, as Robin Fassbinder probed the summit of his early, bourgeois existence. We first see Herr Raab Wood would see it, the \"rough beast\" of Straub-Godard phase in WHY DOES HERR R. (played by Kurt Raab) walking home with societal dissolu tion has begun to RUN AMOK?, an expressionistic color case- two of his fellow employees . There is a epiphanize in the midst of Raab's grubby history on the theme of the mass murderer sad, ominous coating of snow on the life. Unlike Wood, however, Fassbinder as \"tragic hero . The reasons for Herr under-exposed landscape that perfectly eschews Leavis-like lamentings (of the Fassbinder's current nonchalance and dis- matches the tone of strained, complacent kind that have recently graced these pages) regard concerning HERR R.-a brilliant inauthenticity picked up on the beaten for a Brechtian praxis that is able to pro- early masterpiece, rivaled only by THE faces of these petit-bourgeois draftsmen by duce the exact social implications of a mass AMERICAN SOLDIER, where the mirror ef- a dispassionate, unobtrusive camera. They murderer's psychosis. fects already evoke the director's later, Sirk-influenced phase-are easy to under- FILM COMMENT 11
Later that evening, Raab and his wife go analytic dimensions not present in All of Fassbinder's films , true to the for a drink to a local cafe. The wife invites Godard's tight tragedy. modernist praxis that inspires them, limn her old friend over for a talk, and the cam- the return of the repressed in Deutchland's era begins to zoom all over the place as we In a direct tribute to MY LIFE TO LIVE, Herr unconscious; and WHY DOES HERR R. RUN learn that the \"old friend\" happens to be Raab leaves his office for the day and visits AMOK? suddenly crystallizes into an Oedi- Hanna Schygulla, playing her lushly un- a nearby record shop. But the poignant pal tragedy with the appearance of the inhibited self. The presence of Hanna sweetness of Anna Karina's record- stonefaced patriarchal boss. As in some of helps us to see what Fassbinder is getting counter is nowhere in evidence. Here Philip Roth's recent novels, we are re- at, namely that Raab will go crazy because again the reds and blues are expressionist minded of one of Freud's classic case- that' s the only way out for him . The slick and disconcerting; the authentic shopgirls histories (The Wolfman , etc.). And both Cosmopolitan-girl Hanna has the haute- giggle nervously at their inability to im- Fassbinder and Roth manage to inject bourgeois wiles and graces to have or- provise shopgirl dialogue; and Kurt Raab enough personal anguish into their art to gasms beyond the range of the inevitably magnificently exploits the fetishism of Hit be able to bring about an incredible rever- sublima tion-oriented petit-bourgeois Parade ratings. Even more important, sal: we, the audience, come to feel that we couple. After all , their only real fun in life is thanks to this giddy search for some for- are inside a Freud case-history, looking out to get turned on, by the mass media, to the gotten pop melody, Fassbinder has made at fatal interactions of destiny and the un- frisson of imagining what it's like to be us experience the watery depths of nostal- conscious. Hanna. She is able to evoke a testy side of gia that secretly nourish Herr R.'s mad- Raab that we wouldn't otherwise see until ness . How fitting, then, is the cut into the Fassbinder has now shown us the pa- the very end; but then she pulls a skillful dark, grainy interior of Raab's apartment, triarchal totem governing Raab's most pri- Bitch-Goddess castrating tactic out of her where the couple drink and make out with vate hopes and actions. And, like the ar- bag by looking at the wife and saying, the kind of self-conscious silliness that one chetypal terrorist that he is, it will be Raab's \"Isn' t he aggressive!\" (All the more cutting associates with a high school petting party. fate to destroy himself in the inevitable vio- in that the dialogue in this scene, and lation of the Taboo that will allow him at throughou t the film, is almost totally the Herr R.'s parents arrive for a visit; the least a partial immortality. At this point in result of the actors' improvisation.) banal, alienated chatter (observed ironi- history when the entire bourgeois world is cally by Fassbinder's slowly panning cam- experiencing a return of the repressed, It is at this point that the form of the film , era) totally fails to bridge the generation with all of the old phantoms coming out of as it were, becomes aware of the hysteria gap. The parents are very much intoKultur the closet (incest, anti-Semitism, nec- lurking in its content. For Fassbinder cuts (Shakespeare, etc.) but they are also rophilia), we can find in this grim Fassbin- to a single-take, hand-held plan-sequence hopelessly boring and sterile. The tedium der parable a chilling universality. exploration-stunning in its claus- and vacuousness build and build, finally trophobic placidity-of the office in which exploding into the surrealist horror of the But we are still in the placid eye of the Raab works as an ap?rentice architectural walk-in-the-snow scene. The camera dol- storm of Raab's madness; Fassbinder draftsman . Everyone seems to walk about lies back as we follow the elder Raabs, their keeps the turbulence at a distance but we in a work-induced trance, although the son and daughter-in-law and their grand- can hear its howls. The symptoms con- trance may very possibly be the correlative son, Amadeus, along a snow-covered tinue to accumulate with a crushing inten- of the expressionist color effects that path in the neighboring forest. The entire sity. Raab's wife mentions some mysteri- Fassbinder has introduced into the film . shot, including the temporary disappear- ous gas explosions that have taken place in Fassbinder has opened his camera to the ance of Amadeus, is seen through some the streets . We see Raab in a Godardian warm-reddish tones of the neon-lit office kind of pink filter that gives one the effect doctor's office complaining about his and of the workers' faces , while at the of looking at negative footage-an effect headaches and high blood pressure. The same time he has had the bright bluish that heightens the primal-scene fantasy doctor, faithful to the mechanistic society daylight that floods through the windows reverberations of the sequence. Negative that has certified him, prescribes panaceas pushed to the greatest possible extent. The images always convey a directly sexual and refuses to look at the real maladies that result is some kind of Freudian, formalist aura (they represent the original imprint of beset his patient. Even little Amadeus is Hell situated in the farthest regions of reality on the emulsion), and the loss of trapped in the pathological momentum, neo-realism-farther even than the hal- Amadeus is obviously a screen-fantasy for for Raab and his wife are called in by a lucinated black-and-white nightmare that another kind of loss that is rooted deep in teacher to discuss the child's \"speech prob- is Godard's MASCULINE-FEMININE. Herr R.'s-and perhaps Fassbinder's- lems.\" The schoolroom, like Raab's office, oldest memory tracks . The theme of the is an expressionist blur of overexposed Like MASCULINE-FEMININE, HERR R. is a Lost Boy is also rooted in some of the best, reds and blues bisected neatly by Fassbin- modernist explication of the unconscious and most psychoanalytical, modernist der's formalist pans and zooms . After lis- fantasies of a voyeuristic, male anti-hero films : THE MARRYING KIND, REBEL WITHOUT tening patiently to the authoritarian figure whose ultimate death-castration teacher's kindly-frigid admonitions, (Jean-Pierre Leaud jumps out of an A CAUSE, SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER ... Raab's wife (played with a slack mindless- offspace window, Kurt Raab hangs him- ness by Lilith Ungerer) delivers offhand- self above an open toilet bowl) represents a It is typical of Fassbinder's visual irony edly the revealing detail that Raab himself demystification of the castrated voyeur that we cut from this murky illustration of has always suffered from a strange speech who can be found manning the helm of Wordsworth's \"falling from us, van- impediment. After all, she says, he hardly classical cinema. Not that Fassbinder and ishings .. .\" into the classically lit office in- ever talks to me anymore.. .. Godard are the first to achieve such a de- terior where Raab is confronted by his mystification; it is, after all, an incredible sternly patriarchal boss. A good deal of The boss and his workers get together rupture that yawns between MOROCCO and emotional tension is generated by the for an office party. The Walshian discon- either THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI or LA boss's snide dislike of some architectural tinuity of Fassbinder's cuts and slow pans PAURA. Fassbinder has appropriated the designs made by Raab. But the effect of an sets the scene for the inevitable trauma. A modernist Brechtian episode-style of ironic inversion comes from our realization little alcohol, some dancing, and a jukebox Godard's MY LIFE TO LIVE in HERR R.; but that the previously unseen chief of the ar- blaring in direct sound in the background his grim awareness of the repressed Ger- chitectural firm has already been an impor- create an atmosphere that makes the boss man unconscious, as well as his tant source of the tensions that will soon more tight-assed than usual. He obviously Germanic-expressionist uses of color (not begin to shatter Raab's surface compla- wants to leave, but Raab is goaded by the unlike the overexposed expressionist pat- cency. The quiet lunch-hour scene that fol- alcohol into making a silly speech . He terns of Straub's OTHON), add psycho- lows only adds to these tensions. We learn lauds old Frau Eder, who is a sort of pro- that some mysterious, Kafka-like layoffs letarian workhorse in the office; and his are soon expected to occur in the office. 12 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
Top left: Herr R. co nsiders his madn ess . Above left: Raab and hi s wife (Lilith Ungerer) in the schoolroom to d iscuss the speech problem s of son Amadeus. Right: In the wa ke of two murders. Herr R. hangs himself. kind words for the boss are filled with re- bourgeois society. deus-ex-machina: Raab picks up a candie, servation and innuendo. An echt father- lights it, then dubs the wife and friend to figure, the boss senses the threat to his au- Events quicken , and the net of inauthen- death with the holder. The camera zooms thority and, smilingly, removes himself ticity tightens around Raab and his family. after him as he leaves the room and the and his wife from the party with the de- During a Straubian single-take car ride house. Raab has been subsumed into the termination of a falling guillotine blade. with a bearded fellow-employee, it is epiphany of his gesture, and there is no- Herr R. is the victim of the void left by his hinted that Raab will not survive the vici- thing for him to do but enter the offspace, absence. The inevitability and hopeless- ous competition for promotions. Increas- which happens to be the men's room of his ness of Raab's rebellion seem to get ingly schizoid, Raab is beginning to drop office. It is the next morning when the cops through to his wife and fellow employees, out; he is now unable or unwilling to relate find him there . First we have a claus- and they regard him with shocked and to the alienated chatter at home or in the trophobic series of pans and zooms as the sorry glances. office. Fassbinder's Brechtian psycho- police interrogate the office workers, who analysis of the modernist anti-hero has, can't understand what has happened . Fi- As in the office party, Raab's attempts to with a remarkable precision, distanced nally someone remembers that Raab went reach out to people only lead him further Herr R. to an amount directly pro- into the bathroom hours ago. The cops de- into regression. He tries to get Amadeus to portionate to the sympathy we now feel for cide to break in. pronounce the syllables of a poem about this stupid petit-bourgeois wage slave. As an eagle properly (\"The eagle has lovely Tag Gallagher has (unconsciously) pointed Raab has hanged himself from the bath- wings ...\"), but the lesson turns into a out in a recent FILM COMMENT article on room window, his arms stick out parallel meditation on Raab' s airless, caged-in exis- Ford's war documentaries, it is the ever- to the cross-beams and his feet dangle a tence. Raab must have human contact, present distance between viewer and few inches above an open toilet bowl. The whatever the cost, and he angers his boss screen that has determined the influence of shocked, hand-held camera rushes toward by talking on the office phone to an old Brecht on modernist cinema. Herr Raab be- him through the crowd, an almost exact schoolfriend who has arrived in town. We comes the Freudian Other, the mass mur- repeat of the shot in THE LOWER DEPTHS cut to a long, improvised scene in Raab's derer, thereby enabling us to understand after Gabin has murdered the landlord. apartment between Kurt Raab and Peer and transcend the mechanism of phan- But this tribute to the father of cinematic Raben (the schoolfriend). The actors are, in tasmatic projection. We are a great distance modernism, Jean Renoir, is not without its actuality, old friends; they discuss their from THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY with its ironies. Like Renoir (and Walsh), Fassbin- schoolboy experiences in Straubing, and reddish-phantasmatic Japs and silly col- der in HERR R. has evoked the class and sing remembered choirboy songs, with a onialized birds. sexual realities repressed in classical glaring authenticity. Here again is the Lost cinema only under the aegis of a terrible Boy, but the emergence of a repressed The murder is a triumph of the banality and tragic despair, which is magnified by homosexuality (a recurrent theme in of evil. We are in Raab' s living room , the Sirkian mirrors of FIST-RIGHT OF FREE- Fassbinder's films) is not so important as where the wife and a female friend gossip DOM . Ina country where Dachau was once the Sehnsucht accompanying it. Raab is the Ionesco-fashion while R. listens. On the referred to as \" the ass-hole of the world,\" a tragic scapegoat because he must act out radio a black American singer intones a newly psychotic murderer might very pos- the longing for the past, for the golden age quasi-revolutionary song to \" Whitey.\" sibly atone for his violation by crucifying of free enterprise, that is endemic to late- \"Change, Change, Change!\" says the himself above an open, waiting toilet bowl. ~;: singer. That is all it takes, this totally kitsch FILM COMMENT 13
Fassbinder Interviewed by John Hughes and Brooks Riley Both Rainer Werner Fassbinder's appearance important for me because in him I saw a sition in a mirror being observed by some- at the New York Film Festival and this interview man who was able to tell a story to the au- one. were made possible by a car accident in Turkey dience and yet connect it with some politi- which slowed down the work-obsessed Ger- cal connotation; but the politics of Mr. Sirk R. W.F. I have always had a special rela- man director just enough to allow him to are not mine. tionship to mirrors because they break squeeze in five whirlwind days in New York. open a scene between the people in the Fassbinder, who has been known to write an J.H. Do you see Sirk as a sort of romantic shot, and at the same time we can concen- entire play on a transcontinental flight, wasted Thoreauvian in his politics, a nature lover? trate on a certain point; they bring the no time acquainting himself with the multifari- focus back to whatis important. It happens ous pleasures of the Big Apple, dressed in his R. W.F. Well that's fifty-fifty: he is a Simultaneously. signature garb of black leather jacket, olive- romanticist by way of perspectives, but drab denims, and w hite shirt open to the di- he's not a romanticist in the way he sees J.H. Why did you use mostly dubbed aphragm. Seemingly sullen and intense, he things, facts , society. sound in FIST-RIGHT? opened up during the course of this interview until, by the end, he was using his well- J.H. Isn't the main thing that you've got- R. W.F. I don' t like direct sound for these pronounced but halting English to articulate ten from Sirk the use of mirrors and fram- kinds of films . When films are done in a what at first was explained only through an in- ing devices in shots to indicate the uncon- studio it's all right, but if you work in a terpreter. Obviously pleased with the audience scious fantasies of bourgeois society? natural setting, then there are too many response to his film, and the city's breathtaking naturalistic effects coming through. Films contrasts to his native Munich, Fassbinder left R. W.F. I did it before I ever saw Sirk, but should not imitate reality. with the resolution to return soon for several since I've seen Sirk, I do it more con- months and with a tentative New York film in sciously. B.R. What I meant by satire is perhaps his head. the theatricality of your actors, roles played B.R. The melodrama in MERCHANT OF to an extreme. Is this the main connection We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of FOUR SEASONS seems to have a satirical between your theater and your films? Are Henry Marx of Goethe House and Linda edge to it, especially in the tableaux where there other connections? Geiser, for their assistance in translating the in- Irrn Hermann cries and the family groups terview. around her. In your later films this element R.W.F. There is a connection between has been eliminated but not entirely for- the two but it cannot be said that one J.H. Much of the audience for FIST-RIGHT gotten. Is this the influence of Sirk? springs from the other, even though I've used many of the methods of the plays in OF FREEDOM seemed a little surprised, al- R.W.F. I have never attempted to do sat- my films; it doesn't always work. The tab- most shocked by it. I was wondering if that ire. In my early films, there are elements leaux in MERCHANT may be a little bit dif- was because they expected a film about sex that could be interpreted as satire at first ficult for Americans to understand. What and they got a film about politics? viewing; in other words, people are sup- is meant by that is that the German family posed to begin to laugh, but the laughter is is being pictured in this way. R. W.F. I don' t make any sex films; I don' t immediately cut off again. The influence of make any films which aren't political. Sirk began between RECRUITS IN IN- J.H. It seems to me that FIST-RIGHT OF GOLSTADT and MERCHANT . During that FREEDOM is a much more powerful tragedy J.H. Have you been influenced by time I saw twenty films by Sirko than even your most recent films, because Brecht? there you center on the proletarian charac- J.H. There's an amazing confluence bet- ter, whereas in MERCHANT the tragedy cen- R. W.F. As much as everybody in Ger- ween the early accidentally Sirkian shots, ters on a petit-bourgeois character. many has been influenced by Brecht, but like the mirror shots in THE AMERICAN SOL- not especially. There are other German au- DIER with the gypsy, and the shots in R.W.F. I agree. I see everything in my thors who are much more important to FIST-RIGHT, where you are in the same po- film work as a development, and of course me, who are little known here like one thing comes from another; there's a Marieluise Fleisser. What's important to line through the whole thing. At least, I me and everyone else is the idea of alien- hope that is what is conveyed, that there is ation in Brecht, and my films have the a development. character of the Brecht didactical pieces. But they are not as dry as the LehrstUcke. J.H. You mentioned at the press screen- That' s the thing that disturbs me about Brecht's LehrstUcke, the dryness; they have ing that the homosexual community in no sensuality. Germany reacted negatively to the film. Was that because the film centered more J.H. The thing that struck me most about on this proletarian character in a political FIST-RIGHT OF FREEDOM was that it seemed sense, than on the more Warholesque area to be a culmination of your late phase, the of homosexuality as an outgrowth of sex- Douglas Sirk phase, whereas the early ual repression? phase seems to be more low-budget, more Godard. And I think your presence in R.W.F. Partly this is true because in FIST-RIGHT makes it a combination of the Germany, when homosexuality appears in early personal films and the late Sirkian. any kind of art, then it is the main theme. And then the emphasis is on the repres- R. W.F. The discovery of Sirk was very sion of homosexuals on the one hand, and on the other the romantic view of the 14 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975 «
happy life that homosexuals lead . Nobody J.H. What do you think of THE AMERI- J.R. In FIST-RIGHT, what is the role of the has ever said that the life of the homosex- ual is subject to the same mechanics as the CAN SOLDIER at this point in time? sister? She's at one point a very positive, R. W.F. It was a study where I tried with rebellious figure; but in the end, back in life of the so-called normal people. her apartment with you, there's a strange B.R. The effect of FIST-RIGHT is the same; certain distance, humor, and a certain mirror effect, and usually mirrors are con- self-irony to recapitulate what I had done nected with bourgeois fantasies and en- it's a mirror image of heterosexuality. tanglements in your films . I wonder if this R.W.F. That's correct. The idea that the before. B.R. In AMERICAN SOLDIER, Margarethe film takes place among homosexuals is be- cause the political aspects come out much von Trotta tells the story of ALI. Were you implicates the sister in that? clearer this way. When the social and polit- ical mechanisms are strong and working planning to make the film at that time, and R.W.F. Yes. on an outsider group, then they work au- why did you change the ending? tomaticallyon the so-called normal world. J.H. Is there something we don' t know R.W.F. When I started the film in the B.R. The dynamics are the same. middle of 1970, I was a very pessimistic about the sister that you're hinting at? man. When it was finished, I was still pes- R. W.F. No. What I mean is that when R.W.F. Yes. simistic, but I thought that in this kind of a B.R. I'm not sure I agree with this, but story it would be necessary to give people a members of the proletariat come in contact ray of hope. with members of the bourgeoisie, then some critics have called you the German Warhol. Do you see a connection between they are very quickly spoiled and they try Warhol's work and yours? to imitate them and lead a similar life. All R.W.F. The only resemblance between J.H. Did you come to be influenced by classes betray their own character and myself and Warhol is that Warhol also has a favor the next higher. That's why we can group of people around him with whom psychoanalysis in any direct way? THE wait a very long time for a real revolution in he works all the time. Otherwise, there's AMERICAN SOLDIER is so obviously a this world. psychoanalytic distantiation of the Ameri- no relationship. can gangster film and Sam Fuller, particu- J.H. Isn't WHY DOES HERR R. RUN AMOK? larly through the use of the mother coming influenced by the kind of gritty neorealism of Warhol, much more than the later films? in at the end, in the death scene. R.W.F. Warhol was still unknown in R.W.F. In the film is what's left in the Germany in 1969, that is, the Morrissey minds of the German people who see a lot shots, his slow and long takes were not yet known. And my starting point is com- of American gangster films, but it's not pletely different from Morrissey's. from me. I was not trying to imitate an J.H. We're reacting to an article by American gangster films, but to make a Manny Farber [see page 5] where he made that connection. film about people who have seen a lot of R.W.F. There is a parallel in HERR R. to American gangster films. Morrissey's films in that the scene is explained to the actors and then they im- J.H. Does the theme of the mother in THE provise. The result is a surprise. This method of working has been introduced in AMERICAN SOLDIER come from Raoul other countries-France, Italy-simul- taneously. I hate HERR R. and I don't iden- Walsh's WHITE HEAT? tify with it. R. W.F. It's not that it comes from WHrrE J.H. I think it's a beautiful film. HEAT; it is my speCial relationship to R.W.F. Yes, but it has nothing to do mothers which I rediscovered in WHITE 3 with me. It's not a film where I can say I made it, but I participated in it. I was not its HEAT. maker. B.R. Do you share this attitude toward u:: J.H. How did you get the strange color mothers. ~ effects in HERR R. where you have over- exposed bluish exterior light conflicting R.W.F. Absolutely. 0 with this interior reddish glow, in a very surrealistic way? J.H. The theme is also in ALI where the ~ R.W.F. All this came about when they cleaning woman is a kind of mother figure. z R.W.F. Butit's seen from the mother's FIST·RIGHTOFFREEDOM: Peter Chatel (in mirror) and , were finished with the film, when we found that we'd done something very point of view, and in ALI she's a positive Harry Baer reflect on their late liaison . naturalistic that really had no form, no premeditated form. After the fact, we figure; but seen from the children's side, B.R. What form do your scripts take? added the colors in order to give an un- she is probably exactly the same as in the R.W.F. Except for HERR R. , all the naturalistic form to the film. On the one other film. hand it was a very naturalistic play, and on dialogue is written out completely; some- the other, through the colors, it became J.H. Orin ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, the times an actor will change a sentence or a very unrealistic. We worked for a long time gesture, and there's usually a reason for in the lab on these colors, on the blue col- two sides of Jane Wyman, the good and doing so. Actors sometimes have a differ- oration and the de-coloration. the bad . . . In KAlZELMACHER were you in- ent attitude-and I'll try to find out if this fluenced by Straub? It's such a minimal attitude can be put into the film. If we de- J.H. For the record, I think that HERR R. is film it reminded me of Straub. cide it can, then I'm all for it. a brilliant recapitulation of Godard's dis- R. W.F. Straub was the first important in- J.H. Are you familiar with the recent coveries in episodic form in MY LIFE TO fluence on me at his theater in Munich LIVE. films of Rivette, where you also have the where he staged plays. I was very im- R.W.F. That's one of the greatest films in pressed with his work. the world. B.R. When Americans talk about vio- theme of proletarian characters caught up lence in films, they're usually referring to in the mesh of bourgeois fantasies? Have blood and guts, which is much less effec- you seen CELINE ET JULIE VONT EN BATEAU tive than the way you present violence, by or OUT ONE/SPECTRE? leaving the camera stationary on a fight for R.W.F. CELINE AND JULIE I don't know, its entire duration. but OUT ONE/SPECTRE yes. It's a very beauti- R.W.F. I am trying to make films about ful film. violence, but I want to make it unenjoy- able, while Hollywood tries to make it en- J.H. What's interesting for me is your ability to show the angst of the proletarian joyable. character in FIST-RIGHT. Anxiety is usually B.R. Are you after this effect where one connected with the bourgeoisie . The has to look away? bourgeoisie is always privileged to feel R.W.F. You have to find a position anxiety. against violence. R. W.F. I would not say so. The pro- FILM COMMENT 15
MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS: Irm Hermann con- THE AMERICAN SO LDIER : Ricky the gangster (Karl FEAR EATS THE SOUL-ALI : Brigitte Mira solefull y templates the suic id al stupor of her husband (H ans Sc heyd t) d iscusses o ld times with hi s friend Franz embraces her husband (EI Hedi Ben Salem). Hirsc hmuller); her lover (K laus Liiw itsc h) looks on . Walsh (R.W. F. ). PHOTOS: N EW YORKER FILMS letariat has surely its own angst and its own R.W.F. My father is a phYSician and my when it was to be shown abroad it should difficulties with life. Sure, as I said before, be synchrOnized in that language, includ- they are only too willing to take on also the mother is a translator from English into ing the intertitles. This film already works anxieties of the bourgeoisie, but they are through two levels of alienation, and that not yet bourgeois anxieties, but those of a German. She translated Truman Capote. would make it a third level. prol e tariat within the bougeoisie. And that's certainly one of the themes of the It was a chaotic house where I grew up; the J.H. EFFI BRIEST was Sirkian, like all of film. your recent films , but it had this somber normal bourgeois order vyas not valid. loneliness that was very Fordian, like MY B.R. KATZELMACHER is an extremely DARLING CLEMENTINE. Were you thinking pessimistic view of Germans. Do you still From the very beginning I was not treated ofFord when you made the film? hold this view? at all, but when I was treated at all it was R.W.F. I didn't think of anyone but Fon- R.W.F. Yes, but it's not special to Ger- tane. many. There are things in the film which most often as a partner in the family. If they I've also encountered in France. J.H. Why did you use those white took any notice of me at all, I was treated as fadeouts? B.R. I was thinking of the attitude to the foreign worker. a grown-up. - R.W.F. It's one element of alienation, like books which have white color with R.W.F. In Paris, it's the same. Try to eat B.R. Were you an only child? black print. According to Kracauer, when with a North African in a Parisian restau- it gets black, the audience begin to fan- rant. In nine out of ten better places, they R.W.F. Yes . tasize, to dream, and I wanted the oppo- can't even enter. site effect through the white. I wanted to J.H. Is there anything you can tell us make them awake. It should not function J.H. I heard something about some dif- like most fJrns, through the subconscious, ficulties you had with your theater effort in about your next film? but through the conscious. It's, of course, Frankfurt. What were they? the first film that I know of where the audi- R.W.F. It's the story of a leftist poet who ence is supposed to have its own fantasy, R.W.F. We had difficulties with the sys- like reading a novel-the first normal fic- tem of self-determination in the theater be- hasn' t written anything for a year because tion film. This happens also with Straub cause, just as in film, the mechanism of but his films are not normal films . It's like a hierarchical order appeared again, and I he has difficulties with his conscience. One novel that one reads where you can have was in no mood to act as if this were a your own dreams and fantasies at the well-functiOning theater as it was created day he succeeds in writing a poem again; same time. When you read a novel, you to be. And I left. imagine your own characters. That's just he reads it to his friends and they tell him what I wanted to do in this film. I didn' t B.R. Certain names appear again and want to have predetermined characters again in your films , like Magdalena Fuller, that this is the poem of a German poet who made for the audience; rather, the audi- Franz Walsh. Are these real names? Who ence should continue to work, as in read- are they? has been dead for fifty years . The poet is ing a novel. R. W.F. Magdalena Fuller is a relative of Stefan George. He begins to study B.R. In all your films, you place the cam- Sam Fuller. Franz Walsh is Raoul Walsh era at a distance creating an effect of obser- and it's my pseudonym. I edited my first George's life, and more and more he be- vation . One is not in it or part of it, but ob- film under this name, and it's the name of serving it. Is this your alienation effect? the main part. Petra von Kant I invented, gins to identify with George. Then he goes but in the film there is a name, Sidonie von R.W.F. This is my special attitude to- Grasenabb, that comes from Fontane's through a period where he tries to live the ward film. The reason is that I don't want Effi Briest. to create realism the way it's usually done fascism of Stefan George, the special fas- in films , but rather that a realism should J.H. Didn't you also use Petra von Kant come about in the audience, in the head of as a reference to the philosopher who cism of Stefan George-until the end the viewer. It's a collision between film and stood for everything that's anal and the subconscious that creates a new clockwork in the German psyche? And yet when his wife dies and he is so self- realism. If my films are right, then a new Petra represents a return of instinct. realism comes about in the head, which centered and preoccupied that he hasn't changes the real reality, so to speak. R.W.F. At the time I wrote the play, it had something to do with Hegel. found out she was ill for some time. But J.H. Since some of us are deeply in- J.H. What background do you come out then he finds his way back to his of? I know that you come from the same part of Bavaria that Brecht is from. humanism again. He discovers his own humanism and can no longer follow for- eign ideas. He has to find his own. J.H. What kind of film will it be? R.W.F. A journey into the interior of sorrow. J.H. How was EFFI BRIEST received in Germany? R.W.F. It was the most successful film in Germany last year and this year. J.H. It was shown here in New York. I loved it, but a lot of people were confused because your films are usually associated with sort of grade-B material, sleezy gangster stories, whereas EFFI BRIEST came from Fontane, one of the great Ger- man writers. It caused a lot of people trou- ble. They were surprised to see Fassbinder using Fontane. R.W.F. The difficulty is that EFFI BRIEST is a film to be read, and it was my idea that 16 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
KATZELMACHER: Hanna Schygulla, Hans Hirsc hmuller, Rudolf KATZELMACHER: Jorgos the foreign worker EFFI BRIEST: The Baron (Wolfgang Schenk) kisses the Waldemar Brem, Lilith Ungerer, and Peter.Mo land at their ritual (Fassbinder) seeks refuge in his new love l hand of Effi (Hanna Schygulla). meeting place. (Hanna Schygulla). volved in a political view of the world, I found psychoanalytical study of Nazism? [Chromakey]: the actors are playing in wonder what you've thought of the films R.W.F. Because with artistic means he front of a blue screen and you mix the ac- Godard has made over the last six or seven tors . .. I don't like it. years. Are you familiar with them? has been able to deal with history in the same way that Shakespeare does . It's not a J.H. Do you know Renoir's PICNIC ON R.W.F. They're all good films, good and historical treatment of Nazism, just as THE GRASS, made with five cameras? right films, but the audience is no longer Shakespeare's dramas are not historical able to follow them, so they lose their de- dramas. R.W.F. Yes: when you work outside sired effect. with five cameras it's possible. But in a J.H . For me, IVAN THE TERRIBLE beats studio, it's small and there are five big J.H . Have you moved away from im- THE DAMNED. cameras. You can't do much . provisation entirely? R.W.F. I don't like Eisenstein, particu- J.H. Who are your favorite painters? R.W.F. Completely. But as I said before, larlYIVAN. ALEXANDER NEVSKY I rather like. R.W.F. Naive painters, Viennese sur- there's always an element of improvisation realism, and Hieronymous Bosch. to the extent that the actors as well as the J.H. But isn't IVAN a profound study of J.H. What were those large tableaux in photographer have a right to co-determine the political connotations of point-of- PETRA VON KANT? what happens; but the final result to be view? R.W.F. I forget everytime I'm asked ... seen on the screen is the result of a script, Correggio . and into that script are worked in the R.W.F. Yes itis, but he doesn't deal with suggestions from various members of the history in the same way as Visconti. Vis- J.H. Where did you shoot the scene in cast and crew. conti creates the climate of fascism in his film and at the same tUne you see the im- FIST-RIGHT where they're walking down B.R. In FIST-RIGHT, a decoration that ap- pOSSibility of it. Whereas in THE NIGHT some outer area, a very surrealistic locale, PORTER, there is only the fascination left. with stores in the background? pears over and over is the vase of flowers And that amounts to fascism again. on the desks of the doctor and the lawyer. R.W.F. They tried to build a building in Are these meant to be icons of the B.R. RECRUITS IN INGOLSTADT was based Munich where everything was to be in it, bourgeoisie? Does your decor mean some- on a play by Marieluise Fleisser; are there apartments, stores, restaurants, and by the .thing in this way? other plays that you've filmed or would tUne they opened they were broke. like to? R.W.F. There are certain things in the B.R. There's a place in Berlin like that. bourgeoisie as well as in the proletarian R.W.F. I've already made a film based R.W.F. These things don' t work in classes which always appear again and on a play by Franz Xavier Krotz, and I've Germany. again; we've tried to show these things be- done my own version of Ibsen's Nora [A B.R. They're architects' fantasies. cause they're always there. In this film it Doll's House] . R. W.F. They're beautiful but at the same was flowers; in other films there were tUne they're terrible. green plants, particularly rubber plants J.H. You've said that you make a lot of B.R. Do you want to make a film in which I consider dead because they only money from your TV films . America? give you the idea of life. R.W.F. I have to make four or five TV R.W.F. Yes, but first I have to live here J.H. There are a lot of mysteries in FIST- films in order to be able to make a film the and I have to experience something here RIGHT, but one that interested me most way I want to. before I can shoot a film . I can't just make a was the idea that Marlene Dietrich is God . film; it has to come out of me, to flow out of J.H. What do you thiIlkofMARTHA? me. R.W.F. This is a private joke from me to R.W.F. That's not a TV film. It was fi- me. nanced and produced by TV, but it can be B.R. A friend of mine saw you in Miss shown in theaters. It was made as though Julie in Frankfurt-have you ever wanted J.H. Visconti's CONVERSATION PIECE has it were to be shown in theaters, even to make a film from it? a siInilar theme, not style, as FIST-RIGHT: though it was only going to be shown on someone getting caught up in the TV . R.W.F. I've done it in the theater; it's bourgeois culture. Going from Visconti to B.R. Can't they all be shown in theaters? enough. Every day I was so afraid of being Fassbinder is a culture shock, from late R. W.F. Two films were made by Ampex on stage, I was almost sick from it. I like the classicism to advanced modernism. What magnetic band. play, but at the same tUne, I was too ex- do you think of Visconti? cited. B.R. Isn' t that video? R.W.F. He' s a great director. THE R. W.E Yes, the same but more perfect. J.H. You should do an updated version DAMNED is perhaps the greatest film, the of the THOUSAND EYES OF DOCTOR MABUSE . film that I think means as much to the his- B.R. How did you feel about working in tory of film as Shakespeare does to the the- that medium? R.W.F. The horror in daily life I find ater. much more impressive than if it's done ar- R.W.F. It was an experiment to work for tificially. J.H. Do you say this because it's a pro- the first time with five cameras . I would not want to repeat it. Once with five J.H. But Mabuse lives! cameras and once with \" blue box\" R.W.F. Yes, certainly. :!: FILM COMMENT 17
And so I say: we need a film criticism not Conditions are improving. The TLS: \" No, no! It is too much to ask . I based on adolescent bad taste. Most of to- Thousand Eyes, those gallant Gotham pic- cannot listen to the argument. It is day's leading film critics came to their call- ture people, have brought the American worse than listening to that lunatic ing by way of the trash they lapped up in Sirk out of the vaults and put him on view, theme song from the favorite of you Palaces, Orpheums, and Bijous from Los and The New York Cultural Center fol- Sirkites' pictures-wRITTEN ON THE Angeles to London, from Omaha to New lowed up with a Sirk series. History will WIND. It is worse than reading Fanny York . . . . It is for this reason that the Fords contribute. And when The Lost find it Hurst. Do you read Fanny Hurst?\" and the Hawkses and Hitchcocks, even necessary and appropriate to blast Sirk in the Walshes, Vidors, and Sirks ... become the company of Ford and Hitchcock, It hits the Sirkite the hard way. TLS are great film makers, subjects for study and Hawks and Vidor, the battle lines are stilllistenil1g to motion pictures. In despair admiration -artists. stretched in neon. Sirkian cinema, become he thinks perhaps Griffith, the oldest great a cause in w hich to enlist, begins showing master, was right. Sound was a ghastly -John Simon, New York up regularly on television . We can thrash it mistake. Or yet rather, syllable. For the Magazine, August 25, 1975. out in the living room. Imperfect, but be- sound of movies is still the movement of the guiling. (\"You're staying in? Watch IMITA- image; the syllable is the text. What by Who knows Douglas Sirk? .. Douglas TION OF LI FE. I'll telephone during The analogy is the sound of \"Ch egelida manina,\" News.\") The Sirkite commences to enter- of \"Si, per riel,\" of \" Dove sono,\" of \"Ch e Sirk is the most neglected director in the tain lovely dreams . He sees headlines: faro \"? Synesthetic dilemmas ... ANDREW SARRIS TRANSPORTS SlRK whole of American cinema . ... There is no INTO THE PANTHEON/LANA REMI- The wrath of at least the liberal wing of NISCES /ROCK RECALLS /DOROTHY TLS might (perhaps) be (in some measure) serious study, no sign or festival to salute DELIVERS .. . (Pick one) abated if the record of Sirk's artistic-intellectual development were one of the most interes ting and exciting None of this is likely to make a pill's dif- charted. ference to those among Th eLiterate Serious, personalities in the entire history of the who, having long since been effectively si- Sierk, Hans DetIef, a.k.a. Douglas Sirko Born 1900, Hamburg. Studied law, phiIos- onema. - \"P.B.\" in Dictionnaire du Cinema, cited by Jon Halliday in Sirk on Sirk, London 1971 Left: Douglas Sirk, 1954. Above left: Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. Above right: Lauren Bacall , Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, Robert Keith in WRITTEN ON THE WIND. lenced on Hitchcock and Ford, and a little ophy, and the history of art. Painted, and more lately on Hawks, will yet inveigh translated Shakespeare : The Sonnets fiercel y against Sirko A mocking tirade (Hamburg, 1922); translated The Tempest, might run this way: Cymbeline, Twelfth Night, Th e Mernj Wives of Windsor. Translated Pirandello's Six Char- TLS : \"The Sirkian cinemuh? Hah! All acters in Search ofan Author. Apprenticeship that heaven allows to be written on the in the Deutsches Shaauspielhaus in Mu- wind by tarnished angels is an imitation nich. Directed Moliere, Buchner, Strind- of life! Hah! Snort!\" berg, and Brecht, as well as Shakespeare's or, more simply: Antony and Cl eopatra and Cymbelin e. Worked in German films until forced to TLS : '''The Weepies!' Snort! Debased!\" leave Germany in 1938. Arrived, by way of The Sirkite invokes parallels: Expressionist France and Holland, in America, where he expression; operatic involvements (adapt- became one of the group of distinguished ing for Sirkian argument the metaphoric German artists-expatriates. credi of! Viscontiani and Les Ophulslens).
There is not much in these \"credentials\" producer. Director of photography: Rus- barn Rock Hudson had built for himself to ratify genius in filmmaking. Yet the Sirk- sell Metty . and Jane to live in. Weather is a primary ite evangelist, who simply exults in the pic- force throughout. Love blooms in full leaf, torial energy, wit, irony, pathos (juxtapose Sirk: \"In melodrama it's of advantage to wanes in dead Winter, when the ever- two or more of the above) is more than en- have one immovable character against green trees are chopped down and taken titled to appeal with all guns drawn to the which you can put your more split ones to the town for Christmas . Love is reaf- open-eyed and open-witted (those .... The picture is about the antithesis of firmed in Midwinter-Spring, with the younger fortunate , for whom revelation in Thoreau's qualified Rousseauism and es- thaw-glazed field of snow blanketing the motion pictures is as rare as the advent of tablished American society.\" barnyard \"in a silence deep and white.\" individual grace is anywhere) . The Sirkite will point out how his hero husbanded his TLS are not smiling. Rock Hudson as a Jane Wyman lives in a tig ht little world resources, forged an utterly vivid, per- noble savage? Jane Wyman, America? in a tight big house with room dividers and sonal style, and u sed it politically-in a Agnes Moorehead, America's shadow? latticed front wi ndows, barring her from a personal politics: a dissection of the con- new life. She is widowed , worried , sequences of falsity. Moving pictures ex- Jane Wyman, a widow with two grown, trapped, resigned, riddled with \" decen- ploring static, moribund delusions. Cool, but not grown-up children (one a pom- cy,\" and alone. Rock Hudson's barn is one objective explication , exposing selfs' de- pous, callow boy, the other a ridiculous great open space, out of the town; the ceptions. girl-student of Freudian psychology), falls window is o ne grea t sh eet of glass. All in love with the man who comes to trim the within is sere n e. Hudson , th e builder, THE SIRKITE DEPOSITION trees: Rock Hudson. Friend Agnes possesses a certain modesty-in-strength, a In an appreciation of four Sirkian mas- Moorehead warns: \"Carrie! Your Gar- Galahad quality, a Siegfried bearing: of a dener!\" Jane enlists, on the side of love. frank and open nature, innocent of cere- terpieces of the Fifties, we celebrate his Rock meets Jane's town friends. No possi- bral guile, blessed with patience . . . . The bravura, as it worked simultaneously with ble communion. Jane vacillates. Then re- Rock Hudson/Jane Wyman combina tion and against popular, melodramatic ma- neges. Rock departs . Jane alone, her chil- was the perfection of fantasy-Galahad to dren departed, realizes her mistake, but the rescue. The lady rescued . America, if does not ask for a second chance. She sits she had listened to Thoreau. Official mid-century America, overfed, victorious Fifties meets the Thoreau- truth-teller. ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS is Sirk's most wistful, elegiac statement. The picture says \"Would that it were. .. .\" by James McCourt • Above left: Robert Stack, Jack Carson, Dorothy Malone, Rock Hudson in THE TARNISHED ANGELS. Above right: WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956), Karen Dicker, Juanita Moore, Terry Burnham , Lana Turner in IMITATION OF LIFE. Universal-International. Albert Zugsmith, producer. Director of photography: Rus- terial (\"The Weepies\"), turning story instead in front of an empty reflection, in a sell Metty. circumstances into Sirkian -s tances. Sirk switched-off television tube-a perfect staging pictures, creating impressions of Sirkian mirror. Suddenly she changes. Sirk: \"Just observe the difference be- austere isolation on the all-too-over- She rushes to Rock, only to find him not- tween ALL THAT HEAVE N ALLOWS and crowded gigantic wide-screen, became the at-home. She departs. He returns in time WRITTEN ON THE WIND . It' s a different supreme circumventor (Sirk-Inventor) of to see her departing. He calls out, he slips, stratum of society in ALL THAT HEAVEN the meretricious in mid-century Holly- he falls, he concusses. (What more could ALLOWS, still untouched by any lengthen- wood. (And since the Orpheum facts have anyone ask to happen?) Jane sits up with ing shadows of doubt. Here in WRITTEN ON long since convicted us of and sentenced him through the night. At dawn, he THE WIND, a condition of life is being por- us to living there in our fantasies, our Sirk wakes . They are together forever. (What trayed, and in many ways anticipated, is a true redeemer. That's a religion, in- more could heaven allow?) which is not unlike today's decaying and deed.) crumbling American society.\" The picture is simply plotted, gloriously ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (1955), shot, featuring New England (beautifully The Sirk picture of Sirk pictures, con- Universal-International. Ross Hunter, contrived postcards) Fall and Winter as summate. seen through the enormous window of the A rich brother and sister, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone, two hellions, go on the rampage. Stack flies from Texas oil land to New York with his best friend (the once-more poor but truly honest Rock Hudson), corrals the most elegant woman in New York, Lauren Bacall (who else could better claim that title, then as now), and brings her back to Texas. She is daz- zling and devoted and placates his demons for a time. Malone, having been desperate after Hudson since childhood, fails to cor- ral him, and concocts revenge. Malone to Stack, referring to herself, taunting: \"She saw the end of a marriage, and the begin- ning of a love affair.\" It is untrue, of course, but when Stack, who has been (wrongly) advised by the family doctor of his proba- ble impotence, is confronted with Bacall's eventual pregnancy, he attacks her and she miscarriages. Lost and violent, Stack FILM COMMENT 19
tries to kill his best friend , and is, of course, Malone, Hudson. It is a family that must producer. Director of photography: Irving killed tryi ng . Malone, on the stand, sole perish-and Bacall must do it, unwi_tting- Glassberg . witness to the killing, gives up and exoner- Iy, directly -and it is a family as paradigm ates Hudson . She is left her dead father's of society. (Sirk has blessedly never made a Sirk: \"In a way THE TARNISHED ANGELS millions and who-knows-what life. Told in \" message\" picture in his career. As a grew out of WRITTEN. You had the same flashback. cinematic genius whose trumps are irony pair of characters [Stack and Malone] seek- and flamboyance, he works around The ing their identity in the follow-up picture; The perfect Sirkian plot. His life-long Literate Serious in sudden and vivid broad the same mood of desperation, drinking, preoccupation with split-character, di- strokes .) and doubting the values of life, and at the vided selves, pitted against integrated same time almost hysterically trying to character, played twice at once in a per- Malone goes berserk one night in her grasp them, grasping the wind . Both pic- fectl y paired quartet. Divided Stack room, plays \"Temptation\" at top volume tures are studies of failure .... In both against co-ordinated Bacall-\" elegant\" on the hi-fi and does a wild masturbatory WRITTEN ON THE WIN D and THE TARNISHED here signifying whole, instinctive, sup- Salome dance in front of Hudson's picture. ANGELS it is an ugly kind of failure, a com- portive, redemptive (traditional good- But Herod is not present in the father. He pletely hopeless one.\" woman functions in pictures) . Split, twist- (Robert Keith) is a sick old man who stag- ed , de~ perate Malone beating herself gers up the stairs while the dance is on, In quite another way it was that THE against the Rock. suffers an entirely appropriate cerebral TARNISHED ANGELS grew out of \" written.\" hemorrhage at the top of the stairs and It came from Faulkner' s Pylon . Are TLS The picture opens in a blast of wizard tumbles back dow n, dead, the way (we fi- impressed? Like as not not. It is interesting self-assurance, quick bold cuts from the ex- nally understand) the man-killer in nonetheless that Sirk speaks more about terior of the mansion as a car screeches up Malone would really like Hudson to do. the literary inspiration he tried to work into the drive; to below stairs where the first The cross-cutting in closeup of this his vision on this picture more than any words are spoken by the sibylline black maenad and that sick progenitor is electric. other. He tells Jon Halliday he used to read servants (\" I heard talk .. . . There's going to There had never been a nutritive mother. Eliot's \"Prufrock\" aloud to Rock Hudson be trouble, etc.. .. \" ); to the entrance hall, The offspring are withering ... in order to let him hear his character, a all gaudy neo-dassic pillars, crystal chan- Faulknerized Eliotesque outside man. To delier, sweeping staircase, and huge (lat- Bacall has nothing quite so attractive to Stack he read from Th e Waste Land- ticed) windows; to an upstairs bedroom do. What she does do is maintain tension. Phlebas the Phonecian and death by wa- window framing the sensuous blood- Oddly enough, and gratifyingly, this ac- ter. Methods . . . thirsty Malone looking down at a severe tress, whose entire career was founded on angle at her revenge as the drunken Stack smart back-talk-elegant lip, ready Rock Hudson, a newspaper reporter in staggers into the hall below and quantities mouth-plays the seriously-wronged New Orleans in the Depression, sets out to of dead leaves swirl in his wake. Then to wife without a trace of miscast wanness. In explain to himself for his readers (the the room where Bacall awakens . The cam- casting terms it was like asking a thor- viewers) the motives behind the wild era pans on a desk calendar and, as the oughbred to just stand there and rear its daredevil fliers-ex-World War I ace dead leaves are swirling below in the hall, head from time to time . It's a perfect bal- Robert Stack; his wife, Dorothy Malone, a the dead of the calendar yield to the wind ance . parachute jumper; and their sidekick- and blow backward to the beginning of the mechanic Jack Carson. The air circus is the picture's time. In the end, Stack dead, Malone the existential arena . Malone is prostituted to heiress dasps a model oil derrick while sit- an airplane dealer to further her husband's Almost all of the picture is shot in barren ting at the desk under her father's picture. ambition, and Stack commits suicide in the settings, oil fields zooming past as Malone Electra in Dollarland. Hudson and Bacall upshot, crashing his plane into the water. drives to a roadhouse in her sports car: the drive away .. . naturally. Hudson and Malone contact, but separate. roadhouse, all tacky decor and jukebox The fliers, apotheosized, cannot live on the that plays \"Temptation,\" the sterile house THE TARNISHED ANGELS (1957) , ground. They are the terrible angels who itself, the tank-town . Twice, once on the Universal-International. Albert Zugsmith, visit. When they betray themselves as Stack-Bacall honeymoon, in Florida in the human beings, they vanish. moonlight oceanscape, and once in an oasis in Texas, a small river and pool where Malone goes to hear the voices of her childhood- her brother and the man she desires-does nature enter to enforce the contrast, to imply hope, to suggest possi- ble redemption. But in the honeymoon scene there is the eventually fatal revolver hidden under Stack's pillow, and in the sylvan Texas scene, Malone only hears the voices of the past and hears herself taunt- ing her brother, bargaining for the best friend's affection . The character is bruised and the performance is seductive and touching (among Oscar' s better choices). Why can 't the friend love the sister? We discover why, or how not, soon enough. Stack acquires Bacall (Stack's acquisitive compulsion to have the best, Malone's compulsive venality, these are bred into the Texan-American Hadleys), and he' s obsessed with Hudson, to the extent that he feels supplanted as a son, hating him and loving him, pitifully, fraternally, ask- ing when dying how they came so far from the river. It's some family romance: Stack, 20 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
WRITTEN ON THE WIND and (right) THE TARNISHED ANGELS . daughter, Sandra Dee, drifts along in the background. In the end, grief kills Juanita Sirk: \"The story had to be completely A kind of thriller that confounds satisfac- Moore. The climax of the picture is Juanita un-Faulknerized, and it was.\" tion. A picture that steps, but doesn't finish . TLS might be seduced ... Moore' s grand and moving funeral, for Jon Halliday: \"Outstandingly the best which she has saved all her life, at which adaptation to the screen of any Faulkner, IMITATION OF LIFE (1959), Universal- Susan Kohner makes a sudden, stabbingly acknowledged as such by Faulkner him- International. Ross Hunter, producer. Di- appropriate appearance. In the wake of the self. \" rector of photography: Russell Metty. noble black woman's death, the remaining principals are faced with the consequences Faulkner is verbal music; Sirk is pictorial. Sirk: \"And IMITATION OF LIFE is more of their imitation lives' careers. Susan Shooting in black-and-white, technically a than just a good title, it is a wonderful title: Kohner is seemingly redeemed and recon- come-down in 1957 (the U-I executives I would have made the picture just for the ciled. didn't trust the story), the picture looks title, because it is all there-the mirror, exactly right as it happens . In the Fifties, and the imitation . ...\" Sirk's last picture, a defiantly trium- America thought of the Depression as very phant melodrama-a kind of tightrope much a black-and-white period, because Andrew Sarris: \"What was needed with its moving pictorial records-as opposed this material [ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH] was the walk to greatness. to the Hoppers and Shahns on still ironic perspective Sirk's cooly contempla- Sirk: \"I feel IMITATION OF LIFE and WRlT- canvas-were all old newsreels and old tive style provided for such projects as IMI- movies in black-and-white. The Seventies TATION OF LIFE and ALL THAT HEAVEN AL- TEN ON THE WIND .. . have something in can put the Thirties into color; the Fifties LOWS. Neither indulging his glossy charac- common; it's the underlying element of would not. The Fifties were a supposed ters, nor indicting them, Sirk had the gift of hopelessness .... In IMITATION OF LIFE you technical triumph in themselves. making them come alive through win- don't believe the happy ending, and dows, mirrors, and other shimmering sur- you're not really supposed to. Everything Working in black-and-white, shooting faces. More important, Sirk confronted the seems to be O .K., but you well know it planes against worried skies, planes zoom- absurd anguish of shrunken souls with isn't.\" ing around pylons in lunatic aeriel shiny faces head-on .\" carousel, shooting Malone, blown into the The entire picture is trompe l'oreille and a wind and hurtling toward earth until the Would-be actress-mother Lana Turner feast for the discerning eye from beginning parachute opens, Sirk is right in the realm meets itinerant negress-mother Juanita to end. Never has Lana Turner's unctu- of sudden and violent movement he Moore on the beach at Coney Island when ously sincere pear-toned elocution been favors . The scenes on the ground, their daughters strike up a play- better pitted against the utter vacuity of her crowded, crammed rooms eerily lit and as friendship . Juanita Moore becomes Lana gaze, the deadly precision of her MGM indebted to the grotesque in German Turner's unpaid maid at first. Lana Turner comportment-that walk, that invisible cinema as anything he has done, point up sacrifices romance for her only love, her thick of the World 's Great Quotations bal- the ironic treatment of the desperate, not- career; the black and white daughters anced on that perfectly poised head. Those truly-heroic fliers-the Sirkian alternative grow up together. Lana prospers. The Jean Louis gowns. It's all there, perfect im- response to, say, Hawks's DAWN PATROL or light-negress child, Susan Kohner, finds itation of vitality. lf ignorance is a delicate Walsh's FIGHTER SQUADRON, where the negritude unbearable, finds she can pass and exotic fruit, whose bloom is gone if men prove themselves heroically. The tar- for white. Beaten by a boy (Troy Donahue) ever once touched, the Lana Turner nished angels don't prove a thing. for imitating, she leaves home and de- character in IMITATION OF LIFE is the Queen scends to sleazy nite-c1ub work. She of the Mangoes. The perfection of seem- It is a picture about sad losers, \" nar- struggles and makes her way. Her mother ing, she can no more be touched- moved rated\" by the there-and-not-there cynical seeks her out and in the confrontation is to real action-than Narcissus can kiss his Hudson. In contrast to his earlier \"melo\" forced to masquerade as Kohner's child- image in the reflecting pool. As perfect a masterpieces, the emphasis in THE TAR- hood mammy. Lana Turner reaches higher contrast and balance to the Juanita Moore NISHED ANGELS is far less on enlarged and higher into stardom (an Italian film di- character as is black to white, in color. characters than on action-really un- rector enlists her artistic services), and her action, reckless, positive inertia which kills Susan Kohner, a neophyte, triumphed human response, vitiates human concern. as the Sirkian split-character. (IMITATION: another quartet: Turner and Moore, Kohner and Dee.) The scene in which Kohner is slapped down by the boyfriend is shot on the oblique, through a plate- glass window reflected. Reflection, chance seeing, reinforces for the viewer the pathos of the girl's secret, and allows the character her desperate alternative. And desperate it is. Susan Kohner, sit- ting in a chorus line of chairs, joylessly kicking up one leg, holding a grotesque champagne bottle in the ugliest nite-club in the world (Sirk directing CABARET . . . !), and immediately thereafter backstage, turning her back to her mother, sitting in her dressing-table chair, wounded and cruel. Her last permission, her final admis- sion is to her mother, to be embraced one final time . The next embrace is of the flower-decked coffin. Embracing death; leading life. For Sirk, deus-ex-machina, the anodyne. Poet, debunker, triumphant charlatan, stunner, Hollywood visionary, and mag- nificent obsessor. Douglas Sirk resides in Picture People's Paradise. .~{; FILM COMMENT 21
FASSI NOE~ one' s life. She, he, and the world they live in. Basically that's how it seems. She has a ONS~rt motherly touch, she looks as though she might be able to soften at the right mo- Walpurgisnacht party time in THE TARNISHED ANGELS . ment: we can understand what Rock sees in her. He is a tree trunk. He is quite right \"Film is like a battleground,\" Sam Ful- about things, you can only make films with to want to be inside her. The world around ler, who once wrote a script! for Douglas things, with people, with light, with flow- is evil. The women all talk too much. There Sirk, said in a film by Jean-Luc Godard, ers, with mirrors, with blood, in fact with are no men in the film apart from Rock; in who, shortly before he made BREATHLESS, all the fantastic things which make life that respect, armchairs and glasses are wrote a rhapsody on Douglas Sirk's ATIME worth living. Sirk has also said: a director's more important. After seeing this film, TO LOVE AND ATIME TO DIE .2 But not one of philosophy is lighting and camera angles. small town America is the last place in the us, Godard or Fuller or me or anybody And Sirk has made the tenderest films I world I would want to go. Wha t it amounts else, can touch Douglas Sirk. Sirk has said: know; they are the films of someone who to is that somewhere along the line Jane \"Onema is blood, is tears, violence, hate, loves people and doesn't despise them as tells Rock that she is going to leave him, death, and love.\" And Sirkhas made films we do. Darryl F. Zanuck once said to Sirk: because of her idiotic children and so on. with blood, with tears, with violence, \"They've got to like the movie in Kansas Rock doesn't protest too much; he still has hate-films with death and films with City and in Singapore.\" America is really Nature, after all . And there Jane sits on love. Sirk has said: you can' t make films something else. Christmas Eve, her children are going to leave her anyway and they've brought her 'Shockproof (1948) . Sirk recounts \" . .. I recall that ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS a television set for Christmas . It's too Fuller-whom I never met-brought a snipt to Co- much . It tells you something about the lumbia, which I was supposed to shoot. I liked the Jane Wyman is a rich widow, Rock Hud- world and what it does to you . Later on, script tremendously. But against my wish they cal- son prunes trees for her. In Jane's garden a Jane goes back to Rock, because she has led in Helen Deutsch to change it.\" (John Halliday, love tree is in flower, which only flowers headaches, which is what happens tousall Sirk on Sirk, London 1972). For Fuller's account, see where love is, and so out of Jane's and if we don't fuck once in a while. But now the interview (translated from Presence du Cin ema Rock's chance meeting grows the love of she's back there's still no happy ending. If nos . 19-20) published in Samuel Fuller, Edinburgh their lives. But Rock is fifteen years anyone has made their love life that com- Festival 1969. younger than Jane, and Jane is completely plicated Eor themselves they won't be able integrated into the social life of her small to live happily afterwards. 2Jean-Luc Godard, \" Des Larmes et de la Vitesse,\" American town . Rock is a primitive and Cabiers du Cinema no . 94, translated in Screen , Sum- Jane has something to lose: her friends, her This is the kind of thing Douglas Sirk mer 1971. status which she owes to her late husband, makes movies about. People can't live her children. At the beginning Rock is in alone, but they can't live together either. Fassbinder's article, which ha s been excerpted here, love with Nature; Jane at first doesn' t love This is why his movies are so desperate. was firs t publi sh ed in its original form in Fern sehen anything because she has everything. ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS opens with a und Film , February 1971 and was translated in Laura long shot of the small town. The titles ap- Mulvey a nd Jon Halliday (eds.), Douglas Sirk, Edin- It's a pretty abysmal start for the love of pear across it. Which looks very sad. It is burgh (Edinburgh Film Festival, 3 Randolph Cres- followed by a crane shot down to Jane's house, a friend is just arriving, bringing cent, Edinburgh EH37TI), 1972 . © Edinburgh Film back some crockery she had borrowed. Really sad! A tracking shot follows the two Festival, 1972. It is reprinted with permission of the women, and there, in the background, Edinburgh Film Festival and the author. stands Rock Hudson, blurred, in the way an extra usually stands around in a Hol- lywood film. And as her friend has no time to have a cup of coffee with Jane, Jane has her coffee with the extra. Still only dose- ups of Jane Wyman, even at this stage. Rock has no real Significance as yet. Once he has, he gets his dose-ups too. It's sim- ple and beautiful. And everybody sees the point. Douglas Sirk's films are descriptive. Very few close-ups. Even in shot-counter- shot the other person doesn't appear fully in the frame. The spectators intense feel- ing is not a result of identification, but of montage and music. This is why we come out of these movies feeling somewhat dis- satisfied. What we have seen is something of other people. And if there' s anything there which concerns you personally, you are at liberty to acknowledge it or to take its meaning with a laugh. jane's children are something else. There's an old guy to whom they are superior in every way, in youth, in knowledge and so on, and they think he would make an ideal match for their mother. Then there's Rock, who is not much older than they are, better look- ing, and not that stupid either. But they 22 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
react to him with terror. It's fantastic. quite clear that everything she does, she tilted , mostly from below, so that the Jane's son offers them both, Rock and the does because she can't have the real thing. strange things in the story happen on the old guy, a cocktail. Both eulogize the screen, not just in the spectator's head. cocktail. In one case, when it's the old guy, Lauren Bacall is a surrogate for Robert Douglas Sirk's fihns liberate your head . the children beam with delight. But when Stack because he must know he will never THE TARNISHED ANGELS it's Rock, the tension in the room is ready be able to love her, and vice versa. And to explode. The same shot both times. The the father has an oil derrick in his hand THE TARNISHED ANGELS (1957) is the only way Sirk handles actors is too much. If you which looks like a surrogate cock. And black-and-white Sirk I have been able to look at Fritz Lang's later films, which he when Dorothy Malone at the end, sole see. It is the film in which he had most made at that time, in which incapacity is surviving member of the family, has this freedom. An incredibly pessimistic fihn. It everywhere in evidence, you can surely cock in her hand it is at least as wretched as is based on a story by Faulkner which un- see what Sirk is all about. Women think in fortunately I do not know. Apparently Sirk Sirk's films. Something which has never the television set which Jane Wyman gets has profaned it, which becomes it well. struck me with other directors. None of for Christmas. Which is a surrogate for the them. Usually women are always reacting, fuck her children begrudge her just as The fihn, like LA STRADA, shows a dying doing what women are supposed to do, Dorothy Malone's oil empire is a surrogate profeSSion, only not in such an awfully but in Sirk they think. It's something that for Rock Hudson. I hope she won't make it pretentious way. Robert Stack has been a has to be seen. It's great to see women and will go mad like Marianne Koch in IN- pilot in the First World War. He had never think. It gives one hope. Honestly. TERLUDE. For Douglas Sirk, madness is a wanted to do anything but fly, which is sign of hope, I think. why he now takes part in air-shows cir- Then, in Sirk, people are always placed cling around pylons . Dorothy Malone is in rooms already heavily marked by their Because Robert doesn't love Lauren he his wife; she demonstrates parachute social situation. The rooms are incredibly wants a child by her. Or because Robert jumping. They can barely make a living. exact. In Jane's house there is only one way has had no chance to achieve anything, he in which one could possibly move. Only wants at least to father a child. But his ef- Top: Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman , Agnes Moorehead in certain kinds of sentences could come to forts reveal a fatal weakness. Robert starts ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. Above: Lauren Baca ll ,' mind when wanting to say something, cer- drinking again. Now it becomes dear that Rock Hudson , Robert Stack in Stack's pri vate plane in tain gestures when wanting to express Lauren Bacall is no use to her husband. In- WRITTEN ON THE WIND. something. When Jane goes to another stead of drinking with him, understanding house, to Rock's, for instance, would she something of his pain, she becomes nobler Robert is brave but he knows nothing be able to change? That would be grounds and purer than ever, she makes us feel about machines, so he has a mechanic, for hope. Or, on the other hand, she may more and more sick, and we can see more Jiggs, the third one of their team, who is in well be so hung-up and stereotyped al- and more clearly how well she would get love with Dorothy. Robert and Dorothy ready that in Rock's house she will miss on with Rock Hudson, who also makes us have a son, who Rock Hudson meets the style of life she is used to and which has feel sick and is also noble. People who are when he is being teased by the other fliers: become her own. That's why the happy brought up to be useful, with their heads \"Who's your old man today, kid? Jiggs ending is not one. Jane fits into her own full of manipulated dreams, are always or .. ..\" Rock Hudson is a journalist who home better than she fits into Rock's. screwed up . If Lauren Bacall had lived with wants to write a fantastic piece about these Robert Stack, instead of living next to him, gypsies of the air who have crankcase oil in WRITIEN ON THE WIND through him, and for him, then he might their veins instead of blood. It happens have believed that the child she is expect- that the Shumanns have nowhere to stay, WRITTEN ON 1HE WIND (1956) is the story ing is really his. He wouldn't have had to so Rock Hudson invites them to his place. of a super-rich family. Robert Stack is the suffer. But, as it is, the child belongs more son, who was never as good, in any way, to Rock in actual fact, although he never as his friend Rock Hudson. Robert Stack slept with Lauren. knows how to spend his money: he flies airplanes, drinks, lays girls; Rock Hudson Dorothy does something bad: she sets is his constant companion. But they are not her brother against Lauren and Rock. All happy. There's no love in their lives. Then the same, I love her as I rarely love anyone they meet Lauren Bacall. Naturally she is in the cinema; as a spectator I follow with different from all other women. She's Douglas Sirk the traces of human despair. straightforward, works for her living, is In WRITTEN ON 1HE WIND the good, the practical, she's tender and understanding. \"normal;' the \"beautiful\" are always utter- And yet she chooses the bad guy, Robert, ly revolting; the evil, the weak, the disso- although the good guy, Rock, would suit lute arouse one's compassion. Even for the her much better. Rock has to work for his manipulators of the good. living too, is practical, understanding, and big-hearted, like her. She picks the one And then again, the house in which it all with whom things can't possibly work out takes place. Governed, so to speak, by one in the long run. When Lauren Bacall meets huge staircase. And mirrors. And endless Robert Stack's father for the first time she flowers. And gold. And coldness. A house asks him to give Robert another chance. such as one would build if one had a lot of It's disgusting the way the kind lady kicks money . A house with all the props that go the good guy in the balls to set things up with having real money, and in which one for the bad guy. Yes indeed, everything is cannot feel at ease. It is like the Oktober- bound to go wrong. Let's hope so. fest, where everything is colorful and in Dorothy Malone, the sister, is the only one movement, and you feel as alone as who is in love with the right person, i.e., everyone. Human emotions have to blos- Rock Hudson, and she stands by her love som in the strangest ways in the house which is ridiculous, of course. It has to be Douglas Sirk has built for the Hadleys . ridiculous when everyone else thinks their Sirk's lighting is always as unnatural as surrogiite actions are the real thing; it is possible. Shadows where there shouldn't be any make feelings plausible which one would rather have left unacknowledged. In the same way, the camera angles in WRITTEN ON 1HE WIND are almost always FILM COMMENT 23
During the night Dorothy and Rock get to \"Where is everybody?\" Too bad he never lie down and die? It's not fair suddenly to know each other. We get the feeling that noticed before that there never really was find yourself confronted with reality quite these two would have a lot to say to each anybody. What these movies are about is out of the blue. All Lana can do is be sur- other. Rock loses his job, one of the fliers the way people kid themselves . And why prised throughout the second part of the crashes in the race, Dorothy is supposed to you have to kid yourself. Dorothy first saw film. The result is that she wants to play prostitute herself for a plane, as Robert's Robert in a picture, a poster of him as a dar- dramatic parts in future. Pain, death, has broken down. Rock and Dorothy ha- ing pilot, and she fell in love with him. Of tears-one can surely make something out ven' t got that much to say to each other course Robert was nothing like his picture. of that. This is where Lana Turner's prob- after all, Jiggs repairs a broken-down What can you do? Kid yourself. There you lem becomes the problem of the film- plane; Robert goes up in it and is killed. are. We tell ourselves, and we want to tell maker. Lana is an actress, possibly even a her, that she's under no compulsion to good one. We are never quite sure on this Nothing but defeats . This film is nothing carry on, that her love for Robert isn't re- point. At first Lana has to earn a living for but an accumulation of defeats . Dorothy is ally love. What would be the point? Lone- herself and her daughter. Or is it that she in love with Robert, Robert is in love with liness is easier to bear if you keep your illu- wants to make a career for herslef? The flying, Jiggs is in love with Robert too, or is sions. death of her husband doesn't seem to have it Dorothy and Rock? Rock is not in love affected her that much . All she knows with Dorothy and Dorothy is not in love There you are. I think the film shows about him is that he was a good director. I with Rock. When the film makes one be- that this isn't so. Sirk has made a film in think Lana wants to carve out a career for lieve for a moment that they are, it' s a lie at which there is continuous action, in which herself. Money is of secondary interest to best, just as the two of them think for a something is always happening, and the her, success comes first . John Gavin is couple of seconds, maybe ... ? Then camera is in motion all the time, and we third in line. John is in love with Lana; for toward the end Robert tells Dorothy that understand a lot about loneliness and how her sake, in order to support her, he has after this race he'll give up flying . Of it makes us lie. And how wrong it is that abandoned his artistic ambitions and got a course that's exactly when he is killed. It we should lie, and how dumb. job as a photographer in an advertising would be inconceivable that Robert could agency . Lana cannot understand how really be involved with Dorothy rather IMITATION OF LIFE someone could give up their ambition for than with death. love. John is also rather dumb, he con- IMITATION OF LIFE (1959) is Douglas Sirk's fronts Lana with a choice, either marriage LIFE . last film. A great, crazy movie about life or career. Lana thinks this is fantastic and and about death. And about America. The dramatic, and opts for her career. The camera is always on the move in the first great moment: Annie tells Lana Turner film; just like the people it moves around, it that Sarah Jane is her daughter. Annie is IMITATION OF LIFE starts as a film about pretends that something is actually hap- black and Sara Jane is almost white. Lana the Lana Turner character and turns quite pening. In fact everything is so completely Turner hesitates, then understands, hesi- imperceptibly into a film about Annie, the finished that everyone might as well give tates again, and then quickly pretends that black woman. The filmmaker has turned up and get themselves buried. The track- it is the most natural thing in the world that away from the problem that concerns him, ing shots in the film, the crane shots, the a black woman should have a white the aspect of the subject which deals with pans! Douglas Sirk looks at these corpses daughter. But nothing is natural. Ever. Not his own work, and has looked for the im- with such tenderness and radiance that we in the whole film . And yet they are all try- itation of life in Annie's fate, where he has start to think that something must be at ing desperately to make their thoughts and found something far more cruel than he fault if these people are so screwed up and, desires their own. It's not because white is would have either in Lana Turner's case or nevertheless, so nice. The fault lies with a prettier color than black that Sarah Jane in his own. Even less of a chance. Even fear and loneliness. I have rarely felt fear wants to pass for white, but because life is more despair. and loneliness so much as in this film. The better when you're white. Lana Turner audience sits in the cinema like the doesn't want to be an actress because she I have tried to write about some films by Shumanns' son in the roundabout: we can enjoys it, but because if you're successful Douglas Sirk and I discovered the diffi- see what's happening, we want to rush you get a better deal in this world. And culty of writing about films which are con- forward and help, but, thinking it over, Annie doesn't want a spectacular funeral cerned with life and are not literature. I what can a small boy do against a crashing because she' d get anything out of it, she's have left out a lot which might have been airplane? They are all to blame for Robert's dead by then, but because she wants to more important. I haven't said enough death. This is why Dorothy Malone is so give herself value in the eyes of the world about the lighting: how careful it is, how it hysterical afterwards. Because she knew. retrospectively, which she was denied dur- helps Sirk to change the stories he had to And Rock Hudson, who wanted a scoop . ing her lifetime. None of the protagonists tell . Only Josef von Sternberg is a match for As soon as he gets it he starts shouting at come to see that everything, thoughts, him at lighting. And I haven't said enough his colleagues. And Jiggs, who shouldn't dreams arise directly from social reality or about the interiors Douglas Sirk had con- have repaired the plane, sits asking are manipulated by it. I know of no other structed. How incredibly exact they are. film in which this fact is formulated with And I haven' t gone into the importance of such precision and with such desperation. flowers and mirrors and what they signify At one point, toward the end of the film, in the stories Sirk tells us. I haven' t em- phasized enough that Sirk is a director Annie tells Lana Turner that she who gets maximum results out of actors. That in Sirk's films even zombies like has a lot of friends . Lana is baffled. Marianne Koch and Liselotte Pulver come Annie has friends? The two women had across as real human beings, in whom we been living together under one roof for ten can and want to believe. And then I have years by then, and Lana knows nothing seen far too few of Sirk's films . I would like about Annie . No wonder Lana Turner is to have seen them all, all thirty-nine of surprised. Lana Turner is also surprised them. Perhaps I would have got further when her daughter accuses her of always with myself, my life, and my friends . I having left her alone; and when Sarah Jane have seen six films by Douglas Sirko starts being stroppy to the white goddess, Among them were the most beautiful in when she has problems and wants to be taken seriously, even then Lana Turner can the world. -&. only show surprise. And she's surprised when Annie dies. How could she simply Transla ted by Thomas Elsaesser 24 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
I, ~'\" I ~,\\\\ ~ II ~ by Robin Wood Chris Mulkey and John Jenkins in LOOSE ENDS. Paul Bartel' s DEATH RACE 2000. N EW W ORLD PI CTU RE S The Edinburgh Festival was originally a terity) has been running it on a minimal cussion of the defining characteristics of a festival of music and drama, a big prestige budget for several years . She sees it as an revolutionary cinema to Sir Geraint event. In the past decade the film compo- \" intervention\" in a quintessentially Evans's superb (but strictly traditional) nent, previously modest and marginal, \"bourgeois\" festival. all-star Figaro-or from a heated , ac- has developed to a point where it might rimonious critical confrontation over the reasonably be regarded as the center of Glancing around at all the fringe events psychoanalytical excesses of the booklet the entire festival, with ambitious Special that accumulate every summer, one has produced by Paul Willemen and Claire Events (this year, a series of screenings the impression that there are now far Johnston for the Tourneur retrospective and seminars conducted by the editors more interventions than there is Festival. to Janet Baker's incomparable perform- and critics of Screen on the subj ect of One could spend a probably highly prof- ance of the Kindertotenlieder with the Israel \" Brecht and the Cinema\" ) and major ret- itable fortnight going to nothing but the Philharmonic-is (or should be) mutually rospectives (this year, Jacques Tourneur, offerings of small amateur, semi- illuminating, each experience becoming Martin Scorsese, Terayama, and Alain professional, student, or avant-garde more vivid, more precisely definable, in Robbe-Grillet), as well as a wide and re- theatrical groups . It is true, however, that relation to the other. sourceful selection of recent films (with an the Festival proper-the part that is emphasis, by no means exclusive, on meant to attract the tourists, that gets It was an exhausting and bewildering political and avant-garde work) . most of the publicity and most of the offi- fortnight, not only because I saw more cial expenditure-remains a firmly tradi- films than ever before in so short a period, The Edinburgh Film Festival, then , is tional affair of concerts by international but also because of the critical confronta- much more than a film market. Serious celebrities and prestige productions of tions, the dashes of aesthetic experiences, and purposeful, it attracts critics, famous operas. the complex issues raised by juxtaposing teachers, students , enthusiasts, of all de- the traditional \" realist\" movie (SMILE, nominations. What it hasn't yet attracted One wouldn't wish the film festival to ALI CE DOESN 'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE) with is any adequate financial support (given lose its particular character (defined the avant-garde in its varied manifesta- the scope of the programming) from the partly by its interest in the disreputable, tions, and with the developments pro- Festival authorities. Its organizer Linda the subversive, and the revolutionary), voked directly or indirectly by Brechtian Myles (who, with her assistant Jim Hick- which may be necessarily linked with a theory and practice. My overall experi- ey, sets a tone of friendliness and infor- need to fight for its own existence. Cul- ence was of a general fruitful melange in mality that quite offsets any sense of aus- ture thrives on conflicts, clashes, dialecti- which everything reflected somehow or cal tensions. To be able to pass from a dis- FILM COMMENT 25
other on everything else. (Perhaps An- shown (uncut, for the first time in Britain) tion of meanings. In theory this sounds drew Sarris-\"I have never known any- and turned out to be far more interesting. very engaging: admirably democratic, re- one to say at the end of the festivities: Bartel is clearly fascinated by genre and specting the viewer' s freedom and inde- 'Wasn't that a great festival?' \"-should conventions, and loves playing with pendence. In practice, one can doubt try Edinburgh.) In the following necessar- them; but while PRIVATE PARTS works re- whether it can ever really work. The ily hasty, impressionistic, and selective sonant and disturbing variations on its \"openness\" proves either an illusion or the survey, I hope certain recurrent themes sources (PSYCHO, PEEPING TOM, HOMICI- manifestation of a failure of realization. will provide some degree of unity. (My DAL), DEATH RACE remains at the level of comments on the critical issues raised by the adolescent Bright Idea. In an interesting but fundamentally un- the Tourneur retrospective and its con- satisfactory article in a recent Screen, Colin troversial accompanying booklet can be CRAZY MAMA (produced by Julie Cor- McCabe tries to enroll TOUT vABIEN among found in next issue's Books section.) man) is even more frustrating, because its revolutionary open texts, as against material is potentially so rich. But its di- Middlemarch and KLUTE, taken as variously Of the retrospectives devoted to recent rector, Jonathan Demme, appears to have representing the classical realist closed filmmakers, the most impressive was the no control of tone whatever. The transi- text . In Middl emarch , the various \" dis- complete Scorsese-everything from the tions from farce to violence to pathos are courses\" (i.e., the dialogue) are \"placed\" early shorts to ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE hopelessly bungled, and moments that by the author, who makes it clear in her ANY MORE. Scorsese has not, so far, made should be really poignant (the death of narrative how we are to regard each, what much of a mark in Britain. WHO'S THAT the old lady, the scene where the sur- value to assign it. In TOUT VA BIEN, accord- KNOCKING AT MY DOOR? was never re- vivors of the carnage shout the dead into ing to McCabe, the narrative isn't leased over here; BOXCAR BERTHA remains heaven) go for nothing. Comparison with \"privileged\" in this way, and we are free to virtually unknown; MEAN STREETS had a BOXCAR BERTHA is instructive. relate to the various discourses as we will. short run at a London art house with dreadful sound reproduction (it usually The most striking of this year's batch of This is quite at variance with my own shows subtitled movies, so the audience exploitation movies, by virtue of its experience of the film. To take a few obvi- doesn't notice) that rendered much of the detestability, was David Cronenberg's ous examples: the offscreen voices at the dialogue unintelligible . Now ALICE is THE PARASITE MURDERS. Its derivation is beginning establish a sardonic-ironic at- quite a hit, and MEAN STREETS is to re- from INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS titude to capitalism and the commercial open at another cinema. One wishes via NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD , but the cinema which informs the entire film; the some enterprising management would source of its intensity is quite distinct: all repeated lateral tracking-shots across the take up BOXCAR BERTHA, arguably Scorse- the horror is based on extreme sexua1 dis- multiple set of the factory have several se's best film to date . gust. The film is not without an uneasy functions, but one of them is to reveal that humor, of the kind whereby sickness nothing much is happening and nobody My impression is that the less directly laughs at itself as a means to self- knows what to do next (a narrative device personal films, which also happen both to perpetuation. The resolution is very curi- used to specify the characters' predica- be centered on women, are superior to ous, and one wonders if Cronenberg ment); the factory boss is played quite pa- those that are obviously closest to him. realized that it could be read as a happy tently as comic caricature (the \"code\" of WHO'S THAT KNOCKI NG? is a striking first ending. The characters, finally taken over acting style, used to place the character de- feature but very uneconomical, with a by the parasites (which combine the finitively in relation to the film's concerns, fondness for improvisation as an end in properties of aphrodisiac with syphilis), hardly leaves us free to think how sensible itself and a tendency never to do in one all appear happy and \" liberated\" ; all signs his opinions are and how admirable his at- shot what you can do in ten. Even in of disease, strongly emphasized earlier, titude is). MEAN STREETS, distinguished though it is, have mysteriously vanished. They drive I have the alienating sense that Scorsese out into the night to liberate the world Most important, we watch the two finds the characters and situations much into one vast happy universal sex orgy. central characters undergo a process of more interesting than I do, because they The ending seems to represent, under learning, through experience and reflec- are personally close to him. He seems at cover of its expression of horror, a sort of tion, throughout the film . They are present to need either the tensions that perverse wish-fulfillment-the necessary \"placed\" by the narrative, in other words, arise from the discipline of a genre product, perhaps, of the painful tensions as people insecure in their positions who framework or strong collaborators like of fascination and disgust that give the must confront certain issues. The placing Ellen Burstyn; one cannot but see ALICE movie its crude energy. is clinched at the end by the return of the as, in a very real sense, her film as much offscreen voices, which tell us that the as Scorsese' s. ALICE is flawed-the con- Clumsily directed and indifferently ception and realization of the Kris Kristof- acted , THE PARASITE MURDERS doesn ' t ferson character is much too soft, conven- make me long to see Cronenberg's previ- tional in the worst sense-but its local ous avant-garde movies. The experimental aliveness, the sheer sense of creative en- cinema has never been among my in- joyment, is irresistible. terests, and perhaps I should abstain from writing about it. Edinburgh confronted BOXCAR BERTHA is proof that one can me, however, with a few representative make a film for the Corman company and specimens; and, while feeling little interest produce responsible, personal, and sensi- in the films , I am sufficiently interested in tive work. The other Corman products on the critical issues they raise to venture a view (exploitation movies are an Edin- few tentative thoughts. burgh specialty) suggested the contrary. Paul Bartel's DEATH RACE 2000 was very The opposition between the traditional popular with many of my fellow-critics \"realist\" cinema and films variously for the alleged sharpness of its satire. I characterized as \"avant-garde,\" \"experi- found it puerile, a smart-ass under- mental, \" or \"revolutionary\" is commonly graduate charade made the more offen- described as terms of the Closed Text vs. sive by its slick efficiency. Bartel's earlier the Open Text. With the former, a reading horror movie PRIVATE PARTS was also is imposed on the viewer; with the latter, he is invited to participate in the construc- 26 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
protagonists have learned the necessity to tion with social-political content that is at around the rocks and bushes to come to \"live historically.\" TOUT VA BIEN is a suc- least potentially interesting. It is a prob- rest, as the scene closes on God's promise cessful work precisely because Godard lem solved by Michael Snow, in his 285- of ultimate revelation, on the twin peaks and Gorin were sufficiently in command minute RAMEAU'S NEPHEW BY DIDEROT of a mountain in the mid-distance . The of what they were doing to establish (THANX TO DENNIS YOUNG) BY WILMA overt expressiveness is the more impres- clearly how the film must be read. We are SCHOEN, by the simple and drastic expe- sive in the context of austerity so far no freer-and no less free-in watching it dient (at least for the hour-and-a-half for created . than in reading Middlemarch . which I stayed) of selecting or creating raw material of no conceivable intrinsic That first scene, in which no action It is salutary to turn from this to the two interest whatever. This means that those whatever is demanded or implied by text short films by Joyce Wieland shown at interested in the possibilities of juggling or music, perfectly suits Straub's Edinburgh: SOLIDARITY and PIERRE VAL- methods. Unfortunately , it is the only LIERES. The former , taking its material sound and images in varying combina- scene in the opera that does. The second from footage (literally!) of the Dare Cookie tions and permutations can indulge this scene, Moses's meeting with Aaron, strike, consists of shots of people's feet, interest absolutely without distraction. poses no problems but brings no particu- accompanied by activists' speeches; the But even Jonathan Rosenbaum, with his lar rewards. Discomfort sets in with the title-word remains in the center of the commitment to do-it-yourself movies, first appearance of the chorus. A funda- image throughout. The latter consists seemed to find the experience less en- mental dramatic principle of the opera is mostly of close-ups of the lips of a Quebec thralling than he had antiCipated. the opposition between the static, hieratic revolutionary as he expresses his views. confrontations of Moses and Aaron and One supposes from Wieland's choice of Problems of reading arise in a more the constant flu x and mobility of the subject-matter, combined with the de- sophisticated form in Straub's film of People, governed by shifting emotions of terminedly avant-garde manner, that she Schonberg'S Moses and Aaron. Straub's confusion , desperation , rage, ecstasy. By has left-wing sympathies. But this may be aesthetic is theoretically attractive; I always denying this basic opposition, Straub is a rash assumption. Both films leave the find his films more interesting in descrip- not merely \"letting the music speak for it- viewer free to interpret them more or less tion than in experience. The strict rejec- self,\" but acting against it. The intention as he pleases, in a way quite impossible in tion of naturalism and audience identifi- was, apparently, that the People should TOUT VA BIEN. cation, the allegiance to Brecht and the emerge as the real protagonist. The effect practice of distanciation, the apparently is the reverse: by refusing to allow the Interpretations of SOLIDARITY: Either open and affirmative attitude to the cul- chorus any visual means of expression, \"People all wear different shoes, so sol- tural tradition-Bach, Corneille, Schon- Straub receives its status , undercutting the idarity must be impossible,\" or \"Despite berg in the films, John Ford in inter- dramatic force of the music. the fact that people wear different shoes, views-all this sounds more than admi- there can still be solidarity.\" The film' s rable. It suggests an attempt to solve the The \"Orgy Around the Golden Calf\" final image is of the feet of a dog: Either major aesthetic dilemma of our time. defeats Straub completely. The scene \"Even a dog has its place in human sol- notoriously raises problems of staging idarity,\" or \"These people might as well The impression is confirmed by that are perhaps unsolvable. Schonberg's be dogs,\" or even, simply, \"There was a Straub's own remarks in an interview in stage directions demand a detailed dog there too.\" Certainly, the viewer can the Edinburgh Festival review: \"When a naturalistic spectacle involving horses, achieve active participation here, con- man makes a film that goes a little deep, camels, asses, the slaughter of animals, structing his own meaning, profiting and is honest, he makes a work which is lots of blood and violence, mass nudity from the lacunae in the text to be produc- very dialectical. He can have anti-Marxist and copulation. Probably, given the isola- tive instead of passive, etc., etc. But as the intentions and ideology, but if he makes a tion and neglect in which Schonberg meanings he is likely to find himself con- work which is serious and a responsible lived , any idea of performance felt like structing from the available raw material work, he makes a work which you can wish-fulfillment anyway. It is obviously are (a) mutually contradictory and (b) use . .. which is not un-Marxist.\" legitimate to seek some form of simplifica- equally vacuous, the exercise doesn't tion and stylization; what is unforgivable seem particularly rewarding. I came to the film with the highest about Straub's solutions is that most of hopes, with Michael Gielen's magnificent them just look silly. PIERRE VALLIERES seems less open to recording (made at the same time as the the meaning-construction game, chiefly film, with the same forces) fresh in my The Dance of the Butchers has five un- because lips in huge close-up on a cinema mind-the most intense and dramatic talented bare-assed men galumphing up screen for over forty minutes cannot fail to rendering of the score I have ever heard. and down, presumably on the principle become oppressive, even repulsive. One During the first scene of Act I (\"The Call- that any display of savagery would be a quickly loses all sense of what M. Vallieres ing of Moses\"), it seemed that expecta- surrender to representationalism, and is saying; his mainly admirable senti- tions would be fulfilled. Done in a very any choreographic interest a surrender to ments are effectively reduced to gibberish long single take, it opens with the camera aestheticism. The Orgy of Giving pro- (unless one ignores the image and reads looking down on Moses in medium duces a moment of pure Laurel-and- the subtitles, as I found myself doing). close-up somewhat from the side. We can Hardy, wherein one man suddenly pours The effect is intensified when Wieland see only part of his face, and no decor but a bowl of wine over another man's head removes first the titles and then the the barren earth before his feet; there is no while the latter stands resigned if mildly sound, so that the lips mouth incom- attempt to depict the Burning Bush visu- surprised; one reflects that only a director prehensibly. Doubtless the two films are ally. The camera, like Moses, remains stat- totally lacking a sense of humor could fail supposed to be about the relationship be- ic for about half the scene. We are led to to realize how risible it would look. The tween sound and image, the deconstruc- share the character's intense concentra- mass suicides are represented by some tion of illusionism, and the foregrounding tion: for him, concentration on the words men jumping sedately out-of-camera, of technical devices. But to me they of God; for us, concentration on music raising their skirts as if to avoid a puddle. seemed most intelligible as a sort of primi- and text, the bare visual image providing An admirer of the film kindly explained to tive aversion therapy, for respectively, neither representation nor distraction. As me that Straub hadn't wanted the audi- feet and lips. Happily, as with most aver- the Voice from the Burning Bush (sung ence to think the men really got killed; sion therapy, their success proved short- and spoken in overlapping phrases by personally, I have never found this much lived. groups of singers) gains in authority, the of a problem in the fictional cinema. camera at last tilts up to reveal the con- The problem of the Wieland films arises tours of the natural amphitheater in The trouble here lies in the fact that from the combination of stylistic abstrac- which the opera is staged, then pans Straub rejects stylization as completely as FILM COMMENT 27
he rejects naturalism: he substitutes for some unencouraging advance reports , The most successful of the three is the least overtly Brechtian: Rolf Lyssy's CON- both another kind of literalism-th e Bergman' s MAGIC FLUT E.) Mark Rap- FRONTATION, about the assassination of a Nazi organizer by a Jewish student in literalism of real actors jumping a foot or paport's curious and intriguing MOZART Switzerland during the Second World War. The method of the film is that of tw o d own a bit of rock-that looks IN LOVE doesn't attempt a solution, but \"realist\" documentary reconstruction; in some respects it recalls BATTLE OF ALGIERS . merely silly a nd distracting , preventing uses arias and ensembles (mostly from It strikes me as an admirable validation (if one is really needed) of the fact that such the sort of imaginative engagement that Figaro, Cosi Fan Tutte, and Th eMagicFlute, a method is capable of provoking gen- uinely open reflection without any obliga- true stylization encourages . The same with one apiece from II Seraglio and Don tion to deconstruct its traditional il- lusionism. The conduding footage of an admirer, somewhat put out by my lack of Giovanni) for its own somewhat less than interview with the actual assassin as he is today sufficiently \"places\" the preceding enthusiasm for the film, asked me if 1'd scrutable purposes. Actors who can't sing fictionalized account without the need for further insistence; even without it, the prefer it done by Ken Russell . The remark (or, for that matter, act) mouth the texts film, by continually though sympatheti- cally questioning its hero's motivation, depends on two false premises: that the over familiar recordings, the profession- and by questioning the very concept indi- cated by the term \" hero\" , successfully only alternative to one extreme is its op- als occasionally cut off for the amateurs to distances the spectator. It is possible to argue at length about the film ' s precise posite; and that there is an obligation to interpolate a bar or two of their own point of view, not because it isn't lucid, but because it is complex. film Schonberg's opera in the first place. warblings. The actors wear a mixture of On the other hand, LES ORDRES, Straub's aesthetic is less the Brechtian eighteenth-century wigs and jeans , Michel Brault's film about the arrest and humiliation of citizens of Montreal during one of distanciation-which, in Brecht's posed against painted stage backdrops or the \"October Crisis\" of1970, makes overt- ly Brechtian gestures but is really very practice never precluded emotional en- glimpsed in modern apartments or au- simple-not as Brecht is simple, in the means used to achieve complex effects, gagement, and was never incompatible tomobiles. The arias are arranged to tell but in its lack of analytical complexity. At the beginning, the actors introduce them- with humor-than the Puritan one of de- (with the help of the actors' monologues) selves and briefly describe the characters they play; after that, Brechtian distance is nial and deprivation. One of my col- the story of Mozart's shifting relation- abandoned in favor of the encouragement of straightforward identification with nice leagues asked Straub after the screening ships with the Weber sisters . The people and \"correct\" liberal-humanist emotions. The actors are excellent, the il- of MOSES AN D AARON what he had been monologues are deliberately banal, like lusion of actuality is often very powerful, the film is sometimes moving, and suc- trying to do . \" Nothing,\" was the answer. something out of Tru e Romances . ceeds in arousing fury against the au- thorities. At the very end it manages to I see it as having significance beyond that All this brings into play- a number of ask the question which it might more profitably have started: What are the so- of an unassuming response to an unre- contrasts or anomalies : the eighteenth cial conditions and political realities that produce such outrages? flecting question. Straub' s film s suggest century vs. the present; professional sing- The third film, and the one most an attempt to see how little ·one can do ing vs. amateur; varieties of convention strongly indebted to Brecht, may be at once the most interesting and the least and artifice. But beyond a protracted play- successful: THE NEW ICE AGE, third part of a trilogy by the Dutch director Johan van ing around, it is difficult to see just what der Keuken . The film intercuts footage shot in Peru with sequences about the Rappaport is doing . Indeed, one aspect of lives of a Dutch family, most of whom work in an ice-cream factory. The aim is the game seems to be the undercutting of an open-ended contrast/comparison of different forms of exploitation in capitalist possible interpreta tions. The obvious societies. The spectator is mostly left free to make his own connections and opposi- one, for example, that parallels are being tions, draw his own conclusions, the filmmaker juxtaposing various pieces of drawn between Mozart's life and his art, evidence. The Peruvian sequences offer, necessarily, an outsider's view, and never II II is undermined by intrusions from the pretend otherwise; the Dutch sequences are much more intimate, concerned with work of other composers. One can accept the plight of specific individuals. Inevita- the conceit of Mozart listening to \"Che bly, one's interest gravitates toward the faro senZil Eurydice\" as he drives along in Dutch sections, with their painful insights his car, because if Mozart had had a car radio he might well have listened to - - - 0.~... Gluck on it. But what are we to do with J Berlioz's Les Troyens duet, \"Nuit d'ivresse ~ et d'extase injinie,\" sung by Mozart with ;<:;: each sister in turn as the response to \" If ~ everyone's dream could have come ~ true . . . \"? Sissy Smith and Rich La Bonte in Mark Rappaport' s Commendable, of course, to under- MOZART IN LOVE. mine an enterprise that would have been and still make a film . The spirit of nega- naive in the extreme, but nothing con- tion is strong in his work . structive seems to develop in its place. It seems to me also significant that, Rappaport, one supposes, loves the when questioned about his attitude to the operas (he certainly knows them well), opera's protagonists, he replied that the but the final effect is to trivialize them. Art problem was not to choose between as play is a not displeasing concept as far Moses and Aaron but to \"refuse\" both. In as it goes, and I found the film charming Schonberg, the real dialectic arises from for about quarter of an hour. At ninety- the sense that one must accept both. plus minutes, the charm wears a bit thin . Moses (who of course never sings, except on one brief occasion) seems favored by With \"Brecht and the Cinema\" as the the text, Aaron by the music (he is given festival's educational event, it became some of Schonberg'S most eloquent inevitable-and often rewarding-to melodic writing) . The opera's tragic force view films outside those screened for the is the product of the absolute irreconcila- seminars in a Brechtian perspective. Not bility of two necessary viewpoints. The unexpectedly, the seminars gravitated result of the Straub/Schonberg collision is repeatedly to TOUT VA BIEN as the Brecht- that the essential sterility of Straub is ian film par excellence-balanced between overwhelmed by the immense fertility of distanciation and involvement, the Schonberg. social-political analysis consistently felt The problem of filming opera remains and realized in concrete human terms . It unsolved-and is perhaps unsolvable . provided a valuable touchstone for three (One awaits with great interest, despite varied political films in the festival. 28 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
into what it means to be at once enslaved tors, is firmly in the Cassavetes-Scorsese probing of the validity of traditional con- by technological routine and stricken with tradition of improvisation and natural- cepts of relationship on various levels. Its ism, but mercifully free of the relentless freshness is partly due to the way it con- hereditary deafness. insistence that makes Cassavetes' tinually arouses expectations in order to movies, for me, almost unendurable, and reverse or cheat them, a pattern carried \"There is tragedy in every society: what with a sufficiently tight structure to pre- right through to the sad and funn y last differs is the form it takes and the way it is vent it from lapsing into mere be- shot. dealt with\"-such, more or less, was how haviorism. I managed to talk to Morris van der Keuken explained the intention and Wozniak (according to the credits, I was present at the New York festival to me . Friendly, humane, and patient, he she wrote and he directed, but the colla- in 1970 when EVEN DWARFS STARTED made the film seem more interesting than boration seems to have been more com- I had found it at the time . I remain uncer- plete and continuous than this suggests) SMALL was screened and Werner Herzog tain whether his intentions are effectively after the screening, and sensed in them a was loudly booed by a majority of the au- realized. And I still think he is wrong markedly ambivalent attitude to the Hol- dience, words like \" crue!, \" \" sick,\" and about the ending, a series of zip-pans lywood tradition. \"Fascist\" were freel y bandied about. I stopping on an out-of-focus image of a liked and defended the film, and I think young Peruvian. To van der Keuken, this LOOSE ENDS is not really a genre movie, time has vindicated it and me . Certainly conveys a positive question (\" What but it relates very interestingly to a cur- Herzog's new film, EVERY MA N FOR HIM- should we do?\") and a tentative affirma- rent sub-genre that has obviously great SELF AND GOD AGAINST ALL , capti vated tion (\"A new man is emerging, but he is sociological significance-the male duol everyone at Edinburgh with its charm, as yet unformed\" ). To me it communi- road movie, inaugurated by EASY RIDER, humor, and poignance. The story of a cates only a sense of helpless confusion BUTCH CASSIDY, and MIDNIGHT COWBOY, man kept in solitary confinement from and despair. But I would like very much and still proliferating. More lucidly than birth by a mysterious tyrannical father- to see the film again, and in the context of most of the cycle, LOOSE ENDS makes the figure , then arbitrarily released into essential connections between the male eighteenth-century society, it has inevit- the complete triptych. relationship, the desire for flight, and the ably been compared with THE WILD Two independent American movies, increasingly manifest strains in Western CHILD . But whereas Truffaut's film stays society: disillusion with work (one of safely within the bounds of a carefully LEGACY and LOOSE ENDS , propound an Morris and Wozniak's cherished projects, self-imposed classicism , Herzog's is aesthetic far removed from Brecht, if they can get it set up, is a filmic equiva- much more idiosyncratic and takes great- though both are concerned with ideologi- lent of Studs Terkel's Working ), the de- er risks . It also appears a much more dif- cal entrapment within capitalist society. cline of the concept of home-and-family ficult film, its playing off of culture against LEGACY, directed by Karen Arthur, traces as an absolute, and the discontent of nature, Classical against Romantic, the the descent of a wealthy suburban women with the role of housewife. The lucid ordering of experience represented housewife into insanity during a day of film is also somewhat more conscious by Mozart against eruptions of the un- isolation. The film has some very strong than most (without being over-explicit) of predictable and inexplicable, giving rise features which may gain it greater respect the bisexual implications of the male duo to a complex network of ambiguities. than it ultimately deserves . It is very har- movies (as in the scene where Billy, the rowing; the central figure (though indi- younger man, dances with a girl in order I have not seen the previous films of vidualized in great detail) is sufficiently to show off to Eddie, the woman gradu- Wim Wonders (THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY AT representative to evoke uneasy sym- ally and indignantly realizing that she is a THE PENALTY KICK, ALICE IN THE CITIES). pathetic echoes in most of us; and the per- mere pretext) . The film seemed to me one Seeing, quite unprepared, THE WRONG formance of Joan Hotchkiss (also the au- of the festival's unarguable minor MOVEMENT was like discovering Bergman thor) is certainly impressive. That is part successes. with THE SEVENTH SEAL or Antonioni with of the trouble: the film slips too easily into L'AVVENTURA. Not that the film is much the category of tour-de-force, so that the I have left the festival's three most im- like either; but one experiences that shock response evoked is less \"How horribly pressive achievements for last, less to rise of recognition of an achieved and assured confining is the role bourgeois society de- to a rhetorical climax than because it is so individual voice. A contemporary varia- fines for its women!\" than \"What an ex- difficult to write briefly about works one tion on Wilhelm Meister , scripted by Peter traordinary piece of acting!\" greatly admires, especially after only one Handke, THE WRONG MOVEMENT is very viewing . Nagisa Oshima's DEAR SUMMER strange, but with a strangeness that one The last sequences of LEGACY pile on the SISTER is not new; it was screened in the trusts as the product of inner necessity . agony to such an extent that the audience London festival two years ago, but has is likely to become alienated. The assault never been taken up by a British dis- The film concerns a group of people, is too direct, and too insistent. What be- tributor, and Oshima's work is only thrown together by chance encounters of gins almost on the level of THE TOUCH de- sparsely represented in our catalogues. mysterious attraction, who achieve a kind generates almost to the level of DIARY OF A This is among his most accessible films, of temporary, precarious communion MAD HOUSEWIFE. Most damaging (unless I with a charm I hadn't expected from the through their common awareness of in- have misunderstood some crucial point) maker of the harsh, obscure but haunting dividual isolation and the weight of the is the memory-flashback to the affair with DIARY OF ASHINJUKU THIEF. past. There is an extraordinary central a diabetic. I don't see what is to prevent scene of a walk up a mountain road, done the spectator from reading this in simple A Demy-like narrative built on the in- (I think) in a single very long take, the terms of what- a- pity- she- chose- the- tercrossings of intricately related camera accompanying the characters at wrong-man, which seriously undermines characters-a girl, her hypothetical half- varying distances as relationships change the social-ideological implications of the brother, her father, his ex-mistress the and develop, groups split, reform and whole film . boy's mother, the other man who may be overtake, so that there is continual play the boy's father, the father's new young between foreground and background I greatly prefer LOOSE ENDS, though it is fiancee whom the boy believes to be his based on the shifting tensions. I'm not the sort of film that may receive less atten- hypothetical half-sister, etc.-is given a sure on one viewing exactly what the film tion than it deserves (just as LEGACY is the political dimension as an allegory about is about or how complete is its success, sort that may receive more) . Certainly it Japan's relations with Okinawa. The al- but I'm sure it's the work of a major received very little at Edinburgh . No one legorical element is unforced , the film director. .;,:, had heard of its makers, David Burton never becoming schematic: a complex Morris and Victoria Wozniak; and, owing Robin Wood acknowledges the help and per- to an administrative slip-up, the publicity vasive influence of John Anderson in the prep- hand-out failed to get distributed. The aration of this article. film, with three excellent unknown ac- FILM COMMENT 29
THE 12,000 a year, and has two or three chil- theater where the film is screened. IN· dren. The families watch a lot of television Sun has been well served by the proc- DUS· and are, consequently, ripe for the adver- ess. In their offices in Los Angeles's Cen- TRY tising blitz that accompanies the local en- tury City (which is, ironically, the office Wayne Kabak on FOUR-WALLING gagement of a four-wall filin . and apartment complex erected on land By now, most filmgoers are aware that By the time that blitz is delivered, Sun al- that once served as backlot space for Twen- \"four-wall\" companies exist. They're the operations with names like Sun Classic ready knows that its film will do well. They tieth Century-Fox), Sun's executives watch Pictures, Pacific International Enterprises, and American National Enterprises- know it because questionnaires filled out the profits pile up on their low-budget, names with a sound that rings more of conglomerates housed in executive parks in shopping centers throughout suburbia rapidly produced films . A recent success, than of studios that occupy backlots-that have bucked the industry with a string of have assured them that the idea is good . THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GRIZZLY ADAMS is G-rated wildlife and outer-space docu- mentaries. And they' ve won a corner of Sun uses a computer to evaluate the script, what they describe as \"the true story of a the industry with a unique combination of market-research techniques, low-budget a computer to find their audience, a com- man exiled in the wilderness who learns to filins, \"saturation\" advertising, and short runs in theaters that the companies rent. puter to sell the film . \"We operate on a survive with the ferocious grizzly.\" Sun This last characteristic is, of course, re- sponsible for the \"four-wall\" epithet: for, computer philosophy,\" says Orton . \"We began filming the movie in Park City, unlike their larger cc unterparts in the in- dustry, they do not usually split grosses even govern our purchasing department Utah, in July 1974. Five weeks later, man with the theater owners who exhibit their product. on location by computers. \" and bear went their separate ways as \"The four-wall companies,\" says Nor- The computer is the focal point of an shooting was finished. By November 1974, man Pader, public relations director for the National Association of Theater Owners elaborate six-step plan to make sure that a the film had earned over $2.1 million and (NATO), \"place great emphasis on scien- tific preliminary market surveys . They Sun picture is \"virtually foolproof .\" The was heading toward a projected gross of merchandise film like Procter & Gamble would merchandise a new bar of soap.\" first phase involves what computer techni- $20 million on an initial investment of Pader's comment is no understatement. cians call \"concept testing.\" When the $300,000 . Sun's most popular picture, Questionnaires and computers determine the economic viability of potential four- company likes an idea, Sun feeds it into a CHARIOTS OF THE GODS? , has already wall properties. Unless they are sure that the viewers of The Waltons will flock to the computer and runs it against a series of fac- reached the $20 million figure. box office, the companies will not take a chance on the latest variation of a love tors which make up a \"control concept\" In successfully marketing these helpings story involving a man, a wilderness, and six bear cubs. And the companies have that the computer has been-programmed of family pablurn, calculated to please the turned the uncertain process of \"being sure\" into a science. to like: in Sun's case the \"control\" is a Disney set and offend no one, the four- Sun Classics, the most successful four- documentary about stuntmen. Next, Sun wall companies have challenged a film in- waller, knows exactly who will see its movies and exactly how to reach that audi- hits the supermarkets and shopping cen- dustry adage that says a family movie must ence. \"We are going after three per cent of the total available audience,\" says Michael ters for a \"field study\" based on their -new either be an expensive epic or bear the Dis- Orton, who until recently was assistant to Sun Vice President Charles Sellier, Jr. \"Our idea. The questionnaires filled out by ney name to find its way into the black. audience is not very well-educated. They do not have a high degree of sophistica- shoppers ultimately yield a demographic Family films have traditionally played to a tion.\" Sun's average patron is not a movie- goer-he or she generally does not attend profile of the film's potential audience. If \"slow\" market. Unless a film fits into one them more often than once every three months. The head of a four-wall house- the results fit into the mold of the \"Sun of the two \"success\" categories, no theater hold is thirty-five years old, makes $10- moviegoer,\" the idea is on its way. could attract enough patrons in one week Once the filin is made, Sun screens it at to make a run profitable. Since making Los Angeles's Preview House, the well- money fast is an important feature of film known testing spot for television pilots. The point of the screening is not to find out if the audience likes the movie, but to de- termine what parts of the film would be ef- fective segments for the all-out ad cam- paigns that will accompany the filin's vari- ous regional \"breaks. \" The 250 members of the audience respond to elements in the movies by registering their reactions on electronic dials next to their seats. They are told to tum the dial in a positive or negative direction any time they react. The commercials, themselves, become the subject of Phase Three. Sun screens the commercials-not the movie-for a paid audience comprised of focus groups that correspond to the demographic profile formed in Phase One. If the commercials do not dick with the profile group, Sun knows the campaign is wrong . The film is now plugged into a test- market area, where Sun runs a full ad campaign. They interview theater patrons to make certain that the\"demographic pro- ~ file\" corresponds to their original predic- ~ tions. nt::i The operation winds up with a final z monitoring phase which watches the filin's ~:J ad campaign while the picture plays its 0 first area . Four days after the ad campaign ~ breaks, a testing bureau is on the phone ~ finding out how viewers respond to the « commercials. Sun officials daim that the Dan Haggerty in Sun Classic Pictures' THE LIFE AND entire procedure allows the company to TIMES OF GRIZZLY ADAMS. predict within fifty dollars the gross of any 30 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
distribution, the companies have to attract \"umbrella.\" their rental demands. For this reason, the an audience rapidly. Unlike books and Although it is not unique to spend more companies do not regularly blare their film records, which have an extended shelf life grosses in the trade press. Unlike major and can gradually build up an audience, on nonproduction costs than on produc- distributors who use high grosses to get movies must frequently find their audi- tion costs in any area of the film industry, theaters to increase bids for films, the ences in a one- or two-week run. the ratio by which four-wallers' non- four-wallers remain mum about their fi- nancial picture to minimize rentals. The late Sixties taught filmmakers the production costs exceed production costs lesson that many specialized audiences is extraordinary. The companies regularly Some cracks have already begun to ap- existed which had never been explOited. spend three times a film's production cost pear on the four-wall financial picture. In Audiences that were not new, but which to open it in a single market. Pacific Inter- March, American National Enterprises, had been ignored, became sources of rev- national opened VANISHING WILDERNESS at the oldest four-waller, filed Chapter 11 and enue. Black films, to give only the most 110 New York theaters in one week last began bankruptcy proceedings. ANE also prominent example, arrived. Four-wallers year with an investment of $913,000- initiated a $5 million anti-trust suit against realized that the family audiences must be $267,000 for theater rentals and $646,000 Sun, the largest four-waller. (Sun, itself, out there, too. But they combined this had a flirtation with bankruptcy in 1971 realization with a business discovery that for ads. when production expenses of TOKLAT, its proved to be the key to their success. It can Pacific grossed $1,130,000 in that week first film, had emptied their coffers. They be stated as an equation: (a) if you show a struggled back to their feet when the movie in as many theaters in one week as for a quick profit of $200,000. By the end of right-wing Schick, Inc., acquired them.) you would normally use in two, and (b) the film's two-week run, the company had American National attorney Steven you spend twice as much on ads in that pocketed a $572,000 profit. Crockett alleges that Sun has \"violated the week than you would normally spend in Sherman Anti-Trust Act and conspired to two weeks at half as many theaters, then Of course, the short, heavily advertised put American National out of business. \" ($$$), you will do more than twice as much runs cannot guarantee success, despite Sun officials will not comment on the suit. business. computer forecasts . Although Sun's CHARIOTS OF THE GODS? was ultimately But Alan Peterson, American National This gave birth to the \"saturation\" ad profitable, it lost $225,000 on a $995,000 in vice president, says the company will stay campaigns that are a hallmark of the New York in one week last year. When in business . \"It's a cyclical business by na- four-wallers . When a four-wall film is four-wallers fail, they tend to do so in ture,\" says Peterson. \"We depend on a about to open in a market, the television large urban markets with shaky \"demo- few months for revenue and we did not do assault begins. The short runs for the graphics.\" well last fall .\" The peak four-wall months G-rated films are heavily booked into have traditionally been November, scores of marginal (read: cheap) theaters Generally, small independent theaters January, and February when outdoors whose geographical boundaries are de- have welcomed the four-wall companies. lovers are going to wildlife films instead of termined by the strength of the television Long captive to the larger circuits and national parks. signals carrying the ads. The films play in major distributors, they leap at a chance to the entire area covered by the television escape from the normal terms that require American National, however, has had theater owners to pay distributors any- to modify its four-wall approach. Cash- Top: Sun' s $20-million grosser, CHARIOTS OF THE where from forty to seventy per cent of a poor, it now sometimes books its films on a GODS? Above: TOKLAT, an early failure. movie's gross. Often, theater owners must percentage basis. \"There has been a great guarantee a minimum payment to a dis- deal of competition from the industry in tributor, and thus bear the entire risk of a general over the past two years,\" explains film that turns out to be weak at the box of- Peterson, who also feels that the increasing fice. The four-wall companies take that risk use of television by major film companies for themselves. has diminished the uniqueness-and effectiveness-of the four-wallers' basic Four-wall features also fill the void left advertiSing approach. by a shortage of film product. As major companies increasingly lean toward longer These changes have industry observers first-runs in premium houses, neighbor- wondering whether four-walling will join hood theaters grow hungrier for movies. the list of other exhibition fads that have And as territorial exclUSivity for films come and gone in the film business. A few booked into neighborhood theaters for flops could deal a death blow to the system third-run multiple engagements becomes and send it to the same limbo where \" road a thing of the past, the market opens show\" engagements now reside. wider. Theater owners gladly rent their houses for a price that includes their Although major companies have exhib- \"house nut\" (operating expenses) and a ited some interest in percentage bookings guaranteed profit. that are virtually four-wall deals (the fa- mous re-release of BILLY JACK and many In addition, money flows in from other neighborhood runs of THE EXOROST were sources: the family pictures keep the pop- booked on this basis), it is unlikely that corn popping. Bernard Goldberg, vice four-walling will ever be a big factor president of Golden Theaters, which op- among the larger companies. Fear of po- erates seven theaters in Manhattan and tential Justice Department action and of Brooklyn, reports that exhibitors occasion- alienating the large exhibition circuits will ally will rent a theater to a distributor for a encourage big companies to stick with the sum that produces only a small profit, and percentage system. When a distributor then make the real profits on \"the brisk rents a theater even for a week, it legally concession business\" that accompanies the becomes its own exhibitor-and that's children who flock to films. \"BROTHER OF been forbidden to most majors since the THE WIND gave less than $300 per theater,\" 1948-50 consent decrees . But companies says Goldberg. \"How can these theaters like Sun have grown large enough to en- make money? What distributors are get- sure that four-walling will be on the scene ting are marginal theaters who pray for in some form for years to come. ~{~ concession business.\" As theater operators see profits piling up during four-wall runs, they often increase FILM COMMENT 31
NEW 'YORK FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW BREAKING RULES AT TIlE ROULETTE TABLE by Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson New York' s press knows withou t a Left: Bruno S. and Hans Musa us in EVERY MAN lOR self in the diluted, rhythmic pace, the doubt how movie elements should be- movie's design involves keeping the have, and it excoriates those films which HIMSELF A ND GO D AGAINST ALL Right: MOSES figures small inside the landscapes and dare to rearrange formal conventions. It (Gunther Rei ch) AND AARO N (Louis Devos). being tidy and/or whimsical with each tells us (1) music should never be an ag- event that might otherwise become sordid. gressive, dominant element (as it is in a ten-ton truck stuck on a hill: it shifts The hero's first robbery, to pay the wages MOSES AND AARON); (2) voices over the film gears, groans, sweats, farts, but doesn't of the carpenters in his failing furniture fac- should explain and correspond with visual move an inch. Perhaps next time my truck tory, ends quickly with his shooting a vase material and never create a contradiction to will make some headway; perhaps it will of wildflowers . An ugly fight is made the image (INDIA SONG blasts this law); (3) inch forward-imperceptible-or fall piquant by the Robin Hood hero throwing an image should hold the screen no longer backward-headlong.\" a portly businessman's spectacles into a than it takes a quick New Yorker to digest sprawling oak tree. You barely see the fac- the point (KASPAR HAUSER has its own pas- Ms. Rainer is a saturnine independent tory or the all-important hand-made furni- sionately held notion of pace and its pur- who makes jokey, unkempt, opinionated ture which furnishes the motive for the en- pose); (4) an image should never be blocky, films (\" Well, you know, Shirley, I've al- tire plot. Everything is muted and decor- sculptural, and anti-flow (MOS ES AND ways been a pushover for sweeping ous: a half-nude cutie pie (Marlene Jobert) AARON promulgates these Cezanne-esque statements about society by deep think- in a half-lit room, in a pose-y private mo- qualities) or airlessly compacted, flattened ers\" ). None of her films are shown in this ment; she runs the bath, pensively waits in into close frontality (the homosexuals in year's turn of Roud's Roulette Wheel at bed for the bath to fill, her feet on the wall. FIST-RIGHT OF FREEDOM are often profiled Lincoln Center. It's terribly photogenic for a supposed pri- toward each other, close to the camera, fill- vate moment, but, in its stiff juicelessness, ing most of the frame) . Above all, a movie \"Is it Ms. Duras' intention to bore the it's like everything else in the film : tepid should progress fluidly in a rhythm and audience, and, if so, does she feel she has and decorous. length that are comfortable and familiar to succeeded?\" This question, which is asked audiences (which applies to none of the Duras every time she brings the festival In the modern Swiss films, a good above films , our favorites at this year's another of her talented cryptic movies of character actor has to be repressed, filled New York Film Festival). beautiful people trapped in rituals, is typi- with propriety, in no energy scenes that cal of New York's daily-weekly press, treat- don't develop and hardly expose the actor Yvonne Rainer, a Manhattan dancer and ing anything other than illustrative story- beyond a decorative prettiness. A small filmmaker, describes one of her dances telling as the act of a witch. This brings up patrol of talent has been obscured here: with an iconoclastic humor unknown to some subdued, plotty filmmaking : THE Labourier, a firecracker with a solid Thir- the righteous, reproving New York movie WONDERFUL CROOK, a Swiss world in ties toughness in Rivette's cute gripper; critic, who not only knows every point at which all emphasis is on tidy landscape, Leotard, a swiftly efficient villain, now you which an artist goes right or wrong, but decor, and props. The movie stays far see him, now you don't, in FRENCH CON- knows it conclusively within twenty-four away from its subjects, lingering on SInall NECTION II; Depardieu, whose washing- hours. Ms . Rainer talking about Parts of people, shopkeepers and workers, in machine salesman in NATHALIE GRANGER Some Sextets : \"Its repetition of actions, its pleasant outdoors decor that contradicts was a memorable vaudeville turn. These length, its relentless recitation, its inconse- the reality of their trade; the few closeups second knives are dropped into this film's quential ebb and flow all combined to pro- remain decorative and reveal little in a soft, fastidious landscapes with an eyedropper. duce an effect of nothing happening. The all-the-way Thirties storytelling that Inade Heaven forbid there should be some dance went nowhere, did not develop, many critics anything from comfortably excess-acting, dialogue, anything. progressed as though on a treadmill or like happy to ecstatic. The rage against radicalism went on in With its gentle, fresh landscapes and towns, laundered to pristine perfection, and a tout va bien attitude that expresses it- 32 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
the press and perhaps exhibited itself be- rities bragging through some flimsy anec- LAND OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS. A snake hind the scenes in the selection of short dote, walking toward and away from the crawls over the virginal sleeping teenager films which, with the exception of Stra ub's tipsy, hand-held camera. INTRODUCTION TO SCHONBERG'S ACCOM- in WALKABOUT; another s maller snake PANYING MUSIC FOR A FILM SCENE, were, Along with the above film, there were crawls up the skirt of the virginal sleeping across the board, mediocre, philistine. Is it two other self-indulgent hand-held cam- Lily. In Herzog's SIGNS OF LIFE, the movie possible that EmieGehr hasn'tmadea bril- era ramblings . In GREY GARDENS, a smug comes to a halt, observing some quiet ani- liantly lit, ghost-image short good enough crew, liberal and complacent as to its mo- mal behavior, a school of fish causing a for this festival? tives, swims toward and around two com- paper to twirl in the water; BLACK MOON pulsive, painfully poignant performers, a similarly stops and becomes silent, watch- While some critics talk about the wit and pair of recluses trying to play up to and not ing an animal .. . The animals in this movie movie legerdemain in FFOR FAKE, a tour de let down this movie crew which is putting are fancifully good actors: the wonderfully force on the pomposity of art dealers, this them in the spotlight. The camera in dumpy unicorn whose slangy talk is cleverly edited, fast-cut movie is a crude at- MILESTONES is even more A-B-C desultory, mostly comprised of bitchy advice-giving, tack on what is obtainable in painting and jiggling around, tagging after the actors, and a terrifically independen t rat who talks how it is read . At the base is Franc;ois not very interesting people babbling their like a querulous Nloog syntheSizer. Reichenbach's dismal footage about the art lives away . An interesting idea-the stu- master faker, Elmyr de Hory: repeated dent radicals of the Sixties, five years We didn't see everything, but it was no shots of de Hory, wooden palette perched later-weighed down by tons of desultory surprise that the Munichers (including the on his left thumb, squashing his brush into encounter therapy talk. Straubs, who have been in Rome fiv e the paint, mixing the color without ever years) provided the intensity and uplift, looking at the palette, and then smashing it Derivative, taking from everywhere, the sense of crackle, anticipation, that sets onto the canvas in an unintentional parody BLACK MOON opens quite wonderfully: their films apart from a work like CONVER- of the inspired artist at work. This image of damp and romantic early morning light, SATION PIECE, a cavernous space inhabited the modern artist is as misleadingly silly as the image is of a badger sniffing around on by one interest: Helmut Bergers sinuous, the kid in Bresson' s FOUR NIGHTS OF A the highway. It's in lush countryside, not outrageous free loader. FIST-RIGHT OF DREAMER brushing three strokes before quite light yet; tension builds as a car is FREEDOM is less about various types and walking back to his tape recorder. heard approaching. It becomes clear that classes in a dated image of the gay world the badger will be killed, and, after this than it is about the passing snits that lead Reichenbach's chit-chat footage has happens, a slender adolescent in a Tyrol- to petty cruelty, every moment against the been smartly re-edited by Orson Welles, ean hat steps out of the small car, nearest person. What seems like a Joan the main gag being a staccato three- or traumatized but expressionless, staring Crawford melodrama (a gentle, unprepos- four-shot interview which ends in a stop back to where the badger lies crushed . sessing guy who has a side-show act- frame of the gleeful con artist with a fake From that point, the porcelain-faced En- \"Fox, The Talking Head\" -Fox makes a conviction and enthusiasm on his face. A glish beauty, revealed to be a young girl, is bundle on the lottery and is slowly fleeced typical laugh is gained from Clifford Irv- relentlessly tormented and undergoes one of it by a foppish lover) is really a gutty, ing's story that de Hory painted two Mod- unimaginable reversal after another. pessimistic indictment of the constant iglianis and one Matisse before lunch and treacheries between the closest lovers, sold all three. De Hory, a natty and rather After some exquisitely engineered track- friends, and family members that arise out petite man who wears ascots and wide of the minutest provocations. belts in jet-set bohemian fashion, runs ing shots which follow the adolescent's about Ibiza like the island's official host, The Festival's most deceptive movie is kibitzing with anybody he meets in out- orange Honda rippling through woods, loaded with standard cliches (the suave door cafes, inviting them to his next party: across fields, the girl ends up in a Lewis preditory aristocrat in the ascot; Fassbind- \"Don't forget now, I'll be looking for you.\" Carroll country house inhabited by kinki- er, himself, in a cunningly pliant portrait of He presides over forced jolly dinners in ness and multiples. First, she's immersed the rough-trade hustler); the acting is restaurants, with a glib, stage-center garru- with Theresa Giehse, an old lady (not un- theatrical to lugubrious; the framing is all lity, as he tells his guests of his most out- like the complainer in GREY GARDENS) tight space, little distance between front rageous coups against those fools, the art propped in a vast bed littered with food, and back, the people uncomfortably experts, and brags that every major newspapers, animals. She converses in within a tiny box composition (suggesting museum in the world has a de Hory hang- jabberwocky with her grumpy bosom- the claustrophobia of being pinned, ingin it. buddy rat, checks up on the surrounding forever, with a certain class). The sense of male-female war via a large short-wave the plot is of a five-line news shocker from Throughout, the artist is presented as radio, and eats by suckling her daughter'S the back page built into theater with the one who puts something over on others, breast. Lily, the young girl-woman, is then focus and framing kept lower-case. and that the communicated material of terrorized by a brother and sister who look painting is only the various insignia that alike and will tolerate her presence, but The final scene-Fox lying dead in a superficially denote a Matisse or Van won't speak to her. Instead they run their garishly lit subway, his pockets being Dongen (de Hory's not bad at a Matisse hands slowly over her face and make little rifled by a pair of twelve-year-olds-is ronte crayon drawing, but he paints a lousy pressure with the tips of their fingers on appallingly unremarked . Two of his ex- Van Dongen oil). It is not the joyful effer- her shoulder. \"Oh, your name is Lily,\" lovers passing by trying not to notice, the vescent experience indicated by Welles' says Cathryn Harrison to Joe Dallesandro; cobalt-blue tiled station, combine to stamp narration and the chief actors: de Hory, Irv- \" so is mine.\" The handsome, muscular Fox's unimportance. Ironically, the scene ing, and the mad zoomer, Reichenbach . Joe, wearing a white ruffled shirt and a is the first since the opening in which the Along with its vulgar idea-the concept of golden necklace of two wings around his ill-equipped, emotionally vulnerable Fox art as a conspiracy of greedy, pompous neck, symbolizes the movie's sensation of has been allowed enough room in the people in collusion to create an image that being encrusted in rich appurtenances. frame to feel a bit free and comfortable. will make them look like big shots-the ac- tors seem to be pushing the most tiresome BLACK MOON is prodigiously inventive EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF AND GOD hedonism; and beneath some razzle- but in a way that is a rather heartless pas- AGAINST ALL-the awkward framing, un- dazzle editing and insert shots of an tiche of films made with passion and ve- predictable camera positions, the flow of editor's paraphernalia, there is Reichen- hemence. The hand-touch communica- light that meanders in and out of the bach's society-reporters sensibility: celeb- tion (bed-ridden Theresa Giehse running frame-is the droll, zestful, looming work her hands over the contours of Harrison's of a filmmaker still on the prowl, making delicate adolescent face) is a shocking echo an exploratory work each time out. The of Fini Straubinger's efforts to communi- cate with other deaf mutes in Herzog's FILM COMMENT 33
work of a self-propelled artist who'll never able for itself, leads to a weird sensation: schoolmarm-ish, insistent girl rattles off give up, the movie uses the Kasper Hauser every item is a concrete phenomenon that her rhyme about about a little white cat, mystery, \"the sole known case in human has to be read for the first time. Kaspar can best achieve single hard-won history in which a man was born as an words. The very physical feeling of Her- adult,\" to take you into an anti-rational as The movie about Kaspar-a grunting, zog's films derives partly from double ac- well as irrational movie area previously in- lumplike figure raised in a dungeonlike tion scenes: an ingratiating kid with a habited by Bunuel, Franju, and Browning. cellar from infancy-has the sense of fra- memorable trilling voice teaching the rigid It gains this lovingly crafted anarchism grance, plus the very delicate motion of Kaspar anatomy while some squashed through (1) the intense estrangement of rustling, the small effect of flapping bird prisoners grumble nearby; a lieutenant the lead actor, Bruno S .; (2) joining odd- wings. Whether two sodden, aging crea- reading Kaspar's letter while a flea-like angled inventions and disparate actions tures are seen in a pauper's prison watch- town scribe is recording the document, choreographed within the same scene; ing Kaspar's first introduction to words making the officer stop over every word, and, especially, (3) giving the sense that and anatomy (\" Kaspar, das ist die hand ... setting up a rhythmic missmatch of sounds the filmmaker has ferreted out (Bruno S. das ist der arm\"), and grousing about it that has the enthusiastic humor of a Pres- and the prosperous peasant town of Din- (\"What kind of a place is this, anyway?\" ), ton Sturges scene. kelsbtihl, which has tremendous charm in or the movie is outdoors on a misty hilltop, its colored shapes) or made all the ele- Kaspar being back-packed into civilization Herzog gives the sense of a director ments which appear in the movie. With its on the shoulders of his black-caped jailer, without ambivalence, fantastically concen- unpredictable joins, off-kilter shots, it's a the film in terms of light has an awakening, trated on building his movie by piece. lyrical affirmation that resonates one main ethereal effect. Like its strange foundling There are qualities in the above scenes- idea in the mind: the beauty and loss in- who is a just-born grown man, the movie the world is full of marvels, it's stupid not volved in adjusting to society. seems introduced to the world for the first to know there are venal capitalizers and time. those with pure vision, the A-B-C enact- While KASPER is involved with ideas of ment of education: how do we learn to Access to and Deprivation from expression Granted that it looks home-made (one talk, the difference between deprivation and communication, MOSES AND AARON of its wonderful essential qualities), the and accomplishment-of a very joyful, up- addresses itself to the problem of the space great quality of the Kaspar movie is its lifting, erratic movie that gives the sense of between idea and image in the most entry into the poetry of the unadjusted and not being preplanned. materialist of films . \"I want the actors to unalligned. Kaspar's appearance in 1828 in sing as they act, to sing in the desert; in the Nuremberg streets has been examined A bit like MOSES AND AARON, the found- other words to do the Schonberg opera in from every possible literary direction;. this ling's education starts and stops, progres- the most materialist way possible.\" The totally passionate job of direction, an at- sing fitfully through blocky, self-enclosed movie is exalted, rough-hewn, multi- tempt to penetrate details of what Kaspar's units . The film will stop to observe faceted. The MOSES style (bare decors, min- reactions might have been, brings together phenomena: a quiet peasant couple in a imal camt'ra, actors as passive vessels an actor's (Bruno S.) own real-life es- second-story window watching Kaspar, doing an exact singing of the abrasive and trangement and a director's career-long standing transfixed with a letter of intro- seductive music) is conveyed through an obsession with the awkward and unaccli- duction in his hand. A close shot: Kaspar's uncompromising concern for Thingness mated, those who are not harmoniously name written in cress and flowing script in over illustration. This is a theater costume, part of society's mainstream, and a sense Mr. Daumer's garden. It was planted by this is wool. .. Ultimately there is only of pace and composition that is unusual in Kaspar and then negligently trampled by examination of cracked walls, parched its music-poetry orientation. The first some visitor to the garden. This surprising ground, wool, paralleling the same intense scene-Bruno S. chained to his cell floor, interstice-nothing leads into or away physicality of the musical sounds. In the rapidly shuttling a toy horse on wheels from this garden scene-suddenly lifts past, its forebiddingly austere back and forth, abruptly mouthing the into a focus on a nearby stork, just that filmmakers-who have found a way in word \" horse\" in rhythm with each moment having caught a frog, and tossing films to illustrate the conflict between the movement-symbolizes every other scene it around before swallowing it. Where- necessity to understand one's own time in in this Rousseau-like mystical experience. upon the camera returns to Kaspar's name social and economic terms, and the infinity The figure of Bruno S. has the clarity and in cress. The movie, which gives the sensa- of silence toward which great art tends- stark innocence of a Rousseau portrait, and tion of being hand-made, filled with its have made the sound track the major ele- each part of his world (Mr. Daumer's living own constructs, always seems charged ment in their films . The delicious and joy- room, his garden) has the same earnestly with enthusiasm: unenclosed, fluid, ful MOSES AND AARON, however, is a very spacious. sensual experience, from its voluptuous portrayed presence. 360-degree pan around the oval-shaped Kaspar's progress from cell to autobiog- The one film that approached the Ger- Roman arena in the Abruzze mountains to man films in dedication, the feeling of ar- the Cezanne-like sculptural insistences rapher is peculiarly paced: it doesn't move tists trying things, is the mysterious INDIA which make every crack in the arena's by cinematic flow or any approximation of SONG, a leftwing work fascinated with ritu- walls seem extraordinary, a physical real- normal movie progress. Each scene is not als . Using actors who have a nightmarish ity that reverberates in the mind. only involved in itself, but the actor's sensuosity, choreographing near stasis trance-like stare, sucking an egg in a queer theatrically and with a heavy Freudian Both MOSES AND AARON and the Kaspar shed scene, finds its own space in a musi- quality, lingering like Bertolucci on the Hauser film are apart from the other Festi- cal development. One of the key qualities Past, beautiful people dancing in a beauti- val films , given the ecstatic intensity of in this stubborn film is its off-balance list (a ful setting, INDIA SONG is very polite, intel- their weather. In the exact reading of list: an inclination to one side, as of a ship; a lectual, and smells of polished leather, fine Schonberg's opera, the mise-err-scene has a tilt) through time, a lyricism that won' t be tobacco, and spices. Its great attraction: a dry, parched air and a light that produces hurried for box office or plot convenience. sound track that works off Godard's layer- the sensation of a new sculptural world. ing voices, overcrowding the language, The sense of air resounding with music is Where Fassbinder works with close two creating a film that acquires much of its ex- not only a rare movie experience; this is shots and the effect of two people butting citement in the mixing room. While the one of the few times when weather, against one another, Herzog's favorite im- iced, frozen visual film suggests a barely sound, and physical setting have been ages not only involve Separation but the mobilized Dewar's liquor ad, another united with such tactile objectivity. The effect of two stubborn people, kids or movie parallels the visuals, permeated movie's anti-flow nature, the scrupulous adults, involved in different realities. A young girl tries to teach a complex nursery CONTINUED ON PAGE 57 insistence that each element be account- rhyme to Kaspar, who's lunking along in his own rhythm, completely unable to accommodate her speed. While the 34 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW KITSCH 'N SYNCH by Elliott Stein . u . Mavies: (left) Jeanne Moreau in Andre Techine's SOUVENIRS D ' EN FRANCE (FRENCH PROVINCIAL); (right) Gerard Depardieu in Claude Garetta's PAS SI MECHANT QUE CA (THE WONDERFUL CROOK). A LL PHOTO S: NEW YO RK FILM FE STI VAL Frank and Caroline Mouris's CONEY reels are brilliant. They involve the intro- playing if not God, then Grand Inquisitor, duction of two foreign bodies, bored and to Claudine Beccarie, ex-Girl Scout, still- ('\" '\" '\" \"' ) was the fairest of them all . This faithful Catholic princess of France's bur- \" animated documentary\" is a pixilated pampered Regina (Marie-France Pisier) geoning porn industry. Russell Schwartz GrandeJatte. The abstract light patterns, the and folksy seamstress Berthe (Jeanne found Claudine \"a ballbuster.\" His find- fast pans, a fine score by David Moreau), into the marriage beds of the Ped- ings were mine. Davy's opuss is worth the Shoemaker, the extremely personal way ret dynasty whose foundry is the center of while for one sequence which has two activity in a provincial town. A highly things going for it: a) Claudine, for once, is the sky or an apocalyptic elevated train is stylized, romanticized flashback which not busy talking about herself, and b) as seen: five minutes of earned emotion shows the founding of the foundry, as told Sallie Blumenthal noted: \"She handles by the patriarch, is inserted with great brio. herself rather well.\" Beautifully shot and never before provided by so brief a work. The film's greatest scene also occurs early: angled, framed with a few delicately The lip synch in Claude Goretta's a superb set piece with Moreau, alone, in a stalked flowers in the left foreground, it is dialogue with self as she cooks eggs and the finest female masturbation scene I have French-Swiss PAS SI MECHANT QUE ~A tosses salad-it may prove the finest single ever seen in anyone's hall. scene of her career. By the time World War ('\" '\" '\" \"') is what it should be: lips match II breaks out (Berthe, the Resistance InJ.-M . Straub's MOSES UNO ARON (\"' )lip words, the characters seem to be saying heroine, will eventually take over the synch is extremely good, butto what avail? what we are hearing. The credits boast, not works), it is apparent that Marilyn Gol- You can hear Schonberg's score at home a sound engineer, but a \"direct sound\" en- din's script has bitten off more than with superior stereo. At Lincoln Center, Techine can spew.The central theme seems there was an added attraction: the director gineer. It would have seemed crazy, to be the loss of vitality of the bourgeoisie; himself, sputtering away on stage for fully anomalous, twenty or thirty years ago, to the film, too, loses steam and falls prey to half an hour-like all three Stooges talking remark on such a fact about a motion pic- confusion and loose ends. Performances gibberish at once-mostly about how The ture. Today, it is Goretta's film which is the are impeccable throughout: Pisier's best New York Times should be boycotted for cal- anomaly. Nearly all of the feature films work to date, a quietly authoritative job ling his film ARON UNO MOSES in its review. shown in the festival had mouths and from veteran Orane Demazis (the Fanny of The picture which followed this unex- words out-of-whack; in most cases, one Pagnol's great MARIUS-FANNY-CEsAR early pected Goon Show seemed of dubious could simply not believe that what was utility. It neither clarified the opera, nor did being heard was being said. Renoir's 1931 Thirties trilogy). Lush, useful set design by ' it illustrate it competently. Do an orgy LA CIDENNE, also shown at Lincoln Center, Philippe Galland. Lip synch faulty. scene, or don't do one: nothing, nothing had better sound than most of the new could be less useful than Straub's half- films . Today's director may think that by Two-thirds of F FOR FAKE ('\" \"') is reasona- assed orgy. His large sweeping camera avoiding direct sound he is sacrificing a bit bly clever. Orson Welles, aware that an movements are very satisfying as pure of synch on the altar of greater camera mo- hour of viable Clifford Irving-Elmyr de movement-but they would have been bility. He is wrong. Goretta's wonderful Hory footage does not a feature make, fully as satisfying had they been accom- and low-budgeted film proves that you do seems to have been obliged to reach for a panying the Callas recording of Carmen . not need MGM's sound department be- falsie of his own for padding. The Welles hind you to get it all together. It suffices not concoction pits leggy Oja Kodar against ARTIIUR AND LILLIE ( '\" '\" \"') is much more to be a slob. Goretta clearly cares about Pablo Picasso. This section is tiresome not lively than MOSES UNO ARON . Kris Samuel- what gets into his films; he is the most en- because it is a shaggy dog story but be- son's approach to the Mayers-not irreve- dearingly scrupulous new director in a cause the dog has fleas. Still, it is a pleasure rent, merely un-reverent-is just right. long while, a born director of actors, with a to have Welles (looking more and more Arthur teaching or packing a valise, Lillie generous unjudgmental feeling for people. like a walrusian Ed Leffingwell) before us talking about anything: their coupled ages Gerard Depardieu, Marlene Jobert, on the screen again, playing God playing come to almost 180, but for ebullience and Dominique Labourier respond like cats to with a movieola. joie de vivre they surpass all of the planet's his caress. porno queens laid end to end. With J.-F. Davy's EHIBITION ( \"'), pussy Andre Techine's SOUVENIRS O'EN got a footing in Alice Tully Hall. Here, we Miklos Jancso's MY WAY HOME (1964) was have Davy seated in front of a movieola, FRANCE ( '\" '\" '\" \"') is a mess. Mess or not, it was one of the two best features of the fes- tivaland the revelation of a juicy, potential- ly first-rate directorial talent. The first few FILM COMMENT 35
a formidable picture; its technical means \"\"\": Burt Lancaster in CONVERSATION PIECE . \"\": Robert Kramer and John Douglas' s MILESTONES . were unostentatious. Ever since then, in film after film, he has been going round in geois hounds at his heels, in human bond- or scumbag. Believe who will. As much circles. Sometimes the circles-as now in age to a mustachioed blue angel. (Peter can be learned about the sources of Dachau ELEKTRElA (<> <>)-are wide, and the facture Chatel's glitzy waxen mask is perfect for and Buchenwald from the thoughts of is brilliant. The latest Jancso is possibly the Eugen.) Bilked of his bread by lover and Germany's liberals as from a study of its best of all his \"ritual\" films. The astound- lover's family, l'amour fou takes its toll in fascists. ing takes seem endless, seamless, the the end when Fox OD's on Valium in an logistics of the choreography is staggering; underground shopping mall. As boys pick Angela Winkler is a beautiful woman, a no part is dull or unflowing. I was pleased the corpse's pockets clean, ex-pals stroll by good actress who radiates a cool sensuality to learn, however, that the Hungarian with nary a glance. A hetero version of this which I would have preferred to enjoy dervish is currently shooting an erotic film film could have been made years ago-not elsewhere than in THE LOST HONOR OF titled VICE AND PLEASURES . It is time for him by Sirk, please-by Mrs. Wallace Reid. It KATHARINA BLUM (e), the most obnoxious to get into a new rut. probably was. entry this year. Volker Schlondorff is a coarse director who several years ago flat- AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PRINCESS (<> <> <» Peter Mayer remarked that the Fox of the tened Robert Musil's novel Young Tarless directed by James Ivory, produced by Is- outset is too street-smart to have permitted into a dry pancake. His new work is mail Merchant, is a tristful and lovely film, the rest of this particular plot to thiGken. another exercise in mindless Mani- of just the right length and shading. James Folks do lose their wits along with their chaeanism-the new German cinema's Mason's best role in years. hearts every day; but director Fassbinder is plat du jour these days . Katharina spends too busy chalking up marks for class- one night with a presumed left-wing ter- Of L'HISTOIRE D'ADELE H. (e) Ruby Rich consciousness to have time to develop the rorist and the rest of her days persecuted noted: \" Even if it's a true story, it seems character as a function of the situations. A by press, police, and most of the popula- phony. Truffaut has a knack for ruining latently interesting film dissolves into a tion of West Germany. I have no illusions fantastic subjects. \" Right on, Ruby. It silly lumpen-lavender tract. As Fox, about cops and journalists-German, seems that Victor Hugo's daughter ran off Fassbinder-actor is unconvincing in the American, or Bosnian-but the self-right- to Halifax to follow an English soldier who role Fassbinder-author has scripted for eous frenzy (Susan Dobbis: \"It got so in- had briefly known her, and having done himself: you can't play vulnerability with tense I almost fainted!\") whipped up by so, understandably desired to know her no eyes like rusty nails. That he looks like the this movie fails to convince. The bad guys longer. She went on pestering him for young Gertrude Stein is of some marginal are all underdeveloped and overacted. years, and when he was transferred to help. Karl-Heinz Bohm (Mkhael Powell's Scholondorffs firecracker is wet. Barbados, followed him there, and immortal PEEPfNG TOM), as the antiquaire, promptly went bananas. does wonders with a small part. The film is HEARTS OF THE WEST (<» , at leastinoffen- done in by its dualism. It is piquant to note sive, is, thanks to Blythe Danner and Jeff The film opens with a title which sol- that the one drop of kindness allowed Fox Bridges, often charming. Brooks Riley emnly proclaims that all we are about to occurs with the brief appearance of a thought it \" too cutesy\"; it is a bit, but the see is TRUE. Mebbe . Is it 'frue that Fran- middle-aged neighbor woman, who, trouble is more an affair of the script rather ~ois 'fruffaut made a cameo appearance in when Fox is locked out by his treacherous than the tone of voice of director Howard Halifax in 1B63, evoking squeals of satisfac- lover, asks iHhere is anything she can do to Zieff. tion amongst cinephiles who recognized help. The role is played by Fassbinder's him? Did a Royal Canadian Mountie Truly mother! The polemic occasioned by SMILE (<» - assist a hypnotist attempting to defraud \"Is Michael Ritchie condescending in his Adele in Nova Scotia-years before there Werner Herzog's EVERY MAN FOR HIM - attitude towards beauty pageants or is he were any Mounties? Is it True that Adele, SELF AND GOD AGAfNST ALL (e) is based on not?\"-I shall leave to the debate of more when she was pushing forty, looked like tales of Kasper Hauser, who turned up patient souls. The film can be seen without she was pushing twenty? Such questions around 1B20 with no memory or conversa- pain or pleasure; that it can embark wholly may well be twaddle; but Truffaut's tion. The Kasper of historyllegend was a from the mind forever within two minutes heroine is such a howling bore that the teenybopper when he came out of his of the final credits is the worst that can be mind can well afford a few wander-breaks closet-a German Mowgli-who should said about it. Not everyone who shoots a while she is up there scribbling her have been portrayed by some youthful film in Santa Rosa can make a SHADOW OF A memoires in code. Techine or Goretta Aryan Sabu. Herzog cast the role with an DOUBT . could stage a chorus of Mounties singing over-forty schizophrenic named Bruno S. Schonberg barracks songs at Victor Hugo's who has an inimitable way of rolling his The proprietresses of GREY GARDENS (.), funeral and I would believe it and sing eyeballs, butis no Mary Pickford-who, at directed by David and Albert Maysles, are along with glee. I sang along with 1iuffaut forty, amid still playa girl of fifteen and get generally referred to as recluses. The word all during his delicious DAY FOR NIGHT. This away with it. From this instructive film we seems inapt. When friends cease to call be- chintzy picture is cramped, tiny, and con- learn: that in a provincial town in early cause your tloors and furniture are covered stipated. Much of it has the look-as seen nineteenth-century Germany, the people with wall-to-wall cat crap, this does not through a dirty TV screen-of one of those were very provincial. Moreover, everyone make you a recluse, it makes you a \"smelly dreadful English family history shows that except this one retard was a pedant, a visit.\" Ma and Miss Beale, aunt and cousin enrich the lives of Channel 13 viewers. monster, a scamp, scoundrel, scallywag, of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, will do for a little quarter of an hour. Some of their The first two reels of FAUSTRECHT DER dialogue amuses; Big Edie's rendition of FREIHEIT (<» enthrall. Fox, a gruff but sensi- tive lumpen-prole, wins the lottery. He picks up an antique dealer at whose digs he meets a gaggle of fancy queens. After an erotic power skirmish with humpy bourgeois Eugen-who has read all the right books (or at least knows the titles) and been sitting on all the right sofas all his life-Fox's bankroll clinches it: they settle down as lovers. But it is the prole, first seduced, who is now traduced by the middle class. Downhill races Fox, bour- 36 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
>Alan Arkin and Jeff Bridges in HEARTS OF THE WEST. .Angela Winkler in KATHARINA BLUM . associated adolescents . The prof is in- veigled into renting these dolce vitista s \"Tea for Two\" is a show-stopper. (Would rison's granddaughter giving suck to a the floor above his living quarters . Life that it had!) As the film progresses, their talking unicorn should make a beeline soon becomes hell-or does it? The in- mots cease to seem bans, their turns before for it. Others may find , as I do, that it truders, their tacky affairs and dramas, the avid cameras amuse less. We are face to contains one really lovely shot: a \"Peace- do a lot to bring him back to life. There is face with two jabbering bores, one of them able Kingdom\" tableau. But you could a scene in which Berger-shortly before an exhibitionistic paranoid whose only do this shot yourself-if, at your dis- he is murdered-and Lancaster (at first claim to our embarrassed attention is that posal, you had 300 turkeys, 200 sheep, they had treated each other with distrust she is wearing Jackie Kennedy's castoff and disapproval) are about to move into skirts inside out and upside down. A pur- and Sven Nykvist. Lip synch is dreadful something resembling genuine affec- ported documentary, this movie would for humans and beasts alike. tion . It provided one of the few really have turned out better as WHATEVER HAP- touching moments of the festival. And PENED TO LITTLE EDIE, with real pros- At mid-point of XALA I took French this serious comedy (it is almost a deca- Shelley Winters, for example, and Divine leave. There were more annoying films; dent YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU) is also (who does resemble little Edie) in the cast. nothing was as poorly made and plod- often quite funny in just the right places. At the press show, Rex Reed inquired why ding. It is banned in Senegal, its home- so little was made of the relationship to land. It should not be banned, merely The beautiful designs are by Mario Gar- Jackie, since that was the only reason for avoided. buglia, the talented art director of ROCCO public interest in the Beales. The response was that the Beales were so fascinating in Carlos d'Alessio's music for the film is AND HIS BROTHERS, THE LEOPARD, SANDRA, their own right that the Maysles had not ingratiating schmaltz , but Marguerite cared to involve Jackie. With whatever Duras's INDIA SONG (.) itself is a languid and THE STRANGER He has not worked tonnage of salt one chooses to take that droning madrigal set in Calcutta, shot with Visconti since the Camus film. Ab- statement, the Maysles have blown it. The mostly in a hotel near Paris . It is an ex- sent are excrescences of the sort whipped one shot that would have guaranteed tremely conventional narrative picture up for the director by the giddy designers Mondo Bealo a degree of immortality is with a facile and trashy plot, and is of THE DAMNED and DEATH IN VENICE . The missing: the Onassis chauffeur arriving to academic and old hat compared to the only region of the outside world viewed in RIP VAN WINKLE of Mem~s (1905), Kir- CONVERSATION PIECE is a rooftop vista of clean out the cat shit from Grey Gardens. sanov's MENILMONTANT (1924) , Du- the domes of Rome as seen from high up in A fiction film, John Douglas and Robert champ's ANEMIC CINEMA (1926), Rich- the Palazzo-a marvelous artificial ter's VORMITTAGSSPUK (1927), anything panoramic decor, and the best studio Kramer's MILESTONES (* *) is marked by a by Dziga Vertov or Stan Brakhage, and trompe /'oeil set made in recent years for any semblance of documentary integrity. At Walt Disney's THE THREE CABALLEROS film . I hope it has been preserved at 195 minutes, this river of images flows (1944). Its problematical originality con- Gnecitta. self-indulgently every which way. We fol- sists of blowing its suds at the audience low the tracks of several dozen former from offscreen mouths . At the press The original shooting language of this members of a community which now show, the Perdurable Schoolmarm of the French-Italian production was English, exists only in shreds: Sixties Movement Himalayas issued a sharp warning: only but the dubbing is hollow and dialogue people adrift in the America of the mid- specialists in\"different cinema\" have the often stilted. It would have been wiser to Seventies. Perhaps the Time Capsule film right to review her pictures. Anyone show it here in French or Italian. The En- of the festival, the one most likely to in- caught reviewing INDIA SONG, SON OF glish version provoked a memorable open- trigue an audience fifty years from now. KONG, THE SEARCHERS, and HELUAPOP- ing for the 13th New York Film Festival. An honorable disruption has settled about PIN in the same lifetime will have one The audience responded with derisive cat- these figures in a wide landscape- contact lens removed and be condemned calls and Bronx cheers; people stood up children from parents, friends from one to ten years of watching DESTROY, SHE and tried to outshout one another's another, people from themselves, instincts SAID. What is more, if anyone in these smart-Aleckisms. The resultant hubbub from beliefs. Most of the characters seem to parts commits an act against nature such was such that it was impossible to main- have learned little but dismay from their as reviewing a Duras film and then a tain contact with what was going on on the experiences; they roam like stunned in- \"consumerist\" film from Hollywood, she screen. Visconti had a stroke last year and fants fleeing some accident they have sur- will never bring (1.nother of her films to directed the film from a wheelchair. Had vived by a miracle, seeking help from other New York. Promises, promises. he been in New York, the crowd-really stunned fleeing children. What demar- out for blood-might have chased him in cates MILESTONES from the despicable Luchino Visconti's CONVERSATION his wheelchair around the Lincoln Center German \"political\" films on view this year PIECE (* * *) is his best film since THE fountain and beaten him unconscious. is that it has not been corrupted by self- STRANGER (1967) . It treats of an American righteousness. professor and art collector (Burt Lancas- H is film opened in Paris to critical ter) whose moldering solitary existence acclaim and public interest, and has been There is no such thing as a Louis Malle in a Roman palazzo is shattered the day playing there for over thirty weeks in three film, but BLACK MOON (.), is the most in- his home is invaded by a loose-living first-run theaters. It is now not likely to adequate film ever directed by Louis Countess (Silvana Mangano), her young find a distributor in this country. I had Malle. Those who would view Rex Har- gigolo (Helmut Berger), and two ditsey never seen a black-tie-and-evening-dress lynch mob before. Perhaps some an- thropologist can come up with an explana- tion. Though CONVERSATION PIECE is far from perfect, I can think of no film to which this mob of unruly bedizened boors could, with justice, feel superior-not even THE FORTUNE . P.S. A few days after the festival, Vlada Petric reared up beside me at the MOMA elevator. He boomed out: \"I hear you adored the Visconti! Ha-rummppppffffhh!\" He swooped away and I have not heard from him since. ~.\\.l FILM COMMENT 37
•••••• --~ •••••• periods (at six and eleven o'clock), and the time, however, for a ninety-second puff granting of an exclusive interview or two. # piece on the awards and audiences Chan- It's generally accepted that different nel4 had recently won .) As the hour wore \"YOU'RE GOING IN THERE kinds of news stories sell extra copies of on, Guida revealed just a hint of an- A GUNMAN, BUT YOU'RE different kinds of newspapers . The New noyance at the continual shifting to \" the COMING OUT A STAR!\" York Times does well with \"idea\" stories scene.\" With ever-increaSing anxiety in his (Cambodia, the Pentagon Papers), the voice, Guida ran several variations on a re- by Richard Corliss Daily News with \"people\" stories (Oifford porter's question of his own, toPrisendorf: Irving, Alice Crimmins). Although the What, if anything , is happening over Until three in the afternoon, October 6 network news shows, sensitized by White there? must have seemed like a slow local-news House harangues, mostly stick to report- day to the managing editors of N ew York ing \"hard\" national news in the muted, If the evening held any suspense at all, it Gty' s local TV stations. Nothing much but neutral tones of a sympathetic mortician, didn' t concern the safety of the Mayor Beame's discovery that a fellow the local stations are wedded to tabloid hostages-by this time Cat Olsen had re- titulary, Emperor Hirohito of Japan, was journalism: the race for ratings demands it. vealed himself as nothing more dangerous \"a regular guy\"; and the circumnavigation Local TV loves \"actualities\" -stories that than a Stage Door Johnny to the S.L.A.- of Manhattan Island by the felicitousl y- unfold before the viewer's eyes, with an but rather the timing of the showdown. named swimmer Diana Nyad. Cat Olsen occasional goosing from the eyewitness Would he come out before the local sta- changed all that. With his eight-and-a reporter-because actualities goose the tions gave way at seven o'clock to the half-hour siege of a Greenwich Village ratings. National News? And then, would he hold bank, Olsen nudged the local stations into out until the late news at eleven? And fi- doing what they like best: chasing ambu- Now and then, an actuality can change a nally (a fragile but fulfilled hope), will it all lances and winning ratings. new-shows entire ratings picture. Early end before Johnny Carson? This being a and persistent coverage of last June's Ken- Monday, NBC just might have entertained If Cat Olsen hadn' t existed, TV might nedy Airport crash won New York's other ideas: the network's Monday-night have invented him. In fact, it almost did . WNBC-TV spectacular ratings, and is cre- ratings were a shambles, and Channel 4 From the moment he entered the Village dited with making the formerly-hapless could reasonably assume that more view- branch of Bankers Trust, it was obvious \"NewsCenter 4\" competitive with the ers would stay tuned to an evening-long, that exposure and not extortion was newscasts on Channels 2 (WCBS-TV) and minimalist street scene than to the fading Olsen's aim. First he represented himself 7 (WABC-TV). It could hardly have mat- Invisible Man and a saddle-weary John as a member of the Symbionese Liberation tered to WNBC-TV news boss Earl Udall Wayne in THE TRAIN ROBBERS. Army; then he said that he was not a that the high point of Channel4's coverage member, only an admirer, and demanded was reporter Tony Prisendorf's Pulitzer Channel 2, though, had everything to the release of the four recently captured Prize-angling question, fired at a baby- lose: each of its five Monday-night shows S .L.A. commandos; then he asked for safe faced local cop, as to whether he'd ever were among the top-rated seven . passage to a deSignated country to be seen anything like this (hundreds of bodies, Moreover, you could never be sure how a named later. Finally he settled for a six- pieces of luggage, and exploded plane news-flash would \"play\" in the context of pack of beer and an evening of media parts strewn across Rockaway Boulevard) the show it was interrupting. Two weeks notoriety, as a kind of home-town version in his two years on the force. earlier, when the network had broken into of the new TV season ' s reigning stars: an episode of Rhoda for a report on Sara Patty Hearst, Lynette Fromme, and Sara Sure enough, TV viewers came home Jane Moore's misfired assassination at- Jane Moore. from work the first Monday in October to tempt, it had returned to the show just as find Prisendorf standing outside the be- Nancy Walker was delivering a punch line Although, after it was over, Olsen was sieged Bankers Trust branch on Sixth Av- that ended\" . .. you're sweatin' bullets!\" charged with kidnapping, he hadn't in fact enu e, relaying neighbors' gossip and Undaunted, Channel 2 interrupted Phyllis abducted anyone (he just detained a few N .YP. D. flackery aboutthe ordeal. Also on for a remote of what it obviously thought people) . Still, the charge was substantially the scene, but out of Channel 4' s camera would be the climactic Gunfight at Bankers correct, for Olsen had shown how easy it is range, was WCBS-TV's Chris Borgen , Trust. But the mise-en-scene would have to kidnap the broadcast media. But even himself a mini-celeb as the result of his role appealed more to Antonioni than to A.J . here there's a twist-one straight out of O. in the 1972 media kidnap that was turned Liebling: nothing happened. Henry. In \"The Ransom of Red Chief,\" the into DOG DAY AFTERNOON. By now it was an intended victim (an obnoxious little boy) is early, Indian-summer's evening, but As all fables must, this story ended hap- all too willing to be kidnapped, and the Borgen was there, waiting for his on-stage pily for all concerned. The Cat Burglar got perpetrators are ultimately so desperate to call, and marking time by delivering such his picture in the papers. To the relief of the get rid of him that they pay the lad's pa- stop-press bulletins as \"The gunman has media barons, the story ended during the rents to take him back. In the Cat Caper, just ordered sandwiches.\" eleven 0'clock news. And for all those who TV newsmen were happy to be taken for a like to see the TV-news baby giant trip over ride; the ransom demanded here was the The night was studded with such low- its feet once in a while, the local stations prolonging of a true-life urban adventure comedy rhinestones. Tony Guida, Chan- turned the non-event into a comedy of er- that lasted through both major news nel 4's substitute anchorman, first intro- rors: pumping the story for its evanescent duced Science Editor Frank Field for a re- news value one moment, admonishing the port on the questionable efficacy of cir- gunman for taking advantage of them the cumcision; but Field's provocative lead-in next. As it happened, Cat Olsen did give was abruptly cut off as the station returned out some exclusive interviews-to The to Sixth Avenue, and a Damoclean sword Times and Daily News, to the wire services, was left hanging over millions of tiny to the marijuane monthly High Times, and foreskins until the following night, when to WNEW-FM's Scott Muni-but none to the report was aired in full . (Guida did find the eager members of the coaxial cabal. ~';~ 38 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
INDE- TOKYO-THE 51ST VOLCANO (Christopher reveals himself in laughter and doubt. (A PEND- Ralling). Forget the Shinto shrines and series of films , each about thirty-five mi- ENTS geisha girls; instead, view-with despair nutes, Jung Foundation, 28 E. 39th Street, and compassion-the accelerated Wester- New York, N.Y., 10016.) ETIINOGRAPIDC nization, pent-up tensions, and violence in REVELATIONS-I Japan today. A sophisticated, important THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES work. (Fifty-one minutes, Time-Life Films, (Stan Brakhage). The first film to un- by Amos Vogel 100 Eisenhower Drive, Paramus, N .]. flinchingly deal with morgue and autopsy. 07652.) To see with one's own eyes is an act of Film is a many-splendored thing, a great courage and hence not recom- seducer/revealer in a thousand disguises; PANOLA (Ed Pincus/David Neuman) . mended to those preferring blindness. An and whenever the gray dogmatists at- This unsparing, raw, unrehearsed tempt to confine it to their gruesome monologue of Panola, black resident of appalling work of great purity and truth. pigeonholes and \"specifications,\" it has a Natchez, Mississippi-a defeated man but (Thirty-two minutes, Filmmakers' Coop, way of lustily breaking through, reassert- a man-remains a seminal work of Ameri- 175 Lexington Ave ., New York, N .Y. ing its openness to divergent themes, can cinema verite. (Twenty-one minutes, modes, genres, forms, the presumed ir- Cambridgeport, Box 126, Cambridge, 10016.) relevance of fantasy or seriousness of so- Mass. 02139.) HERE COMES EVERYBODY Gohn Whit- cial concern. Still, there are people who will not, for example, accept ethnological MAGICAL DEATH (Napoleon Chagnon). more) . A series of unstaged, revealing films as cinema; perhaps because they An amazing cinema verite study of a episodes from Dr. William Schutz's have not seen what has been achieved famed Shaman of Venezuela's Yanomamo (\"JOY\") encounter sessions at Esalen In- with light-weight cameras and sync tribe who heals by magic, casts spells, and stitute. As the participants, clothed or not, sound; perhaps they only recall those sad manipulates the Gods for good or evil. A act out their fears and aggressions, a tiny pseudo-\"documentaries\" of yore, replete film to ponder. Award, 1974 American portion of our mystery is temporarily with noble (or cannibalistic) \"savages\" Film Festival. (Twenty-nine minutes, revealed amidst the most copious flood of framed against colored sunsets or hitting Psychological Cinema Register, Audio real tears ever. A disturbing, engrossing antelopes at regular intervals with arrows Visual Services, 17 Willard Bldg., Penn work. Cannes Film Festival. (Ninety-nine obligatory to these tragic works of Kultur. State University, University Park, Pa. minutes, Marion Billings, 200 W. 57th St. , 16802.) Achtung! Times have changed; and the New York, N .Y. 10019.) concept itself has broadened to encompass AVES : MAGNIFICENT BIRD, GREAT I'M THE PRETTIEST PIECE IN GREECE any non-fictional recording of ordinary FLAMINGO; also : IZY BOUKIR (Nancy human events, taken in natural surround- Graves). Two outstanding achievements (Richard Wedler). Former star jazz singer, ings and interfered with by the inevitably by the noted artist Nancy Graves, dealing Billie Haywood, reminisces . A strange, subjective camera to the least extent possi- with alien universes: the world of massed haunting comment on fame and then ble. Instead of the magnificent \"lie\" of birds in flight, hauntingly beautiful; and oblivion. Awards, Atlanta and San superior fiction (revealing deeper truth by that of camels-majestic, primordial, a na- Francisco Film Festivals. Just as with detour), we are directly confronted by tion apart but not to be disregarded . PANOLA, you will not easily forget it. non-acting principals or groups who, as in (Twenty-three and seventeen minutes, re- (Twenty-seven minutes, Wombat Films, life, uncover some of their inner truths in spectively; Visual Resources, Inc. , 1 Lin- 77 Tarrytown Road, White Plains, N. Y. action, or willy-nilly, in body language, in coin Plaza, New York, N.Y.1oo23 .) 10607.) masks that have a way of slipping as the merciless camera gazes at them, as unex- TIDIKAWA AND FRIENDS. FAMILY (Hubert Smith) . Overt and pected questions are asked, as montage juxtaposes, links or makes collide what ENCOUNTERS WITH JUNG : TWO VIEWS . covert interaction and non-verbal needed joining to begin with. Herewith a These fascinating, now historic interviews communication in a liberal, white middle- first listing, with sources, all16mrn sound: with Jung-only real \"rival\" to Freud in class family, sensitively captured by one of fame and significance-unexpectedly re- the most original, deceptive talents work- TIDIKAWA AND FRIENDS Gef and Su Dor- veal two different, though ultimately com- ing today. A secret tribute to new lifestyles. ing). An outstanding study of an isolated plementary views of the man: in THE (Thirty-one minutes, Distribution Branch, Papuan rainforest tribe, legendary for ag- HOUSTON INTERVIEWS, the \" official\" Jung, National Audio Visual Center, G.5.A. , gression and ritual cannibalism, reveals in- discussing his basic concepts regarding Washington, D.C. 20409.) stead, the gentle, peaceful life of work and personality, unconscious motivation, and relaxation, intimacy and warmth, com- his differences with Freud; in FACE TO MEMORANDUM (Donald Brittain & John munion with each other and the spirits by FACE, a BBC interview shortly before his Spotten). Twenty years after, a group of means of trance and states of possession. death, a much more human personality survivors return to the Belsen-Belsen Award, American Film Festival. Temple concentration camp for purposes of University Conference on Visual An- ceremonial tribute, only to be confronted thropology, Museum of Modern Art, and by paradox, black irony, and a morass of Smithsonian Selection. (Eighty-four min- unanswerable questions. The most utes, Vision Quest, Box 206, Lawrencevil- thought-provoking film yet made on the le, N.J. 08648). concentration camps and an example par excellence of sophisticated ideological film-making. (Fifty-eight minutes, Contemporary/McGraw-Hill, Princeton Road, Hightstown, N.J ., 08520.) SATURDAY MORNING (Kent Mackenzie) . Californian adolescents in week-long group therapy in a rural retreat escalate their comments-in unstaged cinema- verite-from innocuous exchanges to lacerating confrontations. Stripped of their defenses, \"real\" experiences emerge as frauds; the sweet innocence of sex as re- pression, and tears and loneliness are re- discovered. (Eighty-nine minutes, Swank Films, 393FrontSt., Hempstead, L.L , N .Y. 11504.) More to come. FILM COMMENT 39
In LlSZTOMANIA, Ken Russell's tenth fea- work. (The exceptions include John Bax- MUSIC LOVERS a fairly straightforward nar- ture film, the Pope, played by Ringo Starr, ter's interview book, An Appalling Talent , rative is interrupted with a few fantasies refers to Richard Wagner as \"anti- and Michael Dempsey's thoughtful article, and memories. MAHLER, made three years Christ ... the Prince of Darkness.\" Most 'The World of Ken Russell,\" Film Quarter- later, still has a skeletal plot, but most of critics would apply these epithets to Rus- ly, Spring 1972.) Much of the antipathy that the movie is taken up with a complex mon- sell. Although TOMMY was a critical as well Russell's films arouse is calculated. In an tage of flashbacks and fantasies. In TOMMY as a commercial success (his first since age when most of the traditional pieties and LlSZTOMANIA all distinctions between WOMEN IN LOVE), much of the praise was have been blasted, what can possibly fantasy and reality have blurred. Russell's decidedly backhanded; the critics accepted shock an educated audience? Art is one of work is closer to opera or lyric poetry than the film because they felt the material was the few subjects that critics and intellectu- to traditional drama; he composes dream trivial enough to benefit from madman als regard with an almost religious rever- images charged with emotion that is not Russell's wild flourishes . LISZTOMANIA , ence, and so Russell's heretical revaluation always under control. of famous artists offends people. Although which has just gone into release, has re- intoxicated by the power of art, Russell is The dismissal of Russell by many critics vived all the old objections to Russell's harsh in his attack on the frailties and rests on an overly narrow understanding work. This colorful Looney-Tunes version cruelties of the artist. In addition, he ad- of what art should be-a limited definition of the lives of Liszt and Wagner is the most vances Freudian interpretations of art, that these critics would never think of ap- outrageous, flamboyant film Russell has seeking the sources of Tchaikovsky's or plying to the other arts. Subtlety and re- done; THE MUSIC LOVERS looks positively Mahler's music in childhood traumas and straint are the virtues of a Henry James Bressonian by comparison. Russell still sexual fantasies; this psychoanalytic ap- novel, but they are hardly the terms of polarizes his audiences. Although he is de- proach is intolerable to people who have praise one would apply to the novels of spised by the critics, his films are among come to believe in art as the one sacred Dickens or Lawrence, or the paintings of those most frequently revived; he has a mystery in an absurd and faithless world. van Gogh. Russell's work is notable for its small but passionately devoted cult follow- intensity, ferocity, and imaginative bold- ing. Stylistically Russell's films fllso present ness rather than for its subtle nuance, its problems to critics. His work depends on psychological depth, or its intellectual As one of Russell's original defenders, I excess, and his films violate most of the acuteness . In a famous remark, Dr. am disturbed by the mindless adoration as formal rules taken for granted in naturalis- Johnson described the imagery of the well as by the hysterical outrage that greets tic filmmaking. Over his last several films seventeenth-century metaphysical poets: his films. No one seems capable of ap- Russell has been moving further and \"the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked proaching his movies openly but coolly; further from realism into fantasy . hi. THE by violence together.\" The electricity of there is very little serious writing on his -- by Stephen Farber
Ken Russell's tense, unstable lyrics comes unity. Many of Russell's obsessions can be Nina; his music survives at her expense. from a comparable juxtaposition of oppo- traced to his television films . One of the And this same drama is reworked in site or discordant emotions; he shows little quintessential Russell images appears in MAHLER: Mahler smothers Alma's musical interest in the gray area in between the ex- DANTE'S INFERNO, his film on Dante Gab- talent and demands that she d evote herself riel Rossetti, when the poet, who has to him. Since Alma is stronger than Nina, tremes. buried a volume of poetry with his first her life is not destroyed, but a promising Like many artists, Russell seems to op- wife, goes to dig up the coffin and retrieve career is aborted . the poems-art snatched (quite literally) erate on a mixture of calculation and intui- from the jaws of death. Russell is haunted Russell's investigation of the moral fail- tion. He often plans his visual effects with by images of physical and mental disinte- ure of the artist is a major theme of his meticulous care. Yet he has also said, \"I'm gration; the tension between art and death work, a theme explored most caustically in a great believer in not always knowing accounts for much of the dramatic power LISZTOMANIA . The films of Russell that do why I do things, and not always being able of his films. In THE MUSIC LOVERS not deal primarily with artistS-BILLION to explain them.\" Huw Weldon, Russell's Tchaikovsky hears a fragment of a song DOLLAR BRAIN, THE BOY FRIEND, TOMMY, producer at the BBC (where he made over that reminds him of his mother; he follows even WOMEN IN LOVE-seem less charac- thirty documentaries between 1959 and the song to its source-a woman singing teristic, less urgent. THE DEVILS occupies a 1970), told John Baxter, '1n terms of inven- in a bathtub-and remembers his mother more important position, partly because of tion and the leap of the mind, it isn't that thrown into a boiling bath, her body rav- its Catholic theme (Russell is a convert to he leaves me behind; he leaves me stand- aged by cholera; the music is helpless to Catholicism), but also because the radical ing. On the other hand the capacity to exorcise this ghastly vision of death. A key priest, Grandier, is a heroic, tormented analyse and rationalise Ken doesn't begin sequence in SAVAGE MESSIAH presents a dif- figure involved in the same kind of to have.\" ferent conclusion: after promising a agonized struggle against death as the art- wealthy art dealer a sculpture by the next ist. Although THE DEVILS has a stronger Nevertheless, even Russell's bitterest morning, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska must political subtext than most of Russell's enemies would not deny that he has his steal a tombstone from a cemetery and films, he has very little interest in social own distinctive vision. His baroque visual and political issues, and that helps to ex- effects are easily identifiable, and he has developed a transient repertory company left: Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave in THE DEVILS. Center: Twiggy in THE BOY FRIEND. Right: Glenda Jackson in THE MUSIC LOVERS. of actors whom he uses in film after film (a spend the entire night chiseling a figure plain what is missing from his striking but group that includes Oliver Reed, Glenda from the stone. In this case the artist's ef- unsatisfying WOMEN IN LOVE. Russell does Jackson, Christopher Gable, Michael fort to defy death is triumphantly success- not begin to understand Lawrence' s pro- Gough, Kenneth Colley, Georgina Hale, ful . foundly comprehensive vision of the In- and Murray Melvin). Characters and dustrial Revolution and the class struggle; episodes from one film are re-interpreted Although Russell sympathizes with the the images of poverty (like Gerald's white later. One scene that Russell invented for struggle to transcend death, he wants to limousine moving through a line of black- WOMEN IN LOVE, in which Gudrun and the expose the artist's ruthlessness in pursu- ened miners) are beautifully composed, German sculptor Loerke pretend to be ing his vision. In his eloquent television but without the undercurrent of compas- Tchaikovsky and his bride on their hon- film SONG OF SUMMER, focusing on the rela- sion and rage that animated the novel. eymoon, is like a dress rehearsal for THE tionship of Frederick Delius and Eric Fen- MUSIC LOVERS. In one outrageous fantasy by, a young music student who comes to In spite of this failure, WOMEN IN LOVE sequence in MAHLER, Cosima Wagner, transcribe his last works, Russell intro- was rightly praised for its startling sexual dressed like a Nazi Brunhilde, presides duces another of his major themes: the sac- imagery, and for the superb performance over the conversion of the composer. rifice of a weaker individual to the over- of Glenda Jackson as Gudrun, one of the Later, in LISZTOMANIA, we see Cosima as weening ego of the artist. Young Fenby's predatory female characters that fascinate Wagner's child-bride, promising to keep identity is destroyed by his absorption in Russell (just as they fascinated Lawrence). his dubious theories alive after his death. the dying Delius's life. This theme is de- THE MUSIC LOVERS, however, is Russell's The weird Nazi symbols of MAHLER (which veloped further in THE MUSIC LOVERS. first fully characteristic feature, and the also figured prominently in Russell's tele- Tchaikovsky marries Nina because of her critics who were enchanted by the rela- vision film on Richard Strauss, THE DANCE resemblance to the heroine of his opera, tively faithful adaptation of Women in Looe OF THE SEVEN VEILS), run riot in Eugene Onegin. When his narcissistic were not prepared for Russell's sacrile- LISZTOMANIA. romantic dream turns into a nightmare, he gious treatment of Tchaikovsky's life and abandons Nina and retreats into his own music. The film is a pOinted study of the These relatively simple connecting links imaginative world, where he is in full con- decay of the nineteenth-century romanti- point to a more comprehensive thematic trol. Tchaikovsky's rejection destroys cism. At times the sensuous images and FILM COMMENT 41
the soaring music reflect the breathtaking Gaudier is a romantic who does not with- artistic fulfillment is always double-edged; boldness and confidence of Tchaikovsky's draw to a rarefied fantasy world. In Lon- he has a romantic spirit clouded by a aspirations, but there is usually a tinge of don he works on a construction crew and sneaking sense of irony. Nevertheless, irony qualifying the composer's rapture. lives in a hovel separated from the street by SAVAGE MESSIAH is Russell's most relaxed The images of idyllic family life that ac- an iron gate; his proximity to the teeming and affectionate film, and possibly his company the First Piano Concerto are street life suggests his willingness to con- best-less sensational, more evenhanded, luxurious, yet deliberately overripe. Rus- front the squalid world that Tchaikovsky mellow, and mature than anything else he sell sets Tchaikovsky's ethereal fantasies flees. But like Tchaikovsky, Gaudier be- has done in features; it recalls his fine films against the harsh reality of his disastrous lieves in the supremacy of his own im- on Delius and Isadora Duncan for the BBe. marriage to Nina, underscoring the com- aginative vision, and this time Russell This movie finally highlights the comedy poser's narcissism, his carelessness celebrates his arrogance and audacity. that has always been implicit in his work. toward others, and the destructive conse- Gaudier stands for all the experimental art- In THE MUSIC LOVERS and THE DEVILS, Rus- quences of his immersion in dreams. At ists of the modern age, impatient with trad- sell's jokes-about Tchaikovsky's suicide the conclusion of the film Russell com- ition, eager to break taboos and live their attempt or the public exorcisms in poses stark, horrifying images of the daily lives with the same intensity and un- Loudun-seem disorienting and abrasive madhouse where Nina is confined, in conventionality that they bring to their art. because of the essentially serious ap- order to accentuate the force of the world proach, but the jokes indicate Russell's in- that Tchaikovsky's music ignores. Al- Yet there are a few darker intimations terest in playing with multiple perspec- though precariously balanced between even in this film . Russell cannot help ob- tives on his subjects. In the films he has beauty and decay, romance and sexual serving that the same recklessness that made since SAvAGE MESSIAH, comedy and nightmare, THE MUSIC LOVERS ends with a fires Gaudier's art drives him to his death satire have become even more dominant, harsh nihilistic vision of the triumph of on the battlefield; his passion has its self- though the results have been uneven. chaos. destructive side. The ending of the film is disturbingly ambivalent. At a posthumous Top left: Ri chard Chamberlain in THE MUSIC LOVERS . Above left: Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson in WOMEN IN LOVE. Center: Vanessa Redgrave in THE DEVILS. Top right: Robert Powell 's bapti sm of fire in MAHLER. Above right: Georgina Hale in MAHLER. THE MUSIC LOVERS feels like an exorcism exhibition of Gaudier's work, the smooth, MAHLER, made on a low budget in 1973 of Russell's own fears . SAVAGE MESSIAH is gliding camera movements capture the and released in only a few cities in Ameri- a sunnier companion piece, a more beauty of the sculptures. In an earlier scene ca, is conceived almost like a burlesque wholehearted tribute to the adventurous- Gaudier said that art could not exist with- tour of some high points of the composer's ness of the romantic artist. It contains out an audience; yet the audience at his life. The tone is set in an early scene, when many of the same tensions as THE MUSIC exhibiiton consists mainly of dilettantes Mahler peers out of a train window and LOVERS, but it is a more jubilant work, with who are titillated by his daring. The ending sees a fussy man who looks like Dirk only a few muted reminders of the artiSt'S is a rousing tribute to Gaudier's art, Bogarde throwing shy, seductive glances delusions. One reason for Russell's more shadowed by a nagging, barely perceptible at a boy in a sailor suit. This parody of Vis- sympathetic treatment of the French Vorti- sense of futility. conti's DEATH IN VENICE (which used cist sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska , is Mahler's music in interpreting Thomas that he died at the age of twenty-three, be- This ambiguous conclusion does not Mann's novella) is multi-leveled and star- fore he had a chance to compromise. dispel the exuberant mood of SAVAGE MES- tlingly funny. Mahler chuckles knowingly, SIAH, but it suggests that Russell's vision of 42 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
almost as if he has a presentiment of all the Later Russell clarifies his point of view quences, while in the scenes on the train foolish abuses of his art and life; he man- when he criticizes Mahler for giving up his she presents a completely different side of ages to have the last laugh. Other anach- Judaism in order to advance his career. The Alma's character-a supremely bitter, ronistic comic touches illustrate Russell's conversion fantasy is staged rather clum- savagely sarcastic shrew. Alma's imperi- irreverence: Mahler's conversion to sily, but when Cosima begins to sing an ous , ice-cold facade is the mask she has Catholicism is staged like a silent movie anti-Semitic anthem set to Wagner's \"Ride chiseled to conceal her frustration and dis- parody of a Wagner opera, with a few of the Valkyries,\" while Mahler gorges appointment over the stifling of her crea- echoes of 81/2; in one of the family scenes, himself on pork and milk, the film reaches tive potential. The tension is palpable: we Mahler's brother does an impersonation of a liberating peak of blasphemous comedy. can feel the anger and pain seething be- HarpoMarx. neath her sardonic exterior. This outrageousness is one of MAHLER'S In MAHLER Russell reduces plot to a virtues. Yet there are also some lovely This may be the place to say something minimum and develops an unorthodox quiet moments in the film, particularly in about Russell's unorthodox heroines . Even surrealist style. As Mahler and Alma travel the scenes with Mahler's wife and chil- Pauline Kael , a critic hostile to Russell's across Austria by train, the journey is in- dren . The depiction of Mahler's relation- films , recognizes that the director's ambi- terrupted by memories and fantasies-out ship with Alma is the major strength of the valent attitude toward strong, hard-edged of chronological order-touching many of movie, and some of their scenes together women crea ted the dynamics for the the important events in his life. Alma' s have dramatic tension as well as emotional memorable female performances in his lover is also on the train, and at one point depth. Russell is on to a great subject here: films: Glenda Jackson in WOMEN IN LOVE Mahler gives her an ultimatum: she must the uneasy marriage of two talented, crea- and THE MUSIC LOVERS, Vanessa Redgrave choose between them by the time the train tive individuals, and the stifling of the les- in THE DEVILS , Dorothy Tutin in SAVAGE reaches Vienna . This contrived melo- ser by the greater talent. One thinks of the MESSIAH, and Georgina Hale in MAHLER. drama is a feeble attempt to give the movie relationship of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ken Russell does not have the \" correct\" some suspense, and Russell calU10t con- but Alma has more resources that enable liberated view of women, and that is prob- ceal his own boredom with the romantic her to survive. ably why feminists do not know what to triangle. The train journey is obviously make of him. nothing more than a string on which to An early flashback showing Alma and hang a collection of interesting beads. Mahler shortly after their marriage is a In SAVAGE MESSIAH, for example, Russell tender comic idyll. As he works in his ruthlessly mocks the aristocratic suf- In program notes that Russell prepared study on the lake, Alma goes out to still the fragette, \" Gosh\" Smith-Boyle, exposing for the movie, he claims that MAHLER has sounds of the surrounding countryside; her as a dilettante and a radical-chic hypo- the form of a musical rondo, with varia- she stops the church bells from ringing, crite who turns into a belligerent jingoist as tions on the themes of love and death jux- removes the bells from the cows in the pas- soon as the First World War begins. Russell taposed throughout. But this sounds like ture, and silences an orchestra and a group contrasts her to Sophie Brzeska, a more ex- an after-the-fact rationale for a series of un- of folk dancers in an open air beer garden. traordinary woman who refuses to ally related scenes and set-pieces. MAHLER At the climax of the sequence, Russell in- herself with any of the fashionable political does not have the dramatic or thematic tercuts Mahler conducting an imaginary and artistic movements of her day. Sophie, unity of THE MUSIC LOVERS; in this film orchestra as he whirls around his study magnificently played by Dorothy Tutin, is Russell flings out ideas indiscriminately. with Alma conducting the now-silent dan- truly unconventional in a way that doc- For example, the sequence dealing with cers in the beer garden. Although this trinaire feminists would not begin to un- the death of Mahler's daughter- sequence is rousingly comic, we feel the derstand. Spinsterish, sexually repressed, following on his composition of \" Songs on poignancy of Alma's desire to participate in embittered by her suffering, shrewdly ob- the Deaths of Children\"-raises interest- her husband's creative work in any possi- servant, more than a little demented , un- ing questions about the artist's mono- ble way . Later, in a more profoundly selfish in her devotion to Gaudier but un- mania, and the way in which life imitates melancholy scene, Mahler discourages willing to sacrifice her identity to his, art; but these ideas are not developed in Alma from continuing with her own musi- Sophie is one of the most vivid, madden- the rest of the film . Russell himself admits, cal composition; deeply hurt, she places ing women characters ever created. Rus- \"My film is simply about some of the her rejected song in a small box-shaped sell's acerbic, mysterious heroines are not things I feel when I think of Mahler's life like a toy coffin-and buries it in the gar- perfect models of revolutionary activity, and listen to his music.\" Even this is not den. The overripe romanticism of this but they have remarkable strength; and if quite true; the sequence dealing with scene (accompanied by the music from Russell regards them with a combination Mahler's childhood resembles an Isaac Tristan and Isolde) is partly ironic, but the of fascination and suspicion, that ambiva- Babel story that Russell was at one time images of Alma, forlorn yet dignified, lence at least represents an honest re- planning to film for the BBC. Obviously walking through the darkened garden, are sponse to shifting sexual attitudes. Russell the film is a grab-bag; it doesn't all hang to- very moving, almost elegiac. Only an artist confronts powerful, independent women gether, and one responds simply to the in- of remarkable sensitivity could bring off a without the aid of a modish ideology. dividual sequences, which are almost like potentially ludicrous moment like this the production numbers in a musical. without any condescension. In MAHLER Georgina Hale, alternately poisonous and passionate, joins Russell's The quality of these individual segments Unfortunately, the relationship of company of brilliant actresses. One wishes ranges from brilliant to embarrassing. The Mahler and Alma, which could have made the film gave her more opportunity to de- episode in which Mahler and his sister a film in itself, is only one element in this velop her character. Still, for all of its flaws, waltz before the mad composer Hugo elaborate potpourri, and Russell gets dis- MAHLER is an inventive and riveting per- Wolfe, who fancies himself the Emperor tracted by other sU,bjects just when we are sonal film, and it looks even better when Franz Joseph, is an undergraduate's bright most intrigued. As a result, when Mahler compared to Russell's subsequent film, idea staged for a cheesy student film . The and Alma are finally reconciled at the end TOMMY. In this musical vaudeville, in- childhood scenes are more painfully mis- of their journey, to the lush strains of his spired by the Who's inane rock opera, conceived. The family's Jewish man- sixth symphony, the scene is delicately Russell delivers the kind of movie-to-get- nerisms are so uncomfortably exaggerated handled but fundamentally unconvincing. stoned-by that teenagers obviously that the scenes might have been staged by The tensions between them seem too craved. The amusing thing is that the crit- the anti-Semitic Cosima Wagner. Russell strong to be so conveniently resolved. ics were equally enchanted, for TOMMY val- obviously meant to attack the family as Nevertheless, Georgina Hale gives an elec- idates the charges of sensationalism that mercenary philistines who simply hap- tric performance as Alma . She is touch- were I think unfairly leveled against THE pened to be Jews, but he miscalculated. ingly vulnerable in all the flashback se- FILM COMMENT 43
MUSIC LOVERS and THE DEVILS; this time surprising lapses. The psychedelic fantasy than Jesus.\" It is interesting that TOMMY is most of the scenes have no purpose effects-miniature airplanes turning into at its most convincing when it attacks the beyond shock and titillation. cemetery crosses-are unimaginative; the youth culture most ferociously . use of rear projection is clumsy and In TOMMY Russell has turned into exactly amateurish; the zoom shots that Russell Russell's impulses may be fundamen- what his detractors always said he was: a overused in MAHLER are even more preva- tally at war with the Who's beatific concep- vulgar Barnum who sacrifices everything lent here; the editing often has the aggres- tions, and that helps to explain why the to flash and gimmickry. The images have sive slickness of TV commercials. The ex- film is such a mess. The mindless glorifica- the same sledgehammer crudeness as the treme unevenness of the film's technical tion of youth that is part of the original noisy, toneless rock songs. achievement is troubling, because it indi- opera doesn't mesh with Russell's butting cates a contempt for the audience; Russell mockery of youthful delirium. His own TOMMY is inventive , but it is also assumes that the kids watching the movie confusions magnify the problem. Given exhausting, because it is so totally limited will be so numb that they won't notice the the film's emphasis on torment, exploita- to scenes of horror and vulgarity . The feel- difference between the original and the tion, and commercialization, the feeble af- ing that comes through most strongly is tacky effects . firmative ending rings especially false. one that was probably not intended-Ken Tommy rises from the ashes of the Russell's feeling of revulsion from the The frantic quality of Russell's direction wrecked youth camp, walks over his par- modern world. TOMMY at least helps to suggests that he realized the hopelessness ents' bodies, and, after a baptism under a explain why Russell is ordinarily drawn to of salvaging the material. Most of the waterfall, climbs to the same mountaintop period films. He obviously cannot abide weaknesses of TOMMY stem from the rock where his father and mother pledged their the contemporary world; he is a nine- opera itself, a blend of sophomoric ideas, love. The film is cyclical in structure, be- teenth-century romantic living out of his adolescent masochism, and bad music. It ginning in innocence and ending in inno- time. This popular rock musical is a grating seems to me there is a basic conceptual cence reclaimed . There is obviously a collage of harsh, grotesque, ugly images of problem with a rock opera in which the Christian parable peeking out from be- war, violence, urban rot, middle class protagonist is deaf, dumb, and blind; neath the glitter, and the ending is meant materialism, advertising, and commercial Tommy must be the most passive, anemic to echo the crucifixion and the resurrec- exploitation. Russell's films have usually hero ever created. Perhaps .kids of twelve tion. contained a juxtaposition of savage and or thirteen regard all of Tommy's phYSical lyrical images, but TOMMY is all on one handicaps as symbolic of their estrange- It is hard to tell how seriously Russell shrieking note of nausea and hysteria; the ment from a hostile adult universe; they takes this Christ symbolism. All of his persistent zoom shots are symptomatic of don' t notice how crudely the film panders work reveals an ambivalence on the sub- the frenzy. Even the images of nature are to their fantasies of martyrdom. I suspect ject of religion. He wants to condemn the antiseptic and cliche-ridden. One field of that Russell at least intuitively sensed the commercialism of the church, the atrocities yellow flowers is blemished by unearthly masochism and morbidity of the material, committed in the name of faith; but he also technicians in white suits and gas masks because one of the few moments when the means to endorse spiritual values. In both spraying insecticide. There is no exit from film really comes alive is the sequence in THE DEVILS and TOMMY, however, the this urban hell-a world of sterile subur- which Tommy is tortured by his bullying spiritual affirmation is less convincing than ban homes, auto graveyards, regimented cousin Kevin . Russell identifies with the attack on the abuses of religion. At least tourist camps, and seedy strip parlors. Kevin's sadistic glee, not with Tommy's THE DEVILS succeeds in creating an impos- Ann-Margret and Oliver Reed are the per- Christlike endurance. The sequence is ing spiritual leader in Oliver Reed's Grand- fect heroes of this gaudy plastic-and-neon elegantly designed, edited with electrify- ier; Roger Daltry's plastic purity looks wan universe; Russell uses them for their ing precision. And as cousin Kevin, Paul by comparison. Despite Russell's inven- coarseness and their lewdness. Nicholas is one of the only performers in tiveness, the mixture of cold-hearted cyni- the movie who creates a charader-a de- cism and fake uplife makes TOMMY an un- The fact that all of the ugliness is deliber- liriously happy, almost innocent thug. appetizing experience. ate doesn't make it any more enjoyable. Nicholas does his number with such infec- This film does not even have the emotional tious high spirits that we cannot help LISZTOMANIA continues in the flamboyant impact of THE DEVILS , a more honest savoring the tortures. circus style of TOMMY. But this nightmare film. The horrors in TOMMY are nineteenth-century comic opera (complete sanitized, PG-rated. Technically the film is Aside from this brief interlude, we are with rock songs adapted from Liszt's and admittedly impressive; the story is de- asked to suffer through all the scenes of Wagner's music by Rick Wakeman) is not veloped without a word of dialogue, and Tommy's humiliation. Finally he arrives at so relentlessly ugly, and Russell's satire the fusion of music and images is often ex- his own inner truth, only to see his has a lighter, more insolent tone, with a bit citing. There is wit and imagination in sev- spiritual vision vulgarized and exploited of the Goon Show flavor. One may still have eral of the scenes, particularly in Russell's by the soulless adults who prey on him. reservations about the content of the film, definitive mockery of ·TV advertising: the TOMMY revives the generation gap cliches, and about the messy, haphazard struc- baked beans, chocolate, and soap suds the slogans about youth vs. society, and ture, but this time there are no possible being advertised on television flood right the Hesse-influenced mystical gibberish technical reservations. The film is sumptu- out of the tube into Ann-Margret's posh popular in the Sixties. Russell gives the ously photographed (by Peter Suschitzky) white bedroom, and she reaches orgasm story some desperately-needed energy, and imaginatively designed (by Philip as she wallows in the muck. Since Russell and toward the end he conveys genuine Harrison and Shirley Russell). himself once made TV commercials for de- anger over youth's worship of false tergent, chocolate, and baked beans, this is prophets. The most fully-developed In this case Russell has an underlying a scene he must have been waiting to use theme in the film has to do with the blur- conception and a unifying style-a pop- for a long time; he brings off a tart obscene ring of distinctions between religion and art, comic-strip style, built on parodies of joke on the obsessions of the consumer show business. In Russell's view religion old movie genres. The opening, in which society. has been trivialized and commercialized, Liszt fights a duel with Marie d'Agoult's ef- while pop stars are treated with the rever- fete, villainous husband, is a musical ver- Other set-pieces-Elton John's \"Pinball ence once reserved for saints of the church; sion of a Stewart Granger swashbuckler; Wizard\" number, or the Marilyn Monroe the film makes some biting observations when Liszt and Marie are locked in a piano church service-are almost as dever, but on the pop star as guru, the condition John and placed on the railroad tracks, the they go on much too long, as if Russell Lennon described in 1966 when he said, parody turns into a wacky variation on THE were congratulating himself on his bril- matter-of-factly, \" We're more popular PERILS OF PAULINE. Later the movie plays liance. There is no discipline in this film, with the horror genre, with pieces of and even in technical terms, it has some 44 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
TOMMY . left: Mother Ann-Margret in the WWII warworks . Center: Tommy (Roger Da Itrey) is wired for sou nd. Right: Devotees and high priests in the Church of 51. Mari Iyn (Ann-Margret, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, Eric Clapton , Peter Townshend) . DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN done in the signed to portray him as a purely commer- dominates the second half of the film, and style of Superman comics. There is also a cial creature, a slave to fashion and to the Paul Nicholas, who played cousin Kevin in Chaplin parody; and the ending, a sci-fi marketplace. In a brilliant scene staged like TOMMY, once again wipes Roger Daltrey spoof set in heaven, is a cross between the a rock concert, hundreds of nineteenth- off the screen; he is a natural screen actor, heavenly fantasies of the Forties (HERE century girls shriek and swoon during with a sly, cocky smile. Liszt's recital, grab at his clothing, and in- COMES MR. JORDAN, HEAVEN CAN WAIT) terrupt his serious music by screaming for Wagner first appears as a boy in a sailor him to play \"Chopsticks .\" He cheerfully suit trying to peddle one of his composi- and a Flash Gordon Serial. gives the gallery what it wants. \"We're all tions to Liszt. Later he returns as a vam- in show business,\" he tells Wagner. In pire, who sinks his teeth into Liszt, and Despite all these stylistic flourishes , another outrageous scene several of Liszt's composes a tune on the piano while he LISTZOMANIA has something on its mind; mistresses (including Lola Montez and sucks Liszt's blood. Later still, after Liszt's the collage of wild comic images builds to a George Sand) take a ride on his ten-foot daughter Cosima has gone off to live with climax of unexpected intensity. This is a penis . In truth Liszt was a hugely success- Wagner, Liszt arrives in a German village much more adventurous, imaginative film ful popular pianist, a flamboyant show- and asks for directions to Wagner's castle; than TOMMY, but the critics who loved man, and something more than an ordi- the horrified reactions of the townspeople TOMMY are howling in outrage at Russell's nary cocksman; there is definitely a case to recall similar scenes set in Transylvania . venomous treatment of Liszt and Wagner. be made for him as a progenitor of today's During an electrical storm that night, Liszt The comic-book style is used to attack the pop stars-even though the case is wildly peers into the window of Wagner's castle crass commercialism of both composers, overstated in LISZTOMANIA. and sees naked orgies around the fire, their obeisance to the popular culture of ruled by a laughing, sadistic giant, an ap- their time; according to Russell, their lives Yet Russell also suggests that Liszt is an parition from pagan mythology. Wagner played like a bad Hollywood movie. As is artist of genuine talent whose music will appears in a Superman outfit, and sur- usually the case in Russell's biographical survive the vulgarity of his life. Unfortu- rounded by a group of blond youth, he films, most of the episodes have their basis nately, with most of Liszt's music turned sings a hymn to the \"flowering youth of in fact, but Russell bends facts when he into electronic rock, it is hard to judge his Germany\" and the \"Aryan superman.\" needs to, takes liberties with chronology, achievement from this movie. In one am- Then he takes Liszt into his laboratory; on and rewrites history for his own subver- biguous sequence Liszt remembers his life the operating table his own Frankenstein sive purposes. The jokes and anach- of poverty when he first ran off to Switzer- monster-a retarded Siegfried-crackles ronisms-like the Giotto-type paintings of land with Marie. The sequence is staged to life and sits up to do his master's bid- contemporary rock stars that line the walls like a parody of THE GOLD RUSH , with Liszt ding. As if that weren't enough, Liszt also of Princess Carolyn'S palace-multiply in a Chaplinesque mustache and a derby, has a vision of Wagner-Dracula rising from until it isn' t always clear what is being composing \" Dream of Love\" in their the grave: the doors to Wagner's tomb satirized. quaint little cottage, while Marie throws open, and the dead composer, now made kisses and sews a sampler with a giant red up to look like a cross between the Frank- Major events in Liszt's life are tossed off heart. The parody is done with wit and af- enstein monster and Adolf Hitler, in a line of expository dialogue, and the fection, but the point of view is not entirely emerges. Followed by his youthful disci- narrative is so fragmented that viewers dear. Is Liszt so hopelessly addicted to pop ples, he enters the village and, brandishing who come to the movie without any culture that he can only imagine artistic in- an electric guitar which doubles as a knowledge of nineteenth-century musical tegrity in the sentimental terms of hearts- machine gun, he mows down all the Jews. history will have trouble following much of and-flowers melodrama? Or does the the action. Russell is undeniably cavalier parallel to Chaplin imply that he was once There are shards ot truth in this bizarre and irresponsible in his approach to his- an innocent folk artist? Either way you in- fantasy . Musical scholars agree that tory, but then the film never pretends to be terpret it, the scene presents Liszt as a Wagner borrowed and reworked some of realistic reconstruction. Surely an artist is down. Liszt's musical themes in his own compo- entitled to his own perverse revaluation of sitions, and he was certainly a rabid anti- history, at least when his interpretation of Russell's treatment of Liszt is satiric but Semite whose revival of pagan German the past is as provocative and original as in not really vicious. The treatment of myths in the Ring cycle was part of the Wagner is something else again. Russell foundation on which Hitler's Reich was LISZTOMANIA. seems to have made this film mainly to have a chance to get at Wagner (who was built. In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , On the subject of Liszt Russell is ambiva- in reality Liszt's son-in-law). Wagner lent. The emphasis on Liszt's groupies, his William L. Shirer comments that Wagner's Warhol-like decadent parties, and his garish, luxurious surroundings seems de- FILM COMMENT 45
operas \"inspired the myths of modern might well be obscured by a more dispas- long after the evil consequences of the Germany .. . which Hitler and the Nazis, sionate historical theory . Russell's vision is music have been forgotten. His discarded with some justification, took over as their like a half-mad nightmare with a core of mistress Marie announces, \"The best of us own.\" Hitler himself said, \"Whoever truth that cannot be discounted. He re- lives on in the music, for everyone to wants to understand National Socialist fuses to absolve the artist of responsibility share.\" Liszt and the women enter a rocket Germany must know Wagner.\" Neverthe- for social evils, and this is the heresy that ship shaped like an organ and return to less, Russell's theory of a neat causal rela- music lovers cannot tolerate. Whatever earth to destroy Wagner-Hitler and put out tionship between Wagner and Hitler, a one's reservations about Russell's peculiar the fires in Berlin. As he flies away from the theory that ignores all the other complex approach to German history, the climactic battlefield, Liszt sings \"Peace at last\" be- factors that contributed to the rise of scenes of USZTOMANIA are among the best fore returning to heaven. As in TOMMY, Nazism , is a grotesque oversimplification that he has ever done-blasphemous, au- Russell tries to end on a note of Christian of history. daciously witty, harrowing, and exhilarat- redemption; but although the conclusion ing. of LISZTOMANIA is much wittier than the But it is not really fair to ask a non- ending of TOMMY, it cannot match the documentary film to serve the same func- The sense of horror and outrage in this urgency of the nightmare images in tion as a careful piece of historical scholar- section of the film does not come from Wagner's castle. ship . TIrrough distortion and exaggeration Russell's feeling about Hitler. His concern an artist can provide a flash of insight that about the abuses of art gives the film its Perhaps this ending would have been passion. Russell wants us to see the con- more effective if the rest of the film had nections between Liszt and Wagner-not more mys terious romantic images to re- just the family connection or the musical flect Liszt's idealism. Russell's earlier films influence of one on the other, but the influ- have a broader range of moods and emo- ence of Liszt's flamboyant commercialism tions. THE MUSIC LOVERS is divided be- on Wagner's megalomania . The cult of the tween scenes of horror and scenes of deca- superstar leads to the more sinister cult of dent but hypnotic romanticism; that ten- the superman. Liszt's screaming fans are sion gives the film its extraordinary im- the same girls who stand respectfully in pact. Even THE DEVILS, more frenzied and front of Wagner's tomb. Russell's point is grotesque, offers some contrast to the not simply that hysterical teenagers are in- scenes of death and torture in the tender cipient fascists. What he is really saying in scenes of Grandier's marriage to USZTOMANIA is that once the artist surren- Madeleine. The loud, garish style of ders to the rule of marketplace, he has vio- TOMMY and USZTOMANIA is unrelieved by lated the natural order of the universe and quieter moments. At its best USZTOMANIA released demons that cannot be controlled. is exceptionally powerful, but there are no shadings in the film, and that's why some The Nazi scenes are not meant to be of the spectacular set-pieces grow tire- taken literally; they express Russell's worst some. fears of what can happen when art is per- verted by show business and political Both TOMMY and LISZTOMANIA are in- fanaticism . The paranoia in this view of the artist's responsibility is bizarre, but there is ventive but Singularly unmoving; almost something irresistibly romantic in Russell's the only emotion they inspire is horror. In concern for the artist's integrity. In a world SAvAGE MESSIAH Russell's affection for the where everything has been debased and characters is more important than any of devalued, Russell still envisions art as the his bravura effects. Even MAHLER, which is central creative act that brings order to a closer to the style of a cartoon, has pas- chaotic universe. The fact that most of his sionate feeling in some of the scenes be- films examine the artist's betrayal of his tween Mahler and Alma . The circus format vocation cannot obscure Russell's belief in of TOMMY and LISZTOMANIA is partly a the moral importance of art. His exalted function of the subject matter of these two view of art seems slightly insane and rather films , but one cannot help feeling a mea- breathtaking. sure of concern about Russell's increasing indifference to recognizable human emo- The major problem with LISZTOMANIA is tions . formal. The pop art style is effective for dealing with Liszt's vulgar showmanship, After SAVAGE MESSIAH and MAHLER, but it limits the scope of the film. Elements Russell was regarded by the industry as a of Liszt's life that do not fit the cartoon dangerously eccentric director, and he pageant-his long-term relationship with desperately needed a hit. Therefore the the Russian Princess Carolyn, or his deci- garish carnival style of TOMMY and sion to enter the priesthood-must be USZTOMANIA can possible be explained as rushed over. Toward the end of the film, commercial calculation; the casting of pop Russell seems to want to portray Liszt stars in both movies tends to support the more sympathetically, but his style is not supposition that these movies were made flexible enough to reflect this shift in at- with an eye on the box office. Of course titude, and Roger Daltrey is too inexperi- that makes Russell's attack on commer- enced and vacant an actor to create a cialism in USZTOMANIA doubly ironic. Is character with any complexity. Russell aware of the irony? He once of- fered a distinction between commercialism The ending-a fantasy in which Liszt and vulgarity: vulgarity, he told John Bax- and the women in his life are in heaven ter, is \"an exuberant over-the-top larger- looking down at the results of the Nazi than-life slightly bad taste red-blooded holocaust-is cleverly conceived but thing.\" Undoubtedly he would define his specious. Liszt seems to believe that his own gaudy flourishes as vulgar rather than and Wagner's music will be remembered commercially oriented, but the distinction left and opposite: Roger Daltrey in lISZTOMANIA. WARNER BROTHERS
tends to blur. An artist who begins with a cal facts that do not fit his preconceptions. sell's movies are similar to the problems healthy desire to violate fastidious stand- But the artist's arrogance is one of Russell's that confront many of the most innovative ards of good taste and shock the philistines recurring subjects; he is deeply implicated artists working in the medium. may before long be playing to the gallery, in the moral dramas he poses, and that is going for broad, splashy effects that de- why his films never feel pat or complacent. Although the narrative tradition has light his less demanding fans. broken down, filmmakers have not yet On one point there can be little disag- discovered anything to replace it. The most Another reason for the disjointed, reement: Ken Russell is notone of the great original and important artists-in fiction musical-comedy form of these last three humanist directors. Pauline Kael wrote of as well as in film-are all grappling with films may be that Russell wrote the scripts SAVAGE MESSIAH: \"This is 'art' for people the question of structure. Russell's daring himself, and he has a very poor sense of who don' t want to get close to human rela- but still imperfect experiments with structure. The two films that I consider his tionships , for those who feel safer with kaleidoscopic, non-linear, operatic style most fully achieved-THE MUSIC LOVERS bravura splashiness .. . What is the sum are symptomatic of a formal quandary that and SAVAGE MESSIAH-both had total of [Russell's] vision but a sham affects all filmmakers . Russell is one of the screenplays written by other people (Mel- superiority to simple human needs, a few artists who is pushing forward , work- vyn Bragg and Christopher Logue, respec- camp put-down of everything?\" It is true ing to forge a purely visual vocabulary. His tively) . Obviously Russell had a great deal that Russell's strengths do not include most compelling images and characters al- to do with the writing of both those warmth and compassion. Human rela- ready have a place in film history . ~};. movies. I am sure that he directed the writ- tionships interest him, but he treats them ers as closely as he directed the actors and in archetypal, almost abstract terms. Any- technicians, and he clearly interpreted one who looks to his films for the kind of both scripts in his own distinctive fashion. richly-detailed characterizations found in But the scripts provided a dramatic the films of Renoir or De Sica will be disap- momentum that his recent films have pointed. But there are other criteria for lacked. evaluating works of art. Imaginative power is as important as love of humanity. Despite all the talk about personal Critics often have the naive notion that filmmaking, there are very few filmmakers humanistic films done in a naturalistic in the world who consistently write their style are the only works that deserve to be own scripts without any assistance. Even called art; they misunderstand and under- the European directors whose work is estimate Russell's dazzling baroque films . uniquely personal-Fellini, Antonioni, Bunuel, Truffaut-almost always work Russell's work is blemished by arro- with writers. Their relationship with their gance, self-indulgence, pomposity, and writers is very different from the Hol- sensationalism; but among filmmakers, lywood system where a director is as- those weaknesses are often inseparable signed to a completed screenplay; in from strengths. Artists are drawn to the Europe the finished film represents one film medium by a desire to give form to man's vision, and the screenwriters sub- their most outlandish visions, and also by a ordinate themselves to the director. But lust for power; a movie director is an artist those directors know that they need writ- with some of the same fantasies as gener- ers for construction and dialogue, and als and despots. One can trace a growing maybe to check some of their wilder im- arrogance and pretension in the works of pulses . Ken Russell's recent films could Chaplin, von Sternberg, Welles, Fellini, use more discipline, and they could also Visconti, Kubrick, Boorman, to name just a use the talents of someone who has a bet- few. Most of them have an irrepressible ter ear for dialogue; Russell writes arch, showman's instinc~, like Russell . Russell's highly rhetorical dialogue that is occasion- work can be characterized as a series of ally witty but more often turgid or coy. To vulgar, self-indulgent set-pieces .without put it more simply, Russell needs a writer an organizing principle; but the same criti- to question his ideas, someone to prOvide a cisms have often been directed at the later sense of balance and proportion. I find it films of Welles and Fellini, and that may be encouraging that on his current project, one of the by-products of an original and VALENTINO, Russell is working with Mar- anarchic cinematic imagination. dik Martin, the talented co-author of MEAN STREETS. As a matter of fact, many of the criti- cisms directed at Russell's films could also It would be foolish to make any confi- be leveled at Robert Altman' s. Pauline dent predictions about Russell's future. He Kael's most beloved and most despised di- has changed style before; he followed the rectors have more in common than she elegiac SONG OF SUMMER with the flam- would like to admit. Russell's florid, over- boyant, abrasive DANCE OF THE SEVEN heated style is the opposite of Altman's VEILS, and he went from the apocalyptic casual, throwaway style; and whereas horror of THE DEVILS to the campy comedy Russell achieves his effects primarily of THE BOY FRIEND and the mellow roman- through cinematic means, Altman works ticism of SAv AGE MESSIAH. Mixed re- through his actors. But both directors have sponses to Russell's films are understand- the same suspicion of intellectual analysis, able. His startling visual imagination, and the same single-minded arrogance, and the profound feeling of his best work, at- the same faulty sense of narrative struc- test to his exceptional talent. At the same ture. Altman's movies have been com- time it is impossible not to feel a little pared to parties, and Russell's might be cal- queasy about Russell's egomania, his will- led more decadent and exotic parties. I am ingness to distort and discard any histori- not trying to suggest that the two directors are exactly alike; but the problems in Rus-
NEWCINEMA FROM EASTERN EUROPE by Graham Petrie PHOTOS: HUNGAROFILM NEW HUNGARIAN CINEMA . Left: Pal Sandor' s FOOTBALL OF THE GOOD OLD DAYS. Center: Janos Rozsa 's DREAMING YOUTH. Right: Ferenc Kosa' s BEYOND TIME. There are more overt signs of prosperity eraman, Janos Kende. on an autobiographical novel by the film in Budapest than there are in Warsaw: Hungarian films, in fact, must be visu- critic Bela Balazs. Soft, pastel photography more cars on the streets, a wider range of beautifully creates the enclosed, secure goods in the shops, fewer line-ups to buy ally among the most striking in the world. world of a small boy, living in a cultured, scarce fresh fruits and vegetables, and an The country seems to produce an endless liberal, bourgeois environment, who is abundance of superb restaurants . In War- succession of brilliant cameramen, and it gradually made aware of the racial and saw it took some hours of diligent search- exports some of them (like Laszlo Kovacs class hatreds submerged in the society ing to find a restaurant that served palat- and Vilgot Zsigmond) to America. Janos around him. One particularly fine se- able food and, even there, I was liable to be Kende and Sandor Sara are currently the quence takes place at a primitive film informed that the only meat available on most in demand, with freedom to pick and screening where members of the audience certain nights was chicken. Yet, paradoxi- choose those with whom they wish to delightedly applaud images of themselves cally, Polish films have a much more ex- work; Elemer Ragalyi and Janos Toth have and their friends taken the previous day, pensive look to them than Hungarian clearly made a vital contribution to such then fade away as newsreels of strikes and ones, and there is certainly no Hungarian films as Janos Rozsa's DREAMING YOUTH riots replace these, until only the boy is left equivalent to the mad expenditure of and Pal Sandor's FOOTBALL OF TIlE GOOD in the tent at the end of the program. money on a film like Jerzy Hoffman's TIlE OLD DAYS (both photographed by Ragcilyi) Friends complained to me that the film DELUGE-OVer five hours long and boast- and Karoly Makk's LOVE and CATS PLAY gives, to a foreigner at least, no sense that ing a cast of thousands. The Hungarian (both photographed by Toth). this particular boy was to grow up into a counterpart to this is likely to be something man with a worldwide literary reputation; like Ferenc Kardos's UNRULY HEYDUCKS, an Another feature linked with this is the but this seemed to me a little beside the uneasy attempt to make a Western in a impeccable sense of period created in point, as the focus of the film is on the seventeenth-century setting, where the many of these films, with evocations of the child's growing self-awareness and con- supposed six hundred animals participat- first few years of this century, and the sciousness of injustice and betrayal-a ing in the cattle drive never looked to Twenties and Thirties, that put far more process that can happen to anyone. number more than 100 on the screen. expensive American productions to shame. One reason for this may be that the FOOTBALL OF TIlE GOOD OLD DAYS also Actually, TIlE DELUGE isn't all that bad. It Hungarians are not primarily concerned tries to use the cinema as a metaphor for presents its complex plot and its shifting with promoting next year's fashions by the social and political problems of its personal and political allegiances fairly means of their films . Another is certainly characters. The hero, the manager of an clearly; the settings are appropriately spec- that they are not afraid to show the ordi- unsuccessful soccer team who is con- tacular and the battle scenes well organ- nary, unglamorous, everyday aspect of stantly compared to Chaplin in his physi- ized. And, if UNRULY HEYDUCKS fails ulti- past societies; the clothes look as though cal appearance and gestures (one episode mately to give us any real idea of the mo- they have really been worn, the furniture recreates the famous revolving-doors tives of its characters or to involve us very and houses as though they have been used sequence from TIlE CURE), has a conversa- deeply in their fate, it is at least superbly and lived in. tion at on'e point with the cashier of the IbCal cinema in which they conclude that a photographed by Jancso's regular cam- The best of the recent \"period\" films is probably DREAMING YOUTII, which is based 48 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1975
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