VOLUME 21 - NUMBER 03 MAY-JUNE 1985

You Can't Beat the Experience.

n •Sl•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center Volume 21 , Number3 May-June 1985 'Desperately Seeking Susan'. . . . . . . . . . . 16 Fellinissimo! ...... . ....... 25 It took a yo ung director from Master fabulist , eternal child of the film fringe (Su san Se idel- the cine ma, progenitor of the man), a neophyte screenwriter wo rd (and the wo rld) \"Fe llini- (Leora Barish) , and a cinema- esque ; Federico Fellini will be tographer who'd worked with feted by the Film Socie ty of . Bertolucci and Herzog (Edward Lincoln Center on June 7. In an Lachman) to come up with the e ngag in g c o nver sa ti o n w ith year's sm artest , be st-l oo king Gideon Bachman, the all-time 193 5 screwball comedy based H all of Famer elaborates on the on a Jacqu es Ri vette movie. drea mscape that , becau se of Dan Yakir talks with all three . him , we all inhabit. Midsection: Latin America . 31 42nd Street or Bust. Mexico staggers toward bankruptcy; EI VISIT In 1980 a company bought one Salvador struggles for its soul ; Fidel Cas- building on Times Square and tro schmoozes with Ted Turner. Time for ~fl?T-HSTEl~lb/~t fi ve years later sold it for a 1000- a Latin American Midsection. So, two percent profit. With \"redevelop- v iews o n Mex ic o, from H o ll ywoo d MOVIE me nt\" in the air, the face of 4 2nd (David Thomson , page 32) and from the CAPITAL Stre et is c hang ing - but w ill troubled inside (Leonardo Garcia Tsao, it have the scars rem oved , or page 36). An assessment of progressive OF THE s impl y lose it s c h arac te r ? film s on the region (Carol Cooper, page Brendan Gill outlines the crisis; 39). And a trio of takes on C uban film: lVORLD Bill Landi s ske tches som e how a 23-minute documentary spurred an of the people to be affected ; artistic exodus (G. Cabrera Infante, page I~'~fclj a nd David Thom s on (in 43); a potpourri of C uban and hispanic a n exce rpt fr o m hi s n ew works at the Miami Film Festi val (Emilio Fernandez, page 46); and a review of six b oo k Su sp ec ts) im ag in es film s from within the C uban revolution (Pat Aufderheide, page 49). the reacti ons of a back-ho me fathe r to a son's life spe nt on the Deuce. Also in this issue: Who's Who in Budapest ........22 Objects of Desire .. . ...... . ...68 Men look at women; the camera looks at JOUJTlals....... . ....... .... ..2 A delirious political allegory from Istvan objects. Facts of life or cinema conspiracy? Marcia Pally calls for a new meta-physics. While in Germany, Harlan Kennedy refused (Mephisto) Szabo, a fistful of films with Je\\o\\I- to visit Bitburg Cemetery; he did stop off at Hollywood 2000 .. ... .. ... .... 74 the Berlin Film Festival, though. Jim Ver- ish themes, and the promise of a Miklos President Stallone? Pope John Travolta? You niere spends a day with the dead, George read it here first. And Paul Budra and G ra- Romero-sryle. Michael Sragow fmds paral- Jancso rockumentary highlight J. H ober- ham Yost wrote it. lels between Witness and Violent Saturday, man's trip this winter into the Hungarian cin- Television: 'Green Acres' ........ 76 ema. Armand White likes it better than Places in a Richard Fleischer film of 30 years' vintage. the Heart. H onest. Jack Nicholson interview . . . .... 53 Future Imperfect. ..... . .......11 Rebel, exemplar, survivor, rebel. After 27 Back Page: Quiz #13 ....... . . . .80 Since Melies, filmmakers have used the years in film , N icholson can still amuse and Boys and girls together. camera lens to crystal-ball the furure. Some- Cover photo: ABC Pictures/Fox. times it works, sometimes it doesn't. You'll sastonish. In Prizzi Honor, his new film , he learn sruff from Marc Mancini's fme essay. fmds a new dimension for his sleek menace. And in a rare and revealing interview with Beverly Walker, the actor-writer-director looks back (and forward) on a lifetime of challenges . Edi to r: Ric hard Co rli ss. Se ni or Editor: Harl an Jaco bso n. Busin ess Manage r: Sayre Maxfield . Ad ve rti si ng and C irc ul ario n M anage r: T ony Impavid o. Art Director: E lliot Sc hulm an. Cove r Desig n: Mi ke Uris. Wes r Coas r Editor: Anne T hompso n (o n leave). E uropea n Co rres pond e nt: H arl an Ke nne dy. Research Co nsul rant: Mary Co rli ss. Ci rc ul arion Ass isrant: D e bo rah F reedma n. Back Iss ues : Ma ri an Masone . Accou nta nt: D omin go Ho rnill a, Jr., Edlton allnre rn s: Ma rl aine G li cksman , C hris Tripoul as. Execurive Directo r,. F ilm Society of Linco ln Ce nte r: Joa nn e Koch. Second cl ass pos rage paid ar N ew Yo rk and addltJonal mailing offi ces. Copyn ghr © 1985 by rh e F ilm Soc iety of L in coln Ce nte r. All ri ghrs rese rve d . T he opinio ns expresse d in F ILM Cm l ~ I E NT do nor re prese nt F ilm Society of Linco ln C enter po licy. This publica ri on is full y pro rec red by do mes ric and inte rn ario nal copyri ght. FILM COM~ I E NT (I SSNOOI 5-11 9X), 140 Wes r 65 rh Streer, New Yo rk , N. Y. 10023 . U.S .A., is made poss ibl e in parr by suppo rt from rhe New York Sra re Coun cil on rhe Arts a nd rhe Na rl onal E ndowment fo r rhe ArtS. Subsc ripri on rares in rh e Unired Srares: $ 12 fo r six numbe rs, $22 for rwe lve numbe rs. El se whe re : $ 18 for SIX numbe rs, $34 for rwe lve numbe rs, paya bl e in U.S. fund s onl y. New subsc ribe rs should includ e rh e ir occ upario ns and zip codes. Postmaster: send address c ha n es to F ILM COM~I E NT, 140 Wes r S ixry·fifrh Srree r, New Yo rk . N .Y. 10023 U.S .A.

s Knocked on their Axis: Berlin, Romero, and Friends Our Man in Berlin serene stoicism of Eastern mysticism. For those struggling through ice and The japanese defense counsel, we are snow in search of celluloid - it was the coldest German winter since 1941-the told by the narrator, \"based his summing- 1985 Berlin FilmFestSpiele was like a movie maven's version of john Carpen- up on Oriental metaphysics.\" ter's The Thing. The specter of good cin- ema hurtled semi-invisibly from spot to The material is such a knockout it spot amid the Arctic tundras; it tended to stand still and manifest itself only hardly matters that Kobayashi spends when it had cannibalized enough vivid controversy and livid hi story. At Berlin much of the time adjusting the scales of this was a year of fact, not fiction. Gone were the cuddly gusts of good narrative justice to suit his compatriots. Pearl Har- that usually cheer this competition. Instead, howling blasts of documentary bor was no unprovoked military atrocity truth issued from everywhere: World War IIjapan, Nazi Germany, Auschwitz , but a \"triumph of tactical surprise.\" Mac- Nicaragua .... Arthur is a running dog of the imperial- The army of documentaries at Berlin was led by four-and-a-half hours of japa- ists - \"From that moment [Hirohito's sur- nese war crimes in Masaki Kobayas hi's The Tokyo Trial. Amazing- a festival render]\" says the narrator, \"japan became audience that can start shrinking after only five minutes of, say, a 90-minute MacArthur's empire.\" And the film adopts Rumanian fiction film about revisionist rhubarb growers, will stay to the bitter the device of swerving off in a new direc- end of a 277-minute real-life courtroom epic. tion whenever things get sticky for the Kobayashi , best known for costume accused. The \"atrocities\" section of the gigs like Kwaidan and Rebellion, cut this blockbuster together from half-a-million trial is given about five minutes, before it's feet of Pentagon film on WW II and the International Military Tribunal for the Far interrupted by some irrelevant Tokyo East. The latter is , of course, the Nip- ponese answer to Nuremberg, with the strike footage. And earlier, archive irresistible force of Western law weighing in against the inscrutable object of japa- glimpses of the norrific Nan King massa- nese pride and nationalism. These were far tougher and more elusive propositions cre-when the japanese, venturing to confront-as the film makes c1ear- than the garish evils of Nazism, whose frequently cut in to give a bigger perspec- deeper into China, slaughtered a whole humiliation by Allied jurisprudence (i.e. , tive. And there is a long but brilliantly Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster) every concise resume of japan's prewar Man- town - are juxtaposed with Hiroshima filmgoer knows by heart. churian adventure, which was (claim the prosecutors) the limbering-up exercise and Nagasaki. Gotcha: anything the East Kobayashi , not surprisingly, puts the for their vvartime expansionism. weight of sympathy on the 28 defen- could do the West could do worse. dants-former generals, admirals and But it's the trial that boggles the brain prime ministers arraigned on a \"basket\" of cells. It's a wonderful mixture of the But the bias is brazen enough to be charges including conspiracy to make war heroic and the asinine, as twelve good and commit atrocities. Though the trial is magistrates set out to implement their noted and ignored, if one so chooses; and the movie's meat , WWII archive film is laws, several of which seem to have been invented specially for the trial. Led by an then one can gaze in untroubled wonder Australian judge with a staggering like- ness to Harry S. Truman, they eyeball at the priceless raw material Kobayashi across a crowded courtroom the accused Orientals, who eyeball them back with an has assembled. • attitude somewhere between incompre- hension and unconsciousness. The most These ransackings in the vaults of his- distinguished defendant, Hiruta, spends the whole trial in what seems to be a deep tory are a feature of the Berlin FilmFest. sleep. Last year it was Edgardo Cozarinsky's There is comedy: One prisoner sud- denl y and inexplicably clouts a fellow Memories o/the Camps. The strength of prisoner across his bald pate and then stands up to begin a filibustering mono- these documentaries is that they are com- logue. (He is quickly removed and later diagnosed as a tertiary syphilitic!) There ing from ever more surprising quarters. is drama: the faces of the accused as, led in one by one, they hear their sentences Gyula Gazdag's Group Excursion is a of life or death. And there is culture- shock surrealism, as the pragf)1atism of Hungarian sidelight on Nazi atrocity. A Western law keeps colliding with the coach flotilla of Auschwitz survivors jour- ney from Hungary to the former death camp, stopping en route to eat, drink, and be melancholy as they recall (for one another and the film crew) the horrors of life under Hoess and Mengele. Finally they reach the camp. Here the grim ghosts hover even more vividly in the camouflage of the gray sheds, the model crematoria (the real ones were destroyed by the Nazis) , and the '/irbeit Mach Frei\" on the main gate. The movie shows us a group of con- centration camp survivors who have 2

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moved out of Hell to become \"ordinary actors, and collaborators chime in with semi-documentary Godardian chop-up clinks of insight; the movie is like an ice about the evils of German gemutlichkeit, people.\" In doing so, it provides the price- bucket being rattled in memory of a great juxtaposing everything from picture bottle of champagne. postcards to old travel posters - a sort less reminder that there are no ordinary of Gunfight at the OK Collage. people. Even your next-door neighbor But the real stirrer-upper among the can wear a smile over a nightmare. documentaries was Werner Herzog's Bal- The main competition is never Berlin's lad of the Little Soldiers. This intrepid happiest event. But brief sparks did fly Thomas Harlan's Wundkanal and jungle-beater has now macheted his way from four films this year: David Hare's Robert Kramer's Notre Nazi are no less into deepest Nicaragua, there to film the Golden Bear-winning Wetherby, Bobby grimly hypnotic halloos to Nazism. anti-Sandinista guerrilla groups being Roth's Heartbreakers, Hugh Brody's Harlan, son of Third Reich filmmaker formed by tribes of Meskito Indians. \"For 1919 and-it's that man again-Jean-Luc Veit Harlan, has got hold of a Nazi war sree veeks vee tramped sroo jungle and Godard's Je Vous Salue Marie. criminal- ''Alfred F.\", released from svamp ... :' burbles Werner as the film prison in 1977 -and shoved him in front opens. But this predictability is soon Hare's neat little English thriller, set in a of the camera for a two-hour docudrama exploded by political heresy. Is Herzog Yorkshire village, has schoolteacher interrogation. Playing a thinly fictiona- siding with the opponents of the San- Vanessa Redgrave witnessing a young lized version of himself, the cadaver- dinistas as the Meskitos curse the Com- man's suicide and discovering a whole faced SS veteran keeps tweaking our munist raiding parties who have turfed web of sexual and social repressions reluctant sy mpathy. As the camera them out of their villages, slain their men- radiating out from this violent center. probes , the tears start as he recalls his folk, and driven many into refugee camps Redgrave is superb , and Hare's script is brother, who died in a concentration over the river in Honduras? full of tangy one-liners about Anglo- camp after speaking out against the Saxon angst and attitudes. The icky- Fuhrer. He is, much to the horror of the Euro- centered Heartbreakers is applaudable pean Left, who have anathematized the for its performances, its incidental com- At times Alfred F. seems like an unjust- film. But its grim sympathies are never edy, and the satiric lids being noisily ly bullied old codger. . .. And then we real- simplistic. The camera looks on aghast taken off L.A. life. ize the ghastliness of our own compas- as nine- and ten-year-old children are sion for a codger who helped to kill weapon-trained by former Somoza National From Britain, 1919 is a draw~ng-room 11,000 Jews .... And then we wonder if, Guardsmen to replace their dead fathers tragedy spinning round two ex-patients of even with a man like this , one shouldn't or brothers in the anti-Sandinista strug- Sigmund Freud. They meet in Seventies feel compassion .. . .And slowly the movie gle. The resistance, suggests the film, is Vienna - Austrian-born Maria Schell pries open the spectator's ethics . no less tragic than the oppression. But (now living in America) and White Rus- Herzog continues the Fassbinder tradi- sian Paul Scofield (now settled in Kramer's film about the filming is, if tion of having the courage to rile both Vienna) . Buffeted by flashbacks and anything, even more riveting. His two- Left and Right when it comes to despots. newsreel footage, they recall their crises hour video record throws as harsh a light of yore. Microscopically dovetailing on Harlan as on Herr F, as it becomes And who is so rash as to complain of private and political fates, the Brody film increasingly clear that the director's any Herzog movie in the current state of is a humdinger haiku of 20th-century enthusiasm is not only for unearthing the German cinema? The German New evolution. truth but for exorcising his guilty love for Wave has turned into the German Low his father, who died an unpunished and Tide, a dismal mudflat strewn with sea- As for Godard , his is as impossible an well-cushioned death on Capri. weed and wormcasts. The festival's act to follow as Wagner's or Joyce's . His annual New German Cinema program new essay in breaking the rules has had • boasted not a single must-see movie. cries of \"blasphemy\" hurled at it by the Trite thrillers (Carl Schenkel's Abwiirts) French, since it concerns a young girl Elsewhere, amid the traffic jam of good jostled with twitches of yesterday's surre- called Marie who, though a virgin, gives documentaries at Berlin, three stand alism (Herbert Achternbusch's Blaue birth to a child. She (Myriem Roussel) Blumen). And political docudramas lay loves a man called Joseph (Thierry sout. From Germany came Tosca Kiss, down with an interminable series of Rode), whom she meets off and on at a apres-Fassbinder fishings in the waters of gas station. The latter has a big sign say- by ex-Fassbinder collaborator Daniel the drag world and demimonde. One ing \"Change, Tabac, Oil\"-which I sub- Schmid. Schmid pokes a microphone at could become certifiably insane sitting mit is a modern variant on gold (change), the joyously batty denizens of Rome's through every film about aging lady frankincense (cigarettes), and myrrh Casa Verdi, a home for ex-opera stars buskers (Gertrud Pinkus' Duo Valen- (oil). bequeathed by composer Giuseppe. tianos), or aspiring drag artistes trying to There's Signora Scuderi, wearing a wig break into the Berlin nightclub scene This is a film you spend your whole and shrieking \"Vissi d 'arte\" at anyone (Lothar Lambert's Drama in Blond). time wildly trying to lasso with such infer- who'll listen. (She knows how to empty ences, since it stampedes past you at a rooms.) There's a mad maestro out of a The German films in the competition great speed and distance , full of rapid cut- caricature, with shoulder-length white section were no better: Egon Gunther's ting, often-inaudible dialogue, surges of hair and the gleam of craziness in the eye. MQrenga , a piece of cap-a-pie nothing- string music (a la First Name: Carmen), And there are moments of sudden shock ness set in colonial Africa and photo- shots of sun, moon, and sea, and hanger- and exultation when a correct note is g~aphed as if through a sack; Christian on characters (a seedy gent called Uncle finally hit by La Scuderi, or by her peers, Ziewer's The Death of the White Horses, Gabriel) who leap up in mid-scene as if or by the whole Casa joining in the slaves' earnestly and endlessly \"mythic\"; or chorus from Nabucco. Horst Kurnitsky and Marion Schmid's from a hole in the ground. The film is aridly pretentious Niemann's Time, a wonderful, it's exasperating, it needs at Kazuo Inoue's I Lived, But. .. is a tour least four viewings, and one ends by urg- of the Casa Ozu . This is a documentary ing less talented directors to admire but biography of the great Japanese director, who made films about people going in and out of the front door, shaking their umbrellas, and having tea. Ozu friends, 4

not necessarily to imitate. A COMPETITION AND SHOWCASE FOR THE WORLD'S BEST ANIMATION • SEPTEMBER 25-29, 1985 The Berlin FilmFestSpiele has now PRESENTED IN COOPERATION WITH ASIFA HOLLYWOOD AND THE AMERICAN CENTER OF FILMS FOR CHILDREN been in the hands of Moritz de Hadeln Entry Deadline July 20, 1985. Write: ANIMATION, 2222. So. Barrington, L.A. 90064 for five years. And though he hasn't cured EXPANDED ENTERTAINMENT PRESENTS the chronic ills of the competition - an The International invalid long before he came to power - he Tournee.of An.matwn has done wonders for the rest of the The only featur~length touring package festival. The market is edging close to in the United States to consistently showcase the world's best animation! Cannes for richness and prolixity: twelve -Now Available- theaters offering some half-dozen movies The 16th, 17th and 18th International Tournees of Animation each per day. The Information Show and -Corning in June- the Young Filmmakers Forum have both The 19th International Tournee of Animation made themselves far more accessible to An outstanding selection of the harassed festivalgoer through good animated short films from some of the world's most documentation and extra screenings. ii;I:!I;j'l!i;I\\;i~I\\i:'~I\\i\\~I: ~ talented animators Including: And the retrospective beats anything MARV NEWLAND'S anijan. other fests can offer in the way of looking A new film from the creator of BAMBI MEETS GODZILLA back in amber. This year we had \"Special EXPANDED ENTERTAINMENT, 2222 S. BARRINGTON Effects\" - a program ranging from LOS ANGELES, CA 90064. CALL JEFF CAPP (213) 473·6701 neglected classics (The Devil Doll, For- bidden Planet) to understandably neglected classics (Abel Gance's La Fin Du Monde, which is 85 minutes of pixil- lated domestic melodrama followed by five minutes of falling masonry and mon- tage) to classics that aren't neglected at all and never should be (The Student of Prague, King Kong, Orpheus). The old rubs reels with the new. Films are tickled over and explored. Their syn- tagmas are diegeticised (if that turns you on). And each year the Berlin fest finds a new way to recharge your batteries and blazon the importance of movies as chal- lenge and change. Leb wohl, 1985. Heil dir, 1986. -HARLAN KENNEDY Bearing 'Witness' The names of Victor Mature, Richard Egan, Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin, and Ernest Borgnine flashed on the tele- vision screen as a dusty copper-mine explosion burst through the back- ground - and an excited nostalgia crept through me at 2 A.M. one recent morning. I shook myself out of an insomniac glaze as Richard Fleischer set the stage for his 1955 Violent Saturday with speed and finesse. How quickly he suggested that head thug McNally was laying plans to rob the bank in a small town called Bra- denville; how easily he evoked that Fif- ties' sense of catastrophe hovering over a seemingly impregnable world that also distinguished vintage TV shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twi- light Zone. The action got hotter and heavier as Lee Marvin and j. Carroll Naish appeared onscreen as McNally's henchmen - Marvin was snorting a breatholizer and Naish was playing the proper criminal gentleman, giving some

Amish kids pieces of candy. That's when rectly and concretely question or reaffirm no false affirmation. I really woke up. them. The opening shots of the movie, in An Amish family? In a movie called The whole point of Violent Saturday is which the mine workers signal each other Violent Saturday? Is that why some local that discontent is coursing through a typi- before setting off the explosion, are omi- TV programmer had put the movie on- cal, non-Amish, American small town; nously echoed when Marvin and the very week that Witness overtook but even the Amish farm outside the McNally signal to each other before the Beverly Hills Cop at the boxoffice? It had town represents the most fragile of hav- heist. The parallel suggests that the to be. For as this soap-opera-cum-crime- ens. Bradenville has clearly fallen on hard town's legitimate business, as well as story developed, Fleischer and screen- times. Town librarian Elsie Braden, a imported crime, has sapped the commu- writer Sidney Boehm (working from a member of the founding family (though nity. Nor do the Amish get off as easily novel by William Heath) ended up using no one makes a big deal of it), must stoop here as they do in Witness. When farmer the Amish as a pivot in another action- to purse-snatching to pay her bills. The Ernest Borgnine and his family are bound packed inquiry into the morality of vio- town's one major industry is copper and imprisoned with Mature in their lence. Indeed , even though Violent Sat- (though the hotel clerk tells McNally at barn, the image recalls \"Hear No Evil, urday's depiction of the Amish is thin and the beginning that a men's pajama factory See No Evil, Speak No Evil.\" After wit- rickety (for one thing, the Amish are seen has opened up, putting more people to nessing the wounding of his son and livi ng in what appears to be the South- work). Almost all the action revolves Mature, Borgnine does take violent west), even though it doesn't have a cen- around the mine; among other things , it's action, and he suffers what for him is the tral figure as arresting as Harrison Ford or the biggest single depositor in the bank. victory of the damned. a camera style as lyrical as Peter Weir's, it compares favorably to the later film as a Victor Mature plays the sane produc- The difference between Violent Satur- study in moral ambiguity. tion manager for the copper company; day and Witness is that in the latter, noth- he's the best man in Bradenville, but his ing happens. The set-up takes roughly a Violent Saturday is not likely a direct son wishes Dad had been a war hero. half-hour: the young son of an Amish inspiration for Witness- in many ways Mature's opposite number is Richard widow witnesses a murder in a Philly the movies are matched opposites. The Egan, the heir to the copper fortune , train station; the investigating detective Weir film starts with the Amish, intro- who's stymied by the example of his self- takes the mother and son into protective duces the urban world of cops and crooks made father and humiliated by the nym- custody-and then home to Lancaster as a crucial plot link, then forgets about it phomania of his wife. By the end of the County, when he learns that the killers until the climax. The Fleischer film starts film, their problems are exploded, not are cops from his own department. Once with the crooks and townsfolk, intro- neatly resolved ; the same goes for those Harrison Ford, as the good cop, settles in duces the Amish as a crucial plot link, of the peeping tom bank manager and the for rest and recuperation, the film is given then forgets about them until the climax. nurse at the mine hospital (the object of over to a remarkably full and vibrant pic- Egan's affection and the banker's lust). ture of Am'ish life. Witness rests uncomfortably between genres: it's neither a full-fledged cop The movie makes a powerful melodra- The plot, however, stops dead, be- movie nor a pastorale like Friendly Per- matic push toward flexibility. Mature cause screenwriters William Kelley and suasion. These days, we don't get many presages a line in Witness when he tells Earl W. Wallace simply haven't thought full-bodied genre movies; instead we get his son that there's more than one way to Witness's drama through. They make one movie fads. And Witness fits most com- win a war (he stayed on the home front , attempt to unify the police and Amish fortably into the stranger-in-a-strange- with the copper mine). Later, when the sides of the story: They have the most land subgenre epitomized by E. T., with gangsters commandeer Mature's car to powerful crooked cop explain that the Ford as the lovable alien and Amish-land get to the Amish farm for a rendezvous , police comprise a closed world, much as as Planet Earth. he turns into a heroic battler. His son is the Amish do. But to make that point delighted , but Mature tries to tell him stick, the moviemakers would have to Though these movies can be wonder- that it would have been better if his show how both groups' unwritten laws ful fables, they tend to preclude depth, encounter with the criminals had never stymie individual actions while strength- because the hero can only go so far into happened, if he'd never had his opportu- ening collective identities. his new world before pulling back. (It's a nity for \"heroism :' When this responsi- tribute to Weir and Ford that Witness ble, tender father dutifully flashes a Unfortunately, the killing is never more delves as deeply into the material as it victor's smile for the sake of his son's than an excuse for the two worlds to col- does.) It's a perfect movie cycle for an age schoolmates, Fleischer- and Mature- lide. The filmmakers fare much better of uncertainty. achieve a poignant moment of ambiva- with the Amish, who keep their small- lence. In his last good film before he scale communality intact with a disci- Violent Saturday, on the other hand, began spoofing himself, Mature is elo- pline and conformity that verge, at times, comfortably embraces a host of genres quent enough to evoke James Agee's wish on emotional violence. The script ac- and influences, combining the group- to cast him as Diomed in Troilus and knowledges \"shunning;' the Amish s ruth- heist aspects of The Asphalt Jungle with Cressida. less form of excommunication, but it the small-town scandals of King's Row, doesn't push the tensions to the limit by along with its own Friendly Persuasion This critical balance extends to the having the town shun the widow for fall- crisis of conscience. Because Fleischer other elements in the movie-the film- ing in love with an outsider. and his collaborators could assume the makers show a surprising amount of sym- audience's familiarity with their storytell- pa'thy for Egan's drinking and his wife's Although the writers' reticence can be ing conventions, they could pack in char- tramping-around, and even for the bank taken as a sign of good taste, it's also a acters, twists, and surprises. Because manager's voyeurism. But there's no indi- sign oftimidity. It's telling that in Witness, they could assume the audience's devo- cation that a peaceful Sunday will inevita- most of the crowd-pleasing moments tion to the values of family, industry, and bly follow this violent Saturday-there's come when the characters stay exactly neighborhood tradition , they could di- the same-when Ford reverts to violence 6

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and when the Amish refuse to. In Violent a hole in the ground) , and a few play- \"Yeah;' says Romero, \"I love 'em:' And Saturday, even the supporting characters are full of surprises: Marvin keeps that things of the rich (3000 recreational vehi- well he should: Night's sequel, Dawn of breatholizer stuck up his nose , it turns out, because he once had a wife who cles, including a few boats moored in the the Dead, earned $55 million. always had a cold. cave's 25-acre man-made lagoon). The Back in the Sixties, when Romero was Still, I've come to praise Violent Satur- day, not to bury Witness. The best facility is serving as the film's principal a frustrated filmmaker doing local TV moments of Weir's film have a spontane- ous excitement and emotional pitch that set, an underground complex where the commercials and industrial films in Pitts- couldn't have grown in the tight plot turns of Fleischer's film . There's some giddy remaining scientists and military person- burgh , he tried several times to raise improvisatory hijinks and some lovely comic-erotic feeling to Ford's dancing nel take refuge from the zombies who money for a feature. \"In those days there with the widow to Sam Cooke's \"(What a) Wonderful World (It Would Be):' When- have taken over the world. really wasn't much of a chance of an ordi- ever their sexual instincts seem to be run- ning too hot, Ford high-steps away from The production offices are located nary person getting into filmmaking;' he the clinch . That could be my favorite three minutes of film so far this year. inside the cave's mountainside, drive-in says. But inspired by Richard Matheson's The ideal cops-and-robbers-and- entrance, and one particularly large space 1Am Legend, Romero wrote a short story Amish film would combine the narrative density of Violent Saturday with the lus- has been transformed into a workshop for called ' ~nubis\" and then together with ter and romance of Witness. If I've argued more fervently for the former, it's because \"wizard of gore\" Tom Savini , an ex-com- writer Jack Russo put together the Night dramatic craftsmanship and story logic are too frequentl y taken for granted. bat photographer in Vietnam whose ofthe Living Dead script. Movies like Violent Saturday are so often consigned to the dustbin of history, the splatter effects have graced Dawn of the Now, as a result of that first collabora- least I could do is bear witness. Dead, Friday the 13th, and Maniac . The tion, the zombie-master finds himself - MICHAEL SRAGOW place is a studio-size version of a psycho- competing with another \"Living Dead\" A Day with the Dead pathic boy's high-school locker: music film, Return ofthe Living Dead, directed En route to the set of George Romero's Day ofthe Dead, a $3.5 million , third in- and movie magazines, posters, cans of by Dan O'Bannon. \"Jack Russo and I stallment in his Dead-People-Gotta-Eat- Too series , the driver says , \"Too bad;' I've soft drinks and spray paint, and a variety gave each other the right to do sequels, missed the \"I Was a Zombie\" weekend . Romero's Laurel Entertainment arranged and Jack wrote a Return of the Living this little press junket, which turned visit- ing journalists into zombie extras (an Dead novel, which I think was bought by effect in some cases redundant). \"It was the battle of the egos ;' complains the a third party. I'm not the horse's mouth on driver, a kid fresh out of film school, working as a p.a. this, but that's how O'Bannon got into Some of the writers snorted coke in the it. I've actually seen his film but would back of his van on their way from the air- port, the driver says. Knowing what writ- rather not comment:' ers get paid, \"Hah! ;' I suggest. Worse, he says, the people at the Beaver Falls Holi- Despite reports that Day of the Dead day Inn are up in arms because \"some- one\" abducted the baby Jesus centerpiece would be the final installment in a trilogy, of the hotel's nativity display. Paranoia: The lady at the desk suspects I have lust Romero has tentative plans for another in my heart for the now-childless Virgin zombie epic . \"It's really because of the Mary. The next morning I arrive at the film's of exceedingly lifelike human parts. MPAA,\" says Romero, whose original Wampum, Pa., location, situated inside a Wielding a pair of surgical snippers, Night of the Living Dead was made 125-acre limestone cave. Once a thriving mine, it is now a storage facility for old Savini is carving a mouth in a foam rubber before the rating system (Dawn of the film negatives (Gone with the Wind is here) , surplus cheese and powdered milk zombie's head. Lounging in a nearby bar- Dead was released unrated). \"I had a (which the government prefers putting in ber chair is the rubber head's living twin, script that would have demanded a $7 a Savini assistant being zombified by his million film , but our backers said we young colleagues. Savini fends off ques- would have to guarantee an R-rating or tions about the social implications of his make it for half as much. I opted for the effects with an \"It's just a gas\" attitude. latter but had to cut a lot of the story, so Meanwhile on the underground set, there may be another film. I don't know:' cave-invading zombies menace two To critics who complain that his films actors . For one scene, Romero, very tall only pander to the basest of instincts, he and bearded with a \"lucky\" scarf dangling responds, ''That might be, but the ques- from his neck, shows Jarlath Conroy, an tion really is: Is there a segment of society Irish-born actor from Manhattan's Lower so frustrated that it responds in a negative East Side, how to clobber a female zom- way to aggressive behavior? I'm much bie with a two-by-four. It's a tricky stunt more afraid of a Dirty Harry film in that because Conroy must deliver a convinc- context than I am of a fantasy film. Don't ing but glancing blow so that the foam forget' what we have here are monster rubber \"plank\" doesn't bend upon im- movies. After all, zombies are pretty pact. Several takes later, Romero voices silly:' his approval, and the crew applauds Con- Currently prepping Steven King's Pet roy and the plucky actress behind Savini's Sematary, Romero dismisses the current zombie mask. Hollywood wisdom that the horror boom An hour later I meet Romero in his is over. ''That's what Hollywood is about, office for lunch. I still find it hard to man. They make a dozen bad horror believe that this soft-spoken , friendly films and then say the public doesn't want man (the fanzines call him \"the gentle that type of film anymore;' he says. \"Ob- giant\") makes his living bringing disem- viously, the horror cycle hasn't ended bowelment and decapitation to the since the first two people sat around a screen. But it's been 17 years since he campfire and wondered what 'that sound' made Night of the Living Dead for was. It ain't never gonna be over:' $114,000, and the zombies continue. -JAMES VERNIERI 8

A NEW DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FROM DIRECT CINEMA LIMITED RAOUL WALLENBERG: BURIED ALIVE \"Pays eloquent tribute to the Swedish Protestant diplomat who saved an estimated 100,000 Hungarian Jews during World War II only to disappear in Russia where he may still be alive behind bars.\" Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times \"An extr,ordlnary film about an extraordinary man ... an instant classic.\" Arthur Unger, The Christian Science Monitor \"Admirably direct and undeniably powerful in its account of heroism rendered obscure by a grim twist of fate.\" Dan Sailitt, Los Angeles Reader \"A remarkably moving and thoughtfully structured documentary, all the more powerful for its understated tone and its refusal to sensationalize its subject.\" Henry Mietkiewicz, The Toronto Star A Rubicon Films Produ ction For information contact: ~, l.L Produced by Wayne Aaron and David Harel Direct Cinema Lim ited Directed by David Harel PO . Box 69589 cmema g Narrated by Pierre Burton Los Angeles, CA 90069 78 minutes Color and B&W 1984 (213) 656-4700 limited ~ @

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The Future Isn't What It Used To Be by Marc Mancini Until 1982, no one knew what to call Syd Mead. A futurist? A forecaster? An oracle? His bold , visionary artwork had long glorified the advertising of Honda , Chrysler, and General Electric , and, in some cases, shaped corporate thinking. With his designs for Star Trek, Tron, and 2010, Mead became a prop~et with honor in Hollywood as well. So , director Ridley Scott-for whom Mead created the remarkable, dense imagery of Blade Run- ner-designated Mead a \"conceptualist;' and the title has stuck. The phrasing of Mead's movie credit may be new, but the idea behind it is not. The picture business has long known that we are passionately curious about that foreign destination of ours, the future . So to validate their travelogues of speculation - to make sure that what we see as we peek ahead is believable, even probable - filmmakers have repeatedly tapped into the visions of industrial illus- WIll ECSTASY BE ACRIME

trators like Mead, as well as those of Movies likewise act as avatars of archi- for a century now, some predictions have social futurists, space scientists, eco- already aged mightily. A visit to \"Yester- nomic forecasters and science-fiction tecture and design. Model cities, like day's Tomorrows:' a superb exhibit now writers. No matter that the facts some- wending its way through our nation's times get a little jumbled. With the right the one in Just Imagine (1931), made museums, is proof enough. Its automo- intentions, directors and their imagina- bile prototypes, house models, and tive experts give us something far more Rockefeller Center seem an idea whose Space Patrol costumes make us sense credible than what tea leaves, eschatol- times past, not present or future. ogy, or the National Enquirer provide. time had come. Ditto for the glass-tubed Indeed, their cinematic predictions have The notion of false futures and mixed generally been everything a moviegoer elevators and lofty, curving atriums of times has become a cinematic leitmotif. could ask for: sensible, well-informed, It dominates 20,000 Leagues Under the stirring, even praiseworthy. Things to Come, which have reincarnated Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Master of the World, all films with And they have almost always been as the neo-deco hotel lobbies of John bogus, nostalgic technologies. It surfaces wrong. in Streets of Fire and Buckaroo Bonzai, Portman. And take note of the modular where you can't tell when you are past, We now live in the future that some future or substitute present. It especially long-gone filmmaker could only dream cabin walls that envelop you as you now dominates Michael Radford's new ver- about. As such, we have the smug luxury sion of 1984, filmed last year during the to sift out those rare prophecies that actu- jet from place to place. Then check out period of months that frame the novel's ally did hit the mark. The Greatest Power action. Ironically, Orwell wanted to call (1917) described a super-explosive, the spaceship interiors in 2001, whose his book 1948 and present his readers exonite, whose effect-even on interna- with a reality alternate to that of their own tional affairs-was not unlike that of the then-daring configurations came at a time times. But his publishers prevailed, and atom bomb. Destination Moon (1950) its allegorical design flipped into a pro- and When Worlds Collide (1951) both when an aircraft cabin still looked like the phetic warning. postulated rocketry underwritten by pri- vate enterprise, and that seems to be inside of a culvert, with daisies pasted on. Radford could have revived and coming to pass. Spaceways (1952) pro- updated Orwell's original intent, an alter- posed the outrageous idea of disposing For every accurate prediction, though, native vision of the Eighties, with crowds dead bodies in space; for $3,900 Celes- gathering in the Astrodome to watch tis, a Florida company, will now gladly there have been a dozen pratfalls. Both some power-hungry cultist aggrandizing put your loved one's ashes in a 1,900-mile- himself on Astrovision. But Radford high orbit. And then there is the eerie George Melies (Trip to the Moon) and accuracy of Jules Verne, whose story of a Menzie's set for Things to Come and l'h moon launch from Florida has been H. G. Wells (Things to Come) hurled refashioned for the cinema over and over agam. their astronauts into space via immense One way that a movie conjecture can guns. Wells, especially, should have known ensure its own accuracy is by affecting the better: The occupants would have been future itself. A small example: the launch countdown. Fritz Lang claimed to have squashed. (Unbelievably, the U.S. Army invented this dramatic practice for his Die Frau 1m Mond (1928), and rocketeers did consider building a giant gun to lob have been imitating it ever since. Also, it seems plausible that the \"flying wings\" of unmanned satellites into orbit, another Things to Come (1936) and of Dick Tracy (1937) - or at least the prototype they example of invention imitating art.) \"Pic- were based on-encouraged a similarly designed aircraft at Northrup that, a dec- ture-phones\" were routine domestic ade later, actually flew. There are other gizmos that became real, like Buck appliances in futuristic-movie homes, yet Rogers' flying backpack, Dick Tracy's wrist TV, and the non-anthropomorphic only Just Imagine stopped to think what robots of Silent Running. No matter that the movies lifted these ideas from Rand havoc such devices could wreak-sup- o drawing boards. Their physical incar- pose you had to dress up every time the nation on the screen challenged research- phone rang. And we still don't have ers to build the darned things, no matter how expensive or impractical they might Woody Allen's Orgasmatron or Ursula be. Yet it's almost an axiom that any sci-fi- ish thing the military recreates proves Andress' shooting bra. Win some, lose useless. Take heed, \"Star Wars\" defen- sers, as you tap into the glorified haze that some. • surrounds George Lucas' epic. So the future isn't what it used to be. Old futuristic visions have become leg- end or joke, not fact. The reason: For- ward-looking movies are, like all artifacts of prophecy, deeply rooted to the soil of their times. Ecology seems endangered? Make Silent Running. Think we'll run out of fuel? Show the consequences in The Road Warrior. Worried about urban crime? Turn New York into a maximum security prison. What about world food shortages? Then prepare for Soylent Green. Such futuristic sermons, of course, serve a useful, vital function, magnifying our concerns and helping to redirect omi- nous possibilities. \"I don't try to predict the future:' Ray Bradbury reminds us, \"I try to prevent it:' The future is, after all, the one part of our lives we can change. But history takes rather goofy turns. A hundred years from now some of our wor- ries may seem trivial, incomprehensible, even laughable, like some 19th-century theorist projecting that mounds of dung would surely bury the overpopulated, overhorsed city of the future. And since futurism has been a posture of the media 12

instead chose to make a film that crawls nation or nerve. When the cinema rejects Machine. Some costumers, aware that out from under post-World V,'ar II rub- facts, it is not out of too little imagination old styles always return, try to free their ble-to imagine what filmmakers might or nerve, but too much. designs from contemporary tastes by have done with Orwell's material then. rummaging through period clothing Certainly 1984 profkrs the big screen Current filmmakers are more respect- racks, but the results are almost always TVs that have become common today, ful of scientific truth than their predeces- tacky. but they are str~ngely shaped and display sors, but they too will discard fact when Pathe-like r..;;wsreel montages. Yes, there convenient - to this day few dare show As for furniture, art decorators think it's are computer-like work stations, but spacecraft that don't go woosh in the enough to buy the latest expensive, con- they're networked through black dial silent vacuum of space. Consultants temporary bric-a-brac to prop their avant- phones and mail tubes. There's even so sometimes help. For Die Frau 1m Mond, garde decor. More likely, the glass and little color in 1984 's art design that you two young scientists shored up Thea von marble dining table in 2010 will be in a feel you're watching an old black-and- Harbou's story of an engineer and a pro- Goodwill store before the decade is out. white film. fessor who build a moon rocket. Even in The designer fashions from Soylent 1928 the consultants, Herman Oberth Green already are. This false sense of a past's future sets and Willy Ley, knew what they were talk- off rather strange harmonics. It makes ing about: Their vehicle is a multistage To assume that the future will look one feel happy that mankind has not rocket that tracks out from a hangar to its completely different is a more grievous come to this; even communism has not pad. So similar was it to what would sin. A 19th-century Englishman would evolved to the extremes depicted. It also become the V-2 - designed in part by not be unduly disoriented by modern-day makes one wonder what seeds of Orwell's Oberth and Ley-that Hitler eventually London; barring nuclear holocaust, the vision continue to germinate. Beyond its had all prints of the film confiscated as 21st century would probably be suffi- bleak, deadly seriousness, 1984 reminds \"secret material.\" ciently familiar to us. The 1955 version of us how vital yet treacherous a look into 1984 validated its aerial views of London the future can be. The failures of film prophecy, however, by simply superimposing a few odd demand explanations specific to the domes over the familiar skyline, and it • medium. Two new categories should take worked. Dark Star carried us into its their place alongside those of Clarke: lunatic world by shOWing spaceship quar- In his book Profiles of the Future ters plastered with Playboy centerfolds Arthur C. Clarke explains why predic- The Failure of Practicality: The and defaced by graffiti, and the space sta- tions go astray: failures of nerve, says he, real world eventually sifts out the prag- tion in Solaris is just as much a mess. and failures of imagination. But the film- matic from the unfeasible. Celluloid 2001 reinforced its credibility by propel- making industry, whose very success is worlds don't. Just Imagine may suggest ling Pan Am and Howard Johnson into predicated on anticipating trends, has helicopters for everyone, The Day the space; this near-certain commercializa- never had very much trouble with imagi- Earth Stood Still nuclear vehicles, Blade tion of the next frontier had been curi- Runner a huddle of megastructures, and ously absent from other films. And The Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. 2010 two suns in the sky. But what would Alphaville appeared futuristic not happen when Fred Future, tired from the because of any extravagant sets or props spasmodic daylight that disturbs his sleep but because Jean-Luc Godard and his pattern, rammed his personal, nuclear- cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, dis- powered copter into the side of a 300- torted their contemporary Paris into story building? When Frank Lloyd uncharacteristic, disorienting bleakness. Wright proposed a mile-high skyscraper for Chicago and Buckminster Fuller Such conceptualists as Syd Mead and wanted to dome Manhattan, civic leaders Graham Walker (The Road Warrior) have given such juxtapositions of the familiar applauded these bold visions, and said and the strange a very contemporary no. Hollywood would have said yes, as twist. Mead calls it \"retrofitted utiliza- long as the scale was 100 feet to one inch. tion:' It can be seen throughout the back- sliding worlds of Blade Runner and The The flip side to this is how unexpected Road Warrior. Explains Mead, \"In many developments have rendered perfectly Third World countries you'll find older sensible cinematic predictions impracti- vehicles, some dating back to the Thir- cal. Ocean-liner-sized dirigibles were a ties and Forties, that have air condi- charming idea, until the Hindenberg. tioners on top, large batteries and Melies' Channel Tunnel seemed useful generators, mud-flaps, and hang-on fix- before the Hovercraft was built. The mid- tures .. ..They've taken on a style of their Atlantic floating aerodrome from FPI own:' If the sleek, smooth rocket or sau- Does Not Answer was a convenient con- cer marked the sci-fi look of the Fifties, cept, until the ocean-hopping jet came and the intricately detailed starship that along. And who knows what made the of the Seventies, then the agglomerated monorail depicted in Fahrenheit 451 an vehicle rolling over a post-apocalyptical idea whose time never really did come? landscape is surely the dominant futuris- tic image of our age. The Inconsistency of Style: Noth- ing dates a futuristic movie faster than • padded shoulders, pompadour haircuts, or bell-bottomed spacesuits. Styles, after For a long time, post-technological bar- all, change more frequently than the win- barism was hardly the norm in futuristic dow mannequin in George Pal's The TIme 13

films. Especially from the Twenties up to Borden's pavilion a revolving \"rotolactor\" Metropolis' de-souled, mechanistic soci- August 6, 1945 , much of the wo rld automatically milked 150 contented ety is offset by the soaring views of its believed that a sc ientific and architectural cows. There were also two ambitious architecture-there's every reason to utopia was imminent. First outlined in examples of future urban landscapes : believe that Lang and von Harbou figured fin-de-si\"ecle novels, magazines, and Democracity, housed in the Perisphere that Metropolis' subterranean oppressed newspapers , later sanctified by the theme building, and Futurama, a vast, could do nothing better than to rise into Futurist artists of Italy, and finally freed joltingly prophetic model of the Ameri- their city's grandiose structures. Tellingly, from the counterbalancing Victorian pes- can metropolis of 1960 that had been the film's villain, Rotwang, dabbles less in simism by the very momentum of techno- designed by Norman Bel Geddes, one of science than in magic and lives not in a logical change, the ideal of a scientific the era's most skilled conceptualists. skyscraper but in a thatched hut that has utopia hung on through the Depression, a Even the impending war, the fair implied, resisted the intrusion of modernity. fizzy wish-fulfillment for would-be con- would not get in the way of progress. sumers. \" Hobby\" magazines, like Pop- \"Were coming into a new world ;' prom- Utopian visions are more explicitly ular Mechanics , showed America the ised Chaplin a year later in The Great central to the two great \"city of the future\" marvels that were just around the corner. Dictator, and Americ~ wanted desper- movies of the Thirties, Just Imagine and (Hugo Gernsback, who coi ned the term ately to believe it. Things to Come. Yet no two films could \"science fiction;' began as a publisher of have more different tones. On a superfi- such magazines.) Pulps, radio, and mati- But nearly two decades before the ciallevel (and most of this film is superfi- nee serials popularized Flash Gordon and World's Fair opening, Fritz Lang had vis- cial), Just Imagine derides progressive Buck Rogers. Corporations linked them- ited New York and found his city of the thinking, turning the future into a bad selves to the grand future: Du Pont future without ever going to Flushing joke: test-tube babies out of automats, touted stores in which \" merchandi se Meadows. As he later declared , the Man- pills for food and drink , flying cars that would move past shoppers\"; Oldsmobile hattan skyline apparently provided him are stopped for speeding, even a Martian hitched its logo to a rocket; Detroit prom- with an almost spiritual moment; the with pointed hair and studded leather ised us a Ford in our future; and in 1956 world of his day had no other cities so garb who would look at home in a Billy Madison Avenue (actually copywriter dense and vertical. His enthusiasm Idol video. Behind the film's ludicrous Davis Grubb, who wrote The Night ofthe translated fluently to the screen only a story line and inept acting, however, is a Hunter) proudly announced, \"S uddenly few years later: The views of his Metrop- set so memorable and achieved that it it's 1960.\" Even buildings were stream- olis are the most distinctive element of actually counters any satiric intent that lined, as if they were about to uproot what is basically a stock tale that blends Just Imagine might have entertained. Its and fly. dialectics with the gothic. Paradoxically, New York-1980 miniature cost $250,000, Metropolis' set draws from two opposing filled a blimp hangar, and drew inspiration The apotheosis of utopian thinking traditions: that of the early 20th-century from the conceptual work of Hugh was the 1939 New York World's Fair, illustrators, who depicted future cities as Ferriss, whose drawings of monumental where virtually every American corpora- things complicated and cluttered, and paradigms of future architecture dra- tion felt compelled to launch vis itors into that of the Bauhaus, which trusted that matized much of the era's advertising. the future. At the Transportation Exhibit modern design could ultimately lift the William Cameron Menzie's set for the was a rocketport, in the Hall of Pharmacy human spirit. much more serious Things to Come is a a \"Soda Fountain of the Future;' and at triumph of art-deco style, a perfect cor- Lang's message is equally mixed. 14

The distant past? 2010. The not-so-distant future? relative for H. G. Wells' faith in benevo- erly. No, the past few decades have done moral dissuader has become a powerful lent technocracies. little to belie D ystopia. cinematic convention. Other futuristic Erewhons sit squarely So, cinematic \"wonder\" cities have Yet there are already signs that we may in the midst of the Thirties' motion pic- been a rarity. Logan's Run, Buck Rogers be read y to swing back to Utopian ture mythology: the sublime slabs of Lost in the 25th Century, and several episodes dreams. More intensely than at any other Horizon's Shangri-La, the silly towers of of TV's Star Trek do feature impressive time since the Thirties, advertising is the Phantom Empire's Murania (under techno-towns. But they are populated by intensely allying itself to the future: H yatt Gene Autry's ranch, no less), and, of naive, myopic aesthetes and are sur- shuttles us to a hotel in space; Apple and course, the sleek emerald domes of Oz. rounded by vast, ruined landscapes - a Pacific Bell (with Frank Herbert as But Dorothy brushed aside utopian metaphor for the current attitude toward spokesman) promise us that the Orwell- visions to return to the serenity of Kansas . the utopian city itself and one paralleled, ian vision will never be. The last time this And in 1983, The Day After blew it up. as writer H. Bruce Franklin points out, by happened , the movies quickly tagged the gleaming commercial towers that rise along. Further, we have managed for 40 • above our squalid inner cities, or better, yea rs not to blow ourselves up . Arms by the stagnant prototypes of Brasilia and control seems more likely. And though Hiroshima put an end to romantic Arcosanti. At least The Empire Strikes the \"robot apartments\" about which Allen visions of the future. Why moon over cit- Back's Vespin is sublime, yet tellingly Ginsberg howled have materialized, we ies of tomorrow, when tomorrow might George Lucas placed it , and his whole appear none the worse for it. As the Sec- flatten them? Instantly, cinematic conjec- saga, in a distant past, not our future. Star ond Millennium approaches, we seem ture went from persuasion to dissuasion, Trek, certain Japanese and Soviet movies , already to be making optimistic resolu- from a firm, exhortorial faith in progress and a few Saturday morning kidvids are tions for the Ultimate New Year. to a Luddite fear of its black mischief. So the only remaining bastions of a progres- traumatic was it all that at first filmmakers sive, harmonious tomorrow. Even extraterrestrials don't appear to avoided showing a future nuclear catas- be worried. Unlike The Day the Earth trophe, preferring to embody their fears More alarmingly, films like The Road Stood Still 's alien-ex-machina, most of in assorted giants, beasts, and blobs - all Warrior and The Terminator posit a world today's otherworlders seem not con- spawned by radiation, of course. The in regression, where nuclear war and its cerned about our nuclear problems at all. very few early depictions of nuclear entropic aftermath are taken for granted. So why are they coming to our screens in destruction, like Five (1951), Captive On the one hand, our attraction to such droves? Maybe for the obverse reason of Women (1953), and The Day the World landscapes share common ground with their noisome predecessors. Just as the Ended (1955), were cheaply made and humanity's strange, long-standing fasci- Fifties camouflaged its fears as churlish, poorly received. Only with On the Beach nation with ruins , a sort of cultural equiv- menacing aliens, so now might the did maturity come to the genre. And even alent for what animals must feel when Eighties be shaping its hopes into gra- in those rare futuristic societies not rent they nose about the bones of their own cious starmen, mermaids, and ETs. The by nuclear holocaust , the outlook was kind. On the other, it may mean that we aliens of Close Encounters even fl y to hardly cheerful. A Clockwork Orange's have already given up. There is one con- Earth in their own jukebox city of tomor- society bears only a few affinities with solation. Like every other cinematic row. The future- someone else's, for that foreseen by Wells , but it does with vision of the future , this one too may be now - is visiting us, and it's friendly. Per- our present - a chilling concept with false, or cause it to be false. The future as haps our own is not too far behind. @ which Time After Time plays quite c1ev- 15

Celine and Julie Director Susan Seidelman. The Mover: But Smithereens featured unsympathetic Leora Barish: Susan Seidelman characters - Susan Berman as Wren, a Scraps and Pieces New Jersey middle-class dropout who Susan Seidelman established herself as will stop at nothing to achieve fame and \"I wanted to write a movie that would an ingenious independent with the guts- fortune; Richard Hell as Eric, a rock star give people confidence;' declares Leora ily energetic Smithereens, made in 1982 on the decline who does much the same Barish, 37, the screenwriter of Desper- for $80,000. Her second feature, Des- thing- in a sharply realistic framework. ately Seeking Susan. \"Not a phony, 'you- perately Seeking Susan , is likely to cata- Susan unveils a gallery of offbeat, likable can-do-it' kind of confidence, but one pult her to the top. Shot for $5 million protagonists who come to life in this that anyone-even a spaced-out (and looking twice as expensive), the film funky fairy-tale environment. It's as if a Roberta-could find in themselves. It's a is a directorial tour de force, combining couple of Jacques Rivette femmes had confidence they aren't really aware of, but dazzling techniques with visual complex- met for a breakfast at Tiffany's - Celine experience through their imagination; a ity and, in Leora Barish's script, a rare and and Julie Golightly. deeper thing that leads them toward what welcome brand of screwball literacy. they need without the conscious aggres- Seidelman, 32, has come a long way sion or drive through which such confi- Susan , about the Carroll ian adventures since her 28-minute satire about a mar- dence is usually achieved:' of a New Jersey housewife named ried woman in a rut, And You Act Like Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) who under- One, Too; the 45-minute Deficit; and In Susan, her first solo effort, Barish goes a profound transformation inspired }burs Truly, Andrea G. Stern - all award- dramatizes the sentiments she experi- by a mysterious, nonchalant blonde winning student films that paved the way enced on the screen while watching named Susan (Madonna), updates some to Smithereens. Her directorial debut was Celine and Julie Go Boating. Another concerns visible in Smithereens: strong not only the first American independent source of inspiration was Jean Vigo's female heroines with drive and a desire film to be shown as part of the official L' Atalante, which has \"a lightness of for self-fulfillment; the charms, and competition at Cannes, but it won her touch, a sweetness without sentimental- liberating metaphorical value of New critical praise and encouraging box office ity-and it's also a search. York's Lower East Side; a flimsy, none too results back h.ome. passionate rapport between the sexes. '~ nd ;' continues Barish , \"I was very ''The first thing that struck me about interested in the personals. I used to read (continued on page 20) 16

eGolightly Side-by-Side-by-Seidelman by Dan Yakir Cinematographer Ed Lachman. them all the time. I was wondering what I Edward Lachman: from his background as an art student in could do with these scraps and pieces;' Europe. The first film that impressed him and after six months in which she \"had a The Look was Vittorio De Sica 's Umberto D. , lot of moral support from my husband, through which he discovered the function Henry Bean;' she came up with Susan. Though cinematographer Ed Lach- of the image in storytelling. \"The best man was born in the U.S.A., he made his filmmakers ;' he says , \"are ready to take But her tale of a suburban housewife in name-and his di s tincti ve, dazzling chances as they search for a magic search of adventure and identity \"has to images - with a European sensibility. He moment. I think that's what filmmaking is do with instinct, not social vectors of assisted Sven Nykvist on King of the all about .\" change. I wasn't interested in people Gypsies and Hurricane, Vittorio Storaro moving out of suburbia, but in imagina- on Luna, Robby Muller on The American What kind of visual concept did you tion and how it could save anybody. You Friend and They All Laughed. He was co- develop for Desperately Seeking Susan, don't have to be an artist to be saved by it. director of photography on such Werner and how did you arrive at it ? It tends to be starved out of people; Herzog films as La Soufri'ere and Stros- they're not conscious of it. I Live by it in a zek, in addition to shooting Wim Wen- The script depicts two worlds: Rober- more obvious way than most, and to the ders' Lightning Over Water and A Tokyo ta's, which is suburban, middle-class, degree that I've been ab le to lead a crea- Story. His other credits include: Mark New Jersey; and Susan's, which is lower tive life, I've been happy. \" Reichert's Union City , George Nieren- Manhattan. I had to create these two berg's Say Amen, Somebody, Maroun worlds visually and situate these two Barish, who pursued a career as Baghdadi's Little Wars , Andrei Koncha- characters within them. For Roberta, soprano saxophonist, also drove a school lovsky's short Split Cherry Tree, the Susan's world had to be enticing and fore- bus and washed dishes in restaurants, upcoming documentary Strippers, and boding at the same time, and so I wanted which she describes as \"the pursuit of Jan Egleson's The Little Sister. He also to motivate it but 'still use color in an some philosophical ideas that shouldn't .shot the American sequences on Nicolas expressionistic rather than naturalistic be articulated.\" While she doesn't per- Roeg's Insignificance. way. But I didn't want to go the commer- ceive either Roberta or Susan as exten- cial route-a high-gloss Diva-esque look, sions of herself, she admits to having \"a This \"European sensibility\" - \"It doesn't in which the images wou ld become very deeper feeling for Roberta, because help me here, let me tell you\" - stems cold and removed. I wanted to capture (continued on page 19) (continued on page 18) l7

(continued from page 17) Roberta and Dez. Desp erately seeking fantasy. New York, with its textures, colors, and lighting? L et me say first that I like the action , fee lings. I wo rked close ly w ith Sa nto Aidan's world is part of the world of fa n- and th e camera moveme nt , to take place Loq uasto, the prod uction des igne r who within the frame. But I knew this film had also di d th e wa rdrobe, o n th e sets and tasy that Roberta is afte r. W he n yo u look to work in cuts, so th ere was a pu sh-pull wardro be fro m the very beginning. I have at hi s apartm e nt wind ows , yo u get th e thi ng be tween S usan and me. We'd set up a backgro u nd in p aintin g, whil e Sa nto feeli ng th at it's late afternoo n light. But a scene within a give n m oveme nt but co mes from the theate r; we unde rstood yo u never see afternoo n light in that way. the n had to go on and get the obligatory each oth er. And Susan [Seidelman) was T he problem was to show changes in the coverage . It e nded up worki ng be tter in very sup porti ve of us. light , given the co lor sche me. I did it by sto rytelling terms. And I shot more cov- us ing d ay li g ht flu o resce nt in th e loft , e rage th an I usually do. In Europe , I'd We looked at a lot offas hion magazines lend ing it an emotio nal va lue in the story- shoot more from a point-of-view, with out a nd reco rd jacke t s; I think th ey take te lling. trying to create the ti ming thro ugh the chances. And I was fasc inated by how th e editing as m uc h as through th e acti o n express ionists used co lor fo r psychologi- I do n't thin k ph otography should te ll within the frame. the story, but so mu ch of it was creating cal effec t , to exp ress an idea and affect the diffe re nt worl ds that the imagery in In Roberta's world , I wanted the cam- yo u e motionally, rath e r th an in a me re thi s film was actu ally part of the sto ry- era to be static, to correspond to her life. painte rly way. O p art takes it furth e r, to te ll ing. That's what's exc iting fo r me as a To th e exte nt that I move it , it's just to fol- th e p o int w h e re t h e e ye ca n' t foc u s ci ne matograp her: to play with the sto ry- low people. In Susan's world , I wanted it be tween o ne co lor and anothe r. T hat's line . to be mu ch more of a participant. Search- what I tried to do in Un ion City : to des ign ing. I used do lly shots to move us into th e sets around ideas abo ut whe re the What kind of co llaboration did yo u that world of the unexpected . colors recede and advance. I saw it as a have with Susan Seidelman ? way of mov ing th e eye within th e frame . In terms of lighting... . In H ollywood te rms , the film was very I wanted to wo rk o n each set wi th a low-bud ge t , so we h ad to wo rk fas t. T he conventio n is th at co medy should two -co lo r sc he m e . If I had g ree n , I S usa n and I wo uld meet every S und ay be lit bright , but I did n't want to fall into wanted orange and blue to take over the and literally go over the whole shooting that. It's a co medy of manners, so why next set , and th e n blue and p ink into the script fo r each week . So metimes we had not be manne ri stic? next set, so one color wo uld be mov ing to make decis io ns abo ut th e sets th at the story o n th at subtext. But the film was Sunday for th e foll ow ing week , because Do you consider the actors as images cut in a differe nt way, so that didn't totally we were still locking do\\vn certain loca- that lend themselves to visual treatment ? work out. tio ns. We built the set fo r D ez's loft on Or perhaps the creation of the charac- another fl oor of D ancete ri a. We tried to ters' worlds takes care orthat, too? I wanted to do Roberta's wo rld in pas- co nsol id ate the locati ons as mu ch as pos- tels - monoc hr o m ati c pin ks a n d si ble , because in New York , where yo u I'm inte rested in creating the e nviro n- be iges-w ith softe r, b o un ced lig ht s. I spe nd a lot of time and mo ney is in mov- me nt , and the actors are part of that e nvi- wa nte d to do S usa n's wo rl d in c hi aro- ing from point A to p oint B. T hat gave us ro nme nt. I'm sp eak ing abo ut how th e scuro , with more saturated colors . I th e freedom , while we were working on actors maintain the ir pos itio n with in the wa nte d to carr y co lo rs th at yo u'd no r- one locatio n, to make dec isio ns about th e fr ame in juxtap os iti o n to obj ec ts. Yo u mally sense in reali ty. For examp le, New next se t. co nvey info rm ati o n th ro ugh a shot. Ju st York streets have a mercury vapor flu ores- because it's a closeup does n't mea n it has ce nt li g h t. But I wa nt e d to ta ke th a t Susa n had very precise ideas about the to be devo id of a ra pp o rt with it s sur- slightly out of its co ntext and le nd it th e ki nds of characte ri zations th e characte rs ro und ing objects. T hat relatio nship is a impress io n yo u m ay h ave of it- say, shoul d have, but she gave Santo and me gree n- whi c h th e eye no lo nger sees, great freedo m to work out ideas with her. co mm e nt o n w h at th ey're say in g and because it's acc ustomed to it. I wanted to Most ofte n, she agreed with our notio ns. doing, a part of th e storytelling itself. abstract that co lor and chose a gel close to e me rald . And I acce nted th at off of In terms of camera movement did you sLet talk about storytelling. As you see whe re tungs te n li gh ts wo ul d be in th e ma ke a distinction between the worlds of street, with yell ow. So th e exte rior night Roberta and Susan ? it, what 's this film about ? scenes in th e film wo uld be green and yel- It's loo king into th e loo kin g glass; a low. I remained tru e to that in the story- te lling, because. I believe in co nsiste ncy. And we were able to design the wardrobe around th e set; th e co lors of the set are accented by th e wardrobe. I fo un d out about th at in Union City. I di scovered th at if yo u use a gel th at's in th e same hue as the walls, so me thing starts to happe n. T he wall starts to have a certain rad iance th at transce nd s th e co lo r itself. Yo u get the feeling th e people are be ing lit by the wa ll s. lbu mentioned the two worlds in Susan. Where would you place Dez, the Aidan Quinn character, in terms of color and 18

search for ide ntity. Whe n yo u lose yo ur betwee n the doc ume ntary and narrati ve (continuedfrom page 17) identity, do yo u e nd up fin di ng yo ur ide n- form s . [ like to bring e le me nts of narra- tity? The film needed a certain pl ayful- ti ve to th e docum e ntary and vice ve rsa . Susan , o n a certain leve l, is a prod uct of ness, in order to e nter the wo rld of fa n- Part of th e fun is findin g new landsca pes, tasy. The im ages of the opening sce ne in new ways of say ing so me thi ng. Maybe Robe rta's imagi nati o n . Roberta has a real th e beauty p arl or set a certain abstrac- th ere is some thi ng co ns is te nt in m y inte ri or life, and she c hanges. S he's an tion, which is followed by Robe rta read- wo rk, but I do n't kn ow what it is. I always in noce nt stepp ing into the wo rl d of expe- ing the perso nals. We are about to go o n a fee l I'm imitatin g so m eo ne e lse. [ say, rie nce. In noce nce is thought of as ham- journey. The audience has to know whe re \"Oh , God, this is an image fro m . . . ?\" And pe rin g sur v iva l, but for Robe rta it's a they're go ing. In one cut , we started with late r I reali ze it isn't. I worry that my in spi- the Atl a nt ic C it y seq ue nce, w ith ration is de ri vati ve . surv iva l aid . H e r pur ity of sp irit is like a Madonn a sneaking out of the hotel roo m guiding light :' with the stole n earrings, and it looked like I admire Lajos Koltai, who shot Tim e a gangste r film , a B m ov ie . Yo u had to Stands Still. I loo ked at it w ith S usan and W hile the process of self-liberatio n was start with Robe rta's wo rld , so th at late r o n Santo; we also watched Fass binde r's Lola \"relati vely easy to establi sh ,\" says Barish, the scenes in Susan's wo rld could beco me and One from the Heart. I hope th e re was less ominous. a me rg ing of styles in Susan , with out it what Roberta changes into was hard to being any of th ose. T hese three had cer- find. I coul d o nl y lead he r to th e point of How would you compare working with tain ele me nts th at approac he d th e wo rlds an adve nture , but not articul ate what it Seidelman to your collaborations with of Robe rta and S usa n . Time Stands Still Wenders , Herzog, and Bertolucci ? was useful for S usa n's wo rld , while the re's was. r wa nte d to he lp peop le set o ut o n so m e thi ng in On e fro m the Heart in I think wo me n have a d iffe re nt sensibil- Robe rta's. T he painte rs I looked at fo r th at adve nture , b ut not te ll th e m w hat ity - which I actually prefer. Susan has a thi s were th e abstract express io ni sts. I kind of adventure to have.\" unique view about th e re lati ons be tween studie d the ir use of co lor fo r psycho logi- me n and wo me n. She can see a wo man as cal purposes. H e r sc ree npl ay und e rwe nt so m e strong and yet feminine. In <1 man's per- cepti o n , a strong wo m an is m ale-like. What work exp erience are you most c h a n ges fro m it s in ce pti o n. \"S u sa n Susa n's wo me n.are stro ng, but they're still f ond of ? Seidelman has a visio n of he r O\\vn;' the wo me n. And her men are vulnerable, but sc ree nw rite r expl a ins , \"a nd s he inte r- still male. T hey're all owed to be weak . I'll always feel closest to Werner, who p reted it diffe re ntly. Susan had a stro nger Wo me n are more rea li stic th an me n in gave m e my fir st c h ance. H e never feeling for Mad onna's charac te r and made the ir view of what a m an really is . Me n looked at a foot of film I shot. I m e t h im at he r m ore visib le . She was mo re myste ri- have fantas ies about the m selves . a Europea n fes ti val th at showed hi s Signs of Life. We maintaine d a fri e ndship , and ous and less real in my script , but Susan Wim is te lling H oward H awks stories one day he just as ked me to do th e Ame ri- fe lt the reality of that charac te r in a way about camaraderie be tween m e n. Werne r can sce nes of Stroszek . Hi s blind faith in th at didn't co ncern me. It's inte resting to te ll s of the mys tical qu es t of the m ale. me earned him my loyalty. La Soufri\"ere is And Be rnardo just reverses the ro les : H e one of my favo rites, m aybe because we me;' she says of the fi nished fi lm, \"but I sees th e m an in th e wo m a n and th e ac tu ally ri sked our li ves to m ake it. The fe male in the male . fil m became what it was abo ut. It was ca n't watc h the m ov ie w ith o ut a d isso- abo ut the bli nd courage of thi s man who nance between what I im agined and what The best directors I've worked with - lived o n th e vo lca no and refu sed to leave has e me rged :' and th at includ es Jan Egleso n - are n't in spite of a predicte d e rupti o n; and we threate ned by collaboratio n. The director too fe lt th at \"e ithe r we make the fil m or D oes she like it ? \"If it has a strengthe n- should create an e nviro nme nt that's con- we die:' ducive to that. I like to fee l th at every- ing effect , an opening-up effect o n peo- body in the crew is all owed to co ntribute I like thi s b lind faith a nd naive te. I to the storyte ll ing. It's never one pe rso n's think ca me ram e n have it anyway. I like to pl e, the n r like it:' total vision . think of the came ra as an additi ve proc- ess, whil e th e e ditin g is a subtrac ti ve Barish, who rece ived an MFA fro m the With W im , I know and love hi s images process. so we ll th at I plug in wi th the m . T he U niversity of Iowa , says she \"abandoned same with We rner. Or with a new direc- Do you see the editing process as inter- tor, whe n yo u help him find hi s own style . f ering with your work ? w ritin g p oetry th e d ay afte r I go t my I'm interested in how yo ur style adapts d egree . I rebe ll e d aga in st th e lite rary to - and changes with - each story. Th e re's a rhythm to shoo tin g a film ; part of the editing process is to find th at scene and writing:' It's not that she pre- What about th e cinematog rapher 's rhythm . Sometimes ed iting ca n create personal style? it s ow n rh ythm , rega rdl ess of th e rea l fe rs scree nw riting: \" It's ju st w hat I d o rhythm . I'm interested in the res ult of th e Certain ca me ram e n earne d a re puta- im ages through th e came ra. [ feel th at my now. r might com e up w ith a novel. If I tion for a stro ng visual style: Go rdo n Wil- images are n't co mple te until th ey work in lis, Vittorio Storaro, Robby Muller. But the editing roo m . I think of the e diti ng could w rite w ith o ut th e co nstraints of the ir styles evolve, too . Caleb D eschane l whe n [ co nstru ct an im age - how th ey'll has a di stin ct style, whil e Jo hn Bail ey p lay aga in st eac h o th e r. A c in e m atog- co mm ercialism , I'd be a lot happie r, but changes radicall y with each film. r aph er should be in the ed it ing roo m to the n yo u d o have to communicate with unde rstand how th e pieces fit toge th e r. Where do you see yourself? It's not e nough to just c reate th e m . the audie nce. I te nd to be esoteric, so the I like to change. Little Wars, which writing of sc ript s, w hi c h I li ke less, is sh o t in Be irut , is ve ry diffe re nt fr om -D.Y. act uall y a goo d di sc iplin e fo r m e . It's Susan . I love to go bac k a nd fo rth steere d me toward a m ore gene rous' spirit in writing:' Bari sh is c urre ntl y at wo rk w ith he r hu sband o n a sc ript for Tri-Star. Te mp o- rarily e ntitle d Car Thief, it's \"a Western cum Greek tragedy: a kid who sees hi s olde r brothe r ki lle d by a po licem an whe n he steals a car grows up to be an unde r- cover cop and discovers the kill er. It's not a spec piece like Susan ,\" Bari sh adds . \" Fir st I imagin e thin gs -th e drea m phase - and th e n co mes the craft part of putting the m toge th er. r go to my offi ce every d ay a nd keep wo nde ring, 'Is thi s brilliant or a pile of mu sh ?' But [ keep at it. It's real hard wo rk . And th e hardes t part is keeping the fa ith :' -O. Y. 19

(continued from page 16) ried Woman, where she leaves her bour- \"I didn't go by the book. I was born in Desperately Seeking Susan was the title;' geois husband for a painter. Philadelphia and lived in a mixed Jewish- explains Seidelman. \"That made me \"The character of Susan evolved when WASP middle-class suburb, which looked want to like it. I liked the idea of a woman Madonna was cast. Like Richard Hell, like something out of a Steven Spielberg becoming obsessed with another she has an interesting persona and an movie. It was called Huntington Valley. woman. Weve seen enough movies about incredible sense of style. The original When I was 13, 15, my mother would guys growing up, and it's about time to character was more ethereal; now she's drive me and my girlfriends to school see the other side. And I loved Celine more street and a little trampier, in a fun dances at some 'nice' high school, but we and Julie Go Boating, because it made way. Some peqple might object to preferred the dances given in the Ken- me feel so good. Often, movies that make Madonna, because she was too much of a sington and Allegheny sections, which you feel good aren't very clever. That one 'bad girl; but I like the fact that shes a were Italian working class , because they was. It inspired me. 'bad' girl to Rosanna's 'good' girl. It creates danced better. We weren't supposed to go \"Some things didn't work in Leora's a balance. there, among the 'tough' kids. So after original script, but the ideas were there. \"I like them both. I like Roberta more we'd be dropped off, we would then take a The mystery plot didn't work for me, and when she becomes Susan - I don't think bus to the 'bad' part of town and then we'd it depicted a New York of smoky jazz bars she likes herself in the beginning either. go back to get picked up from the 'nice' that wasn't really contemporary. She doesn't really become Susan, just a high school. A part of me always felt the \"Warners originally optioned it for more interesting version of herself, a syn- parameters of my environment, that development, and we worked on it, but thesis between the 'bad' and 'good' girl. there were all kinds of people besides my the emphasis was wrong. I don't think neighbors. I think that's where my inter- Leora was terribly happy with it. I know I est in marginals comes from. I was pro- wasn't. The McGuffin, which is sup- grammed to fit into something, but posed to be minimal, was overblown; I couldn't. It's not that I feel alienated, it's saw the film as being about the charac- just that I don't feel like a part of a ters , their charm. Warners put the script scheme. in turnaround, and I thought that was \"I was always interested in art. As a kid, that. It had been late 1982 when the pro- I had paint sets and clay instead of dolls. I ducers approached me. Then in spring painted and sculpted. Later, I went to the 1984, Orion expressed interest in making Drexel Institute of Technology in Phila- the movie , but going back to the original delphia to study design. I started in script and revising it. graphic design and then went on to fash- \"Having made independent films, my ion design. I liked the problem-solving approach is that the script is the skeleton aspects of design , where you had to use of the movie. I really liked Ron Nyswaner's colors and shapes to solve graphic prob- dialogue for Smithereens, but the scri·pt lems. But they wanted me to sewall the kept changing according to the casting time. I was becoming a seamstress! So I and the locations . I like working like quit. In order not to lose my credits, I that, flexibly. I can't direct a script as Smithereens' Wren and bedfellow. took communication classes. I watched written - probably to the horror of the movies in one class, and somewhere producers and writers I work with. When \"Susan here and Wren in Smithereens along the line, I got hooked. You had col- we cast Susan Berman as the lead in both move around a lot and try to hustle ors and shapes in motion, plus music and Smithereens, Ron and I talked to her and people, but the core of each is very differ- drama, both of which I love. I rarely went revised the script based on her personal- ent. Wren is totally motivated by her inse- to the movies when I was a kid, except if ity. With Richard Hell , it was the same curities. Susan just moves through the they had Natalie Wood. And here I saw thing. To me, it makes the script organic, squalor as if she were a total princess- Wild Strawberries , The 400 Blows, alive. There were elements of that in oblivious to what's going on around her Breathless, the typical textbook art films. Desperately Seeking Susan, although it's and certain that the next steak dinner will harder\" to work that way when you're appear from somewhere. \"I didn't know how to write about mov- doing a studio movie , because so many ies or be critical about them, so I couldn't people are involved in the decision-mak- \"Why this empathy for bad girls? be a critic. I worked for a UHF TV sta- ing process. Maybe there's .a little bit of that in me. tion for a couple of months, but it .wasn't The distinction between good and bad satisfying. So I applied to film school. \"In Leora's script, Dez [Aidan Quinn, girls has changed. When I was growing Temple rejected me, which in retrospect with whom Roberta falls in love] wasn't a up, in the Sixties, there were very clear- I'm happy about-their emphasis was on projectionist, but a paint-framer and, cut lines. You were either one or the documentaries. I went to NYU, which later on, a musician. The projectionist other. I always felt bad girls had more fun was the best thing that ever happened to idea evolved out of my love for films and that good girls were boring. At times, me . It was the perfect place to experi- within films , and because the film is I was looked at as a bad girl, although I ment in. about reality and illusion-what's on the was brought up to be good. surface isn't what's underneath. Dez puts \"At NYU, through my short films , I celluloid into a machine and passes light found a core group. A crew. Together we through it, and there's fantasy on the did Smithereens . We had to do every- screen. But I didn't want him to be a film- thing, which was hard, but I enjoyed the maker. An 'artist' would have been too communal aspects of that kind of 'guer- much . I didn't want to make An Unmar- rilla' filmmaking. I was living on Bleecker Street at the time, and my apartment was 20

a crash pad: Richard Hell was living in the '?\\s a woman, I can't deny the sexiness movie that would make something like back room; the assistant director shacked of an Eric, whose aloofness is all the more that work. Not too serious, but not too in the living room; the costume maker appealing. But I also like the niceness of a cartoonish either. was on the floor, in a sleeping bag. Fun. Paul, who isn't overly macho. \"Rosanna has a different way of ap- \"We sneaked around the subways, \"Casting is really important. It's really proaching acting, and we banged heads because we couldn't afford to pay for a crucial. In painting, the colors you choose several times during the shoot. She's an permit. Chirine, the cinematographer, determine the outcome. I hear about honest actress, and I wanted an honest had the camera in a flight bag. We'd sit directors who are assigned movies that performance, but I knew this movie there, take it out for a couple of shots, and are already cast. I couldn't imagine work- wasn't going to work as realism. I think put it back in. For two nights, we rode the ing like that. Meryl Streep sheds her skin she didn't understand exactly what I had subways from midnight to 6 A.M. and is different in each movie she in mind, perhaps because I didn't explain Although it's a pain in the neck not being makes - and I respect that - but the kind well. But it's hard to explain tone . I'd use able to control your environment-we'd of acting I'm interested in has to do with words like 'quirky; but what does it really have to stop and get out every time a sub- allowing a bit of the actor's persona to mean? At times, she wanted to make it way cop would enter- I liked the energy come through into the character. I want to more emotionally realistic-the amnesia, it all had. work with actors who have something for example-and I'd pull back and ask interesting as people, something that's her to keep it down. I was afraid of losing \"Smithereens evolved out of the right for the character. the edge. chararacter of Wren. She's a little bit based on a woman I knew - a kind of \"I like Rosanna as an actress. She's one '?\\s to Madonna, she wasn't famous character I hadn't seen in a movie before. when we cast her. I knew her from differ- I was fascinated by this woman, who was Too much ofa bad girl? ent rock clubs , and I have musician so influenced by the environment around of the reasons that convinced Orion to go friends who know her. There was always her, by the pop notion, that 'you could be ahead with the film. Before I got involved something about her persona that famous too: with it, a lot of names were thrown appealed to me. She lived down the around, but they were of a different age street at the time, and I kept seeing her \"Someone asked me if I tried to make group , like Mary Steenburgen. I wanted face. Finally we got together, and I real- the characters in Desperately Seeking to make the casting younger. I think my ized she was as smart as I hoped she Susan more sympathetic because I was graphic style has a you,ng, energetic qual- would be. She was intriguing. At first, making a studio movie. I never care ity to it. Rosanna is young and energetic. Orion was a bit hesitant because she whether I like the characters , but they She's incredibly alive, and she's as good wasn't famous and hadn't acted before. have to interest me. The subject matter reacting to something as she is being But they went along. We talked about her in Susan lent itself to more sympathetic active. There's always something going part, and I had her watch old Judy Holli- characters . It's a romp, with mistaken on inside her. She can be funny, and the day movies and even Breakfast at Tiffa- identities, with a bit of the screwball film needed an ironic, tongue-in-cheek ny 's. She's a performer. She was at ease in comedies. In that kind of structure, you point of view. When I first read the script, front of the camera. need likable characters. But Smithereens I felt that a device like amnesia, which was a character study, or a study of a sub- .Roberta experiences, could be really \"Smithereens took a year to complete. culture, which didn't necessitate it. You dumb . With Ed Lachman and Santo Susan was ready in four months, includ- see, I liked Wren's gutsiness, even though Loquasto - he did the sets and the cos- ing the editing. I guess it's nervous she wasn't likable- in the same way that I tumes - I tried to create a tone for the energy. I don't like to devote too much liked Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. time to a project , because it becomes overinflated, and if it doesn't go well, you ''The relationship between Wren and feel you've wasted three years of your life. Eric in Smithereens may be compared to I worked with really good people and that between Roberta and her husband, quickly. The movie needed a tossed-off Gary, in Susan. Eric is with Wren for a feeling, spontaneity rather than refine- purpose: She helps him get the money so ment. he can split to California, leaving her behind. He's self-centered-all he cares '?\\t first I really had a problem with the about is himself. Gary is also egotistical, a notion of working for a studio. I thought Yuppie businessman. Eric has his picture about studio execs hanging around the on his albums and his walls, while Gary set, telling me what to do. But they've has his face on his TV ads. Gary cares been wonderful. We sent them the dai- about Roberta, but he doesn't really see lies, and they didn't interfere. If you want her. She is his wife the way his car is his to do something offbeat, I think Orion car. are the best people to work for. ''The relationship between Wren and \"But right now I don't want to hear Paul [Brad Rinnl, the nice guy from Mon- about work. I waited two years after tana, just like that between Roberta and Smithereens, because I didn't want to do Dez in Susan , is on the casual side. the teen comedies that were offered to Roberta is more innocent and less manip- me. Filmmakers can get into a run and ulative, but in both cases, when they start making films about films, not about finally make love, it's casual and not really life. Right now, I've got to live a little bit, sexy. They just do it. I show the awk- to get in touch with my feelings again. I wardness, the tension of spending the have the urge to interact with real life. For night in a confined place with a stranger. a while:' -D.Y. ® 21

by J. Hobennan As Mephisto, they say, was the most pop- and military spectacles, Redl scarcely lacks who show up in the middle of the night to ular Hungarian movie since Mihaly Ker- for period splendor. As in Mephisto, embarrass Redl with proof of his humble teSZ's-or rather Michael CUf'tiz's- though, the psychology seems somewhat ongms. Casablanca, it was taken for granted that askew: Szabo is not the world's subtlest the main event at this year's Budapest Film director, and it's disconcerting that the cru- Coolly detached , glacial in its pacing, and Week would be the unveiling of Colonel cial fact of Redl's homosexuality would be awash with bluish vapors, Redl is some- Redl, a two-and-a-half hour extravaganza so repressed until the film's final move- thing of a majestic iceberg. Still, despite ment. Szabo's nearly flawless professionalism, a sthat reemployed not only Mephisto direc- skillful performance by Brandauer (and a Redl's refreshingly tasteless coda-a brilliant one by Armin Muller-Stahl as the tor, Istvan Szabo, but virtually the whole flurry of World War I newsreels scored to chilly Crown Prince), one of the most pow- Mephisfo team: West German producer some cheerful Strauss frenzy-leaves you erful suicide scenes ever committed to cel- Manfred Durniok, cameraman Lajos Kol- wondering whether the colonel's rise and luloid , an abundance of Hapsburgglitz, and tai , sc reenwr iter Peter Dobai, and star fall mightn't really be the subject for a com- even the presence of redoubtable Ne,,\" York Klaus-Maria Brandauer. edy. What gives the film its texture is the publicist Renee Furst, the film was greeted alternately bitter and absurd evocation of with markedly less enthusiasm by Ameri- Freely based on a historical case and set the national rivalries that enabled the Aus- can critics than their European colleagues. in the waning years of the Austro-Hungar- trians to keep their polyglot empire func- No Mephisto this , was the word. No fan of ian Empire, the theme of Colonel Redl was tioning. Szabo's best sequences have Redl the earlier film myself, I found Redl an alto- aki n to its illustrious predecessor as well- serving a stint at the Russian border, forced gether richer and more complex movie- mad ambition and sexual duplicity in a to do time at the ends of the Hapsburg certainly one with greater political treacherous, authoritarian political environ- earth. \"I've had enough, I'm applying for resonance-if not without its longueurs. ment. Alfred Redl is a driven provincial retirement; his predecessor gasps, as well who makes a dazzling military career by he might. This Galician backwater proves a Not simply the week's most acclaimed spy ing on hi s fellow officers, rising to sodden nightmare of Jewish sm ugglers , film , winning the Hungarian Critics' Award become head of the Hapsburg military yapping dogs, and unwelcome relatives as well as the Gene Moskowitz Prize intelligence until caught in a snare set up by (named for the late T1lriety correspondent the Crown Prince himself. With its masked and determined by a poll of foreign guests) balls and dizzying waltzes, overheated bor- by a walk, Redl was also the Film Week's dellos and wienerwald trys ts , Hungarian quintessential offering-at once a Haps- countesses (namely Gudrun Landgrebe) burg period piece, a foreign co-production, and a movie remarkably populated with Co lo ne l Redl by Istvim Szabo. Jewish characters. • For lush assurance, the Szabo film far surpassed the year's two other Hapsburgers - Laszlo Lugossy's downbeat drama of post-1848 betrayal, Flowers of Reverie , in competition at Berlin, and Andras Kovacs' The Red Countess , chosen to open the Budapest Film Week. While the former was a respectably stolid gloomfest, the lat- ter, a biography of Katinka Karolyi, wife of the socialist aristocrat who headed Hunga- ry's first post-World War I government, proved a numbingly decorous trip to the waxworks. Kovacs, a didactic director even at his best, gave a proper history lesson, but the inadvertent moral was how easily East European moviemaking can revert to a juiceless, politically correct style. There were other conclusions to be drawn from the current crop of Hungarian films, more than a third of which were inter- national co-productions. Industry officials were defensive, understandably so: With the exception of Redl, the co-pros were a superfluous lot at best. If Volley for a Black Buffalo, a French-Hungarian job starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and directed by 22

often so hac kneyed (e .g., the painting of dapest the omega sign on a girl's naked bac k as she langorously twitches her biki nied bottom) th ey wo uld e mb a rr as s Dura n D ur a n. Omega , Omega is Magyar MTV, alth ough when an interviewer pedantically as ks each of the O megas his he ight and weight or nouvelle vague icon Laszlo Szabo was a local superstar Lac i Kom ar. ) T he graffiti ' w he n Ja ncso m ajes ti ca ll y dub s \"T hu s vapid hearrwarmer steeped in what M arx \"Break D ance!\" is scrawled on the wall of termed \"the idiocy of rural life; urban glam- one sub way statio n, and a defi ant \"Punk Spake Zarathu stra\" over th e e nd cred its, our faired scarcely better in Karoly M akk's Not D ead! \" emblazo ns a building across Lily in Love, an uncredited reworking of fro m the D ohany Street synagogue. Jesus yo u'd swear yo u were watching This Is Spi- nal Tap II. • Molnar's The Guardsman featuring Maggie Christ Sup erstar, released here in 1983, Continuing the tre nd traceable to 1983's Smith and C hri stophe r Plumm e r as an spawned a Magyar equivale nt , Stephen the Revolt of Job and Daniel Takes a Train , overripe theatrical couple . Even campier King, and even Miklos Jancso has directed Jewish characters were all but ubiqui to us- than Lily's special effects (the Broadway a made-for-TV rock-documentary, Omega , no t o nl y Imre Kalma n a nd num e ro us thr o ug h ga u ze sh o t co uld h ave b ee n Omega. secondaries in Colonel Redl but the child des igne d by Z sa-Zsa G abor) was Imre protago nist of Volley f or a Black Buffalo Gyo ngyossy and Barna Kabay's stridently Omega was one of the leading unofficial lyrical adaptation of the Federico G arcia pop groups of the late Sixties , but, as soon sand the adult hero of Peter Bascos What beca m e app are nt , th e re lu ctance w ith the Time, Mr. Clock ? As Hungary comme- Lorca chestnut lerma- a calculated follow- which Hungarofilm schedule d a spec ial morated the 40th anniversary of the Nazi up of the pair's international hit, The Revolt screening for Jancso's legion of Western fans occupation, the taboo against mentio ning of Job , that optimistically reunited the stars was less a political than an aesthetic judg- th e nati on's uneas ily ass imil ate d Jew ish of A UVman in Flames in a somewhat more ment . H owever \"revo luti o nary\" Om ega minority had clearly relaxed. tepid barbecue. may have app e are d in the S ix ties , th ey While Gyo ngyossy and Kabay arra nged For sheer ho kum , however, nothing come across a la Jancso as a tedious heavy- fo r journ alists to visit a Iumumba Street could surpass Gyorgy Palasthy's The Music metal act , prone to e ndless vamping and scree ning roo m to watch the ir as-yet-un- of a Lifetime, a joint M osfilm-Mafilm biog- exhortato ry gibberish rendered even more title d TV doc ume ntary on the 400 ,000 raph y of th e opere tta co mp ose r Imre turgid by the filmm aker's insiste nce on slow peasant Jews who once populated the Hun- Kalman, which evidentl y exists in a variety motion. garian countrys ide, Jancso was said to be of national versio ns: The Ru ssian s were So m e m ode st expl o rati o ns of v id eo planning an adaptation fro m Elie W iesel. said to have cut the material pertaining to effect~ aside, j ancso's personal touches are (For the Erst time, too, there were film jour- Kalman's Jewishness , while the Hungarian print bore no trace of a sequence in which Kalm an's music he lp s sustain the Sov ie t peopl e during the s iege of L e nin grad . There was even supposed to be a West G e rman versio n as well- which , jokers suggested , co mp ounded the Hungarian deletions 'v\\lith the Soviet ones . • Whether or not Colonel Redl duplicates Mephisto's extrao rdinary success, Ameri- can movies are as popular in Hungary as ever: The old warhorse Ben-Hur has been spinning its wheels for a year and a dubbed version of Tootsie, which ope ned just as the Film Week began, was the hottest ticket on Leninko rut. In Budap es t , as in Pari s, Woody Allen is a local hero , but the interest in American film s is not solely confined to H o ll ywoo d : Strange r Than Paradise , scheduled for a fall release, is as eagerly anticipated as any blockbuster- at least by the film intelligentsia. Actually, as Stranger Than Paradise sug- gests, the form of American popular culture that has the most evident impact is rock 'n' roll. The latest Ips by Michael and the Boss (if not Prin ce and M ado nn a) are readil y available, and Albe rt G oldm an's El vis is promine ntl y di splayed in bookstore win- dows . (I wo ke up o ne m o rnin g to th e sounds of the vintage Pres ley \"One N ight\" O mega , O mega .. .by Miklos Jancso. be ing credibl y groaned in Hungarian by 23

na~sts from Israel, where Hungarian films aggressively charming, blatantly allegorical- much maligned co-productions (surely a are extremely popular; according to Jizriety, the obscure Magyar sex farce Duty Free operetta framework, Gazdag burlesques symptom rather than a cause) were the lack Marriage was building into the Israeli \"sleeper of the year~ everything from the housing shortage to the of films addressing the current social reali- The most extraordinary of the Jewish- suicide rate, audaciously conflating roman- ties. Even young directors seemed unac- themed movies was Gyula Gazdag's The Package Tour. This unpretentious 75-min- tic and political illusions. For an outsider, countably detached. Bela Tarr's Almanac of ute documentary follows a group of elderly Hungarian Jews on a pilgrimage to Ausch- Singing on the Treadmill is as dense a Fall proved a misguidedly arty version of his witz, the concentration camp, now a tourist attraction, to which they were deported in thicket of signifiers as Jancs6's Red Psalm- usual gritty domestic dramas, while Andras 1944. As Vera Suninyi noted in the Hungar- ian journal Filmkultura, Gazdag's style is although cut 15 minutes from its original Jeles's perverse The Annunciation staged a exceptional for its restraint-eschewing \"archive pictures of the atrocities and shots release length, the film actually seems to be 19th-century Hungarian verse drama with a of souvenir shops\" alike. Still, The Package Tour is predicated on shocking juxtaposi- about too much . cast of naked lO-year-olds. tions and unsettling incidents. As the trav- elers reenter Auschwitz, a Polish guide No less remarkable is The Resolution, a Closest to the work of social criticism insists on addressing them in German, and for a moment they respond like obedient 1972 documentary that Gazdag made in was Andras Lanyi's well-directed The Peep- tourists or worse. collaboration with Judit Ember at the hole and the Key (the Hungarian title, Later, with the logic of a nightmare, an elderly woman backs out of some young Jizlaki Figyel, could be better translated as couple's snapshot and falls into a trench, seriously injuring herself. \"Oh my God , \"Someone Is Watching\"). Said to be a hit why did I come?\" she wails as an ambulance arrives to carry her away. These ghostly with young people, this satirical, if not recurrences underscore the horrifying memories the travelers recount. The film's wholly unsympathetic, view of the so- haunting fmal revelation concerns the child of two survivors who takes the trip but called opposition-here a squabbling com- refuses to let herself be photographed: She's afraid her schoolmates will see the fin- mune of overage hippies and free-lance ished film and reject her as a Jew. (Indeed, her fear was echoed, after a fashion , by one social workers-offered the week's best local filmmaker who assured me that , rather than promote understanding, the one-liner: \"Our fate was decided in Yalta for- film itself will only foment ami-Semitism.) The Package Tour offers the acknowledg- ever; one communard explains to the film's ment of suffering but no catharsis; as Gaz- dag himself noted , \"The more deeply anti-hero. \"We fell in love on our holiday involved I became the more clearly I saw I wouldn't understand or find any answer~ there~ The 38-year-old Gazdag, whose adapta- • tion of Balzac's Lost Illusions was featured The Hungarians are disarmingly prone at the 1983 New York Film Festival , is among the most iconoclastic of Hungarian to decry their film industry's current state directors, and two of his earlier films were only recently taken off the shelf. Singing on and throughout the Film Week expressed the Treadmill, completed in 1974, is a satiric musical in which a pair of clownish much concern that the renaissance of the bureaucrats (one played by Czech director Evald Schorm) in an attempt to turn a gar- late Seventies and early Eighties had run its bage dump into a paradise is confounded by the messy recalcitrance of human nature. course. Only 17 features were released, a Parodying such indigenous forms as the Singing on the Treadmill. considerable fall-off from the 29 produced Thirties' \"white telephone\" films and the Fifties' \"operettas of optimism,\" Singing on in 1983. (Nor was TV about to pick up the the Treadmill is replete with rosy pink fades and even a cameo by octogenarian operetta experimental Bela Balazs Studio. The film slack- the broadcast day had just been cut star Hanna Horthy. A film of considerable formal invention and insolent wit, its major is an unprecedented examination of grass- back to three hours.) An industry spokes- flaw is an excess of ambition: Within his roots politics in Eastern Europe, dealing man told a press conference that if 1984 with an unsuccessful attempt by local Com- was a bad year, 1985 will be worse. Cer- munist Party officials to remove the presi- tainly, the Film Week had more than its dent of a cooperative farm. Elusive , share of flops, but his prognosis seemed fascinating, and often irresistibly funny, it's a unnecessarily pessimistic: The prospective drama in three acts . In the first , the CP offi- menu includes new films by such seasoned cials (who actually commissioned the film) directors as Marta Meszaros, Zsolt Kezdi- determine their strategy; in the second, Kovacs, and Pal Gabor, works by rising tal- they confront the co-op president and co- ents like Peter Gothar and Gyorgy op board and are somewhat taken aback by Szomjas, as well as a first film by Geza the latter's spirited defense of their leader's Beremenyi-who, in scripting Kezdi- activities. The third and climactic act is the Kovacs' The Nice Neighbor and Gothar's co-op general meeting where the co-op Time Stands Still, wrote two of the finest president is supported by a majority and, Hungarian films of the last half dozen years. despite a bizarre, halfhearted attempt to Although the poor season has to be seen override the vote, the party has to accept in the context of a global (or at least Euro- their decision. pean) movie malaise, the success of the Back in the smoke-filled room where the Hungarian film industry has bred its own film began, the honchos offer their post- problems. For one thing, this nation of mortem , deciding to \"share the blame\" and fewer than 11 million has overproduced film- taking solace in their 40% of the vote. makers. There are currently perhaps 50 Their anxiety about the leading role of the qualified directors competing to realize a Party appears to be unfounded: An end title diminishing number of projects (a situation reveals that the co-op president was voted complicated by the hierarchial privilege of out \"with disciplinary action\" one year later. key senior directors to make a film each One would be hard put to think of a docu- year). Risk taking is getting more risky, and mentary so comparably revealing of the the result may be a less adventurous cin- American political process. ema. As anyone monitoring the interna- The Resolution seemed particularly strik- tional film scene knows, this would be a ing in 1984 for, more ominous than the loss not just for Hungary but also the world.® 24

And His Ship Sails On The Italians say, \"History isn't made, it integral part of the language we use to deeper understanding of the nature of is told.\" And they are the best proof that deal with reality. media. He has reversed the maxim that we invent not only our past but our life, like history, when told, becomes fic- present as well. Otherwise there would I project myself into a future century tion. His fiction , when told, when seen, have been no Renaissance and none of and imagine looking back on this one, becomes life. that miraculous life-force continuity sur- bemoaning the demise of its art as today viving the proverbial and perennial crises we bemoan the passing of that of the His method is essentially the applica- which, as Boswells from Goethe to Bar- 15th, extolling in the same breath its out- tion of the poetic principle to a Cartesian zini have observed, Italians thrive on. standing practitioners . Isn't it Fellini's you form. Refusing the camera's basic limita- would mention first when asked for tion - that it photographs things which Only a foreigner finds it funny, there- names that might remain as our century's are put in front of it and tends to create fore, to repeat the old saying that prime artists, just as it is Leonardo's and works which Maya Deren used to call Federico Fellini invented the Via Veneto Michelangelo's when thinking of the \"pre-cameratic\" (Dreyer, Chaplin , and that the Italians have tried to live it Rehaissance? Bergman , Welles, and Renoir all work like that) - Fellini has, in the simplest ever since. In Italy, it is not just a saying, it Fellini has outlasted the critics who terms, made it into a paintbrush. He is said he was neither concerned with soci- is the truth. And much more has come ology or politics and we now live in an age the only one among commercial directors from Fellini; things that not only the Ital- marked by a renewed faith in art as fan- faithful to the traditions of the avant- ians are living. He has, in fact, changed tasy. Bernardo Bertolucci's \"Every film is garde, surrealism, experiment, and the our landscape. a documentary\" is quaint in a world total predominance of the personal. thickly smeared with a layer of TV sets Every shot, every frame, every costume, Of course, \"invent\" isn't really the hourly proving every documentary to be a every design, every movement, and every proper verb. It's that suddenly things are fiction. How quick we were to deride Fel- sound are part of a larger-than-life vision, concrete which weve always known but lini, then 30 years ahead of his time for a burst of heart arousing in our innermost couldn't express. He confirms us. We \"fictionalizing reality;' at a time when neo- plexus a releasing shout of recognition. often say, \"Isn't it just like out of a Fellini realism, in its heyday, hid its artifice in film?\" A far cry from the days when in a folklore. Fellini shortened our road to a That is why Fellini's seas are made of film we used to exclaim, \"That's so natu- identifiably plastic sheets , why his Via ra!.\" The Fellini vision has become an

Veneto was built in to the studio, why he that my school companions thought they talgia-or that which is still to happen, were going to do. I knew I wasn't going to that toward which the people you have is the protagonist of all his works, why his be a lawye r (which is what my father laid bare are moving? wanted), or a chaplain (my mother's women have those bosoms , those thighs , wish), and I surely wasn't going to be an I don't have a good answer to that, I engineer, like my best friend . have no precise system. Beyond recog- why he was able to make 8'12 the male's nizing in myself an incurable tendency to In fact, I was a bit confused about what imagine a story and to invent situations, Golgotha in the era of productivity, and every film has its own liturgy, makes my career was going to be. I thought its own demands on you, requires its Casanova the artist's search for love. It is about being an actor or a journalist, a own approach. It's like a friendship , like writer or a painter, a marionette-artist, a human relationships, like love: There are also the source of his anguish and despair, singer. .. and with all these both similar no rules, and they are born from many and contradictory choices I couldn't different sources. his sense of age, his fear of rejection. The decide after all. Today it seems to me that I am in a profession which unites , more or What I can say, however, is that I seem cinema is a trapeze act-put your soul on less , all these various possibilities . A film to have met all my films in the most natu- director is a painter, a journalist, a sculp- ral way, as if they were already in me , like the line and flip it high in the air for the tor, an actor. Anyway, I think that my a train which runs along a fixed track occupation doesn't contradict 'any of along which there are, waiting and ready millions to cheer or jeer. No net for a those early ideas. for it, the stations of the various places heavy fall. Fellini has risked it again and A journalist chronicles that which where it is meant to stop. When I look already exists or occurs, while you probe back now, on the films I have made, it again, sometimes missing. But some- deeper into characters, further than they seems to me that rather than having made themselves might know. What is it, then, them myself, they had already been times he didn't , and those times make the that lights in you that first spark of inter- there, waiting for me, and that my work est? consisted mostly in the effort of not entire experience of cinema wo rth- deviating from that fixed track, to faith- Usually it's something that surprises or fully and punctually follow that itinerary, while. -G.B. strikes me, or arouses my compassion, or that sketched road, and to find them makes me smile. I suppose you could say there. Federico Fellini interviewed it's the way human creatures express by Gideon Bachmann themselves, in all their myriad ways, with But yo u shouldn't listen to me too all the components and connotations of closely, because in interviews one always You love to tell stories. Where do they behavior. Sometimes it can just be some- tells a lot of nonsense, trying to express a come from ? What fascinates you most? thing a person wears that can suggest a dimension between philosophy and fantasy about him to me . It's hard to say romance, whereas in reality things are The stories are born in my memories, exactly. much more simple. my dreams , in what I imagine and fanta- size; it's a very natural and spontaneous It seems to me , too , that the way a When you first perceive that spark of birth . I don't specifically sit down to story evolves often has nothing to do with light in the darkness, what attracts you to invent something. It's a series of sugges- a character, or at least is not directly it ? Is it physical ? Metaphorical? Intel- tions of the mind, thinking about things inspired by a character but perhaps by an lectual? read , personal experiences lived , coming atmosphere. I may be exaggerating when together with a pretext of some sort, a I say it could be a waft of perfume, but I can only talk within the limits of what stimulus of the moment, such as the face actuall y that could be, because all I do; I don't want to sound like Dante of a man in the subway, the smell of a waft it takes is a re-evocation of something Aleghieri .. .but the sign of a first contact of perfume that passes , a sound I hear- that already is , that already exists in me. having occurred, of being close to that something that evokes those fantasies Or, if it is something that exists outside of still hidden and closed town , the thing and persons and situations that I have in me , there is an evocation of something that in the end will be the film , comes me, and which almost by themselves that reveals some aspects of its interior, of to me from a feeling of joy. It's like a organize into a form , provided I give pleasant tickle that runs through yo ur them freedom and follow them on their its own completeness. It is often through entire organism. That sometimes unex- path. It's a matter of staying with them for pected feeling of good humor and of joy- a while , of making friends with them such a form of revelation that I seem to be fillness is like a first greeting addressed to able to penetrate into the interior of me by this new thing, a sign of recogni- And the urge to tell them, to pass them things. tion of a story already beginning to grow, on, these stories , where does that origi- a hint of greater precision about to occur. nate? It's really like seeing, far away in the night, a spark of light, and as you approach So it is like the encounter with a That is not reall y a question I have you find that it is a light in the window woman, someone you seefleetingly in the asked myse lf, nor does it interest me of a house in a street in a town, where street, you feel a first vague attraction, particularly to do so. I think that I had people live, where there are other streets, and then develop the relationship in your decided very early what my work in life where there are piazzas . .. and as the fantasy... would be, what my life and my road string unravels yo u slowly lay bare a would be, it see med to me that I had whole map of places, characters, senti- Perfect comparison. Woman is in fact identified my itinerary, that I had under- ments, and situations. that part of yourself which you do not stood that this was going to be my des- know, and thus you project upon her tiny: to tell stories. Why I decided this Your films actually often end with a while you are waiting to reveal yourself to instead of becoming a priest or a circus spark oflight in the distance. What inter- yourself. The creative process is the clown - although in a certain sense I am ests you most: that which has already same thing. The figure of woman is , in doing both of those things - I cannot tell occurred-the past, memories, and nos- now. But I remember that in school most of my companions had very clear ideas of what they wanted to be. One of them was sure that he would become an admiral, and he did , in fact , succeed. Their ideas seemed most precise, they knew how they were going to organize their lives. I only knew what I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to do any of the things 26

In interviews one always tells a lot ofnonsense, trying to express a dimension between philosophy and romance, whereas in reality things are much more simple. Fellini telling stories. Fellini telling history. fact, always present in any creative one you are making, you are correcting the original idea as you go along. I, on the endeavor, her presence is felt, her virginal other hand , like to continue to hold on to the illusion that I am making the film I or not virginal presen.ce, in every magical had had in my head. If I refuse to see what I am really making, I can go on making or esoteric operation, there is always a my ideal film, and the final delu sion is reserved for the end, when there is noth- woman next to the magician . She is the ing I can do anymore . The film is fin- ished , the crew has dispersed , the sets element that makes the contact between have been pulled down, and I have to get along with what I have done. you and your unknown part flow more Are there any external disciplines that easily; she incarnates a projection upon carry you through the making of a film if you don't actually wish to see what you your subconscious which, in turn , is so are doing ? often represented in art in female form. I think that the psychological type whom we define as a creator or artist I think that creativity itself, that crea- Fellini by Fellini. maintains an essential, vital component tive expression in all its forms, be it paint- of adolescence, of childishness, and needs an extremely authoritarian cus- ing or sculpture or film or mu sic, always me there when, for example, I have fin- tomer or boss to pull him along. I, fur- thermore, am Italian , and we have the has this relation to the feminine , obscure ished a sequence in some big set and they tradition of needing a pope, an archduke, an emperor, a king, to give us the order to part of yourself. want to pull it down, and the material paint a ceiling for them , to create a fresco in the apse of a church, to write a mad- Can we talk, for a moment, of style? must be controlled - the cameraman and rigal on the occasion of a marriage of a princess ... and I think that this psycho- How are the fantasies made into images the production people would like to know logical conditioning, this element of on a screen? What is the first step? if it came out the way I wanted it. Just in It would be hard for me to talk ration- case something needs to be reshot. But I ally about the creative process . It's a often take the responsibility for this: I matter of constantly maintaining an allow the set to be pulled down without equilibrium - constantly threatened- having seen the rushes; I refu se. between that which you had intended to Obviously this isn't folklore or meant to do in accordance with your imagination create a legend-\"Fellini never goes to and that which you are actually doing. see rushes\" - but I have realized what That's why I don't like going to see . happens when one does go: One sud- rushes, like most of my colleagues do, denly is aware of the film one is making, and as I used to do when I made my first not the one yo u had wanted to make. films. I don't want to see what I have shot Because the one you have been wanting the day before. They literally have to drag to make is slowly being changed into the 27

being made to do something, is impor- This idea could be rooted in the past, sciousness to an identification with myself tant to us in our youthful, infantile charac- where on occasion, a bit superficially, the which I cannot control. ter as artists. We need external discipline. central character has been identified to some extent with its author. Such as in It :s 23 years since you last worked with Total liberty would be dangerous for 8 11l, for example. That seems to me those who claim that they want to tell somewhat bold as recognition goes, Giulietta . . . things to others, that they want to because I feel that the author can be rec- Well, yes. It's true that this little film recount the world, or for those who pre- ognized in all the characters of his film- tend to be giving an interpretation of real- and not only in the characters, but also in has stimulating aspects in this sense, ity. Fantasy offers you its images in a the sets, the objects. One can feel a even though for some time now I've been much more suggestive way, much more greater sympathy or a greater solidarity arriving at the actual point of making a seductively, much more glazed than the with one or another of the characters, and film in a state of mind which is almost way you will succeed in materializing one may choose them to say certain antipathetic to it. I resent the film at this them. Therefore, it is a very strong temp- things which one might, in an illusionary point, I make believe that I am forced to tation to leave the images upon a vague way, think are more of oneself than oth- do a thing I no longer really want to do, I and fluctuating screen. To materialize all ers, but normally that never happens. begin to consider it a frivolous undertak- those undefined and loose notions is a ing-a feeling of irritation that accompa- heavy load of a job. We need something It doesn't happen this way; you can't nies all things one is forced to do. But I to oblige us to go through with it. just put into the mouth of one of the char- must tell you that I am used to having acters your own way of thinking or your these feelings and that I know they are The customer is really necessary to philosophy and then hope that this will be the signs of, the film being ready in me. bring off the creative act; to trigger the the thing which will come out the most This antipathy, this hate indicate to me mediumistic interplay between your incli- expressive. On the contrary, I find that that I must begin. nation-or let's use this obscene word: the things that best express the author are your \"inspiration\" - and the practical act the least conscious ones, the ones that This symptom, for the past 20 years, have been the least subject to a process of has become ever more precise, and one of its realization. rationalization and conceptualization. I might be justified in asking me, \"Well, think an author reveals himself most why are you making it then?\" I make it Ifyou were to look at yourfilms as per- clearly exactly where he has had no con- because for better or worse I have arrived sciousness at all of the thing that he was at the point of such unease that I must sons, what would they be? Sons? Daugh- doing. make it in order to free myself of this ters? Fathers? Mothers? Lovers? unease. I escape; I make the film as if I In this film, Fred and Ginger, in which were in flight from something, to get rid No, I don't think I feel all that close the main male role is played by Marcello of it, to get it off my back. Like getting rid to them. They rather appear to me as Mastroianni, the person most often asso- of an illness. strangers , as unknown presences which ciated with your alter ego, and the main for a series of mysterious reasons I find female role by your wife, Guilietta I don't want to exaggerate, now, the myself within elbow-distance of, who Masina, is there an element ofthis super- pathological aspects of a creative act, pretend to have chosen me and ask me to ficial identification between character but deep down, that's what it is. This give them form and character, to make it and author? unknown one, the one I was talking about possible for them to become recogniz- before, who is neither son nor father but a able to themselves, too. It's like traveling Well, if I reflect and seek the program- presence suddenly all too close to me, together in some sort of fluctuating cover, matic elements in what I am doing here urging me to give him life, is a kind of a loose balloon, which I am called upon to this time, maybe yes, because through infection. It's the invasion into my life of fill, to design, to limit, to give a character Mastroianni I hope to relate a more or something I could easily have done with- less sincere, a more or less exhibited, a out. But then that's my life and my des- to. more or less hypocritical discomfort of tiny and, after all, my vocation. Once I have done this, as far as I am my generation. He plays an old step- dancing ballerino who for years had not Recently these unknown presences concerned, our roads diverge completely. worked in his profession and had done have become more and more disturbing He-the film-goes along his road, with other things, and having retired to the because they force me into a relationship the features which I had thought he country is suddenly called back by televi- which is ever more disquieting and upset- wanted me to give him, with the identity sion in order to repeat, together with an ting. I don't know how it all started, this which it had seemed to me he had wanted old companion of his, a lady friend, a cer- feeling of unease and bother and repul- me to define, and I go along my road, tain dance number which had once been sion. Probably because in the last dec- looking for, or waiting for, another phan- done by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. ades my films, before getting a chance to tom presence, which invisibly elbows start, have had all the time in the world me, tickles me, and pushes me to give to Quite possibly I am giving, more or less to allow me to lose my enthusiasm. This it, too, a face, a character, a story. consciously, to Marcello something (grat- endless waiting in a parking zone ifying to me), to express the discomfort while the details are being worked out is It all seems to me like a series of rela- and melancholy, more or less pretentious enough to dissolve my initial excitement. tionships with unknown persons, which, and more or less sincere, of finding him- While the producers are making their once they have been realized, identified, self on the edge of an age at which he has deals, trying to establish an economic- materialized, move away again to the difficulty in remaining in step with the financial platform on the basis of their distance, without even saying good-by. reality that surrounds him. greediness and gluttony, I hang there like Maybe that's why I never see my films a diver on a high board, constantly poised again. It seems to me that meeting again But these are simple tricks, coldly cal- for the jump, hands pointed in front of is not part of the process we have lived culated, and I don't think that it all me, constantly held back because they together; that his job was to appear and amounts mysteriously and without con- still have to build the pool, put water in it, mine to concretize him, that's all. and accumulate the spectators. In the Could it befor this reason that the male protagonists of your films always seem vaguely lost? 28

My films appear to me as strangers, as unknown presences series ofmysterious reasons Ifind myselfwithin elbow-distance of, who pretend to have chosen me and ask me to give themform and character, to make it possible for them to become recognizable to themselves, too. Giulietta Masina in Variety Lights. Marcello Mastroianni in 8 1/2. end you are no longer doing a high jump about television represent this attitude? perses and disbands our values and goes but are throwing yourself off the board to Yes. But this is not a question; this is pell-mell after its own. Punctually, every get it over with. generation seems to have this apocalypse what I would have said. The answer is happen to it. It's been happening for mil- Then something else happens. As included in the question. But one cannot lions of years and so finally it's happening soon as I get to the studio, despite all this take seriously that the public no longer to us. But although it's a known fact, neuroticism , I begin to feel again the fas- loves the cinema and wants a type of when it happens to us it's a bit more dis- cination of the stage with all its attrac- spectacle of a kaleidoscopic, sensationa!, quieting because suddenly there is a hori- tions . I see the crew all ready, the sets all and senseless nature. If you accepted zon in front of us upon which we can built, and when the lights are being this , you'd have to resign yourself and recognize no landing ground . switched on, I submit to the romance of it change your profession. Go back to being all. I'm back being a marionette-artist, the a journalist or open another shop to sell You are not saying, surely, that you puppeteer, and it all suddenly becomes caricatures of passersby, like my \"Funny- pleasant again, I recognize that this is my Face-Shop\" in the years afer the war. I splan to adapt to television demands? life, I recognize myself in it. All that can't think about this. unease passes. What I am trying to say is only that it is I must be aware of what is happening almost impossible to account for the Do you feel that the public is ever less wishes of a public born of a television sensitive to art, that the quality of life is around me. It is useless to hark back to style, influenced by a constant bombard- diminishing , and if you feel this, do you generational nostalgia, to make Amar- ment of images in which man believes he think this is caused at all by television? cord with laments in them , or to make recognizes himself. For 24 hours a day we Does this film which you are making are exposed to something we think is a moralistic works , because, obviously, the mirror, and narcissistically we stay there, generation after one's own always dis- 29

UPTOW.tiN_ MANtwWIS MOVIEOtANNa salutes -=flLLINI=' =- watching what \"we\" are doing the world I don't think this is the end; I think out over. We think that we see what we our- of all this destruction may grow a new selves are doing, the stories we are living, relationship to reality. And thus a new while in reality we see all that in a form way of being man. I find it exciting to be a which robs things of their reality. witness to this development, and to try It's a form caught halfway between and find a way, myself, of how to continue shots of reality and things written and to tell things within our tradition but in performed for televis ion , between fantasy the style and within the requirements of and publicity. This has created, I think, a this new way of life. highly impatient kind of spectator, neu- So Fred and Ginger will not be a rotic and hypnotized , of whom we, who polemic against television, after all? create cinema, cannot claim to under- There is an element of that in it, as stand the desires he may harbor. Actually well, in a funny way, as ajoke. But primar- I think he doesn't harbor any desires. He ily the film is an attempt to understand just wants to see images that move with a how one could try to understand this WalCh Uplown In June lor Ihe felllni film soundtrack spewing forth clangors of var- form . And how to dominate it, if possible. fesllval, fealUrln~: ious kinds (which he thinks is music)\"\" I cannot tell who will come out of it victo- • ~ND THt SHIP S~ILS ON • CITV Of WOMtN While I do not want to risk appearing to rious: the destroying ray or the human vm .• U DOLCf ffLLlNI'S s~nIUCON have opinions which seem dated, I must being. state things as they really are, and see that I am fairl y optimistic, though. I feel can (212) 567·515010 order Uplown, televis ion is a method, a form between us that everything has a meaning, and I don't an exclusive service 01 Group Wcable. and reality, with which of necessity we believe that things can be totally sense- must count and ,\"vith which we must con- less. I think that in the end significance front ourselves. One should make the will win out over lack of significance. effort to conquer and to possess this The characters in your films were mE BEST form , instead of allowing this form to pos- always exceptional, but television makes FlIMSYOU NEVERSAW. sess us. Television has become a natural us all alike. Can you adjust to that? Now you can rent videocassettes force-like gravity, like lunar influences, Television is a big container. The real by mail of over 300 hard-to-find quality film s, including E INorte, The like sunspots , like earthquakes-and thus difficulty I am having with this film, Bostonians, Liquid Sky, After the Rehearsal, and Entre Nous. our struggle is with this form which we which modesty pretends to suggest- Our ever-expanding library in- have invented but which we no longer within the limits of my ability-a small, cludes foreign and independent films , limited release features, HoUywood control. It is a force that continues to delicate reflection or rethinking over the classics, cult favorites and documen- taries. exist despite us or all our intentions. television bombardment, over this total Members simply order toll-free, A maker of cinema cannot afford to inundation of millions and millions of and receive cassettes promptly by mail or UPS. It's simple and inexpen- take into account a spectator who has homes all over the world, is this: Using sive. Phone or write for free infor- mation. undergone such a mutation , who has the same means television employs, 1-800-2S8-FILM become alienated and diverse. But of using its own language , using the infinite (in PA , 1-800-633-FILM ) course he cannot, either, disregard him. I variety of its imagery, to try and make RomeO personally derive great stimulation from those who look at this landscape, at this Film Festiwl this problem; I am not one of those who same bombardment, understand that it is Videocassette rentals by mail say \"The cinema is dead ;' \"Television possible to make a small reflection - to 305 Linden Street, Scranton, PA 18503 killed it:' \"The remote control unit has put themselves, for a moment, on the destroyed the viewer's ability to follow a sidelines, away from the frontal exposure, story line;' \"There is no more space for so that they may see, from this position, c haracterization ,\" and so on. But of what is actually happening. That is the course these things are true. We've got to problem: To say all this but to do it by live in the world the way it is . using the same material the viewer is sub- Or, at least, the way it appears to be. jected to 24 hours every day. I hope I can And I don't think television is something do it ; if not, we'll meet over my next entirely negative. I think it has helped film\" \" destroy a series of structures, schemes, Really, then, what you are trying to do panoramas, and ways of thinking which is give back to television that which could have kept human beings in a kind of perhaps be called its Renaissance prison composed of ways of seeing exis- aspect? tence. Television is a kind of laser ray that Yes, and that's a nice conclusion, which I am grateful to you for. '.fS is destroying all that. 30

ection The Latin Revolution \"NICARAGUA: NO PASARAN\" 31

The Texas That Got Away by David Thomson Viva Zapata. the mustaches wilt and sag in the heat, making tired liars who practice a greased In Mexico - or in southern Texas, like ant in the handling of scowling villains. charm to ease their own ennui. And in the heat above the oven, where the street their beseeching sing-song they are kids are Mexicans - they smile over scor- • always saying lines, never speaking. pions smothered in red ants, and then set fire to the seething mass. Don't they? Anyone, apparently, can play Mexi- • cans. Charlton Heston and Akim Tamir- • off did it in Touch of Evil , birthplaces \"I am coming. I am your friend, Evanston , Illinois, and Baku, Russia. Mel remember. I bring you love and affection It is 1851, and this is an Early Tale of Ferrer was a bullfighter in The Brave from the generaL\" Texas . Three men in a wagon are going Bulls (as well as a bullfighter-basher in south through Texas, with a cow and a The Sun Also Rises) . Paul Muni is our - Mapache's lieutenant in The Wild bull, three men of different ages. They image of Juarez and Marlon Branda, Bunch, approaching the Bunch to hear cross the Pecos River and then, with a Zapata. Tyrone Power played Zorro and how the stolen guns will be delivered. trail of high tossed clouds in the clear air one of Cortes' first band in Captain from behind them, they reach the best land Castille. Mercedes McCambridge put ''Very smart for you-damn gringo :' they have seen. \"This is it,\" says the bootblack in her hair and came on wicked - when he's heard the plan. leader. \"Who does it belong to?\" asks the for Touch ofEvil; the young Robert Blake kid, and he is told, ''To me:' They put a was the beautiful Mexican child who sold • brand on the bull, and then they see two Bogey the lottery ticket in The Treasure riders coming from the south. \"Never ofthe Sierra Madre, and his street urchin Mexicans played Mexicans , too , for a liked seein' strangers;' says the old man. from Tampico had not just the wide eyes few years at a time, in token offerings of \"Guess it's 'cause no stranger ever good- for a charity poster but the necessary nobility or cunning. There was never very newsed me:' English to help the story along. much range in between, or any need to direct these actors. You cast them in the The riders are Mexicans. They are There is a kind of American Mexican way you could say \"Lupe Velez as the polite, and they speak good English, picture in which this qualifying clause is Mexican Spitfire,\" and know it would though they say \"amigo\" and \"senor.\" This read into the record early on: work. But could you be sure of identify- is the land of Don Diego, who is happy to ing these in a lineup: Alfonso Bedoya, have them as guests for a night, a week. ''You speak English?\" Pedro Armendariz, Antonio Moreno, Don Diego lives 400 miles to the south '?\\ Ieetle, senor\"- and that is the only Valentin de Vargas, Lalo Rios, Pedro beyond the river in view, the Rio Grande. honest thing this unwashed , black- Gonzalez-Gonzalez, Rodolfo Hoyos, And how did Don Diego get this land? toothed trash with a rat's mind and a Emilio Fernandez, Leo Carrillo, Juano the leader asks. From grants and patents mouse's heart will ever say. There are Hernandez, Arturo de Cordova, Jaime inscribed by the king of all the Spains. M'exicans in American movies you can no Sanchez, Carlos Romero, Eugene Igle- And he took it away from Indians, sneers more trust than you would the water or sias? Or be quite sure that none of the the leader. Maybe so, says the Mexican. the salad greens on vacation. They wear names is invented? And the leader says, well, he's taking it mustaches as a mark of dishonesty, and now, and Don Diego is to be told that all • the land north of the Rio Grande now belongs to him, to Tom Dunson. He kills There are Mexican-born actors who one of the Mexicans to make his point, did better in America. Green cards, resi- burying him on the land . The Mexican is dent aliens: the first fertilizer. Anthony Quinn, born in Chihuahua, • spent twenty years as Indians, Latins, savages, and greasers before, in the Fif- The actor who played Tom Dunson in ties, he slowly laid hands on a career as an Red River, John Wayne, would go on to exotic-gypsy-earth father that could ac- break his bank making a movie about the commodate Gauguin, an eskimo, an founding incident in early Mexican- Arab, a Greek, an Italian strongman, and American history, The Alamo, in which Attila the Hun, as well as Mexican 180 Texans and their Tennessee partners retreads. held off the huge ant army of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, just as if • Ramon Navarro, born in Durango; they were Cortes and his handful of men Ben-Hur and a successful silent career, going up against all the people of Monte- but never as happy when talking. zuma. And Wayne's Santa Anna was • Ricardo Montalban, born in Mexico played by an American character actor, J City; through diligence, persistence, and a clean-shaved gringo look, he made it all Carroll Naish , experienced and flamboy- the way to Fantasy Island and Corinthian leather. • Gilbert Roland, born in Chihuahua; his family fled the outrages of Pancho Villa, a character Roland never got to play-though he came close in Bandido! 32

The Wild Bunch. Restoring order to Mexico. Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. • Cesar Romero; everyone's favorite tops when American actresses won't, and sense of superior seriousness. The there Mexican, except that he was born in New the ratings will be tolerant-as witness there is not an actual place; so few Ameri- York City. several Sam Peckinpah films. cans know the geography of Mexico. It is a collection of theatrical backdrops and Even in those careers, there is a sub- Even the women are not to be trusted. projections for the American soul. text for actors to abid.e by: that \"Mexican- There is one in The Wild Bunch, the types\" are at best over-earnest, impetu- woman of Mapache, who is the one to It was called Garden of Evil for Henry ous, and flimsy, and at the worst morose, shoot Pike (William Holden). And he Hathaway, Gary Cooper, and Richard dishonest, and irresponsible. The only whirls round, cries \"Bitch!\" with a force Widmark in 1954, an Eden of treasure, smart Mexican in American pictures has and hate that is startling every time you bandits , and death. In ~ra Cruz (two been Speedy Gonzalez. hear it, and shoots her dead. But the words for the Yankee audience , though bitch only thought it was her country, and the town is really one word), it is a lawless As for the women: Dolores del Rio, wondered why these four Americans turmoil fought over by foreign rulers and who never gave up her Mexican career chose to take on the whole army of white-suited partisans, a natural sport for and had to be an Indian in Cheyenne Mapache when the deal had been done American adventurers; one of them, Burt Autumn; Katy Jurado, who was a tough, and everyone was satisfied. But, of Lancaster, sees Mexicans writing, laughs interesting woman whenever she had the and says he never knew they could, and is chance, from High Noon to Pat Garrett course, Americans are never satisfied, told by Gary Cooper that they are writing and Billy the Kid; and Sarita Montiel, and the Mexicans are somehow so stu- their names so that when they die tomor- who was Spanish originally and had to be pidly content. Aren't they? row in the battle they will be identified dubbed by Angie Dickinson for Run of and buried correctly. In Against All Odds , the Arrow. Otherwise there are the • Mexico is an escape for a hot woman and Puerto Rican Rita Moreno and a gather- Aztec ruins are a bordello for Jeff Bridges ing of women to go with the lineup of Mexico is also, and most famously, a and Rachel Ward, fucking back to native. men, all of them ready to give way to sun-baked desert where Ennio Morri- In The Long Goodbye, Mexico is a coun- Linda Darnell, who played Chihuahua cone is the rattlesnake, shot in Spain, try estate for Terry Lennox and Eileen the tramp, in My Darling Clementine, directed by an Italian (Sergio Leone), and Wade, until Marlowe hears the song and Jean Peters, who was cast as Mrs. with Americans (Clint Eastwood) and yawning in the town band's lament and Zapata. Mexican women, you know, they Europeans (Gian Maria Volonte) as its sees how to play the lazy place and its age badly so they wear much makeup, people, with serapes, cheroots, and guns casual police as a version of The Third and they make the chili in the cantina. Or as its times of day and with double-cross- Man . they are young and they can dance and ing as its life-giving helix. give the heroes one happy night and a Americans do not know much Mexi- flower as they ride away next day. And • can history, or realize how often Mexico Mexican women will often take off their has tried to emulate America's discovery It is a vexed border, where our lust for metaphor and cliche smothers the possi- bility of contact or exchange. They are there for us , for our vacations and our 33

of liberty. The Hollywood version of addicted to the idea of luck and striking it The consul in Under the Volcano is no Mexican politics is that the country is an big. EI Dorado is a Spanish name; even in less attached to Mexico. His dream is just entertaining chronic mess in which prin- the U.S. it is called Las Vegas. more clearly self-destructive than Jane ciple and practicality yield to local inter- Greer's in Out of the Past. He has his ests, corruption, confusion, and the habit But there are two Mexicos in The Trea- drink, even if his job is finished. And of revolution. Mexico is the start of those sure of the Sierra Madre. One is filled somehow in Mexico, he has found a fit- lands where upheaval is so constant as to with bars, bandits, and soldiers, and ter- ting set of contrasts for his delirium-the be meaningless-all the better an opinion rain to break men and their plans. The violence and the festivity, the Church and when it comes to holding on to American other is the sweet haven of a village that the Day of the Dead, the towering vol- interests. And so, in American movies, takes the old man, Howard, as its king cano and the squalid barranca where he you can gather that Juarez, Villa, and once he has saved the life of a child. This will die, and the theater next to his favor- Zapata were patriot bandidos whose is a Mexico of balmy fiestas for the ite bar with the sounds of The Hands of efforts were compromised by the indo- Americano. The village may be poor, but Orlac. Nothing is quite sober in Mexico; lence and dishonesty of the country. it has spiritual shade, tequila, three-star a drunk feels at home there. Mexican cooking (and no revenge), and Thus, Americans in those struggles have young women making themselves shyly • a legitimate cynicism and self-interest. In Bandido! and The Wild Bunch, they light available. The purity of these Mexicans is Mexico is reckoned to be harsh by the bombs with their cigars and look to so great that they do not recognize gold Americans - feckless and third-rate, but get what they can - the mercenary is dust when they see it. And so the treasure as primitive as the heat there, and as never a sucker. Indeed, our movie Mex- scatters in the wind and makes its capri- short on mercy. It is in the savage bright- ico is a lesson in the senselessness of cious way back to the ground. ness of Acapulco, in Orson Welles' The causes and allegiances and on the validity Lady from Shanghai, that Grisby of action and exploitation. Howard laughs his old head off, just as explodes with his hope for nuclear annihi- he often laughed at the foolishness of the lation. He laughs, too; Mexico fosters • two younger men. But Mexico is not for that antic humor. While in Touch ofEvil, them: Dobbs dies, at the hands of ban- Mexico is the underside of Hank Quinlan The Wild Bunch is of the modern era, dits, but really of his own paranoia, while (Welles), the worms that wriggle when he and the work of a passionate director who the other (Tim Holt) goes back to moves. was obsessed with Mexico. But still it America, to Dallas, to rescue the widow prefers the self-pitying romantics of of the other desperate adventurer who There is no more complete border Americans to the realities of the Mexican died helping them. There is an under- movie than Touch of Evil, even if it was situation. The movie endorses the tone to Treasure that says Mexico is shot in Venice, California. From the Bunch's need to be an outcast band, to beyond most Americans - for few have opening shot, dragging a crime through act out integrity in wandering and raiding, attained the calm in Howard that can two countries, and following one of the in boozing and whoring, in spreading chuckle at the notion of the gold being screen's· few Mexican-American mar- blood and sentimentality wherever they lost, and then settle back to enjoy being riages, so that the bomb goes off with go. In The Wild Bunch, Mexico is an monarch of an unmapped Utopia. their first American kiss, the picture escape for Americans who will not grow gloats over the decay where two countries up. Who really cares how many innocent • rub together. Mexico is Quinlan's instinct bystanders are killed in their solemn urg- (he knows the Mex is guilty), and ing of their own death? For the deaths are Treasure is also B. Traven, which is to America is his profession (he orders the as gorgeous as peyote dreams; and Mex- say it is part of the Mexico mystique in Mexican suspect to talk English). But it's ico knows sadness, doesn't it? American minds and the chance that in Mexico that he arranges a cover-up, somewhere, in the jungle or in the moun- wraps a peachy-clean U.S. blonde in Laughter is a motif in The Wild Bunch. tains, there is a white man living secretly depravity and goes to have his fortune It's Edmond O'Brien's response to the and simply, a fugitive originally but now told by a woman sitting there, waiting, \"loot\" of washers taken from the bank; it's resigned to having disappeared and, in his with no other purpose than to tell him, the way the Bunch sometimes regard way, as much the object of quest and \"Honey, your fortune's all used up; and to their insane life; and it's there at the end rumor as treasure itself. Nearly every gaze on him with a lack of pity not of the film when O'Brien and Robert explanation of who Traven was says he allowed on the safe side of the border. For Ryan are left with no other bunch to ride went to Mexico to get away from the law Mexicans may be ignorant, but they with except the partisans. There's reason and trouble, to hide out, and that he know, don't they? And they're there to say to be suspicious of films that furnish their stayed there long after the heat had gone the few necessary words over the corpse. own laughter, I think. That proud, ironic off because he was charmed by the life, mirth is not quite as philosophical as it by the freedom, and by his own legend. • thinks. It makes Mexico a land of laugh- ter and forgetting, a self-induced obliv- Mexico has always offered that en- Nearly 25 years later, The Border has ion, and it has a source. chantment for American pictures. It is a the true, bitter haze of El Paso and place to get away from northern fear and Cuidad Juarez. You never feel that make- For it was in The Treasure ofthe Sierra thoroughness. The woman in Against All up had to apply any sweat to its actors' Madre that John Huston first practiced Odds and Out of the Past has gone there shirts. Moreover, the picture does attest, his nihilistic glee, and had his father to in the hope that she will be forgotten- in its plodding way, to some border reali- make the noise. Treasure was the first until the man hired to find her just hap- ties: the forlorn passage of wetbacks, the American film set in Mexico to rely so pens to be in the bar in Acapulco the day dealing in lives and papers, compromise much on Mexican locations, being based she comes strolling in, at which point he in the police. Jack Nicholson, the new in Jungapeo, near San Jose Purua. Again, is turned into another escapee, caught up border cop, is surveying the Rio Grande- it treats Mexico as a land for outcasts in' the dream of threatened paradise, of a rather shallow trickle here - and the from the American system and for those breaking out and finding a country like a \"picturesque\" view of Mexican women desert island. 34

washing clothes, when he realizes a kid said we were going to shoot it somewhere easygoing outlaw can have his way with has stolen his hubcaps. He chases, but else. He said an amusing thing: 'Suppose the world. he only gets them back because the a Mexican company came up to Illinois to Best of all, and unsurpassed among thiefs older sister returns them. She is make a picture about Abraham Lincoln's American Mexican movies , is Bring Me another Mexican archetype , the passive life with a Mexican actor playing the lead, the Head of Alfredo Garcia. That says madonna, as flawless as every other per- what would you think of that?' And I said that Mexico is another country. It has its son in the film is worn down by life. to him: 'I think it would be great, I'd love beauty, and Peckinpah i-s a Monet for Nicholson falls for the madonna. The to see that.' We left Mexico the next Mexican light; it believes in Mexico as a movie does not spell this out, or have the morning. I decided to make the picture in . stage for dark and fateful existential plays. prospect explored. But she is the only Texas, as close to Mexico as I could, on But it does not condescend or make the thing he can find to believe in. It may sim- the Mexican border.\" country an American resort. There is no • other world or country in Alfredo Garcia. ply be that she is the unknown-cliches do not need depth - or that, like all native In the same interview, Kazan confessed The Americans there have nowhere else women, she is unknowable but unques- that Viva Zapata! had been in many ways to go or be. They are absorbed in the tioning. She does not pester and nag him about himself, his own adventures with harshness and the beauty, and so the pic- with grisly sweetness, as his wife does. radical politics, and even his relations ture is a true myth, made without self- Better a silent madonna than an El Paso with women. There have been American conscIOusness or coyness. cutie on a water bed, the weary eyes sigh. directors with a greater interest in Mexico It is in looking across the border, from And the wife knows, for when he brings security to wildness, that Americans can- the Mexican girl into his house, and she not drop their advantages or stop seeing sits there, rebuking its lousy style, she the far country as the projection of their senses a true rival. own fantasies. Being so close to America, The film never settles that contest. It Mexicans cannot expect understanding, merely stops in its tracks as Nicholson or stop hoping for it. Being so much the hands the girl back her baby, and smiles. actor in someone else's drama prevents They are standing in the middle of the Mexicans from being themselves. They Rio Grande, and it is the first time the live like the Irish, full of fury and imita- wild smiler of the movies has cracked his tion. (Of course, they know this best: face in the picture. Decency, says the Octavio Paz's Labyrinth ofSolitude is the film, may touch hands at the border. No best formulation of the problem .) There wonder Nicholson starts to grin. have been so many people in Mexico who wanted to be our companions. But fan- • What do Mexicans feel about this? Do tasy is so energetic in the American head we know how to ask them? Do they have that we allow them no role except that of the opportunity to tell their so-much- our betrayer and nemesis. A piece of us stronger neighbor what they think? expects to be murdered on holiday in There's one answer in Kazan on Kazan, as Mexico, and so the knife would come as the director talks about Viva Zapata! no surprise. • \"I wanted to make this in Mexico very But our movies have so little of the much, and I submitted the picture to the head of the syndicate of film techni- Mexico that is Luis Buiiuel, Paz, Carlos cians - a cameraman named Gaby Figue- Fuc;;ntes, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. roa.· I wasn't very keen on having him Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. This is all the stranger since Hollywood photograph the picture; he made all movies have had the most effect on Latin women look like madonnas , and he loved for its own sake: Welles for one, with that American writing, in helping it to see the very corny effects like large crowds carry- unfinished Latin American movie, It's All ways life mimics the neurotic patterning ing candles. But when we first met I True, to add to those discussed; John of stories. It is south of the border that found him intelligent and agreeable, and Huston, who has lived there; Budd Boet- people watch American movies and enjoy we had some good conversations. Then ticher, who so admired bullfighters that the infinite labyrinth they are . • he read the script and his whole face he went there to make Arruza, and has changed. He demanded certain changes; not directed since; Robert Rossen, who Letitia: I don't know. ... Or rather, he said he couldn't work on the picture made The Brave Bulls and They Came to yes .... It's quite extraordinary. How long unless certain things were different. Fur- Cordura . have we been here? I've forgotten. But thermore, he would oppose its being Peckinpah hardly worked without hav- think of the number of times each of us made in Mexico unless we made those has changed places during this horrible changes, and we told him to go to hell. ing his tired head tilted toward the hot eternity. Think of the thousands of com- The conversation ended abruptly and we peace of Mexico . As well as The Wild binations which we've formed, like pawns Bunch, there is Major Dundee, taking Mexico as a rehearsal for Vietnam; The on a chessboard. Even the furniture: • Gabriel Figueroa , rhe phorographer of several Getaway, in which the fugitives are head- we've changed it round hundreds of Emilio Fernandez films (Maria Candelaria, La ing for Mexico with the money-though times .. .. Well, at this moment, every- Perla, Rio Escondido) , of John Ford's The Fugitive , thing, both us and the furniture ... is in of Night of the Iguana and Under the Volcano for . Peckinpah stops far short of the Jim exactly the same place as it was that night. ... Or is it another hallucination? Huston , and of several Bufiuel pictures -Los Oliva- Thompson novel where Mexico proves - The Exterminating Angel dos, El Nazarin , and The Exterminating Angel, for to be Hell itself; Pat Garrett and Billy the example. Kid, with Mexico the last place where an 35

by Leonardo Garcia Tsao eXle co After a long period of deep crisis for ElOtro. Mexican cinema, there still doesn't seem to be a light at the end of the projector. An in the position of backing any ambitious so called dUflng average of a hundred films is produced each year, of ~hich 80 percent originate plan of film production. In the third year the Forties and resulted from a happy with private production companies. Their one purpose: to make a good profit of President De la Madrid's regime, the coincidence of historic events; World War out of low-budget quickies. results are still meager. Perhaps the solu- II, for example, helped in gaining a strong These films fit three basic genre formu- las. There's the bordello comedy with its tion will come from the independents, commercial foothold in the Latin Ameri- whores-with-a-heart-of-gold cliches , low- brow humor, and soft-core porn. There's who with alternative ways of production, can market. And the country benefitted the working class neo-realism genre: the signal boxoffice success of El Milusos distribution, and exhibition are trying to from the flowering of talent: Emilio (Man ofa Thousand Jobs , 1981) spawned dozens of imitations, all pretending to be find a way out ofthe morass. Fernandez, Fernando de Fuentes, and gritty portrayals of the plight of Mexico City's proletariat, but actually hackneyed Under the guidance of Alberto Isaac- Alejandro Galindo, among others. At melodramas with demagogic points of view. And there's the borderline thriller himself a movie director and, for a present, most filmmakers from that with assorted bootleggers, drug dealers, country music singers, wetbacks, and so change, not a presidential sibling-the period are either dead or retired. The on. The latest success in that genre is Lola la Trailera (Lola the Truckwoman , De la Madrid government has made only true exception is famous cinematog- 1984), a clumsy actioner that probably learned a thing or two from Hollywood B tentative steps toward encouraging the rapher Gabriel Figueroa, who recently movies like Truck Stop Women , with a dash of bordello-genre conventions independents; already a couple of inde- did the photography for John Huston's thrown in for good measure. pendent pictures and an experimental Under the Volcano. It's sadly telling that The remaining 20 percent of annual Mexican film production is divided film contest have received partial state in the same film, Emilio Fernandez, the between the state companies and the independents. Fifteen years ago, during funding. But getting a film made doesn't director with whom Figueroa did his best former President Luis EcheverrIa's re- gime, the state was the main producer of guarantee it will be shown. In the Eche- black-and-white work, could be seen in a \"quality\" pictures. Helped by grants from the Banco Cinematografico, a now- verrIa years those ftlms produced by the bit part as a frail old man. extinct institution headed by Echeverria's brother, Rodolfo , a young generation of state weren't handled properly, and most A new breed followed the Golden filmmakers - generally film school gradu- ates-had a chance of getting their pro- of them bombed at the boxoffice. Today, Agers 20 years later. These young direc- jects off the ground. the few works of merit are seen merely by tors deeply felt the influence of the All that came to an end with the Lopez Portillo government. Thanks to the a minority in marginal exhibition circuits, French New Wave; some of them had pisastrous administration of Margarita Lopez Portillo, the president's sister, cine-clubs, and film archives, while the been graduated from European film state film support was reduced to a mini- mum. When films were funded, they large audiences flock to see American schools. Of this group, only Jaime Hum- were often international co-productions helmed by foreign directors. Red Bellsl movies or the trash produced by the pri- berto Hermosillo has pursued a steady, Mexico in Flames (1981) , Russian direc- tor Sergei Bondarchuk's costly turkey, is vate companies. That trash has been individualist career. Unlike most mem- the clearest example of that wrong- headed policy: it earned neither prestige around for so long that it's become a hard bers of his generation, Hermosillo hasn't nor boxoffice returns. habit to break. • directed TV programs, commercials, or The Lppez Portillo government left the country in a state of economic crisis routine outside projects; his films are that further stanched its cinema's growth. Nowadays, with the second largest for- During the Lopez Portillo administra- often independent, state, or university eign debt in the Third World and an ever- mounting inflation rate, the state is hardly tion there was talk of returning to the financed. Recently, he moved from Mex- \"Golden Age\" of Mexican cinema. That ico City (where Mexican cinema is essen- 36

inderbox with almost all dialogue and chronologi- cal sequence, Leduc has rendered an Paul Leduc's Frida. impressionistic account of Kahlo's life story through a series of striking images tially based) to Guadalajara, where he Poquianchis (1976). Alas, he has shot that confirm his standing as an imagina- tive visual stylist. As Mexico's foremost shot his latest film, Dona Erlinda y su nothing but commercials since 1982. film historian, Emilio Garda Riera, has hijo (Dona Erlinda and Her Son, 1984), Arturo Ripstein made his name with suggested, Frida also poses an intriguing question: whether artists of the Left, like mostly with local amateur actors and two superb films, El lugar sin limites those portrayed in the film , have man- aged to get in touch with the working technicians. Dona Erlinda repeats two (The Place With No Limits, 1977) and classes they identify with , or have merely surrendered to the seduction of radical themes that are recurrent in Hermosillo: Cadena perpetua (Life Term, 1978). chic. homosexuality and a dominant mother Then last year, after a fair share of duds, Jorge Fons is something of a suspended case. After two remarkable works, the figure who strives to keep her family he returned to prominence with EL otro Caridad episode from Fe , esperanza y caridad (Faith, Hope and Charity, 1974), together. This defiantly self-indulgent (The Other), an eerie film about a dis- and the feature Los albaniles (The Brick- layers), he has been unable to do any- film is also a milestone: the first out-of- turbed young man's suicide after a love thing but a documentary on Vietnam and educational TV programs. To use an the-closet, totally gay film in Mexican affair gone wrong. Ripstein shuffles time Andrew Sarris category, Fons remains a Subject for Further Research. cinema. and space to create a sense of oneiric Social concience meets experimental Fel.ipe Cazals is another survivor of the mystery-a mood that just barely atones sytle in the work of Ariel Zuniga. His films Anacrusa (1978) and Uno entre Sixties. Not as concerned with develop- for poor production values and camera- muchos (One of Many, 1981) are about individual victims of political repression ing a common theme in his movies as work and a screenplay, by Argentine nov- in Mexico City. Zuniga has a European taste for minimalism, and, true to form, Hermosillo, he's undoubtedly the finest elist Manuel Puig, that is too intent on monotony is made significant in his films through long takes that flirt with real craftsman among his peers. Call it inspi- explaining the story away. Even so, El time, silent pauses, de-dramatized plot- the works. This approach is far from typi- ration, intuition, or gut-instinct, Cazals is otro is Ripstein's most worthwhile film in cal of Mexican cinema; yet Zuniga has a strong sense of colors, textures, shapes, capable of privileged cinematic moments years. and sounds that could come only from a Mexico City filmmaker. That quality is even in his commissioned movies. At his Paul Leduc is a maverick among the less apparent in his recent El diablo y la dama (The Devil and the Lady, 1983), a best when dealing with fact-based stories eminent directors of his generation. He French co-production so precious it plays like warmed-over Robbe-Grillet. of violence and cruelty, usually taken has never made a state-produced film; • from the newspapers, Cazals created a what's more, he's never shot a film in 35- The youngest generation of Mexican tense and sordid atmosphere in his latest mm. His IS-year career as a director com- filmmakers consists of men in their early 30's . Most have just completed their first film, the 1982 Baja La metralla (At Gun- prises only two features, one TV movie features, and all have been through film schools. There are two of those in Mex- point) . It takes place in an unspecified (as yet unseen), and three documenta- ico City: the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematograficos (CUEC), Latin American country and examines ries, all in 16-mm. which is the national university film school; and the Centro de Capacitaci6n the situation of urban guerrilla warfare. His latest work , Frida (1983), is a Cinematognifica (CCC), the state film school. Should Cazals get his hands on a good . unique and beautiful biography of Frida The CUEC's students are known to be screenplay and curb his penchant for Kahlo: painter, wife of famed muralist strong in their political interests and a bit sloppy in their technical know-how, Peckinpah-like bloodbaths, he will return Diego Rivera, friend of the exiled whereas the CCC filmmakers are reputed to have a more pragmatic education with to the high standards of his previous Trotsky, member of the Communist an auteurist emphasis. Of course, it isn't exactly true in both cases, but the CUEC is Canoa, EL apando (both 1975), and Las Party, and current cult figure. Dispensing responsible for the production of valid political documentaries, like the ones 37

Jose Carlos Ruiz and Ignacio Guadalupe in Vidas Errantes. made by a couple of graduates, Carlos alyptic conclusion. them convincing in a Mexican setting. Cruz and Carlos Mendoza. Regardless of how powerful either the Garda Agraz insists he wants only to practice his craft and isn't interested in In their so-called \"Cha Cha Cha Tril- film school documentaries may be, they doing p~rsonal films. To prove this, he's ogy\"-Chapopote (1979) , El Chahuistle haven't reached a wide audience. just finished a Hollywood co-production (1980), and Charrotitlfm (1982)-such Chances that they ever will are slight. titled Dreams ofGold. national problems as the oil economy, And so some young independent direc- malnutrition, and corrupt unions are tors have tried to make a more commer- Maybe the strongest link between viewed with an acute critical eye and a cially inclined kind of movie, to assure Mexico's classic cinema and this new gen- healthy sense of humor. Mendoza also their professional survival in the industry. eration is in Vidas errantes (Wandering collaborated on Salvador Diaz Sanchez's For example, the yet-to-be-released De Lives, 1984) by Juan de la Riva, another iLos encontraremos! (We Shall Find veras me atrapaste (You Really Got Me, CCc graduate. The storyline is simple: a Them!, 1982), a bold documentary that 1983) by CCc graduate Gerardo Pardo traveling picture-show run by a cheerful denounces the little-known disappear- practically begs acceptance from the man and his young apprentice makes its ance of political prisoners, through the young audience with its sex-drugs-and- rounds along the small villages and saw- personality of Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, rock 'n' roll philosophy. The plot is inane, mills of the Durango mountains. At the presidential candidate for a Leftist party the characterization never goes beyond same time, they and some friends erect a and herself the mother of a missing the old \"heads are good/pigs are bad\" hip- ramshackle movie theater at the outskirts activist. pie axiom - the whole thing resembles a of a town. In his choice of film clips, De la live-action Fabulous Furry Freak Broth- Riva pays homage to Luis Bui'iuel, Emilio As it happens, the CCc's current boss is ers cartoon. But Pardo is an able director Fernandez, and Ismael Rodriguez, while also one of Mexico's best documen- who knows his public. If You Really Got his narrative style shows the influence of tarists. In over 15 years of work, Eduardo Me is ever released, he may have a huge Wim Wenders. Vidas errantes wants to Maldonado has focused on the labor and hit on his hands. be Kings ofthe Road, with good-natured economic problems of the working and country charm instead of German angst. peasant classes through a compassionate There's also a minor film noir revival , It is a film that blisses out on niceness. At point of view that never obscures his with Luis Mandoki's Motel (1983), a the end, the movie theater is burnt to the straightforward political acumen. His cross between Macbeth and The Postman ground; the characters' sole reaction is a most recent documentary, Laguna de dos Always Rings Twice, and the more inter- stoical shrug of the shoulders. tiempos (Lake of Two Seasons , 1982), esting Nocaut (Knockout, 1983), a first deals with the Mexican oil industry, and feature by Jose Luis Garda Agraz about a That is an apt metaphor for the present in particular with the socio-economic and boxer who murders a drug kingpin and is situation. Together with the country's ecological changes endured by a small pursued by thugs, police, and his own economy, Mexican cinema may have community of peasants and fishermen memories in nighttime Mexico City. gone down in flames - as the Cineteca since a huge oil complex was built in its Garda Agraz is respectful of film noir Nacional did literally three years ago. vicinity. Supported by facts, figures, and conventions - the paranoid hero, the What can filmmakers do except stand images that speak for themselves, Maldo- extensive use of flashbacks , the dark aside and keep their own flame burning nado draws his expose to an almost apoc- streets imagery - and manages to make with a smile, a prayer, and a shrug? 38

Central America: The Domino Next Door 1 ~ .j . ~ ~ .. to ~ I ,. - .... l ~~~. ' J' Under Fire. EI Salvador: Another Vietnam. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-~\"r;::e:aiili~st;;i;c.:\":\"-:s~o~m~e~t+h:;:ing in Panavision and Nicaragua, it became possible, even in- evitable, for Hollywood to make films by Carol Cooper Technicolor might be? Those few films critical of U.S. policy in Latin America. set in South American locations only Wartime films, cold or hot , make for great dramatic settings. And - ironically when In a 1937 Fred MacMurray vehicle, helped convince the Latino colonials of Hollywood plausibly explains, in con- Swing High, Swing Low, Panama City is the U.S.A:s fundamental wonderfulness. cise, emotionally vivid terms, how and why America bullies its neighbors to the portrayed as a Central American boom They even internalized the notion of south - stateside audiences go home purged and complacent. town where expatriate Yanks and Europe- their country's underdevelopment. For that reason, the dream makers now ans have all but squeezed the locals out of Then Cuba happened. And the whole battle the documentarians for realism . The former study the latter for a wealth of business. Elegant in their white tropical carefully stacked house of cards - hero detail, and learn how best to manipulate the floating variables of sympathy and suits - but possessed, male and female worship, economic dependency- moral identification. Writing in late 1979 Gust after the onset of the Iranian hostage alike, of an indolent, predatory sexual- became irrevocably suspect. A tiny coun- crisis) about Richard Lester's Cuba, Andrew Sarris wrote: \"If anything is to be ity - the Spanish-speaking majority is try that had virtually become a 51st state deduced from the political turmoil of the past few weeks it is that American self- caricatured when it is not ignored. opted for independence instead. Cuba flagellation will be less fashionable in the Eighties than it has been through the Six- Released on the eve of Franklin Delano proved it was possible, and perhaps even ties and Seventies.\" If anything, Holl y- wood's self-flagellation has ach ieved a Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy, this desirable, to break away. By so doing, it level of perfection worthy of deSade in its translation of every guilty welt into orgas- film perceived the Canal Zone as a west- helped unravel many of the movie-borne mic self-justification. ern hemisphere Hong Kong, with lots of myths about Cold War strategems. Cuba is very much the thematic fore- runner of Under Fire (1983), the only pre-Boxer Rebellion hostility between With the growth of Cuba's own film substantial twist being that Nick Nolte is on the side of the insurgents , where swarthy natives and golden opportunists. industry, and the encouragement it lent In truth, the Panama Canal prompted to leftist directors all over Central and the economic protectionism our country South America, there was suddenly would soon demand throughout Central strong opposition to the Hollywood America. As usual , Hollywood reflected cliches. Screenplays on both sides of the the national arrogance that made this political debate now had to respond to a possible. more sophisticated, more polarized view- In subsequent decades , Guatemala, ership. Through the Sixties and Seven- Belize. EI Salvador, Honduras , Nicara- ties, filmmakers started to deal with the gua, Costa Rica, and Panama - in a thrall new dialectic - the ticklish business of re- to multinational industry and ethics- acting to two lines of propaganda rather became a fairly passive market for Ameri- than one. In the Seventies in particular, can films. American movies exported with largely negative public reaction to American values, and who cared how CIA interference in Chile, Jamaica, and 39

Cuba's Sean Connery was a mercenary Nicaraguan revolution comprehensible in their village, is a valid attempt at merging for the Batista regime. Contrary to Sarris' ways that Reagan's rhetoric does not. You documentary and fiction. Unfortunately, prediction , the sympathetic love interest can see the seeds of Under Fire's plot the hybrid is neither a good horse nor a of the Eighties is pro- not anti- guerrilla. here, but without the dramatic expedi- good donkey, since the clever comedic In both Missing (1982) and Under Fire , ence of a visiting Yankee ubermensch to bits undermine the drama, and the social bleeding-heart liberals can have it both save the day. realism sabotages the emotional consis- ways. Individual Americans are seen as Honduras: America's New Policeman tency. Three worlds are depicted: the ignorant but righteous, perfectly capable addresses the Contra issue. One of the Guatemalan state of siege, the loony of challenging their country should the last true ~banana republics,\" Honduras is limbo of the Mexican border runners, need (usually personal) arise. The ideally situated geographically to apply and the surreal overdevelopment of sub- assumption promoted is that, if things deadly force against the two adjacent urban California. Nava has a real gift for really got out of hand, the American peo- rebel states. The military buildup in Hon- the cinematic anecdote, and offers key ple can wake up and stop the carnage. duras is nicely contraposed agaiflst inter- events in each of these environments The truths expressed in Cuba were per- views with cheerfully nonplussed teenage which allow an audience to distill the haps more to the point: meddlesome for- Contras. The parallel with our erstwhile essence of what might have degenerated eigners like Connery, and aristocratic troops in Vietnam is unmistakable. And into dogma. But his subtle pedagogy is parasites like Brooke Adams' Cuban prin- while the concessions made to commer- interrupted by weird Bunuelisms which cess, have other options. Between them cial viability in feature films extend also to undercut and distract. and the hapless spy in Roger Spottis- these documentaries-the use of sympa- When the siblings finally arrive in the woode's Under Fire are expressed the thetic image composition and charis- promised land, they are split by the direc- sentiments of America's power elite: Stay matic interviews-there is no reason why tor's conflicting intentions. The young and rule or cut and run in momentary the craft of persuasive documentary boy is thrust into an immigrant's fast lane defeat. The bottom line is still US vs. should be any less refined than the most of illegal employ, white women, and Them, but those lines are no longer compelling drama. The trick is, of green-card scams, while his sister halluci- naively drawn strictly along doctrinal course, not to betray cause or conviction nates Mayan symbols for death at the boundaries. • with too many gimmicks. same time she applies her first rouge and Guatemalan documentaries - their lipstick. The boy seems ready to embark The commercially released documen- subject recently dramatized by Anna on his own movie, a sort of El Super taries provide the subtext to all this big- Thomas' and Gregory Nava's EI Norte- Meets Scarface, when his sister dies. And budget fiction. The lean, strident shorts have availed themselves of a number of abruptly the movie comes together again produced by various independents and cinematic diversions, the better to get for American viewers, because we (albeit network news teams are viewed mostly across the horror of that country's fero- briefly) become the brother. We know by the anti-Reagan minority. Those few cious campaign against the Guatemalan that he will go on to participate and even which are eventually aired, either on Pub- peasantry. The natural beauty of the Indi- excel in the American rat race, though lic Television or as special-event pro- an's native crafts and dress is juxtaposed that is what will destroy his past and all gramming on a major network, suffer with a woman's eyewitness testimony of memory of any alternative. from the same sense of abstraction that helicopter strafing and wholesale slaugh- The failure of El Norte is the brevity of plagued nightly coverage of the Vietnam ter of women and children by govern- this epiphany. It is almost accidentally years. Icarus Films, which distributes a ment forces in Pamela Yates' and Sigel's achieved, after many detours and blind large selection of Central American When the Mountains Tremble. Protecting narrative alleys. El Norte strives for the shorts, many made by or in cooperation the interests of the United Fruit Co., sentimentality of Missing but lacks the with their subject countries, does a thriv- which pays subsistence wages for labor Costa Gavras film's emotional continuity. ing business with schools and commu- and exclusive use of a lion's share of the When playing real life for melodrama, nity groups. The quality and commit- arable land, has been the Guatemalan which all of the current crop of partisan ment embodied in most of these projects dictatorship 's task since Eisenhower cinema does, the choice of peaks and val- is unassailable. Yet the most powerful of brought it to power in the mid-Fifties. leys must be made with utmost care. these documents, circulating among The resultant impoverishment of the Humor inserted too casually can be mis- activists and intellectuals during the past area, coupled with recent programs on interpreted - although I suppose the five years, has had no stemming effect on Indian villages, has forced over 100,000 comic relief in El Norte was Nava's way of public support for the Reagan Adminis- refugees into neighboring Mexico. compensating for the lack of sympathetic tration's interventionist policies. These disease-ridden refugee camps white leads. • are the topic of Camino Triste, released in Winner of an Academy Award in 1981, 1983. It too contains powerful visuals and Indeed, the only thing that balanced the comprehensive documentary Ameri- interviews with a population mired in Miguel Littin's excellent but short-lived cas in Transition is still the most re- poverty. The enforced idleness, the cast- Alsino and the Condor (1982) was a Den- quested title in the Icarus catalog; report- off ghetto clothing, the lack of adequate nis Hopper-scripted psychedelic rant edly, there are public high schools now food, space, medicine, and sanitation which made the white military advisor in where you don't graduate before you've could be difficult to work into feature film pre-Sandinista Nicaragua appealingly dis- viewed it twice. Narrated by Ed Asner, it conventions. But Camino Triste manages affected. The rest of the film's sober controls the flow of relevant information to do in 30 minutes what El Norte only focus, on life for an illiterate little boy who with an elegance which rivals the best partially accomplishes after almost two grows up deformed because the Somoza segment of 60 Minutes. By tracing the government didn't believe in basic health pattern of U.S. involvement in the entire hours. region from the Thirties to the present, it El Norte's story, about two Guatemalan care for the poor, is misleadingly sub- makes the civil war in EI Salvador and the kids fleeing north after the army destroys dued. 40

•• In the Name of the People. ~ualn le~1t[01,tO Lib\\e en <£ent'\\.D Jlmi~ic a Nicaragua: No Pasaran. EI Norte. It is doubtful that U.S. movIegoers Bradbury's camera takes us to a Mes- Mesquita concentration camps when quito internment (\"rehabilitation\") camp, faced with a charming apologist like picked up on anything but the celebrated and interviews Sandinista officials who Borge, who will probably be perceived as acknowledge having not yet found a an urbane, clean-shaven sophist. As the conversion of Alsino to the Sandinist proper way to handle Mesquitos sus- success of \"in-transition\" films like Miss- pected of incendiary activities. Against ing and Under Fire prove, it's easier to cause, but along the way there were inte- the threat of American invasion, Brad- rally gut-level sympathy during a revolu- bury allows one leading revolutionary fig- tionary struggle than to defend the rior criticisms of working class perver- ure, Interior Minister Tomas Borge, to uneven task of reconstruction. When speak for all the pros and cons of the San- Fidel Castro first toppled Batista the U.S. sions and bourgeois fantasies - both dinista regime. Each major issue is raised was almost sanguine. The hysteria arose in a bracketed context, comparing social once all the implications of the new order cultivated under neo-colonial capitalism. and economic repression before the revo- sank in. lution to similar situations which have Four Latin American countries helped persisted longer than the current govern- That is why the films on EI Salvador ment had hoped. are so compelling. El Salvador: Another produce this political fable , including Vietnam, and the FMLN's own Decision to Strangely, Nicaragua: No Pasaran Win both clearly address that country's Mexico and Costa Rica, both nominally contains all the elements of a solid dra- civil war as an internal dispute. The for- matic presentation-pageantry(the Pope's mer, directed by Glenn Silber and Tete anti-Communist. Nicaragua's own film abortive goodwill mission) , action-adven- Vasconcellos, won an Oscar in 1981 for ture (flashback to Borge's months of tor- drawing a clean parallel line between institute collaborated on Alsino as well as ture under Somoza's guards and his Cold War propaganda and the real war. rescue by a guerrilla raid cum hostage Decision to Win , however, was a com- on several other film projects that serve to exchange), and romance (the marriage of pletely different animal. Put out the same two members of the civilian militia) - but year, it gave a palpable sense of life in the explain, and sometimes apologize for, seems more a compilation than a compo- liberated zones of EI Salvador, a preview sition. What Bradbury chose to film was of what the opposition forces hoped to their position. Nicaragua: No Pasaran is highly calculated, but not the way he build once they won. pulls it together. Thus the ultimate effect one of the latest of these, a documentary is didactic and contrived. Scenes in Under Fire , in which the Nolte character visits the rebel enclave to firmly didactic in its approach, as indica- Nicaragua: No Pasaran suffers the vul- see scenes of surprising domesticity, are nerability of its genre: it appeals to the reminiscent of the bulk of Decision to ted in its anti-invasion title: They Will Not converted but is less effective in impress- Win. Everything, even the weapons-train- ing the skeptics. They are less likely to ing and battle sequences, is done quietly Enter. . empathize with the painful paradox of and with modest efficiency. American Director David Bradbury intercuts taped portions of Ronald Reagan's most inflammatory speeches against the San- dinista government with footage of Nica- ragua's militia preparing against U.S.- backed contadora forces. It's an old and obvious technique , but effective because of the untruth of Reagan's tales of a mas- sive Cuban presence, an imposing and illegitimate military regime, and a lack of pro-Sandinista citizens. Like several of the recent Nicaraguan films, this one directly confronts the Mesquito Indian contretemps and accusations that the Sandinista government hunts and impris- ons these people. 41

neat-freaks and sophisticates , who snig- tional furor hinted at by the telecast and Meanwhile, back in the mountains, gered at Roger Spottiswoode's Under eight teens (six boys, two girls) mysteri- Fire conception of nattily turned-out drily remarks, \"Maybe we should have ously acquire rocket launchers and gre- Sandinistas with spotless bandannas and nades and learn to use them. The training guerrilla-chic berets, may be shocked to killed a foreign journalist years ago.\" None and combat sequences are remarkably note the same emphasis on personal similar to documentary sequences. The hygiene and discipline in genuine combat of .lack Lemmon's table pounding in kids see parents tortured and killed (op. situations. Critics complained that Spot- cit), occasionally merge unnoticed into tiswoode made his guerillas too together, Missing brought us this close to the heart the civilian population (check), and \"too cute.~ But the current crop of on- adopt a stranded fighter-pilot as interim location war films demonstrate that Cen- of the matter. • leadership. Why, it's the old Serutan tral American insurgents are together. If trick! Just read all the signals backward left-leaning or liberal Hollywood folk When MGM/UA released John Milius' and you have a leftist morality play. choose to work against the stereotype of Believe me, when Red Dawn's tanks and the rabid dirty Commie toward ·some- Red Dawn last year, many pegged it as the helicoptors roll up on this one-horse thing a bit more realistic, how much more Hooterville with khaki-clad Latins con- a film made by the embattled subjects cinematic revenge of the right wing. But gratulating themselves on the big victory, themselves defangs their image. Grenada comes to mind before Afghani- was it really? The movie's Star Wars-like stan does. If Red Dawn has any value at Frank Christopher's In the Name ofthe all, it is in its camp belief in the Domi- People was nominated for an Oscar this preamble was suspect enough: Russia no Theory. year, and is for the most part just an update of Decision to Win. Narrated by invades Poland; Cuba and Nicaragua pool • Martin Sheen, it follows a mixed platoon of civilian militia and battle-hardened resources to capture Honduras and El It's not, I think, that Americans don't guerillas from a \"liberated\" zone into terri- know how to do populist political films, tory yet to be wrested from Salvadoran Salvador; Mexico revolts; and NAW dis- but that they have no respect for them. government control. Each of three Even our documentaries tend to be tarted groups-the young women fighters, the solves. All of this supposedly leaves up beyond the call of duty. Good inten- pre-adolescents (many orphaned by army tions aside, Decision to Win is a far more raids), and adult urban guerrillas - is middle-America wide open for bomb silo allowed their story, their own motiva- eloquent vehicle than In the Name ofthe tions. The interviews come off so can- sabotage, which permits the CubaNics to People. Hollywood seems never to have didly and relaxed that they are suspect of had the knack for undersell, and the lust prior staging. A surveillance helicopter parachute into a midwestern hamlet as if of a big big picture with a big big message briefly interrupts a soccer game; teasing oozes over everyone like the Blob. Inured and giggles stop an all-girl morning drill. they were the Andromeda Strain. The to gore and genuine sentiment, American Can this be life during wartime? audiences are lured into theaters on the same insidious racial tokenism that gave pretext of \"human interest.\" Boy gets girl, The US Air Force captain turned medi- parent saves child, friends or siblings cal volunteer for the FMLN marches sin- us black and Latino cameos in Forties affirm their bond. Individualism is all, gle file with a platoon of old women and and the hell with collective effort. That's kids. Then he pauses during a break to musicals now gives Red Dawn a black his- why the Nolte and Cassidy characters are tell the camera what moved him to serve the focus of Under Fire, why Lemmon the Farabundo Marti Front as a doctor. tory teacher who gets blown away by the and Spacek dominate Missing. The Several of the individuals In the Name of issues on trial in Central America right the People features become familiar pres- CubaNics ten minutes after the title cred- now are so foreign to American value sys- ences. When the epilogue reveals the tems that the closest our filmmakers have inevitable - that many of the protagonists its. His white students scatter before gotten to their proper representation is to were killed - the viewer feels a little dirty. parallel the situation to our own Revolu- You want to call it a shameful manipula- \"'V· tionary War. tion of your sensibilities, but you can't. You've already been to the movies and Red Dawn. But having to reach so far back for his- cried for much less. torical resonance puts a strain on the pub- tear-gas and rocket launchers, but a smail lic imagination. We end up pitying our And this is the Catch-22 of all political neighbors to the south for being 200 films since the Forties, that media- band of hardies makes it into the moun- years behind the times. We count our created emotion is cheap simply because tains to become a commando squad as blessings for being born in the thoroughly media produce it. Such films become deadly and single-minded as the PLO. modern land of the free, and call it a reactionary by definition if not by intent. night. We can watch the little hunchback The best, purest moment in Under Fire There were lots of ways they could in Alsino and be glad we're not him. We is when heroine Joanna Cassidy sees a have played this, but they opted for an can watch the death of Indians in El Norte TV report of her ex-lover's death as she allegorical treatment that ends up no and feel the same cathartic melancholy as slumps in a makeshift Nicaraguan hospi- more offensive than Under Fire. Ron we do for the passenger pigeon. One tal full of the wounded and dying. An O'Neal, in his first major role since Super hopes in vain that a cautionary work on a observing, impassive woman notes Cassi- Fly, smartly plays a Nicaraguan field offi- par with The Deer Hunter will surface dy's discrete sobbing and the interna- cer who from the first sees the resistance before- not after- World War IJI/z. And by the occupied town as similar to his we all watch the screen fade to black. own revolutionary struggle. O'Neal's Captain Bella is permitted throughout to make comparisons between the guerrilla band of Yankee kids and Central Ameri- can insurgents, telling stiff-necked Rus- sian advisors that it went against his conception of The Struggle to hold a town in which the residents were reso- lutely uncooperative. He is made to spout poetry and write moving letters to his wife, who (we are allowed to assume) lives in a peacefully liberated worker's paradise. 42

Cuba's Shadow by G. Cabrera Infante With eyes full of Eisenstein and Soviet Ruben Blades in Crossover Dreams. vistas, nobod y knew that there was a Russian cinema before the October Rev- pirated American movies. Every foot of program, broadcast on a channel that was olution. With ears full of speeches by a positive and negative film, even for a box state-owned but not yet state-controlled. demagogue, nobody knows that there camera, including Instamatics, is bought Nothing happened when the movie was was a Cuban cinema before Castro. But abroad by ICAIC-not only in the Soviet shown on TV one Monday evening. But there was. Nestor Almendros, as a histo- Union but in Japan as well. The Institute when its makers, Orlando Jimenez Leal rian, called it in the Fifties \"a Peter Pan is the only producer and the sole distribu- and Saba Cabrera, took a copy to the cinema;' because it refused to grow up . tor of Cuban and foreign movies. It is also Censorship Board, the same from Batista Lenin had said, \"Cinema, of all the arts, is the exporter of Cuban films and O\\vner of days, PM was not given a release certifi- the one that should interest us more:' He every Cuban co-production. It is the cen- cate to be shown in a commercial theater. said art but he was actually thinking of sorship board, though one is no longer In fact the film was actually banned and propaganda. Castro, a cruder man, said needed. It controls the Cinematheque, the copy seized by the Board-by ICA IC. nothing; but since early 1959, barely two an organization founded in 1950 by Ger- The motives behind the seizure were all months after he seized power, he placed a man Puig, Nestor Almendros, and me (all political , for Guevara is nothing if not a man he trusted, Alfredo Guevara, as the now in exile), though the ICAIC insists political man, but the apparently absurd head of the Cuban Film Institute OCAIC). they created it in 1960. It also owns, but action has other, hidden reasons that only never leases or lends, all the equipment the totalitarian mind can conceive. If you Guevara, no kin to the guerrilla of the nationalized in the past or imported from could ask Dr. Goebbels, I'm sure he'd same name-never a guerrilla-was a the Soviet Union and other Communist understand. man who came from the Communist countries. It is, as Lily Tomlin used to say ranks. In exile very briefly in Mexico of her telephone company, omnipotent. There was, naturally, an outcry. The City, he had worked for the Mexican pro- Lunes writers issued a written protest ducer Barbachano Ponce, the man who Ironically, it was this all-powerful state signed by more than 200 intellectuals , made Torero , Buiiuel's Nazarin, and Bar- monopoly as instrument of propaganda writers, and artists not necessarily con- dem's Sonatas, among others, and who that sent abroad most of the filmmakers nected with Lunes. The sequestering of was partially responsible for Guevara's that are today in exile and work in Paris, PM was a serious act of violence. It was in catching the movie mogul microbe. Stockholm, Madrid, London, and all fact the first time that any work of art had Before 1959 Guevara had been a Commu- over the United States. In 1961, ICAIC been censored not because it was politi- nist agitator at the University of Havana censored a film of no importance but of cally incorrect- PM was visibly apolitical and a man nobody could even vaguely enormous consequences titled PM. The or non-political , and dangerously so-but connect with literature or the arts. title could mean post meridiem, or mas- solely on artistic grounds. The film had (Among his peculiar beliefs was his ter positive in Spanish. It is about night sinned in showing the sources of popular notion that Hollywood was a city and life on the old Havana waterfront; lack of music in Havana: among the blacks, in Wall Street was its main thoroughfare!) money forced its authors to forget about small bars across the bay, in the dens Thus he became, late in his life but early making any more copies from the nega- where the lumpenproletariat dwelled. In in the Revolution, a combination of tive. This small movie, only 23 minutes Cuba, then, the Marxist concept for the Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's henchman for long, was partially financed by the literary declasses was shortened, distorted, and culture, and Boris Shumiavsky, Soviet magazine Lunes. misdirected when the Revolution perse- high commissar for the cinema and the cuted the iumpen for being counterrevo- man responsible, among other things, for As co-producers Lunes was granted the lutionary-or for just being. Eisenstein's demise and early death. first showing of PM on their television Guevara became the head of a monop- oly, for that's what the ICAIC was - and still is. The Cuban Instituto del Cine isn't the innocent Film Institute its name leads you to believe. Some sort of ministry for film, ICAIC owns all the theaters and movie houses in Cuba, which compared to the size of the country were, and still are, numerous . There were, for instance, more cinemas in Cuba than in Venezuela, a country with ten times the population. ICAIC also imports all the movies that are shown on the island, now including 43

Only a few months later they orches- been apprehended working at the Presi- cha-cha, Cuban-Chinese restaurants, trated \"the Night of the Three Ps,\" a kind dential Palace during a meeting and was plus the Watergate plumbers:' 1t was a hit of tropical Krystalnacht in which prosti- accused of showing President Dorticos in tutes, pimps, and pederasts (and all a bad light. It had nothing to do with everywhere, from Manhattan to Miami, lookalikes) were indiscriminately lighting but with Orlando - always a free- but also from Bogota to Barcelona and rounded up as so many usual suspects cinema camera - shooting the move- from Chicago to Cannes. The Cuban cin- and sent to jail. Some were still in prison ments of the Presidential hands, which ema in exile had been born, with eclat, in in late 1969. One of Cuba's greatest writ- were never shown in public or on televi- spite of everything- including the ers , Virgilio Piilera, was apprehended sion. President Dorticos, a very nervous rhumba, the mambo, and Fidel Castro. with extreme prejudice: he was accused , speaker, used to weave his hands in weird Orlando Jimenez had become the great- as the warrant said , of \"looking like a patterns. To make a closeup of these est filmmaker Cuba has ever produced, in sodommite:' Virgilio, like Oscar Wilde , yarns, even in an insert, was counterrevo- or out of Cuba. already knew that the criminal classes lutionary. Nestor Almendros left later in couldn't spell. But this was the police! 1962, less than a year after the trials. No wonder. At 14, wonder boy was Precisely. Orlando went to New York , Nestor to handling like a pro a CinemaScope cam- Paris. Little by little everyone who had era and shooting at everything that Worried about the repercussion of the anything to do with PM left Cuba for moved, above all, legs. Small, sprightly, protest (which was never made public), good. PM had been 23 minutes that and stimulating, Orlando was the little the government staged a show trial, not shook our world - or revolutionary truth big man who with a few frijoles had made only against the little documentary but at 24 frames per second. The rest was, a beanstalk grow to reach the ogre where against Lunes and all the people asso- for some, silence. For others, cunning. he dwells . The ogre was not only Castro ciated with the magazine. It was put on, For all , exile. and his propaganda machine but also the on three consecutive Fridays, in the lec- monsters of exile that devoured so many ture hall of the National Library. Presid- • talented people and reduced others to ing was Fidel Gastro, the Maximum poverty and oblivion, or struck a few Leader and Prime Minister. On the What happened to us all is well-known. others, like Roman Polanski with neon Bench were the then President Osvaldo If you are called Nestor Almendros, it is lighting. Dorticos (who later committed suicide, very well known: exit, exile, success. If not out of remorse but for being put out you are called Saba Cabrera, the other Since the success of El Super, Guede of office) ; Minister of Education author of PM, it is not known at all: for Films became general headquarters for Armando Hart, now Minister for Culture; him exile was more than banishment, it Cuban filmmakers in exile. But Leon the members of the Communist cultural was a vanishing act. Orlando Jimenez, all Ichaso, bugged by the tag of an eternal apparat, Alfredo Guevara and Carlos enthusiasm and dynamism, conceived a co-director, left in a huff (the latest Rafael Rodriguez, who is now the third film, to be titled On the Park , the model) and pitched camp elsewhere in man in Havana . moment he arrived in Miami. He contin- Manhattan, closely coached by Max ued gathering material, perfecting his Mambru, the producer. Better than a Vic- At the trial's outcome, PM was given craft with a camera, and looking for an torian child, he was never seen or heard. back to the filmmakers , but the film angel-even an Angel Perez or an Angel But he was there all the time, pleading, stayed censored. Lunes would cease pub- Levine. But he never made the movie. plodding, plotting. lication. And Castro himself closed the Instead he formed a publicity agency, proceedings with a perfectly Stalinist together with another exceptional cam- Proof enough must be Crossover summing-up , later called \"Words to the eraman, Emilio Guede. They both Dreams, which was almost an ill-starred intellectuals:' They were truly lapidify- became successful and rich . project. The film was always near com- ing, for they turned us all into stones: pletion but never finished; South Ameri- \"Within the Revolution, everything!\" the The agency has its headquarters in can operators offering, or threatening, to Prime Minister thundered . \"Outside the New York. Here Jimenez discovered El buyout the numbers sung by the film's Revolution, nothing!\" For himself he Super, a play about the toil and trouble of star Ruben Blades, a salsero much retained the privilege of saying who was a Cuban superintendent in Queens who sought-after in the Spanish-speaking out and who was in. years before yearned to go back to Cuba, world; nobody giving Ichaso the paltry \"if Fidel falls:' In the end, after many a sums necessary to complete the movie. Everybody connected with the maga- winter, he chooses Miami as his second- zine or with PM would be in trouble, per- best bet. I saw Crossover on videotape, almost manently. Nestor Almendros , then a film with no sound and certainly with no visi- reviewer for a popular weekly, was kicked El Super superceded its stage origins, ble ending, at Mambru's office. Leon out for publishing a favorable review of and even sorted out the neo-realist self- Ichaso was both eager and wary that I see the documentary. The filmmakers them- pity that sometimes rears its disheveled his film in this state: such a sorry sight. selves , who had worked outside the Italian head (the little man vs. the forces I've been, it's true, spoiled by the video ICAIC, operating from a narrow loophole of evil exile), to become a mock-Medusa quality of British television, and my tapes in one of the official television stations , slashed here and there with jokes and are painfully pure, pristine almost. But I became closely watched citizens. Some finally wounded comically with the brand was not only amused and moved-to bor- others from the magazine found a haven of Cuban humor that Orlando loves to row Andrew Sarris' words about El in the Casa de las Americas, headed by a love. With Jiminez was Leon Ichaso as Super-but virtually glued to Mambru's revolutionary heroine, Haydee Santama- co-director and also a proud producer, the decrepit TV set. ria, who would later kill herself. It was all mysterious Max Mambru. It was, as the a mess that looked like all mass: mass credits go, \"a Cuban-American comedy\" Here was a film of several successive trial, mass sentence, mass exodus . made by \"the people who brought you the exiles. Exiled is its music, a salsa that is rhumba, the mambo, Ricky Ricardo , dai- the offspring of Cuban popular music of Orlando Jimenez left first. He had quiris, good cigars, Fidel Castro, cha- the Forties and Fifties surfacing in New York, with the double link of Blades being half Cuban and Ichaso being all Cuban, 44

with a sense of rhythm and riot. Cross- get than the films already mentioned. But tro y Cuba; it closes for the moment the over is, above all, triumphant proof by they have yet (0 achieve international chapter on lengthy documentaries about Ichaso that, after El Super, he could attention. Castro's Cuba shot by Cubans abroad make it on his own. Or rather without almost shot by Castro on his island. Orlando Jimenez, who happens (0 be his Guaguasi (1984) is the best of the lot. Suarez is the connection between this brother-in-law. This movie is in fact It is the story of a peasant, almost a film and the first feature by a remarkable almost a job of the Cuban brotherhood, moron, who becomes a guerrilla by con- actor turned director, Orestes Mata- the meta-mafiosi, full of (Otal allegiances tagion and executioner by trade when the chena. He was the nature boy in and doublecrossover dreams that any can war is over, and later is even the murderer Guaguasi and is now the sophisticated buy. of his mistress and his best friend, her director of Tainted, a thriller. lover. This is the fable of the innocent Orlando Jimenez, after trying to make turned evildoer. Shot in images of a Tainted has nothing to do with Cuba or a film with Ruben Blades out of Blades' Gauguin-like splendor, Jorge Gutierrez- exiles. It is played by Sharri Shattuck and homage to Benoit Brecht in the song Ulla's film shows that paradise on earth is other American actors and was shot in \"Pedro Navaja;' went on to make with just the site to build hell. As Susan Sontag North Carolina. There is not much sun in Nestor Almendros the terribly funny, ter- wrote: \"Beautiful, human and it; it is set in winter. In the first five min- ribly triste (gays are suddenly so sad) undogmatic. A moving and disturbing utes a beautiful woman is raped, a rapist is Improper Conduct. This documentary killed, and a jealous husband comes back told what happens if you happen to be an Almendros and Leal. too late and dies of mortification. Tainted indigenous Cuban and a dissident: sex- story of sexual innocence and corrup- reminds me of the old \"Guantanamera\" ual, social, or literary. tion.\" Nobody can say that what we see in melodramas from Cuban radio. this film - shot in the Dominican Repub- Conduct is more than, and less than, a lic and Puerto Rico-isn't Cuba. Other exile films bear mention. The documentary and as such has won awards very successful comedies by Guillermo in festivals in Strasbourg and Barcelona, Guaguasi, was photographed by Alvarez Guedes are spoken in Cuban but and has been praised and prized almost Ramon Suarez, who won prizes for Mem- have proved popular all over Central and everywhere in the Americas. Except, nat- ories of Underdevelopment and now South America. Camilo Vila's Gusanos urally, Cuba, where it has been called seems to be shooting all the Cuban mov- (Wonns) was made in Puerto Rico but has names, none of them pretty. As the syn- ies abroad-those not shot by Orlando its plot taken from Sartre's The Dead opsis says, this is \"a filmed investigation Jiminez. Suarez shot Fausto Canel's Without Graves. There is also Amigos that sheds light on the revolution's shad- Power Game, made in Spain but truly an from Ivan Acosta, who wrote the play on owy side.\" Where they say shadowy I'd English-speaking thriller, as if Michel- which El Super was based. There is Vila's say dark, but it is much, much more than angelo Antonioni had gone from London Rla, Rla, Rla!, also shot by Ramon that (i.e., can you be gay in Cuba?). The to Madrid. Suarez also shot a Swedish Suarez. Meanwhile back in Madrid, film marks a happy reunion. Almendros documentary directed by Humberto Roberto Fandifio, another ICAIC man, and Jimenez had collaborated before, in Lopez, formerly from tCAtC, titled Cas- has made at least three feature films, one Cuba, in 1961, on a shon that dealt with of them with Isela Vega, once Sam Peck- music and a minority, the descendants of inpah's favorite Mexican moll. And the original French settlers and their Ramon Barco chose, of all people, Car- slaves from Haiti still living in Oriente roll Baker to be the bashful blonde in his Province, Cuba. This beautiful minimal Mecanismo Interior. movie, La tumba francesa, (The Black French Drummers), was made in a kind of If most of the movies made in exile by internal exile, privately financed and shot Cubans have behind the camera the eyes almost in secret. of either Orlando Jimenez or Ramon Suarez, somewhere in the cutting room At the Miami Film Festival, Orlando they have the eyes and hands of Gloria Jimenez has recently opened his latest Pifleyro. She is the editor of El Super, movie, made (Ogether with Carlos Fran- Little Rain, Guaguasi, and La Orra qui, a Cuban revolutionary writer in exile. Cuba, plus many shorts and commer- I saw L'otra Cuba (produced originally by cials. Gloria in excelsis (you should see Italian television) on television, too, and I her invisible mending) is an editor in haven't yet seen the final cut. I am willing, exile. however, to endorse what Bill Cosford, the movie reviewer for The Miami Her- There is a very ambitious new project ald, had to say: \"The Other Cuba is the of Orlando Jimenez called A Profile of most effective film to date on the tragedy Fidel. Perhaps some of the men behind of Cuba's revolution; it's a chronicle of the camera will change positions and, in a friends betrayed and ideals abandoned, Matachena reversal, will become actors. told for the most part without hysteria or Cubans, as Fidel Castro attests, can be tub-thumping:' The Other Cuba is what the greatest actors. exile is all about - what the cinema of exile really is. Jiminez, Pinyero and cameraman Emi- lio Guede-with Max Mambru-com- • plete a true crew. A Cuban crew making Cuban movies in exile. And all because of But there are other Cuban films made a small movie in black-and-white with the in exile that were not other films either. In poorest sound shot in 1961 by two fact some of them are closer to their tar- amateurs! 4S

Miami's Miami Film Festival, now in its sec- ond year under the directorship of Nat ~utores' Chediak. What Have I Done to Deserve This!? The son of a Lebanese diplomat, Che- diak came to Florida with the wave of by Enrique Fernandez the U.S. barrio cinema circuit, but few exiles from Cuba, which had a signifi- American cinephiles would wander into cant legacy of cinephilia. The older gen- The view presented by the New Left these neighborhoods, where one could eration of Cuban cineastes included films of Cuba and Latin America - shown occasionally catch a Bufiuel comedy play- novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante mostly in 16mm on college campuses in ing as straightforward entertainment. It (Three Trapped Tigers, Infante's the Seventies by Tricontinental Films- wasn't until the student radicalism of the Inferno), director Tomas Gutierrez Alea was intelligent and conscientious. But the Sixties .that the Anglo-American public (Memories of Underdevelopment), and films' radicalism - in art as well as in poli- became aware of a cinema that spoke cinematographer Nestor Almendros. tics -limned an unorthodox perception Spanish. Thus, by the end of the last dec- This tradition found its heir-in-exile in of Latin reality that stood in the public's ade, the Hispanic films released in the Nat Chediak. Today, this Lebanese- eyes for the cinema of a whole continent. U.S. seemed divided between the com- Cuban-American runs two successful art This was, in fact, the Other Latin cin- mercial, conformist, and often poorly houses in Miami's fashionable Coral ema. The mainstream industries of made studio Output that played the bar- Gables and commands the festival, using Spain , Mexico, and Argentina - the rios and the politically militant cine de these venues to enrich his interests, Spanish speaking world's major filmpro- autor that played colleges. honor his heroes, and explore his obses- ducing countries - were putting out sions-an Henri Langois ofthe tropics. something quite different. But are all Latin autores revolutiona- ries? The mid-Eighties, with the radical- Quality Latin cinema plays well in The commercial Spanjsh-Ianguage cin- ism of the last two decades grown a little Miami, a city with an affluent, well-edu- ema evolved its own conventions, genres, wilted at the edges and with Spain, cated Hispanic population, though it stars-in Mexico, Luis Bufiuel played Argentina, and Brazil newly liberalized, is goes without saying that radical Marxist with the system joyously, as when he cast seeing a new cinema; Spain in particular cinema is not hot among Miami's Cuban matinee idol Arturo de Cordova as the enjoys a prodigious number of energetic Americans. It makes sense, then, to find paranoiac in El. The films from the His- autores. This personal, less obviously personal, non-politically engaged cine de panic studio systems perennially played politicized cinema from the Iberian world autor at the Miami Film Festival. has found a port of entry in the U.S.: the Even a festival film about the struggle against oppression, like Maria Luisa Bemberg's CamUa, is a far cry from agit- prop . The scenario is the cruel Rosas dictatorship that choked Argentina in the 19th century, and though Bemberg meant to strike parallels with Argentina's recent period of repression, the historical distance removes Camita from any con- temporary political battlefield that would be polemical in Miami. The freedom CamUa celebrates is personal, erotic, the freedom to love. It's a glorious romantic tale-the doomed affair of an oligarch's daughter and a handsome young priest- unhappily overcooked by a heavy hand with a greased lens; yet even as the festi- val was going on, Camita was nominated for an Oscar. No sign could be clearer: By the measurable standards of excellence, Miami was showcasing the cream of the new Iberian ~inema, the work of the best contemporaryautores. Though many of the films in Miami came from outside the Spanish-speaking world, the Hispanic presence dominated. Spain had the largest representation. Chediak is a fan of the Spanish cinema, and the festival entries echoed his prefer- ences: quirky, self-conscious, comic films. The most striking of these was Pedro Almodovar's What Have I Done to Deserve This? - an irreverent look at life in a working-class housing project that features some of the least-cliched humor 46

of any recent Spanish comedy. Almo- situations and a godawful acting style that mentary about Latin American romanti- dovar explained that his film was an echoes, badly, the classic era of Argen- cism, not machismo. Their candid re- exploration of the different kinds of tine comedy. Miami's predominantly His- sponses strip the bachelors bare. maternity, and Carmen Maura, who plays panic audiences liked it, though; Sweet the hardest suffering of the film's moth- Money is a straightforward example of a And her Our Marriage engaged the familiar and popular genre. Miami audiences even more directly. ers, told how in Madrid working-class Based on a book by c la ssic romantic Moderism is the issue that separates dime-novelist Corln Tellado, Our Mar- wives stop her in the street to sympathize these two comedies. Almodovar is a riage is a deadpan adaptation in which with her miseries. \"They tell me, 'My modernist, Ayala isn't. For some of the the irony run s like an undercurrent that husband is just as bruto, '\" said the ac- new films, modernism is all too much , in can be tapped at any moment but never tress, whose character finally dispatches fact. The obsessive self-consciousness of intrudes . The film quotes the same Rose- her bruto with a well-aimed soup bone. Gonzalo Suarez's Epilogue and Emilio bud-lips shot as Everything Is Wrong, but Martlnez-Lazaro's Everything Is Wrong in a clever structuralist maneuver, the Inventive as What Have I Done to smacks of artsy trendiness. Unfortu- shot signifies everything opposite from Deserve This? is, it may seem too mild nately, neither director has the sang froid Citizen Kane's. It's the lips of a young girl for non-Spanish viewers accustomed to needed for structuralist filmmaking. not an old man and the words are the gen- kinkier, more outrageous stuff. Still, it's der opposite of the answer (in Kane the invigorating to breathe Almodovar's free- Epilogue is almost a parody of an art shot poses the question) to Rosebud: dom and to hear such foul-mouthed, film, and only the performance of the \"Papa.\" Underscoring the word that way is streetwise humor in a Spanish-language aged Francisco Rabal, as half of a suc- not gratuitous; Our Marriage is one long movie. In recent cinema from Spain, sex- cessful two-man writing team, makes it Oedipal joke. The result is a film that ualliberation has reached such a self-con- worth watching. The plot is as silly as that pleases the romance fan, the Latin-kitsch scious state of nonchalance that charac- ofthe two novels the two men concoct- collector, and the deconstructivist aU at ters go off to have sex as if to blow their that their adolescent machismo is sup- once. This is a work that can be enjoyed noses. By contrast, What Have I Done to posed to keep the female member of their on several levels-depending on whether Deserve This? contains one of the sharp- menage hooked is the second silliest the spectator glides along with the glitzy, est and funniest sex scenes in any lan- thing about the movie, the first being the absurdly bourgeois romance or pays guage, between a prostitute and an cutesy self-consciousness of the circular attention to the Freudian subtext-and it enthusiastic exhibitionist. Trying to rush structure. Everything Is Wrong looks like is a tribute to Sarmiento's talent that the session, she intones in a fake-jovial beginning film student stuff, with every- those women in the Miami audience who voice, \"I think I'm going to come. Yes, I thing in quotes. It's a mock thriller all read Our Marriage as a handsome adap- really think so. I'm definitely coming. wrapped up in its own misguided clever- tation of their favorite author were thor- Yes, I came. I did. Why, how nicely I've ness. A famous rich man's dying words oughly satisfied. come.\" (would you believe extreme closeup of lips?) set off a quest for the truth about • Almodovar's film is populated by prole- him, with clues strewn in a series of film tariat eccentrics, as if a neo-realist movie \"texts.\" One suspects that both films Guillermo and Miriam are in bed with had been taken over by the Monty serve a function in the development of a the Haitian. Cuba's most famous writer, Python crew. Curiously, it's a painfully new Spanish cinema and that a Hispano- long in exile, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, honest film about working-class life, cinephile like Chediak appreciates them and his wife, Miriam Gomez, have caught probably because Almodovar, except at in special ways. Still, these films, like the crippling flu dubbed el haitiano that the end, resisted the pathos of his charac- much of the new Spanish cinema, do not scourged the Miami Film Festival. For ters· conditions. There are economic rea- travel well. Their tentative outrageous- days they stay in their room at the River- sons for the cramped quarters, the sleazy ness is part of the new Spanish cinema's pare Hotel, warning visitors to stay a trades, the eventual breakup of the fam- search for a language in an era of artistic healthy distance from their dreaded hai- ily; but no one shouts them in this subtle, and political freedom. Outside that par- tiano. Cabrera Infante entertains com- whacked-out social comedy. ticular dynamic, however, they seem old- pany with his impression of Sam Fuller, fashioned and mild. who is joining him for a panel on literature Less successful at materialist hijinks is and film later in the week. Chediak's the Argentine comedy Sweet Money, If the new cine de autor from Spain and guest for the second year in a row, directed by Fernando Ayala, about a cabi- the rest of the Iberian world seems a bit Cabrera Infante is becoming the Miami netmaker sucked into the world of high- provincial, one homeless autor, actually festival's godfather, like Truffaut - who finance chicanery by an old buddy who's autora, presented some of the most was memorialized at the festival- was to ~made it.\" The story sticks close to recent sophisticated festival entries. Valeria Sar- the New York Film Festival. And for the Argentine economic history, the chaos miento is a Chilean living in Paris. Her second year the Cuban writer is here in wrought by the currency crisis that has husband is Raul Ruiz, whose City of person and on film. Last year it was for ravaged not only Argentina but nearly all Pirates was featured in the festival. But it Nestor Almendros' and Orlando of Latin America. was Sarmiento, with her understated Jimenez-Leal's Improper Conduct; this feminist irony, who was the real find of time it's for Jimenez-Leal's The Other Plunged into modernity by the short- Miami. HerA Man When Helsa Man, an Cuba. Both documentaries are blows lived favorable rate of exchange, a tradi- imaginative documentary on machismo aimed by the exiled Cuban intelligentsia tional family finds itself deluged with shot in Costa Rica, sent Miami's Latin against the regime of Fidel Castro. consumer goods, most of it incompre- audiences howling at her wicked decon- hensible electronic gadgetry-bought in struction of the all-roo-familiar macho Like Improper Conduct, The Other Miami, of course. However, the film's mystique. Sarmiento told her subjects, Cuba was made for European TV. In comic potential is seriously stunted by a mostly men, that she was making a docu- Miami, where no words are spared to directional style that is the precise oppo- berate the m!J.ximo leader of the Cuban site of Almodovar's. This is a traditional studio film, full of stock characters and 47

Revolution, these films are mild stuff: present regime were overthrown.\" dropped the frail Lydia Cabrera three history lessons based on old footage and talking-head interviews with some of the The official opinion of the exiled seats away on the same row as the young more articulate, thoughtful exiles. Their version of the Cuban revolution-told Cuban intelligentsia as it is expressed in firebrand. more or less chronologically-admits to a righteous upheaval against a cruel dic- The Other Cuba is that Cuban culture Besides the unavoidable stiffness of the tator and a need for reform, but sees that process betrayed by its power-hungry and Castro are incompatible. Thus, we closeup format, The Other Cuba suffers leader. Though in Cuba these works must be seen as part of a diabolical, CIA-based have The Other Cuba's list of exiled over- from another layer of problems. There plot to discredit the revolution, they are, in fact, the authentic point of view of the achievers and Cabrera Infante's putdown are interviews with Mariel refugees, right least hysterical of Castro's enemies- those who, were Cuba a Western democ- of the writers who are at peace with the off the boat, that capture, as only the cin- racy, might constitute an aggressive, vituperative, but nonviolent opposition. revolution. There is some deep truth in ema can, the raw drama of immediacy. Alas, Cuba is a third-world country plagued by a history of shabby politics, this position, but it is an oversimplifica- This footage, which comes from a docu- repressive dictatorships, imperialism, and now the enforced homogeneity of tion. The artistic community is divided. mentary about the boat people by The state Marxism. What The Other Cuba ' and to some extent Improper Conduct Though Lydia Cabrera is in exile, the Other Cuba's screenwriter, Jorge Ulla, reveal is that alongside Cuba's turbulent politics something else has flourished in great Manuel Moreno Fraginals never left. contrasts with the presence of Cabrera the island (though often in exile from it): culture. Miguel Barnet is not an insignificant Infante, Padilla, et al. One believes in the The Other Cuba does its best to flaunt writer, as Cabrera Infante claimed. And boat people's pain while the writers - no Cuba's cultural stars and their alienation from Castro's regime. In fact, Cuban cul- the major established figures of Cuban matter how articulate, charming, and pro- tural history is more complex and, in cer- tain ways, of a piece, in spite of politics. culture - ballerina Alicia Alonso, poet vocative - have been stating their point Yet no matter how it is presented, the phenomenon of Cuban culture is aston- Nicolas Guillen, novelist Alejo Carpen- for so long that their statements seem ishing. Afro-American scholarship, for example, is virtually a Cuban invention, tier, and artist Wilfredo Lam - always rehearsed and ring false even if they're and here is the world's most important living Afro-Americanist, Lydia Cabrera, supported the revolution. However, the true. The problem is generic. The stam- onscreen explaining why she left Cuba, while the flesh-and-blood Cabrera, who artistic generation that came up with the merings of the traumatized work on film; lives in Miami and is nearly blind, asks her theater-seat neighbor, \"Is that me revolution has been, to a large extent, the manicured phrases of writers don't. talking?\" alienated from that process. Thus Cuba's Except in very limited ways, documenta- The haitiano kept Guillermo Cabrera Infante from attending the screening, but most brilliant writers-Cabrera Infante, ries can tell us little. No one should walk in the film his presence is a joy. (A deli- cious bit of in-humor is his parody of the Severo Serduy, Heberto Padilla, Rey- away from The Other Cuba or Improper great Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier's French accent.) Yet one could observe in naldo Arenas -are in exile. In the mid- Conduct smug in their understanding of the Miami audience's reaction that the prodigious intelligence of these figures dle, the corpse of Jose Lezama Lima, the Cuban process. These films must be was being drowned in politics, that their radical pessimism, their disdain for his- considered by many the greatest Cuban viewed with the same skepticism with tory, went over the heads of a Cuban- American public that, like its communist writer, is now being disputed by both which films from Castro's Cuba must be foes back home, still believes in the power of men to shape the course of Cubas, proving that for the Cuban artist, viewed. The spectator must supply the events. Both Cabrera Infante and Lydia Cabrera are basically political agnostics. there is no peace-even after death. \"yes, but...\" missing in films from either The gathered congregation cheered when Lydia Cabrera declared onscreen It's doubtful that The Other Cuba will Cuba. that she would never return to Cuba, but they closed their ears to the heretical sec- have the resonance of Improper Con- Whatever their shortcomings, films ond part of her statement, \"even if the duct, for the latter appealed to a liberal from either Cuba are more thorough, public by focusing on gay rights while the more honest, and more engaging than former has no such hook and rests its Werner Herzog's The Ballad ofthe Little case on the weight of historical argument. Soldier, also at the festival. Though Her- This is not the case against the revolu- zog, who flew in for the screening, tion's excesses but against the revolution, claimed that his was not an anti-San- as currently constituted. Yet in Cuban dinista documentary and that he basically terms, The Other Cuba is a more cohe- sympathized with the Nicaraguans, it's sive, though perhaps less sophisticated hard to read The Ballad of the Little Sol- film, a precise point of view of Cuban his- dier as a neutral piece. tory, the point of view of Guillermo Ca- Ostensibly, Herzog's support lies with brera Infante, director Orlando Jimenez- the caught-in-the-middle-of-someone- Leal, and former Castro ally Carlos Fran- else's-war Miskito Indians. But all this qui, whose recent book Family Portrait documentary shows is children making with Fidel expresses some of the same anti-Sandinista statements that mayor opInIOns. may not be true but certainly do not Franqui was booed by the Miami au- sound as if they are spontaneous. There dience when Chediak mentioned his is a film to be made about the abuse of name before the screening and when he Indians and children in the Central Amer- appeared onscreen. Anyone who believes ican conflict and about the cynical manip- Castro's opposition is monolithic should ulations of powermongers of both left and take note. Franqui, a lifelong socialist, is right, but The Little Soldier isn't it. In persona non grata to many Cuban-Amer- fact, it's almost nothing, except a film that icans, who cannot forgive his involve- will sell in Miami. ment with Castro. In Miami, registered at The Festival's political neutrality did the hotel under another name, Franqui not apply to the anti-Castro, anti-com- kept a low profile. \"He wouldn't dare munist position. Not only were the show up here,\" said a tight-faced, military- Cuban dissidents and Werner Herzog in looking young Cuban-American male Miami, but-though not at the festival, of when Franqui's name was resoundingly course - so was anti-Sandinista leader booed. Actually, Franqui had just Eden Pastora. It's that kind of town. 48