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• ou STAFF ~ VOLUME 7 NUMBER 1 editor .J SPRING 1971 RICHARD CORLISS - CONTENTS assistant editor MELINDA WARD IL YASUJIRO OZU A Biographical Filmography graphic designer I- by Donald Richie MARTHA LEHTOLA page 4 2 managing editor FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT AUSTIN LAMONT w A Man Can Serve Two Masters by David Bordwell advertising manager ~ page 18 NAOMI WEISS ~ BRUCE BAILLIE assistants o An Interview research MAR Y YUSHAK CORLISS page 24 u design LINDA MANCINI VISUAL ANTHROPOLOG Y subscriptions CATH Y VAN LANCKER ~ pages 33-51 Introduction by Margaret Mead subscriptions EDITH WEINBERGER -.J page 34 Toward an Anthropological Cinema editorial board IL by Jay Ruby GEORGE AMBERG , Chairman I- page 35 Department of Cinema Studies, New York University Ethnographic Film Production 2 by Tim Asch New York , New York page 40 w Jorge Preloran JOSEPH L. ANDERSON , Director Interviewed by Howard Suber Film Program , Ohio University ~ page 43 Athens. Ohio ~ JAMES WHALE JAMES A. BEVERIDGE . Director o by Paul Jensen Programme in Film. York University u page 52 Toronto . Ontario ~ FILM FAVORITES pages 58-63 HOWARD SUBER . Assistant Professor -.J Andrew Sarris on Motion Picture Division . University of California THE SEARCHERS IL page 58 Los Angeles . California I- Miles Kreuger on IT'S GREAT TO BE ALIVE The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT 2 page 62 are those of the individual authors and do not w ELEANOR PERRY necessarily represent the opinions One Woman in Film of the editor. staff or publ isher. ~ Interviewed by Kay Loveland and Estelle Changas ~ page 64 FIL M COMM ENT, volume 7 number 1, spring 1971 , price $1 .50. FILM COMM ENT is published quarterly o LO ST AN D FOU ND . by Film Comment Publishing Corporation. by Ri cha rd Koszarski. . Copynght1' 1971 Film Comment Publishing Corporation . u George Lobe ll . and This publication IS fully protected by domestic and international Ri chard Corli ss copy right. It is forbidden 10 duplicate any part of Ihis publication page 70 In any way wi th out prior written permissio n from the publishers . Book Reviews Second c lass postage paid page 76 at Boston , Massachusetts . Subscription rates in North America: An th ology Film Arc hi ves $6 for four numbers, $12 for eight numbers; Meli nda Ward vs Ri c hard Co rli ss elsewhere $7 for four numbers. page 88 . $1 4 for eight numbers, payable in US funds only. New subscnbers please include your occupation and zip code. Classified Subscription and back issue correspondence: page 92 FILM COMMENT 100 Walnut Place Brookline Massachusetts 02146. Edito rial correspondence: FILM COMMENT 4 I Union Square West New York NY 10003 Back vol umes of FILM COMM ENT have been reprinted by Johnson Reprint Co rpo ration I I I Fifth Avenue New York NY 10003. Microfilm editions are available from . Uni versity Mic~of i l ms Ann Arbor Mic higan 48106. Please write to these companies for complete sales information. . Type set by Rochesl er Monolype Composition Company . Wrightson TYP ,?graphers and Machine Composition Company . . Prrnted in USA by Willis McDonald and Co mpany . National newsstand dislribution by B DeBoer, 188 High Street Nulley NJ 071 I O. lnlernational dislribuli on by Worldwide Media Service. ISO Fifth Avenue , New Yo rk NY 10011 USA . Library o f Congress card number: 76-498. on the cover: FLOATING WEEDS. directed by Yasujiro Ozu . photo: Museum of Modern Art / Film Still ArChive ~ -.J IL
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YASUJIRO OZU A Biographical Filmography by Donald Richie Donald Richie is curator of the Film Department Returning to Shochiku after a year in the Army, of the Museum of Modern Art. This biographical Ozu turned down six or seven scripts . He didn 't feel filmography is part of Mr Richie 's forthcoming book, like being a director, certainly not a director of Yasujiro Ozu. jidai-geki. Being on the payroll , he knew he had to make something , but he didn 't know what he wanted Yasujiro Ozu was born December 12, 1902, in to make. Eventually, the studio put him to work on Tokyo. When still young he moved to Mie Prefecture a series of comedies. with his mother and there graduated from middle school. He never went to college but joined the Wakaudo no Yume (THE DREAMS OF YOUTH), 1928, Shochiku studios in 1923-the same year as Heino- Shochiku . Script by Ozu . Photographed by Hideo suke Gosho-and worked as an assistant to Tada- Shigehara. A comedy about college dormitory-life, moto Okubo, one of the first directors to specialize based on several American pictures. in light comedy . In the new company Ozu had op- portunity to get ahead but \" the real truth is that Nyobo Funshitsu (LOST WIFE) , 1928, Shochiku . I didn 't want to . As an assistant I could drink all Script by Ozu and others . Photographed by Hideo I wanted to and spend my time talking . As a director Shigehara. A light comedy about marital mixups. I'd have had to stay up all night working on continu- ity. Still , my friends all told me to go and try , and Kabocha (PUMPKIN) , 1928, Shochiku . An Ozu finally orders came through making me a full direc- idea, scripted by the Shochiku staff. Photographed tor, \" though they put him in the jidai-geki (period- by Hideo Shigehara. Comedy about a young man film) section , the lowest in Shochiku . Here, however, and his misadventures with girls. Ozu met Kogo Noda, the screen-writer with whom he was later to do some of his finest work. Noda, Hikkoshi Fufu (COUPLE ON THE MOVE) , 1928, Sho- nine years older than Ozu , had entered Shochiku chiku. Script by Akira Fushimi. Photographed by a year after the director and had written scripts for, Hideo Shigehara. A comedy about a couple who among others, Yasujiro Shimazu . It was he who cannot stand living in the same house all the time , scripted Ozu 's first film . and are continually moving . Zange no Yaiba (THE SWORD OF PENITENCE), 1927, With this last film Ozu began to like being a Shochiku . Idea by Ozu , based on an American film , director. He said that he finally felt he knew what KICK-IN . Script by Kogo Noda. Photographed by he was doing. With his next film, he began , he said, Hideo Shigehara. to find his own style. This was , in part, an adaptation of the Shochiku house-style. Each Japanese com- While Ozu was making this film he received an pany had its own style and that of Shochiku was inductio·n notice from the Japanese Imperial Army. called Ofuna-cho-because, though the studios \"Though I tried to finish it in a hurry, I didn't have were at Kamata when Ozu joined the company, they time . Torajiro Saito (a director friend of Ozu 's) had were later moved to the city of Ofuna. We would to direct the last few scenes for me. When I finally now identify this style as naturalistic home-drama. saw it, I didn't have the feeling that it was mine-and A little smile, a few tears, a full , warm feeling-this though it was my first film I only saw it that once.\" is what Shochiku rightly thought that its public wanted . Ozu 's contribution , from the beginning, was to make both smiles and tears natural, and to make the full , warm feeling a genuine one. 4 SPR ING 1971
Nikutaibi (BODY BEAUTIFUL) , 1928, Shochiku . earlier films , to an extent, at any rate, and in any Script by Ozu and Akira Fushimi . Photographed by event his criticism even in later films could never Hideo Shigehara . An unemployed husband be- be called stern . Ozu 's way was always to film things comes his artist wife 's model. When he too turns as they are and to refrain from comment. In this painter, she becomes his model , and he wins the way he was quite different from other directors of first prize. the period , Gosho , for example, who generously sought to find a remedy for society's ills and thought Takura no Vama (TREASURE MOUNTAIN) , 1929 , he found it in polemic . From the first , Ozu was not Shochiku . An Ozu idea, scripted by Akira Fushimi , interested in politics and , as he became more and photographed by Hideo Shigehara. A melodramatic more able to say what he wanted , he became even comedy about the jealousy between a traditional less interested in the easy solution-that of the left, young geisha and a modern girl. Shochiku needed as well as that of the right. It is doubtful that he the film in a hurry and it was completed within five wanted merely to show \" the coldness of society\" (that favorite theme of the period)-rather, he want- days. ed to show things as they were and this he did Wakaki Hi (DAYS OF YOUTH) , 1929, Shochiku. through dispassionate satire rather than passionate melodrama. Script by Ozu and Akira Fushimi. Photographed by Hideo Shigehara. A student comedy about skiing . Kaishain Seikatsu (THE LIFE OF AN OFFICE- WORKER) , 1930, Shochiku. Script by Kogo Noda. Wasei Kenka Tomodachi (FIGHTING FRIENDS-JAPA- Photographed by Hideo Shigehara. A comedy about NESE STYLE), 1929. Shochiku . Script by Kogo a man and his wife who look forward to spending Noda. Photographed by Hideo Shigehara. A comedy his year-end bonus, only to find that, because of about two truck-drivers in love with the same girl. the general depression , he is not going to get one . Daigaku wa Deta Keredo (I GRADUATED, BUT ... ) , In this picture Japanese critics usually see Ozu 1929, Shochiku . Script by Ozu. Photographed by creating his first shomin-geki. This genre, later to Hideo Shigehara. A college graduate comes to have a long and honorable history, is devoted to Tokyo to look for a job. He is joined , first, by his the lives of that lower middle-class majority which , mother and , eventually, by his fiancee , all three until recently, were the economic backbone of the having to live in one small room . country. The shomin were \"people, like you and me,\" but , in the films of Mizoguchi , Gosho, Ozu, It is with this film that most critics see the emer- Shimazu-and later, the pictures of Toyoda, Chiba, gence of the Ozu style. Here, they say, he moved Imai , Kinoshita-they became something more, from the simple light comedy (a genre called non- something like spokesmen for all of Japan . As a sense-mono) to the mature social comedy. The first , film genre it became known and highly regarded they say , is emotional in its origins , the second is for its honesty-it may perhaps have somewhat by its nature analytical. As a social comedy , they overplayed hardship but, at least, it did not gloss find the film influenced by the politically oriented over life 's very real difficulties. Ozu's refusal to give \" tendency \" films of the period. Finally, they say, Ozu either himself or his audience an easy way out of became socially conscious and in this film turned from the mindless acceptance of the nonsense- mono to the stern criticism of the \"tendency\" films. Actually , however, Ozu had criticized society in his FILM COMMENT 5
.. the problems he discovered found a natural form Shochiku . Script by Kogo Noda, based on a Rene in the shomin-geki but, unlike other directors , he Schickele story. Photographed by Hideo Shigehara. refused to be ci rcumscribed by the genre. Ozu 's A romantic melodrama which Ozu wanted to pho- pictures, even these earlier ones are always-no tograph entirely within one small set and then had matter the message-about something else. They difficulty in plotting the action. are, briefly, about character-about people as they are. Erogami no Onryo (THE REVENGEFUL SPIRIT OF EROS ) , 1930, Shochiku . Script by Kogo Noda . Pho- Tokkan Ko·zo (A STRAIGHTFORWARD BOY) , 1930, tographed by Hideo Shigehara. Typical Shochiku , Shochiku . Script by Tadao Ikeda. Photographed by atypical Ozu-a nonsense-comedy ghost picture. Hideo Shigehara. Ozu was much ta ken with a child-actor he had used in a previous picture and Ashi ni Sawatta Koun (LUCKY LEGS) , 1930, Sho- made this comedy about him and his character. It chiku . Script by Kogo Noda. Photographed by Hideo had to be slipped into the Shochiku schedule and Shigehara. A variation on the popular Yutaka Abe was completed in just three days. film , ASHI NI SAWATTA ONNA-a light comedy about office workers. With this film the critic is in possession of most of the ingredients of the mature Ozu film . First, the Ojosan (YOUNG MISS), 1930, Shochiku . Script by director was a maker of comedies who had already Komatsu Kitamura. Photographed by Hideo Shige- achieved subtlety of style because he was more hara. A typical light comedy about girl journalists interested in character than in comedy . Second , which was distinguished by Ozu 's sense of humor making Ofuna-cho home-drama, he had found his and his respect for character. It surprised the studio major theme: the Japanese family-either directly or and possibly the director by getting third prize in in its extensions , the school, the company . Third , the prestigious Kinema Jumpo polls for that year. his interest in the family led him to an interest in society at large, though he always preferred to see Shukujo to Hige (THE LADY AND THE MOUSTACHE) , this larger group reflected in the smaller . Fourth , 1930, Shochiku . Scripted by Komatsu Kitamura. his interest in society had led him to the shomin, Photographed by Hideo Shigehara. Another comedy that class which was most typically Japanese and , about young ladies, but not so successful. at the same time , formed the larger part of the audience for Japanese films. Fifth , interested in Bijin Aishu (BEAUTY'S SORROW) , 1931 , Shoch iku . character, in the family , in society , he began to find Script by Tadao Ikeda. Photographed by Hideo Shi- in children a vehicle for his ideas-in particular, for gehara. A romantic melodrama. Ozu had a weak- the kind of social satire he was now developing . ness for such films , which he could not handle and never learned . He later made several such melodra- Kekkon Gaku Nyumon (AN INTRODUCTION TO mas, all of them undistinguished . MARRIAGE) , 1930, Shochiku . Script by Kogo Noda. Photographed by Hideo Shigehara. A film about that Early, Ozu became known around the studio as time of marriage when both man and wife get tired the man who says no . He had said no to becoming of their mutual life . full director. Later he had said no to a number of scripts. Now he was saying no to his actors, making Hogaraka ni Ayume (WALK CHEERFULLY), 1930, them work harder than they ever had before. Later, Shochiku . Script by Tadao Ikeda. Photographed by he would refuse to make talkies-for a time . He Hideo Shigehara. About a young delinquent who would eventually refuse to make more than one film eventually reforms. a year. Still later, he would refuse color, to succumb eventually. He never did accept wide-screen. At the Rakudai wa Shita Keredo (I FLUNKED , BUT ... ) , same time , Ozu is also remembered as an extraor- 1930, Shochiku . Script by Akira Fushimi after an dinarily affable man (off the set at any rate) , one idea by Ozu . Photographed by Hideo Shigehara. A who liked to talk as much as the next, and to drink satire on college life based , in part , on the earlier even a bit more. He was always extremely easy- keredo pictures. going but he refused to be pushed. He was a good craftsman who was now beginning to realize that This film remained important to Ozu because it he was something more. This, his company did not was the first time that he had entrusted a major role as yet know . Shochiku had hired him as a simple to Chishu Ryu , the actor who was later to become comedy man and , though they liked his Kinema central to his work. Ryu , then twenty-four , had ap- Jumpo award , the studio was, after all , a film-fac- peared in all of these early pictures (he was later tory. Ozu went along with their various assignments to say that he had been in all of Ozu 's films except for a time, but he was beginning to know himself. for BEAUTY'S SORROW and WHAT DID THE LADY He later remembered that he had tried particularly FORGET?) but it was not until this picture that he hard with BEAUTY 'S SORROW and that it hadn 't worked . became the \" Ozu-character\" himself. Several critics He also remembered that he had not tried at all with have maintained that the Ozu atmosphere would YOUNG MISS and had made a successful picture . have been impossible without this actor and Ryu , Concerning his next he wrote that \" having learned himself, soon became aware that he was himself my lesson from BEAUTY 'S SORROW , I made this pic- playing the Ozu persona in these films . \" Today ,\" ture in my best easy-going manner, and it worked .\" he was to write in 1958, \" I cannot think of my own identity without thinking of him. I heard that Ozu Tokyo no Gassho (TOKYO CHORUS), 1931 , Sho- once said , ' Ryu is not a skillful actor-that is why chiku. Script by Kogo Noda. Photographed by Hideo I use him. ' That is very true .\" Shigehara. A serious comedy about a salaried man who eventually gets fired , the film won the director Sono Yo no Tsuma (WIFE FOR A NIGHT), 1930, his second Kinema Jumpo third-prize. 6 SPRING 1971 r
With this film what Ozu called his \" darker side \" unsure of it that they delayed its release for two and what we would called his mature style began months.\" It went on to win the Kinema Jumpo first to emerge . He was not uninterested in social prob- prize that year and is the single early Ozu picture lems as such , and there were many in Japan during still shown . In it the director brought together in the 1930's, but he was much more interested in the almost perfect form the various elements which general social unease within his country. He grew comprised his own unique style , his personal way more and more able to picture this atmosphere and of looking at the world . The picture is a shomin-geki indicate how this unease affected the characters in and the rigidity of Japanese society is well implied . It is about a family unit and Ozu is more interested his films . In doing this , he did not blame the feudal in the members than he is in the unit. It is about family-system of Japan any more than he did capi- children and Ozu perfectly indicates their innocence talism (both prime targets of social critics) , and has innocently reflecting the falseness of an adult soci- consequently long been wrongly criticized for a ety. He goes further and sees that such innocence degree of passivity which he did not, in fact , pos- cannot continue . Though the film is a comedy , it sess. Confusing the passiveness of the Ozu charac- is a serious one-his two little boys will never again ter with a passiveness on the part of the director, be the same. Later, Ozu would realize that inno- Japanese critics sometimes fail to understand what cence returns-and he would celebrate the some- Ozu was doing . He was, at least in these prewar what battered simplicity of his older men who have films, showing conditions in so faithful a manner in this cold world kept , though at great cost , a kind of purity . In this 1932 picture , so bright , so funny , that they indicted themselves. At the same time, he had not yet realized that innocence can , in a even before the war, he was quietly celebrating a way, be retained . character-a personal rather than a national attri- bute-which could remain brave in the face of family Seishun no Yume Ima Izuko (WHERE NOW ARE THE pressure , which could continue to hope in the face DREAMS OF YOUTH) , 1932. Shochiku . Script by Kogo of an increasingly restrictive social order, which Noda. Photographed by Hideo Shigehara. A sequel could remain simple, naive, strong enough to con- to I WAS BORN , BUT . . . and an unsuccessful one . tinue to have faith in itself. From this stuff of tragedy , Four boys graduate from college; three of them he fashioned some of his best comedies. eventually have to ask the fourth , son of a company preSident, for jobs. Haru wa Gofujin kara (SPRING COMES WITH THE LADIES) , 1932, Shochiku . Idea by Ozu , under the Mata Au Hi Made (UNTIL THE DAY WE MEET AGAIN) , name of James Maki . Script by Tadao Ikeda and 1932, Shochiku, Script by Kogo Noda. Photo- Takao Yanai . Photographed by Hideo Shigehara . graphed by Hideo Shigehara. An atypical story- This picture was another of Ozu 's college-comedies . romantic melodrama-about a prostitute in love with For Ozu the years in university were a golden age a boy whose father doesn't like her, it takes place where the real problems of the world were seldom during the night before the young man is to leave understood , and all security was false . His affection for the army. for college life remained with him all of his life , pe'rhaps because he had never had one , perhaps Ozu often said that romantic love did not interest because it was so near the world of childhood which him , implying that he was interested only in the love offered Ozu the acute angle he needed to view and shown among members of the family. And usually, evaluate the adult world . his romantic melodramas are failures . In this 1932 film , however, he captured with delicacy and tact the Umarete wa Mita Keredo (I WAS BORN , BUT . . . ) , feeling of two genuine people in a genuine situa- 1932, Shochiku . Idea by Ozu , under the name of tion . This picture was seventh in that year's Kinema James Maki. Script by Akira Fushimi . Photographed Jumpo polls. by Hideo Shigehara. A typical suburban salaryman lives in his typical house with his typical wife and Tokyo no Onna (WOMAN OF TOKYO) , 1933, Shochi- two small sons. They are not typical. They see their ku . Script by Kogo Nada. Photographed by Hideo father, whom they love, bowing to the boss and , Shigehara. Another romantic melodrama, th is one later, they watch him making a fool of himself in a quickie . It was about a girl who works hard to order to ingratiate himself with his employer. They put her young brother through school only to have want to know why , since they themselves can easily him kill himself after he learned she had had to beat up the boss's son , he has to act this way. This become a prostitute. he cannot answer and they , in protest , go on a hunger strike. Though he punishes them he also Hijosen no Onna (EMERGENCY GIRL) , 1933, Sho- sees that \" this is a problem they will have to live chiku . Scripted by Tadao Ikeda after an Ozu idea. with for the rest of their lives, \" and he wonders if Photographed by Hideo Shigehara . Another silent they will have to live the same kind of life that he quickie, a melodrama about a street gang. has had to . They probably will. In the end, ethics seduced by hunger, they begin to see that , some- Dekigokoro (PASSING FANCY), 1933. Scripted by how, the boss is the greater man . Tadao Ikeda after an Ozu idea. Photographed by Hideo Shigehara. A boy and his widowed father live Of this, the first of his great films , Ozu has said together in a cheap apartment; the latter becomes that , \" wh ile I had originally planned to make a fairly attracted toward a young woman ; the son is disap- bright little story , it changed while I was working pointed but life goes on . It won for Ozu his second on it and came out very dark. The company hadn 't Kinema Jumpo First Prize. thought it would turn out this way. They were so One of the patterns to emerge in a chronological study of Ozu 's work is that after he has said what FILM COMMENT 7
he wants in the best possible way (as in I WAS BORN , universes where everything combines to create a BUT . . . ) there will follow several films in which he consistency somewhat greater than life-in short, appears to mark time before setting out in a new a work of art. Ozu himself remained fond of this direction . In PASSING FANCY we see a new inter- film-which won the Kinema Jumpo First Prize for est-one which sustained him throughout his career, that year-and successfully remade it in color in an interest in what we might (though he would 1959 under the title of UKIGUSA . never) call archetypal situations. Parent and child live together. One or the other is attracted toward Hakoiri Museum (AN INNOCENT MAID ), 1935, Sho- someone outside. There is a marriage. The one left ch iku . Script by Tadao Ikeda and Noda Koga. Pho- behind must learn to live alone. In PASSING FANCY tographed by Hideo Shigehara. Shochiku decided the story is the reverse of that seen in fuller form to make a series of comedies about girls in various in LATE SPRING , LATE AUTUMN , and AN AUTUMN situations. This was the first. It was to open on New AFTERNOON , but it is, in other respects , the same . Year's Day-traditionally a money-making season- This film also marks Ozu 's first conscious use of and Ozu and his staff worked day and night to finish setting as an indication of character-something he it. The film starred Kinuyo Tanaka , an actress from had already attempted in an unsuccessfully experi- whom Ozu was later to draw some great perform- mental fashion in the single-set WIFE FOR A NIGHT. ances (the mother in EQUINOX FLOWER , for example) . He had already begun to refine his technique. From Here, however, she was no better than the film . After 1930 on , Ozu gave up the optical devices upon it was finished , Shochiku decided not to make the which most directors rely. Of THE LIFE OF AN OFFICE series after all. WOR KER he remembered that \" it was a rare thing for me to do , but I used several dissolves. This, Tokyo no Yado (AN INN IN TOKYO) , 1935, Shochiku . however, is the only time I ever did . The dissolve Script by Tadao Ikeda and Masao Arata. Photo- is a handy thing , but it's uninteresting. Of course, graphed by Hideo Shigehara. A man loses his job it all depends on how you do it-most of the time and resorts to petty robbery to support the woman it's a form of cheating .\" Of I WAS BORN , BUT .. . he he loves. It won ninth place in the Kinema Jumpo remembered , \" I consciously gave up the use of polls. fade-in and fade-out. Generally, overlaps and fades aren 't part of cinematic grammar-they are only Daigaku Yoi Toko (COLLEGE IS A NICE PLACE), attributes of the camera.\" Asked to explain , he did 1936, Shochiku . Scripted by Tadao Ikeda after an so in typ ically Ozu-like fashion . \" When I first got idea by Ozu under the name of James Maki . Pho- into the movie business they used to carry the cam- tographed by Hideo Shigehara. A comedy which era around from place to place. I was husky so they became what Ozu would have called \" dark \" and made me an assistant. I had to do all of the lugging . which we would call meaningful. It starred Chishu I carried that camera for well over a year and I know Ryu and was to have been followed by TOKYO YOI all about it. Stuff that it can do is Simply not in the TOKO (TOKYO IS A NICE PLACE. ) grammar of film. \" Thus, having begun to refine how a thing was seen , Ozu now began to restrict whatev- Hitori Musuko (THE ONLY SON), 1936, Shochiku . er it was we were seeing . In PASSING FANCY he inter- Scripted by Tadao Ikeda , after an idea by Ozu under ested himself in the props and in details of the set , the name of James Maki. Photographed by Hideo simplifying , choosing not what props or set would Shigehara. A mother works hard to send her son reveal about actuality but what they would reveal to college. Later she spends all of her savings in about character. While the location was still impor- order to visit him . He, in turn , has to borrow money tant, its true importance lay in what it could reveal to put her up. about character. Despite the somewhat novelettish sound of the Haha 0 Kowazuya (A MOTHER SHOULD BE LOVED), precis, this film-which was fourth on the annual 1934, Shochiku . Script by Tadao Ikeda. Photograph- Kinema Jumpo lists-is filled with originality, integri- ed by Hideo Shigehara. A film about the relations ty, and the sharpest kind of observation . Ozu has between two brothers who have different parents. said \" I rewrote an earlier script, TOKYO IS A NICE Ozu later remembered it well , \" not because it was PLACE-in fact, I began to shoot that film , then any good , but because my father died while I was stopped for some reason or other that I forget-and making it. \" turned it into this picture.\" One of Ozu 's many Japa- nese qualities was his ability to make unlikely com- Ukigusa Monogatari (A STORY OF FLOATING binations into something original and personal. WEEDS) , 1934, Shochiku . Script by Tadao Ikeda, after Here, he was working with his college-genre again , the American film , THE BARKER . Photographed by but with it he put another, the haha-mono, that Hideo Shigehara. Though based on a popular favorite Shochiku genre, the film about mother. One American picture, the story was much changed. The of the reasons for the somewhat unlikely choice of head of a small troupe of travelling players returns haha-mono material was that such films always to a small town in the mountains where he meets made money and Ozu 's films, though critical suc- his son, fruit of a casual affair of some years before. cesses, made little and sometimes lost much . An- Ozu turned this somewhat melodramatic plot into other reason, however, and the more important, was a picture of great atmosphere and intensity of char- that Ozu perceived the reality behind the genre, just acter, one in which story, actors , setting , combined as he was always able to find the truth in a truism . No to create a whole world, the first of those eight-reel matter how many films are made about them , an individual mother is an individual person with indi- vidual problems , and it is this that Ozu showed in this fine film . \" It was my first talkie,\" Ozu has said . 8 SPR ING 1971
He was not too happy, however, about the Tsuchi- _ bashi sound-system then employed at the Shochiku studios. \" The only reason I finally agreed was that my cameraman , Shigehara, was experimenting with his own sound system , and I promised him that if it were successful I'd use it. \" After he had moved to the new Ofuna studios-this picture was the last made in the old Kamata studios-he found that he could tinker with the sound equipment (based on a Western Electric design) and that it did not get in his way too much. \" We worked in the empty studio , but the trains were so noisy that we couldn 't shoot during the day. We worked every night, and from midnight to five in the morning I made about five cuts . I really enjoyed it. \" It is typical , however, that he wanted sound to further restrict rather than amplify his style. He particularly liked the idea of the stationary microphone. It let his actors move less . If they moved less he could , he felt , get at them more. At the same time \" because I couldn 't get rid of the style of silent movies, I got upset. In spite of my understanding that everything in a talkie is different, this movie was just like a silent film . I even got to thinking that I'd been left behind by the other directors.\" It was, after all, five years since Gosho had made Japan 's first successful talkie, and Ozu was the last director to convert to sound. \" But now I realize that my clinging to the ways of the silent film really helped me with what I'm doing today.\" Shukujo wa Nani 0 Wasuretaka (WHAT DID THE LADY FORGET?), 1937, Shochiku. Script by Akira Fu- shimi and Ozu under the name of James Maki. Photographed by Hideo Shigehara. A bright and mordant comedy about the upper-classes. In the household of a hard-working, golf-playing husband, and a spoiled and indolent wife, comes a modern yo.ung niece from Kyoto . Eventually husband and wife get back together again. What keeps this charming and typical domestic comedy alive is Ozu 's continual concern for charac- ter, his wry, affectionate, and ironic outlook, and the essential seriousness of the underlying if unstat- ed conflicts : a couple married long enough to be tired of each other, the continual contrast between old and new in Japan , the problem of what to do with your life. Again , having said what he wanted to say and having said it as perfectly as he could in THE ONLY SON , OZU typically turned his back on what he had been doing and went off in search of something else . This was a change of locale. Most of Ozu 's pictures (with some exceptions, among them I WAS BORN , BUT ... ) had been laid in the \" old \" section of Tokyo , the shitamachi, or downtown , the section where tradition lingered longest. In this film Ozu went to modern Tokyo , to the yamanote resi- dential district. To the Japanese there is as much difference between these two sections of Tokyo as there is between the North and the South to an American . This film , then , indicated a new direction for the director. One, however, which he was not allowed to follow . He was drafted into the Imperial Army (he had already served his time but the war with China was on and all reserves were being called) and made to serve on the China front for All photos : The Museum of Modern Art / Film Stills Archive.
three years. In a way , the timing was good . Shochiku to see it, despite the fact that Ozu 's works were had begun to complain about Ozu 's many box-office never hits. And after that a lot of people always came failures-though they liked his critical notices and that to see my later pictures. But before long- \" he was WHAT DID THE LADY FORGET? made eighth place on working on the somewhat melodramatic TOKYO TWI- the Kinema Jumpo lists. If Ozu had remained with LIGHT at the time- \" I'm going to start making films his company it would probably have meant more that they won 't. \" That Ozu himself relied more on light comedies but no dark overtones. His going , movie-making ways than on his own perfected style however, left unknown a direction which he might in making this 1941 film indicates a three-year inter- have profitably explored. It also deprived him of ruption , and the exposure to Japan 's adventu res Hideo Shigehara, the photographer with whom he in China. It also indicates , however, a pattern unique had worked from his first film onward. Though Ozu to him-a period of relative restlessness was neces- made his own camera set-ups, and always checked sary before a major creation. That major creation each shot himself before shooting-there being in was his next picture . Japan no union laws concerning this-his photog- rapher was always much more than merely the man Chichi Ariki (THERE WAS A FATHER) , 1942 , Shochi- who pushed the button. He was included in story ku. Script by Ozu , Takao Yanai and Tadao Ikeda . Pho- conferences and had his say about the look of the tographed by Yuharu Atsuta . A school-teacher is finished film . When Ozu lost Shigehara he lost one very close to his son . When the boy grows up he of the few men who had helped him form his early is drafted , but the father has the pleasure of seeing style. When he returned , he had to find a new cam- him married to the daughter of his best friend . After eraman , a new staff, and-for a time-himself. the father dies, the son returns to carryon the family name. Toda-ke no Kyodai (THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE TODA FAMILY) , 1941 , Shochiku . Script by 0zu Ozu's work is just now being revealed as largely and Tadao Ikeda. Photographed by Yuharu Atsuta. biographical. Japanese critics-particularly Tadao After her husband dies, a mother and her youngest Sato in his excellent 1970 study of the director-have daughter move in with the eldest son. His wife , uncovered many of the seeds for earlier films in however, finds this disagreeable and so they finally incidents in Ozu 's own childhood: the story for decide to go to China and live with the second son PASSING FANCY came, indirectly, from something who has settled there. which happened to him . No film before this 1942 picture, however, had been so directly autobio- \" Before the war,\" Ozu has written , \" no matter graphical , and perhaps none had been so deeply how many best-ten awards one received , the salary felt. Ozu 's own childhood-though born in Tokyo , of the director was always the same-not enough. he spent his early school years at Ujiyama near the I went to Kido [head of Shochiku] and asked for great shrines of Ise-was a happy one. The loss of a raise. He told me to make a picture, that he 'd his father was the greatest tragedy of his life, and decide after he'd seen it. So I made this one , got this he showed in the depth and compassion of the raise, and lived a lot better after that. \" The film those many film fathers he created : those in LATE was Ozu 's first bo x-office hit- it also won the Kinema SPRING , TOKYO STORY , and many others including Jumpo first prize-and Shochiku was delighted to the one in THERE WAS A FATHER . After the death of arrange for a long-term contract. One of the reasons his own father, Ozu , within his family, took his place. for the sudden success was that three difficult years Never marrying , he lived with his mother until his had passed and the public was more prepared to death , and made film his entire life. His several understand what Ozu was showing . Another reason , romances-those with actress Kuniko Miyako , with however, was that Ozu met his company halfway. a particularly elegant Akasaka geisha-turned to The picture was a real haha-mono in the Ofuna-cho friendship rather than eventual marriage. Ozu creat- tradition , that tradition which divided such films into ed out of himself the character of the father, and one, two, and three-handkerchief pictures. Though to portray this he used Chishu Ryu , a close personal it was made severely, almost like a silent film , it was friend who was to become on film the persona of also more melodramatic than the films before and the d irector. His role in THERE WAS A FATHER is the after. Consequently, the characters were more free first of these. Critics have called his performance than usual of the human complexity which Ozu in this film \" one of the best in the history of Japa- ordinarily insisted upon. They were therefore more nese cinema .\" It helped the picture win the Kinema like the ordinary movie-characters which the large Jumpo second prize that year. The script had been audience loved and welcomed. \" The company kept finished before Ozu went to China and after that after me,\" remembered Ozu . \" They said the film \" I wrote and rewrote it over and over again-and would never be ready in time. You have to finish there should still be more improvements. As the shooting today. I only had two hours of shooting years go by, many films become artificial. \" It is now time left and lots of long scenes to do. I felt bad easy to forget that this picture and the one before about not working this out but most people, I guess, it were made during the Pacific War, yet it must have didn 't notice the difference. I liked the film-any film been difficult for Ozu to make them . The industry I enjoy making I tend to like, whether it is any good was all but openly government-controlled and \" na- or not. I'm still fond of this picture. Both Shin Saburi tional policy subjects\" were usually insisted upon . and Mieko Takamine were new to me when I used Both of these films were about such subjects-the them in this film-they were just right for it. And they war, soldiers, home morale, etc.-but Ozu refused were popular. That is why so many people came to compromise his own kind of reality . He would 10 SPRING 1971
not sacrifice h is characters to the needs of propa- finished the script in ten days. No one thought I ganda. The subject was official , but the treatment could work so quickly, and I told them that this was was so human that the official attitude was inherently the first and last time that I was going to .\" It was critized . Not only was Ozu brave in the face of also during this year that Ozu wrote a script for governmental criticism of his own pictures , he stood himself which he called THE MOON DOES NOT RISE up for the work of other directors as well. Akira [TSUKI WA NOBORI NU] . He never filmed it, however, Kurosawa in particular remembers him during the and later gave it to the actress Kinuyo Tanaka to wrangle over SANSHIRO SUGATA . Kurosawa 's film was direct in 1955. (A number of Ozu scripts have been shown to a military board-as all films were-which directed by others: UNENDING ADVANCE [KAGIRINAKI then laid into it, saying that this would have to be ZENSHIN] was directed by Tomu Uchida in 1936; in cut, that that would have to go. One officer even the same year the same director filmed THE HAPPY asked (a question incomprehensible to us today) MR . YASUKICHI [TAONOSHIKIKANA YASUKICHI-KUN] ; h is if the young Kurosawa was not interested in aiding last script, RADISHES AND CARROTS [DAIKON TO NINJIN] and abetting the enemy. To this Ozu replied that was filmed after his death by Minoru Sh ibuya. ) either the film was a good one or it wasn 't, that he thought it good , and that they ought to pass it Kaze no Naka no Mendori ( A CHIC KEN IN THE and get on with their work. This kind of remark was, WIND), 1948, Shochiku . Script by Ozu and Ryosuke in 1942, enough to send a man to prison , yet Ozu Saito. Photographed by Yuharu Atsuta. With Kinuyo always escaped . Masahiro Shinoda, later one of Tanaka, Shuji Sano, Kuniko Miyake, Chishu Ryu . Ozu 's assistant directors, remembers that \" he A destitute woman is awa iting the demobilization always made such funny jokes, always got everyone of her husband when one of her children falls ill . in such a good mood , was so ex pert in saying a She prostitutes herself to get money for the hospital. very serious thing in a very light way , that nothing Then the husband returns. She tells him all . He ever happened to him .\" Nonetheless, he was shortly knocks her down the stairs, then apologizes, sud- sent to Southeast Asia . Though he had already denly realizing all that she has been through . served his time in the Imperial Army , the government had decided that directors should be put into the Writing ten years later Ozu said: \" Well , everyone field to make propaganda films. There was some has his failures . There 'are all kinds of failures and talk of Ozu 's making a Malayan production , but some of my failures I like. This film , however, was a bad failure .\" The picture was seventh in the Kine- nothing came of it. He was stationed in Singapore ma Jumpo polls, heavy melodrama perhaps appeal- and spent his time studying those foreign pictures ing to critics surfeited with wartime austerities. None- public exhibition of which was forbidden. Among theless, even they complained at some of the more them was CITIZEN KANE , a picture which , antithetical unlikely scenes-that the covers in the whorehouse to Ozu 's in every way , became his \" favorite film ,\" were fresh and -clean ; that the heroine banged all to be mentioned whenever he was asked what his the way downstairs and no one came out to see favorite film was. (His other \" favorites \" are equally what the noise was. Given the film they were right surprising . He once said that if he had not seen to complain . In the general context of Ozu 's style, Ince's CIVILIZATION , he would never have become however, sacrifices of reality to beauty were already a director; he always much admired Chaplin 's visible and it was through these that a new and WOMAN OF PARIS ; also , \" Ilike John Ford 's spontane- perhaps higher reality was shortly to become visible. ity. When you get to ROMAN HOLIDAY , though , that Though Ozu-and his critics-decided that nothing man Wyler isn 't spontaneous;\" also \" somebody was new had been learned through those days of film- talking about Re x Ingram and I remarked that I used viewing in Singapore, and that the unchanging Ozu to see his pictures when I was in middle school-in was , in his own words , \" a tough old buzzard ,\" one fact, if there hadn 't been a rlirector called Ingram of the possible results might have been the new I would not now be a director myself. \" ) Concerning aesthetic-beauty for its own sake-in later Ozu the Malayan period Ozu mainly remembered that films. In a film as melodramatic as A HEN IN THE WIND he had learned a lot from screening films and that Ozu 's heightened interest in formal beauty (nice this changed his style . Otherwise , he was dissatis- clean bedspread in the whorehouse) stands out. In fied. \" If there had been no war I could have made film such as LATE SPRING , however, the same \" sac- at least seven more films during the time.\" rifices \" in an almost eventless story only enhance the experience as a whole. Nagaya Shinshi Roku (THE RECORD OF A TENEMENT GENTLEMAN) , 1947 , Shochiku . Script by Ozu and Banshun (LATE S?RING ), 1949, Shochiku . Script Tadao Ikeda. Photographed by Yuharu Atsuta. With by Ozu and Kogo Noda. Photographed by Yuharu Chishu Ryu , Choko lida, Takeshi Sakamoto , Reiki- Atsuta. With Chishu Ryu , Setsuko Hara, Haruko chi Kawamura , Tomihiro Aoki. A war-orphan is Sugimura, Jun Osami . A young woman , somewhat found on the streets of Tokyo and sent to live with past marriageable age , lives with her father. She is a middle-aged woman . At first she finds him a happy being with him , and when she hears of one bother, but eventually comes to love him . Finally, of his friends marrying for a second time she disap- however, the boy's father appears and she must give proves . The father , however, feels that he is keeping up the child. her from marriage. He introduces her to a young man , but nothing comes of it. Then her aunt tells Of this film Ozu remembered that \" I had just been her that her father is think ing of remarriage . She repatriated and I was very tired . Still, the company is d isturbed but, bel ieving that this is what he wants , kept telling me to get a picture out in a hurry . I she agrees to marry another young man. The two , FILM COMMENT 11
father and daughter, go on a final vacation in Kyoto . o>- When they return she is married . The father, who had no intention of marrying , is left alone. Ui Called \" one of the most perfect, most complete, .o>..- and most successful studies of character ever achieved in Japanese cinema,\" this picture was also - - - - -- \"o\"\" one of Ozu 's own favorites-along with THERE WAS things is just like mine. Our ideas never cross each A FATHER, THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS/ 0F THE TODA other, and they never get out of hand . Of course, sometimes we disagree. And when we do we really FAMILY, and TOKYO STORY. The various components disagree. Since we ' re both so stubborn neither of of the Ozu style-the Ofuna-cho-flavored home- us will compromise. \" Kinema Jumpo First Prize . drama, the interest in character seen in the earlier shomin-geki, the haha-mono-like idea of a parent Munekata Shimai (THE MUNEKATA SISTERS), 1950. as central figure-are here combined in a perfectly Shintoho. Script by Ozu and Kogo Noda, after the balanced film , the whole of which far transcends novel of Jiro Osaragi . Photographed by Yuharu any of its elements. The entire film is so complete Atsuta. With Kinuyo Tanaka, Hideko Takamine, Ken a realization of Ozu 's intentions that one cannot Uehara, So Yamamura. imagine any part of it being other than what it is. Part of the reason for this perfection was the depth Of this film Ozu once wrote \" to be frank, I find of Ozu 's feelings and the security of his style. Part it difficult to make a film out of a novel. You ' re forced also was perhaps due to his being able to once again into reworking the imagination of the author, and work with Kogo Noda, with whom he had made his then have to select someone to playa role already first picture, and many in between , but with whom created . When I write, I always write with an actor he had not been since 1935. \" We hadn 't worked in mind from the beginning and this helps create together since AN INNOCENT MAID. When a director the role in the film . Actually ,\" he characteristically works with a writer they have to have some habits adds, \" making this film was easy,\" for which we and characteristics together or else they won 't get might read : all too easy. In addition Ozu was ham- along . Our daily life-what time we get up, how much pered by working for a new company (for the first we drink , and so on-are in almost complete agree- time in his career) , though he later said he had ment. When I work with Noda we work out together enjoyed this experience. Not so enjoyable, however, even the smallest bit of dialogue. And when we get was that the new Shinotoho company insisted on around to discussing the details of the set or the romantic love interest being included and this is costumes, I always find out that his image of these something that Ozu never knew how to do very well. Mostly, though it won seventh place in the Kinema Jumpo polls , the picture suffered from an Ozu pat- tern we have already seen at work. Having said something perfectly (LATE SPRING) he always set out to look for other things to say in other ways. Bakushu (EARLY AUTUMN) , 1951 , Shochiku . Script by Ozu and Kogo Noda. Photographed by Yuharu 12 SPRING 1971
Atsuta . With Setsuko Hara, Ichiro Sugai, Chieko seki in the south of Japan , decide to go to Tokyo Higashiyama, Chishu Ryu. As in LATE SPRING , a to visit their two married children . They are some- Kamakura setting, this time showing a middle-class what disappointed at their reception there. Both the family and the relations among its six members. son and the daughter are busy with their own lives and send their parents off to a hot-springs resort, Ozu has said \"plot bores me, \" and in these later ostensibly as a treat, actually to get them out of pictures he gradually freed himself of it. In this film the way . The only one at all nice to them is the and in his best later pictures , such as TOKYO STORY , widow of the son who was killed in the war. No there is no trace of plot , and the \" story\" is simply sooner has the old couple returned home, however, the recounting (balanced , artful, incisive) of things than the children receive a telegram that the mother as they happened . More and more it became possi- is sick . When they arrive back in Shimonoseki the ble to compress this \"story\" of an Ozu film into a mother is so ill that she can no longer recognize single-line anecdote ,' though to do so would give them . After the funeral the children rush back to no indication of the great emotional power of the Tokyo but the daughter-in-law stays on. She con- film . Someone once said that Ozu 's films were like fesses that it is difficult for her to live as a widow , those paper flowers the Japanese used to make: and the father advises her to get married again . dry, tiny, they fit into a tiny pellet; put into water they Then-now alone-he sits in the empty house. swell , grow, fill the entire container with their beauty. Of the picture Ozu has written : \" In this picture I From this simple anecdote unfolds one of the wanted to show a cycle of life, I wanted to picture greatest of all Japanese motion pictures. Ozu 's style, mutability. I was not interested in action for its own now completely refined , utterly economical, creates sake . And I've never worked so hard in my life . . . I a film which is unforgettable because it is so right, didn't push the action at all , the ending leaves the so true , and because it demands so much from its audience with a poignant aftertaste. \" Kinema Jumpo audience . Evasions of any sort are rare in an Ozu picture , but here there are none at all. Two genera- First Prize. tions, a simple story which allows all the characters to Ochazuke no Aji (THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER change places (and hence to show themselves), a pervading delineation of high summer, and the de- RICE) , 1953, Shochiku . Script by Ozu and Kogo ceptively simple-appearing technique of the director Noda. Photographed by Yuharu Atsuta. With Shin combine to create a picture so Japanese and at the Saburi , Michiyo Kogure, Koji Tsuruta, Keiko Shima. same time so personal-and hence so universal in A middle-class, middle-aged couple experience a its appeal-that it becomes a masterpiece. Ozu, who crisis in their marriage. With no children to hold was himself very fond of this picture, had little to their lives together, married life has lost its meaning say about it. After it won second prize at the Kinema in routine . They both attempt to be stronger and Jumpo polls he said that \" through the growth of hence create a stronger marriage. both parents and children I described how the Jap- anese family system has begun to come apart.\" The scenario was originally written in 1941 after Then he added , surprisingly, but in a very Ozu-like Ozu 's return from the Army . In it a man and wife, fashion: \" Also , this is one of my most melodramatic parting , perhaps forever since he is going off to war , pictures. \" have a very simple dish of tea and rice rather than the proper ceremonial food. The implication is that Soshun (EARLY SPRING), 1956, Shochiku . Script it is the simple, everyday things which are important. by Ozu and Kogo Noda. Photographed by Yuharu To say this , however, is both to coarsen Ozu 's inten- Atsuta. With Chishu Ryu , Ryo Ikebe, Chikage Awa- tions and to misinterpret the Japanese mystique shima, Keiko Kishi , Daisuke Kato , Teiji Takahashi. about simplicity-a quality found in the term assari- A young salaried office-worker is bored with both shite iru, a word often used to describe the flavor his job and his wife. He has a slight affair with the of tea over rice. Ozu says: \" I took this film out of office flirt. He and his wife quarrel. Later he accepts the drawer where it had been since the Army cen- a transfer to the country. She goes to him and they sored it so heavily, took it out because there was agree to start again together. no reason for it to stay there . Because the times had changed I rewrote it so that the main character The story of this picture is a bit like that of THE goes off to South America, but that weakened the FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE . In addition , the film dramatic development. I wanted to show something is a late look at an earlier milieu-that of the office- about a man from the viewpoint of a woman-but worker and his lot. Sixth in the Kinema Jumpo polls this film wasn't very well made. \" Ozu very rarely of that year , it represented something of an experi- attempted to graft new material onto old in this way . ment for Ozu. \"Although I hadn't made a white- He was wise not to since he was rarely successful collar story for a long time I wanted to show the in doing so . This film has admirable things in it-so life of a man with such a job-his happiness over many that some people prefer it to his finer pic- graduating and finally becoming a member of soci- tures-but it does not, of course, have the perfection ety , his hopes for the future gradually dissolving, of LATE SPRING or TOKYO STORY. his realizing that, even though he has worked for years , he has accomplished nothing . By showing Tokyo Monogatari (TOKYO STORY) , 1953, Shochi- his life over a period of time I wanted to bring out ku. Script by Ozu and Kogo Noda. Photographed what you might call the pathos of such a life. It is by Yuharu Atsuta . With Chishu Ryu , Chieko Higa- the longest of my postwar films, but I tried to avoid shiyama, So Yamamura, Haruko Sugimura , Setsuko anything that would be dramatic and to collect only Hara, Kyoko Kagawa, Shiro Osaka, Eijiro Tono, Hisao Toake . An elderly couple, living in Shimono- FILM COMMENT 13
casual scenes of everyday life hoping that thereby with the parents . Al l the recent movies seem to deny the audience would feel the sadness of this kind their values and to approve the behaviour of the of life. \" The picture also took more time to make young .. . In th is film the daughters seem modern than most Ozu films. \" It took eighty-seven days to enough but really they are traditional. The father write the script for SOSHUN . They kidded me at the seems to be sensible enough and he gives good company, saying I'd better call the film RAISHUN advice to other people , but when it comes to his (Next Spring) . The meaning of the title is in its own problems he says one thing and means anoth- reference to young people . People seem to under- er ... he has raised his daughter and he worries stand this kind of symbolism . And President Kido about her marriage. She went and got engaged with- (of Shoch iku) is very fussy about titles.\" Eventually, out tell ing him. He knows that her choice was good the film took three years to make. but because he was neglected he feels somewhat injured , and yet cannot totally be against the mar- Tokyo Boshoku (TOKYO TWILIGHT) , 1957, Shochi- riage . It is this tension in the father that I wanted ku . Script by Ozu and Kogo Noda . Photographed to show in the film .\" Though there is, consequently , by Yuharu Atsuta. With Setsuko Hara, Isuzu Yama- some implied criticism of the Japanese fami- da, Ineko Arima , Chishu Ryu , Masami Taura , Kinzo ly-system , there is certainly no denigration of it. Ozu , Shin . A father lives alone with his two daughters. in fact, never treated the family-system in the ironical Both the younger and then the elder discover that way with which he treated , say , the social system . their mother is living nearby. This discovery shatters This was also Ozu 's first color film (\" I felt I'd regret them . One kills herself; the other leaves home. The it later if I didn 't do it now\" ), and those critics who father is left alone. had criticized the unreality of the sets in earl ier films (too clean , too neat, not naturalistic enough ), found Before this film was released , Ozu said : \" Recently new cause for complaint with a color system (Ag- there has been increasingly severe criticism of the facolor) which rendered all things too pretty. Ozu , Ofuna-cho flavor in films . But the traditions of Ofuna- on the other hand , liked color from the first. (\" Even cho are the result of thirty years . They are not when I was using black and wh ite I was always going to fail in one morning . I believe that the true interested in tone and mood so it isn 't too difficult flavor of the Ofuna-cho will be found in this film. \" to work with color. Red turns out magnificently on And so it is. The picture is one of Ozu's most melo- Agfa.\") He had none of the misgivings that went dramatic (in our sense , not in his) what with con- with his early sound films . He felt that color made frontation-suicides , and the like. It is redolent of the his \" compositions \" more interesting. He never, Shimpa, that theatrical form in which domestic however, went so far as to have any good words melodrama becomes a genre ·in itself. The idea of for the various sized \" scope \" screens. \" I have not a missing parent dramatically reappearing, a favorite seen Cinemascope,\" he wrote during this time, \" but melodramatic device, was used by Ozu several times I did see VistaVision. I got fed up in the middle ( in both versions of UKIGUSA , for ex ample) but such of THIS IS CINERAMA. \" Kinema Jumpo third prize. excesses as suicide were rare for him. Still , Ozu 's melodrama appears austere indeed by comparison Ohayo ( GOOD MORNING) , 1959, Shochiku . Script with anyone else 's, and sections of the film were by Ozu and Kogo Noda. Photographed by Yuharu somewhat salvaged by extraordinarily good dia- Atsuta. With Chishu Ryu , Kuniko Miyake, Yoshiko logue. The picture was also Ozu 's last black-and- Kuga, Keiji Sada, Koji Shidara, Masahiko Shimazu . white film . Of it, the director wrote : ~ ' Many people Two little boys live with their parents in one of have found this picture to be about the w ild behav- Tokyo 's many housing developments. There is a iour of the daughter, but I think the emphasis lies misunderstanding among the next-door neighbor on the older generation-it is about Ryu , how he , ladies which the boys innocently compound . After having been deserted by his wife, yet continues to an argument with their parents-they want a televi- live on . I intended the younger generation only as sion set and their father refuses to buy one-they foil for the older. But somehow most people have are told to shut up . Taking their parents at their gotten to think that the film is about young folks.\" word they shut up completely, won 't talk to anyone, not even the neighbors. These ladies, finding the Higanbana (EQUINOX FLOWER ) , 1958, Shochiku . customary morning greeting (ohayo) unanswered, Script by Ozu and Kogo Noda after a novel by Ton at once assume that the mother is angry with them Satomi. Photographed by Yuharu Atsuta. With Shin and the neighborhood quarrel beg ins. Finally father Saburi , Kinuyo Tanaka, Ineko Arima, Keiji Sada, relents , the TV set is bought, the boys answer the Chieko Naniwa, Fujiko Yamamoto , Chishu Ryu , Yo- neighbor lad ies politely , and all ends happily. shiko Kuga. A daughter wishes to marry the man of her choice, but her father objects. Her mother \" I had this story in mind for a long time ... and understands her position , however, and her two I wanted to make it though I knew it would be dif- friends try to win her father over. Eventually he ficult. I mentioned it at a meeting of the Director's agrees . Guild and they all seemed interested so I told them that anyone of them was free to make it, but no one From TO KYO TWILIGHT on , Ozu became more and tried , so I did it myself. At first I thought of this story more interested in the younger generation , or at as being more quiet and sober. After awhile though least that part of the younger generation in rebellion . I thought I might have a money-maker here and so The traditional daughter in LATE SPRING is quite I made it funnier. Well , I guess what I mean is that different from the modern girls in these later Ozu I wanted more people to see and enjoy the film .\" films . \" There is always a little difference between the generations , but in th is film I'm more sympathetic 14 SPRING 1971
Ozu himself never mentioned the fact that the film closely resembles I WAS BORN , BUT . . . The two boys in the 1932 film question the assumptions about bosses and workers in the world they are going to have to live in whereas the boys in the 1959 film question the basis of all social conversation , those polite and meaingless phrases , such as \" good morning ,\" which people use with one another ; in the first film the boys go on a hunger-strike , in the second film they go on a silence strike ; in both films they come around in the end . There are , naturally, many differences. Easy good humor takes the place of irony, and acceptance takes the place of satire. Nonetheless the social milieu of the housing devel- opment is made gentle fun of , and Ozu drew from his actors a number of touching and memorable performances. This film was the first of a series of three \" remakes. \" Ukigusa (FLOATING WEEDS) , 1959, Daiei. Script by Ozu and Kogo Noda, based on the 1934 Ikeda script. With Ganjiro Nakamura, Haruko Sugimura, Machiko Kyo , Ayako Wakao , Hiroshi Kawaguchi . A small theatrical troupe revisits a remote island town after some years absence. The aging leading actor is particularly an xious to stop because he had a son by one of the local women and wants to see him again . Though he has returned from time to time, his visits have been so infrequent that the boy thinks the actor is his uncle. This visit, however, leads to complications . The leading lady is the actor's mis- tress and resents the older woman , mother of the boy . Then the young son falls in love with one of the younger girls in the troupe. Eventually, she de- cides to stay with the son, and the troupe fails, the actor returning to his mistress. The Daiei Motion Picture Company had earlier asked Ozu to make a film but he had his Shochiku contract and usually making a film took him a year. He finished OHAYO early, however, got Shochiku to agree , and moved for a season to Daiei. \" Many years ago I made a silent version of this film . But now I wanted to make it again up in the snowy country of Hokuriku , so I wrote this script called THE HAM ACTOR (Daikon Yakusha) but that year we had little snow and so I couldn 't use any of the locations I had in mind in Takado and Sado . For Daiei I changed the season and setting . Although it is a contemporary film , the mood is really the Meiji Period. It could have been filmed that way but that would have meant going to all the trouble of inves- tigating the costumes and the manners and so on .\" All of Ozu 's films are about contemporary life . He is, in fact, almost the only director never to have made a period film (expect for his debut picture) . Not that he didn 't want to . \" I would really like to make a jidai-geki,\" he once said , mentioning that Jiro Osaragi (who had written the original novel from which THE MUNEKATA SISTERS was taken) was always urging him to . \" Miyagawa, the cameraman , went to lots of trouble and experimented a good deal with this film . I began to understand just what a color picture is. For example , you must give the right kind of lighting to a certain color to make it look on film the way it does to the eye. If you shoot two different
colors with the same lighting , one of them won 't come out , and so you have to decide from the beginning which color you don't want. About this time CinemaScope became popular. I wanted to have nothing to do with it and consequently I shot more close-ups and used shorter cuts.\" Having reacted against the long-shots and long scenes of the new screen , he discovered that \" this film must have more cuts in it than any other recent Japanese movie. \" The finished film was a remake , and a close one, of the 1934 picture and was also one of Ozu 's most beautiful creations . That he made these \" remakes \" argues neither loss in interest nor in ability. Rather, since all Ozu 's pictures have some- what similar stories , it is fair to assume that he wanted to view again , in the light of his ex perience , what he had already done. Both films are close in spirit and almost identical in story and structure. There are, to be sure, a few differences. The 1934 picture has the troupe going to a small town in the mountains in the north of Japan , while the 1959 film has them coming by boat to a small port in the Wakayama Peninsula in the south . The bits of theat- rical performances seen are different-though both are equally delicious in their lovingly observed bad- ness. There are in the 1934 version some camera movements which were discarded in the 1959-and the earlier picture was silent, the later picture sound . But, by and large, externally, the films are iden- tical-even down to identical scenes such as the fight between the leader of the troupe and his lead- ing-lady mistress in the rain , and having Koji Mitsui in the cast: in the 1934 film he plays the son ; a quarter of a century later he plays one of the older actors in the troupe. The only real difference is internal. The earlier version is the more bitter. To- ward the end of his life Ozu mellowed and one does not see nor feel the pain of the once-more aban- doned mother in the 1959 picture. To be sure, Haru- ko Sugimura is by no means happy about further betrayal , but she has become philosophical. Choko lida on the other hand shows us a bleak despair rarely seen in the later films of Ozu . In 1934 Ozu felt deeply and personally the wrong that life inflicts. Twenty-five years later he felt just as deeply but , perhaps, less personally . The first version is, on the other hand , spring-like in its comedy ; the second has an autumnal sadness about it. Certainly , the latter film is the most physically beautiful of all of Ozu 's pictures. It was photographed by Kazuo Miyagawa, one of Japan's greatest Cinematog- raphers, known in the West for his work on RASHO- MON and YOJIMBO . The atmosphere of a Japanese port is exquisitely captured , and the feeling of August in Japan has never been rendered more palpable. Though Japanese critics tended to dismiss the film as \" merely \" a remake , it is actually one of Ozu 's finest works. Akibiyori (LATE AUTUMN) , 1960, Shochiku . Script by Ozu and Kogo Noda. Photographed by Yuharu Atsuta. With Setsuko Hara, Yoko Tsukasa, Chichu Ryu , Mariko Okada, Keiji Sada . A young girl lives with her mother. Though she had had opportunities to marry, she refuses, preferring to stay at home.
The widowed mother, however , feels that by doing begins deceptively. One ex pects a light comedy, so her daughter is wasting her life and attempts to consummately well-done, the kind of picture Ozu find her a suitable husband . The daughter is against was making during the Thirties. The surface is mun- this until she comes to believe, mistakenly, that the dane, marvelously so , but with no hint of the depths reason is that her mother wants to remarry. They we are later to view in this still and slightly stale take a last trip to Nikko together. The girl is married water. With humor, with affection , we are willingly upon their return . The mother goes back to their led deeper and deeper until we are faced with the apartment and begins her life alone. fact of death. Perhaps an icon for the film would be found in the role which Haruko Sugimura This the third of Ozu 's \" remakes \" (and winner plays-the talkative and amusingly malicious Tokyo of the fi'fth place in that year 's Kinema Jumpo polls), cousin who , in the midst of complaints at what a is a new version of LATE SPRING . Both feature Set- bother the funeral is, quite suddenly and without suko Hara-in the earlier film she had played the warning bursts into tears . Death triumphs. It is daughter, now she plays the parent. The major shown in the most direct and uncompromising man- change is Ozu 's substituting mother for father. Minor ner with the funeral bed, the cremation , the smoking changes include a number of friends of the widow's chimney. At the end the family moves on , goes late husband-all men-who help her find a likely home, only the crows remain. It is one of Ozu 's most young man for her daughter. Again , there is a beautiful films , and one of his most disturbing. change in tone . There is an elegiac quality in LATE AUTUMN which makes it the sadder of the films. There Samma no Aji (THE TASTE OF MACKEREL) (AN AU- is , consequently , some relaxation of that extraor- dinary objectivity which so distinguishes LATE TUMN AFTERNOON), 1962, Shochiku . Script by Ozu SPRING. Of this later film Ozu has written : \" People and Kogo Noda. Photographed by Yuharu Asuta. sometimes complicate the simplest things. Life, which seems complex, may suddenly reveal itself With Shima Iwashita, Shinichiro Mikami, Keiji Sada, as very simple-and I wanted to show that in this film. There was something else too . It is easy to show Mariko Okada, Nobuo Nakamura, Chishu Ryu , Kun- drama on film-the actors laugh or cry, but this is only explanation . But a director can really show what iko Miyake, Ryuji Kita, Eijiro Tono , Teruo Yoshida. he wants without resorting to an appeal to the emo- tions. I want to make people feel without resorting A company auditor , his wife dead , getting on in to drama. I've been trying to do this ever since THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE TODA FAMILY , but it years, lives with his son and daughter. Besides his is very difficult. Here [in LATE AUTUMN] I think I was fairly successful , but, still , the results are far from children , his other friends are men his own age. perfect. \" Through one of them he hears of the marriage of Kohayagawa-ke no Aki (THE AUTUMN OF THE KO- HA'YAGAWA FAMILY) (THE END OF SUMMER) , 1961 , Toho. yet another friend's daughter. This sets him thinking Script by Ozu and Kogo Noda. Photographed by Asakazu Nakai . With Ganjiro Nakamura, Setsuko about his own. He decides that she would marry, Hara, Yoko Tsukasa, Michiyo Aratama, Yumi Shira- kawa , Reiko Dan , Chieko Nanaiwa. An older man and eventually arranges it with a young man recom- has had three daughters by his wife , one by a former mistress. The eldest daughter is widowed but getting mended by his friends . The event goes off as ready to remarry . The second is married and her husband runs the family business-a sake plant. The planned . Again he meets with his friends. They all third has already had her hlJsband picked out by the family. When the father decides to take up with drink together once more and he realizes that he his former mistress, the daughters are upset. In the midst of this the father has a heart attack and later is getting old now, and that he is alone. dies. Ozu 's last film , this is also his simplest. The ingre- As in THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE TODA FAMILY, Ozu here makes a picture about an entire dients are familiar. The story resembles that of LATE family, enriching the several strands of his story with many anecdotes. The film is unusually rich , even AUTUMN and LATE SPRING . The colors are subdued ; for Ozu , with vignettes of character. It is, at the same time, one of the director's most bleak films. Despite the viewing angle is invariable . The simplicity of the setting , the season , the lushness of the produc- tion which Toho allowed Ozu , there is little of the the film is the result of a style brought to absolute golden , autumnal atmosphere of LATE AUTUMN , wh ich went before , or AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON , which perfection. Nothing is wanting ; nothing is extrane- followed . Perhaps this is because th is is one of the few Ozu films in which death-always present-is ous . At the same time there is an extraordinary actually seen . And it is perhaps the only Ozu picture in which there is no spiritual survivor. The film intensification of mood in this picture. It is autumn again , but now it is deep autumn . Winter was always near, but now it will be tomorrow. At the same time Ozu 's regard was never kinder, never wiser. There is a mellowness about this picture which is stronger than nostalgia. Or, perhaps one finds it so because it was the director's last film before his death-or, perhaps, it was because Ozu knew he was going to die. During the making of this film he had noticed that the glands in his throat were enlarged . He went to his own doctor, who sent him to a specialist. There he was told that it was nothing , something to do with his age-sixty-and was sent home. He knew it was cancer, however, and he told his friends . He died in November, 1963, and was buried at the temple of Engaku in Kita-Kamakura, near where he had lived a good part of his adult life. On his tombstone there is the Single character for mu-an aesthetic word , a philosophical term , one usually translated as ' nothingness ' but which also suggests that noth- ing which , in Zen philosophy , is everything . IIIIIII FILM COMMENT 1j
fR4NCOIS TRUff4UT A ~AN CAN S[RVf TWO ~ASTfRS by David Bordwell David Bordwell is a graduate student in film at the the pressures of a new form-or, more precisely, a new formula . University of Iowa, Iowa City. Enter Alfred Hitchcock. Truffaut's worship of A photograph \" directed \" by Francois Truffaut in Renoir had always been accompanied by an admi- a recent Esquire shows him reclining jauntily o n a ration for the Master of Suspense. (Cahiers du Cine- chair, his back turned to us while he puffs on an ma had run his discerning essay on SHADOW OF A enormous cigar ; his face is ingeniously reflected DOUBT when he was only twenty-two .) He could toward us in the open French window . The shot hardly have chosen two more different idols. and the accompanying article seem to confirm what Whereas Renoir's is the cinema of liberty, equality , many have been suspecting for a long time. The ci- and fraternity, Hitchcock probes a world of guilt, gar, the cutely oblique point-of-view, the claim that betrayal, and malignant coincidence. Renoir cele- he makes films for the man in the street-isn 't this all brates joy and love ; Hitchcock excels in depicting the outcome of Truffaut's whoring after false gods, fear, suspicion , and jealousy. Renoir loves and and one portly god in particular? Pauline Kael , with respects his actors; to Hitchcock they are cattle typical nuance, concluded long ago that Truffaut under contract. Renoir favors improvisation on the is \" a bastard pretender to the commercial throne set, but Hitchcock maps out each shot before a of Hitchcock.\" frame of film is exposed . Renoir goes on location looking for lucky accidents of atmosphere; Hitch- It is a tempting charge. After all , didn 't the great cock prefers to stay in the stUdio for more control. trilogy and half of THE SOFT SKIN recall the work of And while Renoir's loose plots suggest the possi- the grand old man of French cinema, Jean Renoir? bility that man can attain freedom , Hitchcock's How could Truffaut go from such lyricism to the compressed intrigues entrap the characters in a theatrics of FAHRENHEIT 451 , THE BRIDE WORE BLACK, ruthlessly constricting moral field . STOLEN KISSES , and MISSISSIPPI MERMAID? The Hitch- cock in-jokes, Bernard Herrmann 's scores, and the Truffaut, whose temperament followed the Ren- pulp-novel plots do suggest that he has degenerated oirian lines of autobiography, improvisation , and from Renoir to Hitchcock-or, some would say, from formal looseness, found the objectivity and concen- Hyperion to a satyr. tration of Hitchcock an attractive restraint. In a 1962 interview, he suggested that \" we can discipline our The view seems to me unjust because, after all , work so that it becomes complex and has more than we typed Truffaut too early in his career. (He was one layer of meaning .\" He explained by recasting not yet thirty when he made JULES AND JIM .) We were the plot of Chabrol 's LES BONNES FEMMES as Hitch- taken with his Renoir ian delight in spontaneous cock would have shot it, adding mystery, suspense , digression , his celebration of life 's looseness. We and surprise. \" Don 't tell me it would be inferior or forgot that such artistic latitude can be as harmful vulgar done that way . .. It's all there , but inserted as complete confinement. Renoir, who had always into a framework which keeps you on the edge of recognized the need for rigor in even the most your seat. \" One can , he insisted , express a story seemingly casual style, concentrated his plots either of subtle emotions within the confines of a formula spatially (as in LA GRANDE ILLUSION) or formally (as entertainment; one can mi x Renoir and Hitchcock. in LA REGLE DU JEU) and turned later to theatricality What had started as a catholicity of critical taste because it offered challenging restrictions. \" There's thus became a rich tension in Truffaut's work . really no freedom without discipline,\" Renoir has said , \" because without it one falls back on the The tension , latent in SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER disciplines one constructs for oneself, and they are and JULES AND JIM , becomes perhaps too ex plicit really formidable. It's much better if the restraints in THE SOFT SKIN [1964] , a curious melange of are imposed from outside. \" love-story and suspense-story. Most critics found the deceived wife's revenge on her husband dis- This remark pinpoints Truffaut's dilemma. After comfiting ; how could Truffaut annihilate such a three very free films, he had to choose between delicate romance with those abrupt Shotgun-blasts? In career terms , Pierre 's wife is another example ainventing his own form (or anti-form , la Godard ) of Truffaut's betraying women (AntOine 's mother in THE 400 BLOWS , Charlie 's wife in SHOOT THE PIANO and following Renoir's lead in seeking a discipline PLAYER , Montag 's wife in FAHRENHEIT 451) and that was not intolerably confining . He chose the vengeful murderesses (Moreau in JULES AND JIM latter, and , being of a different generation than and THE BRIDE WORE BLACK , Deneuve in MERMAID); Renoir, he turned not to the theater but to film genres . Thus the new direction in Truffaut's work springs from a subjection of his lyrical impulses to 18 SPRING 1971
but in dramatic terms , the femme fatale element uncharacteristic of Hitchcock , is a reminder of his is perfunctorily inserted into THE SOFT SKIN. Still , Renoirian affinities. the film represents a serious attempt to pit a lyrical temperament against a stringent suspense-formula. It is these affinities which counterbalance any tendency toward intrigue pure and simple. Truffaut's It was th is growing absorption with the discipline Renoirian impulses move him toward a more cen- of suspense and intrigu e that in 1965 led Truffaut trifugal, inclusive form. While Hitchcock's determin- to undertake a project which recharged his creative istic plots move toward a parable-like strictness, batteries: he interviewed not Renoir but Hitchcock. Truffaut (like Renoir) welcomes digressions that give The resulting boo k, which has been justly and co- us fitful glimpses of a wider conte xt. The private gently attacked by Leo Braudy in Film Quarterly, is griefs of Truffaut's protagonists are illuminated by not a suc cess . Truffaut feverishly tries to ventrilo- the casual intrusions of strangers that remind us quize into a phlegmatic Hitchcock meditations on that beyond the individual , life flows on . In JULES grace and guilt while th e old master drones on about AND JIM , an anarchist smears on a wall , \" Death to the other(s),\" but when Jim returns from the war, famous crimes, technical gimmicks, and box-office Jules asks immediately, \" How are the others?\" The figures. Still , the book does afford valuable clues to question is a measure of his and Truffaut's humanity; Truffaut's own work . H is introduction shows he we cannot forget that there are always others. Hence understands Hitchcock's techniques-the \" Mac- the tension which dominates Truffaut's latest films . Guffin \", the importance of timing and coincidence, The intrigue formula demands that every character the injection of uncertainty and suspicion into the be essential, that every detail advance the suspense. most innocuous scenes, the use of glance to con- But the opposite tendency toward haphazard inclu- trol point-of-view, and the strategy of putting a com- siveness strains such an introverted form: strangers mercial gloss on a formally daring film. Not surpris- wander in , gratuitous details intrude , suggesting the ingly these techniques of suspense, surprise, and casual irrelevancies that permeate everyday life. subjectivity provide the formal discipline for Truffaut's next four films. Yet he doesn 't use these SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER offers a paradigm for devices mechanically. Rather, he opens them up, Truffaut's resolution of the tension. Charlie's brother analyzes them , warms them-Renoirianizes them , is running from other gangsters : conventional sus- we might say. The later films become essays pense. He slams into a telephone pole, gets up , and toward a comfortable form , and in one for certain falls into step beside a man who nonchalantly con- (STOLEN KISSES) and perhaps in another (MISSISSIPPI fesses all sorts of things about his sex life. In sus- MERMAID ), we find a successful fusion of Renoirian pense terms , this is anticlimactic , but Truffaut isn 't lyricism and Hitchcockian intrigue. really interested in suspense. His puncturing of a purely mechanical formula mocks the pat view of Truffaut has always made his protagoinists out- life which the suspense-drama pOSits and suggests siders (\"My characters are on the edge of society\" ), the unpredictability and evasiveness of existence; and in this his latest films are no different. In FAHR- life will not be reduced to neat patterns . Truffaut EN'HEIT 451 , Montag takes to reading books in secret. has Iyricized intrigue. Jeanne Moreau , in THE BRIDE WORE BLACK , commits herself to total revenge , accepting a sterility and Th is is the operating principle in all his post-1965 solitude reminiscent of Charlie 's in SHOOT THE PIANO films. Truffaut 's journal of FAHRENHEIT 451 [in Cahiers PLAYER . In STOLEN KISSES , Antoine moves forlornly du Cinema in English , volume 1, nos 5,6,7] offers from job to job, and Belmondo , in MERMAID , begins the clearest record of his attempt to give depth and as a lonely-hearts correspondent and ends as a humanity to a pure genre-picture. Realizing that murderer on the run . Crime forces these characters science-fiction tends toward gimmickry, he worked into flight ; like the protagonists of THE 39 STEPS, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN , most of Truffaut's recent heroes are forced to be- come fugitives. Once displaced from society, the characters must seek happiness on their own . The plots become quests: the bride tracking down the five men ; Bel- mondo , gun in hand , following Deneuve to a shabby nightspot; Antoine's crisscrossed odyssey through Paris; Montag 's search for the Book People. The shifts of locale become thematically important. The bride's murder itinerary constitutes a survey of five different classes and life-styles, and Antoine 's wan- derings compile data on modern attitudes toward love and work . As in Hitchcock , changes of setting suggest changes in character: Montag moves from the city to nature, from the firehouse to the wintry landscape; Belmondo begins at his sultry plantation and ends in a snowbound hut. But Truffaut's prefer- ence for ending his plots in pastoral settings , qu ite FILM COMMENT 19
against the grain, introducing archaicisms-old- tapers off into an underplayed , ambiguous reconcil- fashioned telephones, dresses, houses, utensils- iation , Truffaut capitalizes on melodrama's ability to which he called \" anti-gadgetry.\" The fire captain seize our attention and emotions, but then mildly was envisioned as an ogre, but when Truffaut saw mocks it by having his characters respond not as that Cyril Cusack could be schoolmarm ish but not figures in an intrigue but as people in life. menacing , he realized that the former was better: \"Because of it (or thanks to it) we ' re getting away Truffaut deflates Hitchcockian surprise as skilfully from melodrama and the role will be more alive.\" as he deflates suspense . In FAHRENHEIT 451 , Montag Throughout production , Truffaut recognized all the has broken into the Captain 's office and is discov- compromises inherent in the film-the simple- ered ; he faints dead away. In STOLEN KISSES , the minded story, the stiff characters, the whiff of Stanley old detective just keels over at the telephone, and Kramer. He took a very auteurist gamble, hoping at the finale , the mysterious figure trailing Christine to transcend a formula by the force of his tempera- reveals himself to be literally nobody. When , in MIS- ment: \" When one is navigating in the waters of SISSIPPI MERMAID , Belmondo sees Deneuve on TV , science-fiction , one is sacrificing verisimilitude and Truffaut seems to be admitting that without this psychology, which is not a serious matter if one coincidence, the story would stop ; he films the makes up in plausibility and lyrical feeling what one scene absolutely deadpan . Only THE BRIDE WORE loses by being out of tune with reality.\" BLACK, Truffaut's most Hitchcockian film , plays up its surprises to the very end. For this reason , one How does this Iyricization overhaul the apparatus may admit that it is Truffaut 's coldest film : for once of intrigue? FAHRENHEIT 451 begins with the classic he reduces his characters almost totally to their plot suspense-device of cinema: cross-cutting . Firemen functions . slide down the pole and leap aboard the truck; a young man , gnawing an apple , gets a phone call For Hitchcock, suspense and surprise follow from warning him to flee; cut back to the firemen . But a rigorous use of cinematic point-of-view. He knows once they arrive, the plot doesn 't follow the young precisely when to involve us by means of subjective man , as we might expect. He simply escapes and camera movement and editing and when to distance is quickly forgotten in the firemen 's swift and expert us by means of omniscient angles and cross-cutting . search for books. \" Why will they do it?\" clucks the In Hitchcock, subjectivity is usually gained by con- Captain . \" Sheer perversity.\" The victim 's fear, the fining a scene to only what one character sees or methodical search, the surprising hiding places, the knows, thus ominously restricting the audience's authorities' petulance-all gain an impetus from the knowledge as well. Occasional parallel editing (often suspense. The cross-cutting has caught our interest stressing the recurrent theme of doubles) permits a and channeled it to the real subject of the film. complex fusion of suspenseful identification and This principle of deflected suspense rules Truf- ironic detachment. Suspense derives from the audi- faut 's subsequent films. He repeatedly builds our ence's sharing the character's ignorance; surprise expectations by mystery and tension , only to divert derives from a sudden shift from subjectivity to ob- our interest from plot to character. In THE BRIDE jectivity. In I CONFESS , for instance, we have fastened WORE BLACK , we know the men must die , and our our identification on the priest Montgomery Clift interest focuses not on how Moreau will do them when , at the scene of a murder, a woman comes in but on how they will react when they learn their out of the crowd and exclaims to Clift , \" We ' re free! \"; fates. In STOLEN KISSES, the client who wants his the surprise abruptly distances us from the charac- magician friend followed introduces a note of mys- ter. To such ends Hitchcock uses all the resources tery , all of which is dispelled later when he simply of subjective shots, criSp cutting, and rebounding rages and weeps and drops out of the film. MISSIS- glances to make his characters Jamesian centers SIPPI MERMAID abounds in red herrings: Belmondo's of consciousness. pursuit of Deneuve stops abruptly when he simply gives up the motion of killing her; her pOisoning Both on paper and on film, Truffaut has paid of him , instead of building to a melodramatic finale, tribute to the power of Hitchcock's point-of-view technique. \" Because of his unique ability to film the Franc;:ois Truffaut. thoughts of his characters and make them percepti- All photos: French Film Office.
ble without resorting to dialogue, he is, to my way Still , Truffaut is more than the sum of Renoir and of thinking , a realist ic director,\" he observed in his Hitchcock. The shut-down Cinematheque, the at- book , and as early as 1962 he noted: \" The cinema mosphere of Paris during the student strike, the becomes subjective when the actor's gaze meets references to LA CHINOISE and MISSIS SIPPI MERMAID , that of the audience. And if the audience feels the and the reappearance of Antoine 's idol Balzac are need to identify (even in a film where the director figures in a familiar and unique landscape. The film 's has no such intention ), it automatically does so with theme-the relationship between love and work in the face whose gaze it meets most frequently .\" He the modern world-is also a characteristic Truffaut accordingly concluded that THE 400 BLOWS is pure one , which is enriched by the homage he pays his Hitchcock. \" Why? Because from the first shot to the French and American mentors. last, one identifies with the boy.\" The characters of STOLEN KISSES see sex and love There is a sense that Truffaut has tried to carry from the standpoint of their professions. At first, the this technique into his recent films , An occasional military attitude: someone shouts, \" Get laid for me, subjective angle-with Montag watching the Captain Doinel! \"; Anto ine watches an officer tell a class that punishing students, with Clarisse when she revisits dismantling a mine is like seducing a woman. An- the school-add a certain uneasiness to FAHRENHEIT toine's reason for enlisting (his frustrated love of 451 , and THE BRIDE WORE BLACK judiciously alternates Christine) and his failure as a soldier strike the two our identification with the bride with an ironic om- keys of his character: romanticism in love and in- niscience . In MISSISSIPPI MERMAID , we are mainly with competence in work . As soon as he is released , he Belmondo and thus share his bewilderment about visits a brothel. The first ja/ie laide, as polyethelene Deneuve's behavior; we see a new side of Deneuve's as Madeleine in MASCULINE FEMININE , won 't be character when through Jardine's eyes we watch mussed ; sex may be her job, but rumply affection her quarreling with an unknown man. But in these is out. A second is more pliant , but no less false . films , Truffaut has not followed Hitchcock 's lead in From the start, then , man and woman are both seen dissecting the moral implications of pOint-of-view; as rapacious and chilly , viewing sex as busi- it would seem to be the one technique Truffaut ness-as-usual. By contrast, Christine's parents sug- borrowed uncritically. In STOLEN KISSES , though , he gest the possibility of a healthy relationship, but does analyze point-of-view, and so creates his ironically, they may be so happy because they are richest blending of autobiography and detachment, in business together. Antoine 's visit to them cap- sulizes his position : he eagerly pursues love but spontaneity and discipline, lyricism and intrigue. has no job prospects. \" Our best film ,\" he writes, \" is perhaps the one in which we succeed in ex pressing , voluntarily or not, At first this theme is traced with methodical our ideas about life and about the cinema.\" STOLEN Hitchcockery . The vehicle is Antoine 's stint as a KISSES may not be his best film , but it is his most detective; the method , surveillance; the motif, doors profound exploration of the tension between his and windows. A private detective pries into the ( pri- Renoirian temperament and a Hitchcockian form . marily sexual) secrets of the populace; his role of curious but anonymous observer epitomizes the \"These two imposing gods hover over the very detached voyeurism of both the individual in modern first shots , indeed the very title, of STOLEN KISSES . society and us in the audience . Henri 's invasion The long-shots of Paris and the recurrent tricauleur of the hotel defines the strategy of the detective suggest Renoir reborn in the si xties . But then a pan business-exploiting others to help one pry into and zoom to a window (echoing PSYCHO'S opening) sordid secrets-and Antoine 's reaction to it-impul- take us to Antoine in a jail cell : the hint of crime sive innocence. Like the prostitute 's the detective's business is sex, but for him it is impersonal aand the question of spying will thread the film voyeurism . la Hitchcock . If the ensuing story seems as relaxed Truffaut's visual style corroborates the surveil- as Renoir , it is because the lives of others casually lance theme. We watch people at a distance and intrude at the most unexpected moments; but the through windows and glass doors; we see a mirror plot also moves into Hitchcockian reg ions of crime , secrecy, and voyeurism . Fran goise Dorl eac and Frangois Truffaut on location for THE SOFT SKIN.
distort M. Tabard ; we glimpse scenes played in objectivity for spontaneous poetry. But the Agency secretary reprimands him , reminding us that in this doorways; we have doors banged shut in our faces ; world love is unprofessional. and we even view some scenes through Antoine's As Truffaut's film deviates from the rigor of Hitch- cockian formula , Antoine 's infatuation moves him eyes. Truffaut has thoroughly absorbed what he away from the discpline of surveillance and toward the intimacy of love. At the shaving mirror, Antoine needs of Hitchcock's idiosyncratic point-of-view tries to learn English. Later, when he hypnotically chants his name and the names of Madame Tabard techniques . STOLEN KISSES , stylistically glosses and Christine into the same mirror, his monologue becomes a Gertrude-Steinian panegyric, a celebra- NOTORIOUS , REAR WINDOW , and PSYCHO; like them , tion of the happy cohesion of rhythms and accents. The comic narcissism of the scene aptly evokes the it is a moral condemnation of voyeurism . self-absorption of adolescent love. When Antoine joins the Blady Agency, the cata- Antoine's professionalism finally collapses at Ma- dame Tabard 's luncheon . \" Do you like music?\" she logue of work-misshapen loves swells; some entries asks, and , probably remembering Henri 's warning to be respectful to superiors , he blurts out, \" Yes , are pathetic, others comic. Blady surmises that a sir. \" He dashes out , all control lost. In answering a hint of affection in the hypocritical jargon of busi- client hired them to watch his secretary because ness , he has failed as both detective and admirer. he 's sec retly in love with her. A couple who work The affair moves toward an investigative comple x- ity that satirizes the detached surveillance of the at the Agency argue in front of a mirror. Antoine detective's role: the female agent shadowing Ma- dame Tabard watches her visit to Antoine 's room- solves the case of a nurse who takes a baby out ing-house while Christine 's futile call is scrutinized by her mysterious follower. Because of his choice for a stroll , leaves it in a dingy room , and goes to of love over work, Antoine has fallen into the in- trigue; no longer the outside observer , now an ob- a club where she strips in her uniform, adding filips served participant. At the Blady agency, a marvelous shot reinforces this : M. Blady is listening to the with the baby 's bottle. \" Look professional ,\" an reports of the detectives when Antoine steps into view in the background-no longer the hunter, but older detective advises Antoine on a date, so he the culprit. In this context, Henri's death (in the act of impersonation!) epitomizes the pathetic anonymi- turns his collar up-just like the stranger trailing ty and deceit of the detective business. At the ceme- tery, Antoine separates himself from the Blady peo- Christine. Yet detection proves difficult for Antoine. ple and wanders off. It is his farewell to the profes- sion . He abandons his job to seek love, and as we He loses a suspect by calling Christine and chatting watch him select a girl from among the prostitutes waiting in the chill beyond the graveyard wall , we uneasily with a former girlfriend . Just the reverse recall an earlier remark : \" Making love is a way of compensating ; you have to prove you still exist. \" occurs at the bistro ; when for once he is being Throughout the film, Christine's student activities completely professional , he must ignore Christine. have been her excuse for avoiding Antoine; she has escaped from love into her \" job.\" But a shot of her Success in love or success in work-Antoine can 't at the table, facing away from the television image have both . The Tabard case is the central example of the film . \" Everybody hates me,\" M. Tabard announces , and unwittingly demonstrates why. As we observe his stuffiness and coldness, we realize that his em- ployees loathe him because he ignores them as people. He shares the business-sex confusion too ; he likes to look up his salesgirls' dresses and he claims that he learned English in bed with an English girl while her husband was at work . Tabard lives for his business and ignores human warmth , while Antoine, incompetent at every job he tries, lives for love. Small wonder, then, that he is dazzled by Ma- dame Tabard: always dressed in black and white , she is as much a prisoner as Mme. de Mortsauf in Le Lys dans /a Vallee . Significantly, Antoine first sees her standing like a mannequin in the window Catherine Deneuve of her husband's store; the shot perfectly symbolizes and Francois Truffaut the role she plays in her husband 's mind . But the moment Antoine sees her, he forgets his jobs: his on location ecstatic report to the Agency abandons professional for MISSISSIPPI MERMAID.
of student demonstrations, implies that she has me to represent a deepening and enrichment of repudiated her previous behavior. She yanks out a TV tube and calls Antoine , who is now a repairman . Truffaut's synthes is of Renoir and Hitchcock. Wh ile When he arrives, work becomes a pretext for love. The camera tracks over the parts-strewn floor (An- FAHRENHEIT 451 and THE BRIDE WORE BLAC K, full of toine is in the wrong business again) to the ticking meter, tiptoes up the stairs, and peeps into-the undigested Hitchcock, are Truffaut's only in small wrong bedroom . The camera shamefacedly doubles back and discovers the couple in the parents ' bed . touches, lyrical cadenzas, the more recent films These handheld shots, a lyrical joke on Hitchcockian point-of-view, undermine the premise of the detec- subsume the intrigue elements-detection , tive business and our involvement in the intrigue as c inematically as Antoine 's behavior does drama- voyeurism , the chase-to more personally expres- tically. In the morning, the Christine-Antoine break- fast scene recapitulates the Madame Tabard-An- sive ends . True , in MERMAID especially , all the in- toine relationship-coffee at luncheon and frantic correspondence-but with a contrasting intimacy jokes are there: references to THE BIRDS, Cahiers and spontaneity: no spilled coffee, love notes passed across a kitchen table. critic Comolli , the \" Clinique Heurtebise\" souvenir The climactic scene , as in most Truffaut films , of Cocteau , and the \" Arizona Jim \" gag (stolen from takes place in nature (or as near it as Paris will permit). Antoine and Christine are sitting on a park Renoir 's THE CRIME OF M. LANGE ) that Godard and bench when the man who has been shadowing her draws near. In a film so full of snooping , we have Truffaut are swatting back and forth . But MERMAID assumed him to be another detective. A shot taken from behind the lovers places them visually in the nevertheless marks a new maturity in Truffaut 's front row of the theatre , watching the man as we have been watching them . \" I know all about life ,\" handling of adult situations. His characters are no the stranger says. \" I know that everybody betrays everybody. I've no work , I' ve no obligation to any- longer children (THE 400 BLOWS), adolescents (STO- one. \" He announces his perpetual love of Christine, and as he moves off he adds with a smile : \" I am LEN KISSES) , or adults who behave like adolescents very happy.\" Truffaut will not let us savor Antoine 's happiness without remind ing us of the others-those (JULES AND JIM). Likewise, the escape into voyeurism who trail life, watching from a distance. Antoine was is repudiated : as Deneuve and Belmondo flee the very nearly doing it himself, and he may be again ; love isn 't certain, even when divorced from work. police, she says she wants to be with her accomplice Truffaut has invoked Hitchcockian intrigue only to dispell it, violating melodramatic formula by the Richard , and Belmondo answers bitterly that she force of his Renoirian sensitivity to joy and melan- choly. What Bazin wrote of Renoir applies to Truffaut can take a hotel room opposite Richard 's cell and perfectly : \" If Renoir amuses himself and us by taking his actors to the edge of parody, and if he lingers glimpse him everyday. The suggestion , which refers over apparently accessory charms , it is the better to seize us all at once with a truth we were not back to LOVE AT 20, STOLEN KISSES , and Truffaut's expecting .\" own past , is seen as an act of cowardice and irre- STOLEN KISSES and MISSISSIPPI MERMAID seem to sponsibility. Truffaut finally condemns Hitchcocki an voyeurism as clearly as Renoir does in his remark : \" The big problem is not to stop at being a voyeur. Not to look on at people 's pred icaments as if you were a tourist on a balcony. You have to take part.\" It is significant, then , that children , previously so central to Truffaut's vision , are of peripheral impor- tance in his last four films. Is it too much to suggest that L'ENFANT SAUVAGE [WILD CHILD] marks Truffaut's return to the emotional impulse of THE 400 BLOWS but with a new compassion for the adult? (He has remarked that he erred in making Antoine 's mother too nasty; now he himslef is playing the guard- ian-role .) Perhaps passing through a Hitchcock phase matured his sensibility, made him more aware of the sinister complexity of human nature. In any event, those who groan at Truffaut's pretentious photograph and charge him with Hitchcockian cyni- cism could not be more wrong . His last two films verify the Sincerity of the impulse that led him to Fra ngois Truffaut and Jean Pierre Cargol preface MISSISSIPPI MERMAID with the words : \" This in sc e nes fr o m THE WILD CHILD. film is dedicated to Jean Renoir .\" 11111111
Also-rans on the screen were some products of • bouncing Bolexes and several passionate personal statements whose message was apparently too ineffable to be expressed with technical competence or logical sequence. Immaturity and disorganized psyches were projected in several films screened . A synopsis of one of these (or, for that matter, all of them) is approximately as follows : The filmmaker, who is making a trek from here to \" there\" (unspecified place or undefined state of mind) attempts to represent a chaotic state of affairs (personal, political, and / or social) by showing chaos on the screen . The result is a compilation film pieced together from scraps of footage shot during the filmmaker's pilgrimage (via motorcycle, Volkswagen , station wagon, etc.) across the American landscape. Interspersed are fragments of TV commercials, shots of cars driving at night, filling stations, people lighting cigarettes, \" earth\" shots (parched or fertile, possibly switching from black and white to color), sunrises, clouds and more clouds, animal close~ups with emphasis on the eye , roadside signs reading \" Jesus Saves,\" fast cuts of highways (we ' re covering a lot of territory, you see) , traffic jams ... These are the ingredients. Mix in any proportion and almost any order, and serve on at least one screen. The super-category of expressional filmmakers cannot make do with but a single image at a time. Their scenes are double-printed to suggest either ambivalence or duality, and they intersperse black (or white) frames to indicate profundity. For example, superimpose pig heads over Rotary luncheon (pigs are hungry, men are hungry, hence men are pigs). What you don't catch on film , put in the sound track: carnival music, construction sounds (especially grinding, burping, groaning noises), rushing water, and heavy breathing , as in passion or emphysema. Play lonesome jazz over a bum 's face and cut on a blue note. Follow with either a cop or the American flag , and switch music to jelly-roll jazz. Print Negroes in negative, turning black into white, thus solving the race problem . Harvey V. Fondiller, from \" The Flaherty Film Seminar\" Popular Photograph y, December, 1969 I had a question about QUIXOTE, which was, it seemed to me, really two films-a film with two sensibilities-one about the West and one more directly about politics, Vietnam, the urban set-up. There seems a very clear demarcation point and I thought both would have made supremely satisfactory films. I just wondered why you put them together. Personally, I felt that for me, as an audience, it might have been more satisfactory as \"Champion Jumper of World \" Bruce Baillie in Yosemite .
two separate films, dealing with separate things. from a friend in South Dakota , going on over the .. . I don 't see that it's two films. How do you Sierras toward Idaho and Montana into winter. For whatever reason I also began the daily reading of separate the land from the politics, the land from Don Quixote. As this form became known to me the life? I see it as a whole collage of America, with it was both a shape and a vehicle for my film-my an inner kind of way of thinking, and the impact adventure-and that peculiar burden of a thing doesn 't hit me intellectually, it hits me somewhere coming into being . where I hurt, I just wanted to cry somehow after the film. I can see a great collection of fantastic images I suppose one of the reasons I came here was working against each other and I can 't see how to see the film . I liked seeing it, but it's awkward for you put them together in that shape. That, to me, me in places , seeing it as an audience. The is what I try and find in anyone 's work, how they techniques were the best I could do with what I knew, how I could work , and the money I had . But put them together, and I couldn 't grab it . . and it was more just really what I could do . I couldn 't I was wondering is it something to be taken as a have done more. whole, or is there a linear path to it that I ju st Specifically, the multiple imagery technique was missed? the taping of original A-B-C rolls over a light box Doesn 't the linear path make the whole? with opaque mylar, so that things were kind of coming and going like screens moving across Yes , you get bombarded. It is a total experience. each other . It was really crude ; this was one of my first films where I wanted to share the frame, one You can 't wend your way through it, it just diverse material with another, without the effect of happens. Maybe it's all around me, maybe I can superimposition . assemble it that way at my own time rather than the time necessary on the screen. Most of my revisions were clarifications (1967), just taking out a lot of things, taking away things That would be nice like a newspaper, invent so that you could see the essential images more your own news. clearly . Still there is unclarity and no real control in some areas . To really reach into a frame , the Because the form is linear and that 's the way it frame, and pursue the logic within the frame and collected, I couldn 't get with your work. I c ouldn 't without, according to sequence, etc. .. . When you get your linear form. get into more abstract work, for example ... I'm thinking now about watching it as a storyteller like I'd say that it probably had a pretty formal , linear Gorky ... in watching my frame , whether it's structure. During that period of time I came under abstract or not, I want to guide the relationship the influence of a number of teachers: Bach, toward some clima x, resolution-as in the Brakhage, Cage, cummings, Cervantes. Anyway, I narrative, each phrase and the phrases in remember myself having a very acute and relationship to one another toward the whole. long-winded joy with this film and its structural problems. I loved them. Like Cocteau , obsessively , How do you work? Do you shoot with an idea structuring the silverware between the designs on in mind, assemble some stock footage that fits into the tablecloth and the plates. Like the Cervantes your mental framework, and then begin refining it novel itself, filled with chapters, dialogues, songs. Some parts discreet, others continuing , in varied down , or do you have a plan to begin with, or what? form , into new sections. In e. e. cummings: \" Uncle,\" the last word of a stanza; his proper name It's like a quest, as I suggested . When I think beginning the ne xt stanza-a full double space back , I refer to a man from the past. This was a between stanzas. hero-maker, a storyteller, an image-maker with whom I gradually became concerned generally. You being in closer than I would be, your But I was concerned with heroes-a hero fragments are more fragmented and it's hard for concerned with heroes. Like the poet-warrior he me to do all those extra steps and put it together would start when it was time to start, knowing so I can grab it somehow. really not particularly where, and then where he came to , the places he came to , began to tell him Every time there was a cut, or joint, section where he was going , and then he, of course, succeeded by section, frame by frame , it was began to know where he was at. carefully, \"heavily \" conceived . If it is a work of art-a living thing-it might take some acquaintance It wasn 't the Don Quixote of Cervantes I set out with it over a period of time. to discover, or re-discover, it was only an adventure, I don 't know why he came to me. To It is a little like running and just missing a train that time I hadn 't read the work. that I wanted to catch . I began to keep notes as I went-with Lilian , My own technical criticism of the film , again , is Dog and Volkswagen-through the Southwest, back to California, borrowing a little more money that there was lacking , especially in those complex simultaneous parts, the depth of control that I . .. seek. I have never seen it in a film yet. You can see it on another level , perhaps , in brilliant works of narrative cinema . But, in an essentially non-storytelling film , there are at some This interview with Bruce Baillie was recorded at the 1969 Flaherty Seminar and edited by him . FILM COMMENT 25
pOints quite d ifferent problems , for example , in this notes that covered perhaps a fourth of the sound. pursuit of the reason for / within a film phrase-for Otherwise , there was only a vague idea of it at that the relationships (\"that go down \" ) from phrase to stage . phrase and within the frame itself. When miraculously I had found the money to I had a thought while I was sitting in the theater , develop and workprint all the film I had mailed between several films , about how different the home during those months, I began to put the film moments are when one thing becomes another in together-a film made of many distinct parts, not succession . The cut-really the heart of the unlike the novel. It began in mid-context with the filmmaker 's work-and the moment. He makes the old man , Archie Jewell Cradick of Deming , New moment by cutting . I believe that with certain cuts Mexico. A definite structural idea, based on the it is impossible to find the \" right \" ex act moment. peculiar length of the film-I wanted the man to be On each viewing , with each viewer it will be a little talking right into the screen , in mid-context, this side or that , having \" in each case \" a different without any fade , without easing in . meaning-a different relationship to the \" center\" or moment. There 's some kind of cut-I 've never Edited to the picture for the most part, I would noticed this before-that will never be solved . That note down sound relationships as I went . . . also may be good information. playing stretches of sound with the picture as I edited. Finally , the sound track came as a last What do you mean by \" solve \" . .. that cuts will phase of work-in the way of filmmaking it was in never be solved? part a separate endeavor. This particular track almost plays by itself. It might be nice if on radio Well , cuts are problems to a man that's making they occasionally played the tracks tC' 30me of them . these films. Do you mean solve in the sense of where it Some of the basic sound material is from should be? compositions and other tapes of Ramon Sender, The San Francisco Tape Music Center. They were Yes, for each time, in any kind of film-the most isolated , re-worked , etc.-combined with things simple, descriptive kind of film-there 's an exact from the road , and so on . Another sound base was moment for each cut, which a master finds and from Charles Ives' symphonic work dedicated to makes. But as I said , it seems there are some cuts America, since I discovered I was making a film which will always occur a little differently to the that seemed to me very similar to his symphony, sense, to everybody, to the theater itself. There is filled with Protestant hymns. no universal place for some cuts, I guess. Sin ce I know that every film you make, you I wa s partic ularly taken by the so und. Did yo u make several hundred decisions every ten minutes have that growing with you in the car too , or did in the pro cess of shooting and editing, it has this come later? always seemed to me that it would be pretty I was recording th e pieces in the same way I recorded the pieces of the visual . When I came in diffic ult for every filmmaker to remember every from the road , after three quarters of a year, I had 26 SPRING 1971
reason why he made every decision, and that fact From left: that you can 't leads me to believe that you are Cradick from QUI XOTE ; giving me a better impression of what it's like at TO PARSIFAL [photo by Dan Yates] ; least to make your kind of film than you might if TUNG ; you could remember each one of those thousands Bruce Baillie of particulars in them . At any rate , regardless of Self portrait. how you explain them, they are quite an a horse and I looked all up and down the street accomplishment. I wish you 'd talk a little bit about for her, risking hanging, and finally found her aunt's house. I mean I felt that there in that VALENTIN. It seems to me a simpler image. environment-you probably have some feelings for Sometimes I wish VALENTIN would move a little her from being there and seeing the film-that public execution was a risk that I was running by bit slower, about another half pace slower. It's asking . But I asked her and then I had a meeting odd , I suppose I didn 't really know when I was so coming up with her father, Manuel. I was afraid close to my subject that he would move a little bit and it was about three days to go when I was faster through my screen . That film came out of going to meet him on a corner at night. I had never the painful experience of one making a record of seen him and I wasn 't going and a little boy came his own life. I remember that the strength of my to the house and said he was waiting . So I went impressions daily there was so severe that I really to see him and I just said the thing that I had said thought I couldn't live through it. It was being a many times, just learned to say, that I made movies foreigner, being an outsider by choice ; even the and there would be an exchange of money to the horse rejected me down there, I couldn 't take his family because they were poor, for my being able picture. It, being the last film I've made, led me or to be part of their family, allowed into their house at least indicates where I feel I'm being led , and at least. They lived behind a wall with the horse. that is into an essential question about recording . I wanted to sleep at night on the girls' floor and Whether it's a distinct action from those actions photograph them through the cracks as they woke you make according to just being , and not being up. I never got that far but that's how I felt. I was a recorder of being , or the concern with creating completely, erotically, totally, taken with Mexico another being . That is, I am talking about being an and there was no way out. I had found that to artist, a vehicle through which something flows make films was the way out. Now I'm looking for and is one thing and then another; or I don 't know how to stay there always. I haven 't found how to that, but at least it flows through and all the do this yet . Neither in or out , but just there, particular pain from that flow was really at a peak something like that. Instead of making the transit, when I was in Mexico . I still saw myself as a making way, instead of depending upon a vehicle, recorder, so I sought to make a thing from being instead of having a weapon at my command , a in this extreme environment and finally, after a thing between , instead of thing-making to get number of months in the same town , behaving there . So, in Mexico I began to shoot , using an myself, I couldn 't stand it anymore. I saw a girl on extension tube with my Bolex and the three-inch lens, skin , the vibrations in the wooden blocks, and the ground , and the sun coming up through the blocks , and the blood flowing down there in the earth. And the sun was so intense I would have FILM COMMENT 27
thought that the images would be more light. They with Mexico and then you said that you wanted the were so heavy. But then I deliberately bought time to be slower, which reminds me that we Kodachrome down there and kept it pretty low. unfortunately saw VALENTIN at the wrong speed Like I say, I wish it were a little slower, absolutely all of it, by a fourth . The game, Loteria, the girls here and lost all the sensual qualities of it, and I'm were playing-we used to play with the girls every thinking that maybe, in a way, if it had been slower night on the street corner-the game is the kind of game that's like a whole family, where playing it would have expressed the sensuality of the air, lottery at night is a kind of nightly reassurance of erotic things that you felt. the whole story of being alive , with all the animals , the sun , the elements, all on the cards . We 'd play Well , that film was finished and as a finished it every night. living film , I can 't really question it myself, that 's the way it is. It's like looking at a friend and wishing Well , anyway, so that game was in the middle. he would slow down . The sync part was kind of astonishing to me technically, since I was jaundiced at the time and I was very held by what I felt was the struggle probably shouldn 't have been working . That's all in the film between, say, the Indian life, which was I had to do was that sync passage, maybe a minute in a way the content and which was very pure and and a half, and there were two passages within it. simple, and on the other hand something that was I didn 't have a sync outfit down there . In fact, I had to borrow a very bad tape recorder. a kind of abstraction and a kind of chaos which Is VALENTiN your favorite of all the films you 've came in the form . And I wonder if you 're conscious made so far? of that and if you feel that as you get closer to that Indian kind of life you 're going to get some of that Well , I kind of liked it. I named my horse after slowness that you felt the lack of. that film . I'm still stuck with a kind of primitive view of my existence-like horse, home, woman , man. That's a good question. I think I wondered about that once. That's just a good question to In CASTRO STREET and MASS I thought I saw a pose. It doesn 't need an answer. A very good one . style beginning to evolve, and now, for me, you It's for me a good question anyway. (Silence) Well , kind of break that style with this one, and I am what would you like to hear? (Laughter) I mean , wondering if it couldn 't possibly be the rejection kind of generally. I 'd like to hear how conscious you were of that struggle. Probably absolutely unconscious of it as an you felt that could have resulted in that kind of aesthetic problem , and probably just now noticing style in Mexico? it. It may be that its pace is, you might say, correct or real or truthful to what its aspirations are, where I knew pretty clearly when I set out shooting it's going-thinking of it like a brother or a friend. where my style was, and probably if I could really I can't tell. remember , could bring up why . It would take me a while to remember though . In all this stuff while It's a combination of elements which stop and we 're talking-I don 't know how the talk 's gone so begin with the cuts, which somehow seem to have far-this is good enough-very personal , it's fun an inner logic and a kind of inevitable quality that and nobody that really knows not very much QUIXOTE built very strongly, in the way you shift should get to talk a lot, I figure . So, if it doesn 't from one block or section to another. The come across in the sense that we're all connected , connections are always clearly stopped and then that we ' re all from the same family, then it's sort started. It's hard to say quite why, but sometimes of worthless. For example, what we call and still it's enough to say that it works. It's its own think of an artist , the question why he might have come on to a different style might be pretty justification. revealing about a lot of things. I can't remember In VALENTIN there are several heartbreaking though . Maybe it'll come up. images, primarily of the people, and I wonder how You said you were having sort of an erotic affair you go about finding these people. I mean you explained how you found them, but . .. 28 SPRING 1971
I will answer according to my past work . I head . Well , the shot wasn 't too well placed so Yum always entered my work religiously, and always Yum had a lot of blood pumping out of his head when you ' re devoted things come your way . They and I was photographing it. Okay , we eat cows make their own way , they find their own place . If every day and I had to do that job or not do it, one you commit yourself to it you ' re bound to pass or the other. He walked around half-dazed with a through . Before you start, of course, there's no huge bullet in his brain , wondering how soon it way to anticipate and that's why we have such an would be before he was dead . old fear in us about walking , about commitment or taking roads , since they are unknown . I suppose These are good men , the men who were killing that 's why we have discussions, in fact. him , and the man with the gun in his hand was nervous, though he was an extra-good man. Then The Eskimoes , as I understand ,when they make they had a dead shell and I was setting up with my a carving , they pick up a rock and they see what's shutter speed at 1000 and all . Everything was set inside the rock , the carving that's there, and they right , waiting for a second shot so I cou Id get the just try to uncover it. shutter the moment the shot entered the animal , so I did . The boys were all astounded and watching , Well , let me tell you about Yum Yum. so I shot them kind of like you see in the They all arrived on Saturday morning to kill Yum newspaper. This, and then the reaction to this: Yum . \" As a trained reporter,\" the first thing I did coverage , it is called . So , I did a good job and was to go back to where Yum Yum was while they bought beer for everybody while Yum Yum was were preparing the garage . All the tools and knives being made into meat. It took him a long time to were sharpened and laid out, and I saw who was die. And then I spent the day looking for girls, I to be killed that morning and recorded it properly, think. In the evening , I was riding down Main maybe three shots, I'm sure. When he got up from Street in my truck and all of a sudden I felt nausea. where he was lying , I kind of stood behind a tree It wasn 't the fact that the animal was killed , or as though I'd just got there . That was his first anything , it was just that I had another huge perception , recognition? .. . isn't that the first question now. What kind of work was I doing time? ... he knew this was going to be some kind there, which meant to say, \" Who are you? What of fun Saturday morning . And I began to look at part did you have in his vision , this animal to be him myself, and I was looking at him , and this was killed?\" And I know better than to be completely a new question in my life that I came to . The next step was when all the boys prepared the tools . From left: And then I took pictures of the boys in their Miss Wong in anticipation . They had a gallery in the garage up ON SUNDAYS ; in the hay. I wrote down some of the things they switch engine in said so I wouldn 't forget, since I was recording . I CASTRO STREET wrote down , \" Save my place,\" and \" You got the [photo by Dan Yates ); gun?\" . I sawall these elements and photographed THE GYMNASTS ; them , each separately. Then one of the oldest boys Fred 's boy went to get Yum Yum . He didn 't want to come out and goat of the yard , and then there was joking by the where Yum Yum father, saying , \" Oh, come on Yum Yum , you never \" is about to did like me ,\" and the boys bringing him along with become meat. \" some Olmalene . Now Olmalene is the most wonderful food for a cow or horse. It's corn mash , overcome by sentimentality. I can tell myself that barley, oats and molasses. There isn 't anything we all die and the animals crushed on the highway more wonderful. He had some in the bottom of a or made into meat are just making a transit ... It's pail but Yum Yum wasn 't too interested-he was important, nevertheless, the man , the participant, scared . Then he came out and was shot in the that journalist in the front row at the gas chamber, know his relationship to Death as well as to Life . Also , it may be that my whole feeling was only for Yum Yum . Do you know your relationship to it? [Death-Life 1 No. Being nothing like my heroes, I haven 't worked on it, I've let it go. Of course , I can also give you some more information-some people know about this, and some not. I know a little more lately. These kinds of unknown deeds collect in each of us. They have a particular form-this has the particular form of the butchering of a steer. And if they go unattended , they reoccur in that FILM COMMENT 29
From to p : \" My Vol kswagen at Pete Spellman 's [ I made all my form , in that unknown form , and the most films out of this car] ;\" Morning Star home, 1965-66 , where I convenient form for those unknown specters is terror. That 's where fear of the dark , fear of an made CASTRO STREET, ALL MY LIFE, and edited VALENTIN open door, fear of those \" visitations\" that each of DE LAS SIERRAS ; Bruce Bai llie at Pe te's. Summ er 1969. us gets occasionally, come from . Each of us gets [ph oto by Pete] occasional indications from some unknown presence that would have himself invited , and we usually say, \" No, no , no , no , no \" even among the best of us, and the reason we say no is because we invented those presences (i n fearful form) nurtured by our own neglect, I think . They needn 't be terrifying ; they can be peaceful and wonderous. In' Mexico they have the fear . . . Well , Mexico works it out a lot better than we do. Their masks, their parades ... I 've been thinking about two things the whole afternoon . One is that it is like Dostoevski saying that the man is always better than the work, and the other thing I 've been thinking about is that if you actually became an Indian, lived there, became like an Indian, there 'd be something in you that would still have to make film . I don 't know. Do you think there is a doubt? Is film a way into life, and if the life if full, is filmmaking so important? If the life is realized, the art falls away? Maybe you 'd just like to weave or take care of horses if you 're \" retiring.\" I wonder about adding to the noise men make? Well , it isn 't that it's a distinguishable question-initially it's not a discrete question between for whom , since the man doing the making is partly the man doing the receiving , the using . And then it's not different again since to decide about it or, for example, to go on the wrong road , to continue on the wrong way, he'd be a wrong-way filmmaker. He would do nothing, his films would be noise, so that's the question ... What would make you feel that it is the wrong way? I don 't feel that necessarily. I'm just questioning the road , the way, the way of making, of doing , of committing energy outwardly into shapes and forms and things. Is it somehow because the return isn 't what you hoped it might be? What return could there be, I don 't know . I can 't imagine any. Do you feel that your films are accomplishing something of what you put into them? Well , I wouldn 't know that .. . I think probably some of those things do matter but I don 't know which , and I don't know how. Does it matter whether you pick up a camera or whether you dig a hole in the ground? There have been some successful human artists, human beings that could function singly and were brilliant thing-makers . Well , there's a tradition that says that man , the artist, it's all right, he's a madman! It's a glorification , a heroic, a romantic tradition , and it's one which will no longer serve . Making a passage right now, we ' re in a changing no-place, a gigantic uncertainty; a man who might choose to foolishly accept that 30 SPRING 1971
tradition becomes very mad in the twentieth that world in which I will inevitably find myself. All century , really . It was still useful in Europe right adventures seem for us to have a way in and a way through Genet. So, now demands something out? unfamiliar, demands another norm , the shapes we used before don 't work now. Hardly any you can In the beginning , if we 're well acquainted with name-even the size of shoes-everything has it, we don't look for it again-we don 't even want it-and initially, early in the adventure , we find disappeared, and its usefulness. It's terrifying and ourselves free. It's a romance , we ' re in love again! a man who wants to enter that kind of life with a We ' re free . Because that 's what romance does , tradition saying it's okay to be mad as long as temporarily, free us-and gradually we become you 're a filmmaker! I think it is Life magazine 's job wed to this new familiarity, this new world , and I to list those certain principles that have worked for want to know about that. I don 't want to get there centuries . For all I know , Life is handling that ever again . I want to stay in transit. Not lost like already, I hope so . We should learn in the third a ghost. Ghosts are those who have lived, who grade about romance , life and death, etc . have had form , who are familiar with having a place, being somewhere, and have turned off, Then you are questioning . .. deceased in any sense you like , and are constantly I'm questioning the romance that a man can be terrorized by all the unresolved stuff of their lives, two things , that he can be on the one hand this , the result of their living . There's more about ghosts and on the other that, which offers him madness. that I don 't know at the moment. Before, some men were strong enough to contain it, and in fact have been brilliant creative madmen . But I don 't mean like a lost soul. I mean the What do you do when you 're driving around in contrary, like a permanent infinite kind , always your Volkswagen and you get lost . .. here, just here. No matter where. I call Life magazine. (Laughter) I do. So , I am questioning the vehicle , art. I am What do you do when you get lost when you 're wondering about it. I wanted to be an artist all my in the desert or in Mexico or something? Do you life, since I was a little kid . Late in my life I finally just keep on driving, or do you stop and go back, found tools and worked hard at it making films that or some people stop and ask, or do you open a I loved . They are all off now on their own-they are map, or do you just go by your feelings towards whatever they are, and I wonder now-I have much east or west in the general direction? People have more skill now at my command at this moment different ways of doing things when they get than I had a year, two, three years ago-and I lost-the reason I asked that is you talked about wonder at the film I'm making , and may not make. going in the wrong way. You can go in the wrong So, I'm asking can we make that new adventure each time , can we make it now and take our tools way and when you make a mistake, the only way with us from here to there, can we carry these to correct a mistake is to stop doing it. You can tools, can we use them? What can we possibly know about bringing anything to a strange go back and take the other fork, or something, but environment? Now, I can answer a little bit just for maybe you don 't. I'm just asking what you did in myself, as having been a film artist. I always felt that YOUr Volkswagen. I brought as much truth out of the environment as I could , but I'm tired of coming out of. It's like That's something I think people really have to being comfortable. (Like the author of Don work on now-to know if they are on the right way Juan)-like you go on an adventure but no matter or on the wrong. what you do , or where you go , you know you 've got Berkeley back there , or whatever safe place it I overshot this place by twenty-five miles the first is . It's home. No matter how fierce the day here. I had to drive all the way back. Revolutionaries , they 've all had a home . Well, you 're obviously considering retiring, and But I want everybody really lost, and I want us so forth , or continuing making films, and you say all to be at home there . Something like that. that might be the wrong way. Actually I am not interested in that, but I mean that's what you could do. Lots of people would like I think that's probably the story of most people's it. I have to say finally what I am interested in , like lives, perhaps , being in the wrong place in the Socrates: peace .. . rest ... nothing .. . wrong time. No movement at all? The problem seems to be to make that step into Nothing. Okay, that's enough . the dark, not knowing which way you are going to go and allowing yourself the freedom, trusting that FILMOGRAPHY: BRUCE BAILLIE you have to go whichever way you feel. I don 't see (notes by Bruce Baillie) how you know-I think you can know when you 're 1961 mad. And whether you can stop that and still be On Sundays. 35 minutes, black and white . an artist, if that's the way you would go- With Miss Wong . Document of a lovely friend and of San Francisco woven together in fictional form . I think the trap that awaits man is his attraction 1962 to movement. As you go along the way, you David Lynn's Sculpture. 3 minutes, black and gradually become familiar, and as you become white . Shown in our early Canyon Cinema familiar, you become gradually possessed , just like in the way of families, attached to it. Now, my new mystery? Each time is new, brand new, no rules for it at all except for the footwork. My question is can I do that work and remain unattached to the environment passing through FILM COMMENT 31
showings, never printed. Example of \" The News,\" I I Ishe was someone II you we had known .\" an inexpensive local means of combining film seeing and filmmaking. Numerous first awards; Ann Arbor Touring Mr. Hayashi. 3 minutes, black and white. Short Festival, 1966. document of a man , made originally as a \"News, \" Castro Street. 10 minutes, black and white and and now in distribution . Midwest Film Festival color. (\" The Coming of Consciousness.\" ) Award, Ann Arbor, 1963. Conceived in the form of the street itself, Castro Friend Fleeing. 3 minutes, black and white. Street in Richmond , California. A Standard Oil Another \" News,\" made for my friends and not Company refinery on one side of the street, printed . railroad switch yards on the other. Male and female The Gymnasts. 8 minutes, black and white. counter-motion . Ann Arbor Touring Festival, 1967. Semi-narrative, partly documentary, my first film All My Life. 3 minutes, color. \" Singing fence,\" with \" fancy \" editing . Originally a \" News,\" now in Caspar, California. One continuous moving shot. release . Ella Fitzgerald singing All My Life on the soundtrack. Everyman. 6 minutes, black and white. The sailing Still Life. 2 minutes, color. From the commune life of the boat Everyman into the Pacific nuclear at Morning Star, where I made CASTRO STREET. testing area as protest. John Adams and guitar. Termination. 6 minutes, black and white. Tulley News #3. 3 minutes, black and white. Material and I made this film for some people up at the from a Cuban rally intercut with peculiar rock Laytonville Rancheria. They were being formations from my California travels. The sound \" terminated\" under a new Bureau of Indian is radio music and mob sounds. Affairs program . Have You Thought of Talking to the Director? 14 Port Chicago Vigil. 9 minutes, black and white. minutes, black and white. Made while under the Kind of a \" News,\" for the people of the 24-hour first impression of Mendocino, up the coast north a day vigil around the US Marine Ammunition of San Francisco, and of my friend, Paul Tulley. My Depot at Port Chicago, California. first \" serious\" piece. Show Leader. 1 minute, black and white. A Here I Am. 10 minutes, black and white. A film for repeated shot of me in a stream talking to the the East Bay Activity Center in Oakland , a school audience, used as an introduction to Baillie film for mentally disturbed children . programs. Rent-free. 1963 1967 To Parsifal. 16 minutes, color. Still one of my best. Valentin de las Sierras. 10 minutes, color. Made A tribute to the hero , Parsifal. The first part is off in Chapala, Jalisco , Mexico. Titles in Spanish . the California coast, at sea; the second part is the Song by Jose Santollo Nasido en Santa Crus de mountains and the great slow freight trains through la Soledad , blind singer. First Award , San the passes. First Award , San Francisco, 1963. Francisco, 1968. 1964 1967-1970 A Hurrah for Soldiers. 4 minutes, color. Dedicated Quick Billy. 60 minutes, in four reels. Plus Rolls to Albert Verbrugghe, a Belgian whose wife was #41,42,46,47; three minutes each. Color and killed by UN soldiers in Katanga, December 1962. black and white. The essential experience of A collage mishmash with a strong recognition within transformation, between Life and Death , death and it of the quality and historical place of the soldier. birth , or rebirth . The first three reels, which are The Brookfield Recreation Center. 6 minutes, color and abstract; structure adapted from the black and white. Made for the Oakland Public Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Schools on an experimental series of classes fourth reel , in black and white, is in the form of a in the arts. one-reel Western , summarizing in drama the Mass. 20 minutes , black and white. A film mass, material of the first three. \"The rolls\" are silent for the Dakota Sioux. Grand Prize, Ann Arbor, rolls of film that came after the film itself, like artifacts from the descending layers of an 1964; Moholy-Nagy Award, Illinois Institute of archeological dig . Aesthetically complete, they are Technology. part of the total work . (Rent-free option.) Part IV was a group effort by Paul Tulley, Charlotte Todd 1965 and myself. Quixote. (Revisions 1967) 45 minutes, black and Distributors: white and color. Originally intended for two Audio / Brandon, 34 McQuestern Parkway, Mount simultaneous screens. \"A view of America and Americans, sometimes complimentary, often Vernon NY 10550. embarrassing, always fascinating .. .. The sound Audio Film Center, 406 Clement Street, San track is a montage of the sounds which surround Francisco CA 94118. us in modern life.\"-Gregg Barrios. Canyon Cinema Co-op, room 220, Industrial Center Building , Sausalito CA 94965. 1966 Center Cinema Co-op , Columbia College, 540 North Lake Shore Drive, Chicago IL 60611 . Yellow Horse. 9 minutes, color. A cycle scrambles Filmmakers Co-op, 175 Lexington Avenue, New poem . Shot while editing QUIXOTE . Bass solo by Pat Smith, a Los Angeles musician friend . York NY 10016. Tung. 5 minutes, black and white and color. Silent. Also co-ops in Tokyo, Stockholm and London . 11111111 I IPortrait of Tung : \" Seeing her bright shadow II thought 32 SPRING 1971
VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Toward an Anthropological Cinema by Jay Ruby Jay Ruby is executive secretary of the Program Program In Ethnographic Film, a committee of the in Ethnographic Film of the American Anthropolo- American Anthropological Association devoted to gical Association and host of Temple University's encouraging the use of visual media among anthro- annual Anthropological and Documentary Film pologists was reorganized and through a grant from Conference. This article is an expanded version of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological a paper given at the 1968 triple A meetings in Seattle, Research now publishes a Newsletter,*** and an Washington. annotated filmography. PIEF has plans to conduct a summer training Institute in Visual Anthropology The history of film in anthropology is cyclical. and to aid the Smithsonian Institution in the es- Its beginnings are as early as the motion picture tablishment of a national anthropological film ar- camera itself-a French anthropologist, Regnault, took a camera with him to Africa in 1896, one year chive. after the first public showing of movies in Paris by There are several reasons for this sudden upsurge the Lumiere brothers (Regnault 1900*). In fact, the scientific quest for new methods for studying move- in interest. Academia, like the rest of our society, ment is one of the reasons for the invention of motion has become media infested. Films, and to a lesser pictures (Ceram 1965). degree, television are now viewed as replacing, or at least supplementing the traditional book-and-lecture Since that time motion picture film has been used educational process. Textbook companies are now to record data on the visual manifestations of human adding film distributing divisions. However, the behavior by many anthropologists, Birdwhistell major attraction for the anthropologist comes from (1955), and Sorenson and Gadjusek (1963) . In one more internal sources. Film offers the possibility of a new approach to the study of man-for some it sense, all motion picture footage is potentially useable is a legitimate outlet for artistic aspirations often data for the anthropologist-in that movies, whether frustrated by the demands of science, for others it they are on 8mm home effort or a 70mm color spec- provides an opportunity to bring together theories tacular, are a product of a particular culture and developed in communications, psychology, linguistics as such are reflective of the life-style of their produc- and other social sciences into, what Worth (1968) ers in much the same way as a folktale, song, or calls the ethnography of visual communication. carving. It is essential that anthropologists carefully ex- In addition to the research attributes of cinema, amine their \" new-found toy \" to see if it contains some anthropologists and documentary filmmakers qualities which will allow it to become a significant have attempted to produce anthropological docu- tool for anthropology. mentaries for classroom and general educational use. Most of these films have followed, consciously or Apart from the more profound considerations, otherwise, the model established by Robert Flaherty certain practical aspects of filmmaking require such in NANOOK OF THE NORTH* and Miriam Cooper in a discussion . Filmmaking is costly and time-consum- GRASS. ** ing. Professionally produced documentaries cost, on the average, $1000 per minute for a finished 16mm In spite of its obvious utility as a research and color sound film. If the anthropologist has the tech- teaching device, film has until quite recently played nical skills of a filmmaker (a rare combination of only a marginal role in anthropology. Most anthro- talents) these costs are obviously reduced, but it pologists continue to be technological innocents and, requires him to take time away from his anthro- if they think about filmmaking at all, they fantasize pological studies to learn the craft. Also, the produc- about the \"objectivity\" of it. tion of a film under field conditions is a complex matter. As 00 anthropologist has unlimited time in During the past decade and particularly during the field, the time spent in filmmaking must be jus- the past three or four years, this trend has reversed itself. The number of anthropological films has mark- • A complete citation for film s a nd books is appended . edly increased. Training programs in ethno-cinema \" Neither Coo per nor Flaherty were trained as anthropologists but have been instituted in several universities (e.g., UCLA) and a number of scholarly conferen ces have both were attemptin g to do a nthropology in their filming; they been held (Temple University, N.Y.U., UCLA) where tried to let the life-sty le of t he people dictate the structure of attempts were made to develop a dialogue between the film and not impose their own preconcept ions on t he materia L anthropologists and filmmakers. Last year (1969), \" 'Ava il able upon req uest by writing to PIEF , T emple University, R oom 200 South Hall , Philadelphia, Pa. 19122. FILM COMMENT 35
tified in strictly anthropological terms. recognizable cultural scenario, that is a beginning, It is the intent of this article to briefly summarize middle and end, such as the making of a pottery vessel or a funeral ceremony. The filmmaker need only to the current place of film in anthropology and to know the structure of the event (if possible by view- suggest what must be accomplished before an an- ing it several times prior to filming it) and have the thropological cinema can be created and occupy a technical competen ce and equipment to film. Be- place in the general framework of the discipline. The cause many of these events are largely public and central question is: How can the motion picture be \"self-consciously\" performed by the participants, the used to generate anthropological statements about presence of a filmmaker does not constitute any human behavior? further disruption than would the presence of any other observer, i.e., the anthropologist always alters At present it is extremely difficult to define what what he is studying whether he has a notebook, tape constitutes an anthropological film, other than the recorder or movie camera. On ce the anthropologist subject matter, (i.e., In the popular mind, anthro- begins to deal with the more synthetic and symbo lic pologists study exotic, primitive people, therefore, aspects of the life-style of a group, called cultural any film about these people, including MONDO CANE processes, he becomes less concerned with the who- is thought to be anthropological), or perhaps the listic recording of events. Once this shift in intent involvement of an anthropologist in the production. occurs, the techniques of research film become insuf- Most anthropologists who evaluate films are pri- ficient. To express the concept of an exchange system marily concerned with the ethnographic accuracy of such as reciprocity or a social system such as lineage the narration and what is being depicted, seldom are on film, the anthropologist must make more con- they concerned with the effect of the techniques scious selections of the available visual manifestations employed. A film, THE WASHOE, recently reviewed of these processes. Secondly, the apparent lack of in the American Anthropologist was accepted by two subjective interpretation which has been suggested reviewers as being a good contemporary ethnographic as being basic to this approach, is in itself a tech- account of this American Indian culture and yet the nique. Any filmmaker makes constant subjective film employed many awkward directing techniques decision: choice of topic and \"actors,\" camera place- which cast doubt upon its validity. For example, some ment, type of lens, length of scene, and so forth. All scenes were obviously directed and perhaps staged. of these decisions are based upon his evaluation of There are those occasions when it is necessary for the best way to depict the event. The camera and the filmmaker to intrude in order to be able to film the eye are quite different mechanisms and the an- at all. However, from the audiences' perspective there thropological filmmaker is obligated to become aware was no apparent reason for the staginess of this film. of the limitations of the medium if he is to use it The result of the filmmaker's use of this technique properly. was to cause me to question whether the film was really a good representation of the Washoe or simply Frequently, discussions on film by anthropologists the portrayal of the filmmaker's preconceptions of revolve around the mistaken notion that it is possible that culture. to objectively record phenomena on film. Anyone who seriously questions the subjective nature of film For purposes of discussion, anthropological film should read Rudolf Arnheim's Film As Art (1964) can be divided into two categories, primarily upon or anyone of a number of other works on the nature the basis of intent and the corresponding techniques of film, e.g., Worth (1969). employed: Research film, which is a part of the general body of scientific films common to many While research filming has a definite and neces- disciplines (cf., Michaelis 1955), and interpretative sary place in anthropology, it relegates film to the film, which is really a special kind of documentary. position of being a technologically sophisticated recording device and as such its use becomes The Research Film only a minor methodological question. Given the When motion pictures are used primarily as a recent advances in portable video tape equipment and Super 8 cameras, it seems likely that research specialized tool for the gathering of data, they be- filming (VTR, Super 8 or 16mm) will become a com- come a visual note taking device analogous to the monplace method of data collection much in the tape recorder or even the pencil and paper. The intent same way that still cameras and tape recorders are is to gather visual information which will be analyzed at a later time (Sorenson 1967). These films require now. a minimum of initial interpretation on the part of the maker. The degree of success depends upon his Interpretative Films knowledge of the culture in general and, specifically, In addition to record footage, there exist anthro- upon his knowledge ofthe event he is filming. The foot- age is not edited except for the addition of titles and pological films which are more intentionally inter- in some cases an explanatory narration , if the film pretative. These anthropological documentaries are was shot silent. These films are produced for research edited constructions of cultural events which vary purposes and are therefore only screened by profes- in their degree of interpretation from general cultural sionals who use them as field notes. If interpretative overviews, such as Flaherty's man vs. the environ- films are constructed from this footage, care is made ment theme in NANOOK OF THE NORTH, to the ac- .to preserve the originals. counting of a specific event, like THE SUCKING DOC- TOR (a film of the curing ceremony of the Pomo The limitations of the research approach to film Indians of Northern California), to films that use are two-fold. First, it is confined to those aspects events to suggest a general cultural theme, like Rob- of human behavior which already have a definite and 36 SPRING 1971
ert Gardner's film on warfare among the Dani of found to be unsuitable then the collaboration be- Highland New Guinea, DEAD BIROS. tween documentarist and anthropologist becomes questionable. No anthropologist would think of hir- The role of the anthropologist varies greatly in ing a journalist, untrained in anthropology, to take these films from consultant to collaborator to film- field notes for him or a professional ghost writer to write his monograph, yet apparently no one has maker. t These films also have an equally broad range questioned the exact same kind of collaboration in filmmaking. The problem is compounded somewhat of approaches from tightly scripted films , e.g. EARLY by the subject matter. No professional filmmaker STONE TOOLS , an archaeological film demonstrating hired to produce a film on cell reproduction would various methods of stone tool produ ction , to films ever think of questioning the biologist 's perceptions constructed from saturation shooting footage , like ofthe subject. But because of the popular application John Marshall's THE HUNTERS or the Netsilik Eskimo of social science concepts, documentary filmmakers series (cf. , Balicki and Brown 1966) where scripts were tend to have their own theories concerning how to constructed after the footage was shot. In these last portray human behavior filmically and the anthro- two examples, the filmmakers attempted to cover all pologist, because of his lack of technical knowledge, the major aspects of the culture, shooting over frequently defers to the expert, and adds his expertise 500,000 feet of film and create a film during the to the narration. The collaboration between the editing. filmmaker and anthropologist can be a very exciting experience for both people-the anthropologist pro- If these films are viewed in the larger context of vides a structured framework for perceiving human documentaries in America, then anthropological behavior and the filmmaker the technical skills nec- films have employed the techniques more common essary to translate these perceptions into a film . to older documentaries (i.e, the Flaherty-Cooper style), and have failed to benefit from such innova- I am not suggesting that all of the conventions tions as cinema verite. (Here the French are more of documentary filmmaking should be ignored and sophisticated than we are. Jean Rouch, an anthro- a totally new approach to film be created. That is pological filmmaker, was one of the originators of probably not possible and if it were it would require cinema verite, i.e. , CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER). Ameri- reeducating the audience as well. Rather, I am urging can anthropological films are technically quite poor anthropologists to select from all existing approaches as a rule and except for THE HUNTERS and DEAD those techniques which best suit their purposes. For BIROS have attracted almost no attention outside of example, there is much to be said for the cinema anthropology. verite school-their stress on portable equipment for maximum flexibility , their use of lip sync sound Currently, these documentaries are used as a sup- instead of narration, their use of long scenes (as plement or illustration to written materials-visual opposed to the jump-cut action editing so common textbooks used to create an empathic feeling among in fiction films), and yet the self-conscious crudity undergraduate students and occasionally the general of most of these films has become an aesthetic device public. It is vaguely hoped that, by forcing students which has no place in anthropological film . For ex- to view films they would probably avoid under other ample, John Cassavetes' FACES, a fiction film which circumstances, they will in some mysterious way learn employs cinema verite techniques to provide the anthropology. Seldom are the films really integrated audience with the illusion that they are seeing a into teaching. Seldom are students required to do documentary anything except passively watch them, usually in a room unsuited for the screening of films. 2) To what degree is anthropology print-domi- nated? The creation of anthropological methodology If film is ever to become an integral part of an- thropology and not just another specialized research NANOOK tool or an aspect of that dreary world of visual OF THE NORTH photo: Museum textbooks called educational film , then the following of Modern Art / questions must be examined from a strictly anthro- Film Stills pological perspective: Archive 1.) What is the nature of film as a particular form of communication in our society? a.) What effect does perceiving human behavior through a motion picture camera have upon the anthropologist: How can he learn to make the cine- matic decisions that will reflect his perceptions of culture? b.) Are the conventions of documentary film really applicable to his needs? Or should he consider creat- ing his own film conventions? The answers to these questions have several im- mediate consequences. If documentary styles are tI a m ex cludin g from this discussion film s a nthropologists may find useful in their teaching which were not in tenti ona lly pro- duced as anthropologi cal film s, su ch as Satyaji t Ra y's AP U TRILO · CY o r Burto n Gershfie ld 's NOW THAT THE BU FFALO 'S C ONE. There have always been filmm a kers, like Robert Fl a herty , who perceive the world in ways anal ogous to a trained anthropologist and who make anthropological film s without being awa re of it. FILM COMMENT 37
DEAD BIRDS and theory has been structured to some degree by the by anthropologists as yet. However, if there is to be an anthropological cinema that can be justified by photo: the unique abilities of the film medium, then anthro- pologists and filmmakers concerned with portraying Contemporary / need to translate various kinds of perceptions (visual the human condition must begin to systematically McGraw-Hili among them) into the printed word. It may be that deal with the problems I have outlined. this necessity has had no significant effect on the At the Winter Sea Ice Camp, parts 1, 2, 3, 4. 1969, conceptual framework of anthropology and it may color, 1-36 minutes, 2-36 minutes, 3-30 minutes, be possible to describe, analyze, and present state- 4-35 minutes; distributor Universal Education and ments about all aspects of human behavior using Visual Arts ; producer Kevin Smith and Quentin print. On the other hand, as the anthropologist Ed- Brown, Education Development Center; director mund Carpenter suggests, we may be collecting only Robert Young; camera Robert Young and Kenneth the data that is fit for print. Post; advisors Asen Balikci and Guy Mary- By experimenting with film, anthropologists may Rouseliere; theme Eskimo life during the winter experience a perceptual shift which could enable months. them to see the nature of the limitations of print, or at the very least gain a new perspective on their One section of the Netisilik Eskimo film series theories. Exactly what do anthropologists \"see\" when designed as a packaged-curriculium by Edu cat.ion they study another culture? Are they actually seeing Development Center. All of these films are narra- the same things or are printed conventions so condi- tionless episodes in the life of an Eskimo family. tioning them that they force the data to fit their Somehow, perhaps because of NANOOK, Eskimos are preconceptions and exclude all else? viewed by us as one of the most appealing of all non-western peoples.These films con tinue our fascina- If anthropological theory is not print-dominated, tion. Some of the footage from this section was then it should be possible to translate it into filmic edited into a CBS special (March 1970) entitled, terms, that is, make a film which reflects the ideas of a particular school of anthropological thought, ESKIMO: FIGHT FOR LIFE. such as the structuralism of French, anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss. Baboon Behavior. 1966, color, 31 minutes ; distribu- tor, producer University of California Extension The two questions which remain central to the Media Center; director, scenario, camera Irven De creation of an anthropological cinema are : 1) Are Vore, S. Washburn and Cameron Macauley; camera there certain aspects of human behavior, other than Charles Trotter; theme the social organization of the obvious ones like the use of space and the body baboons. as communication systems, which can be studied and presented with visual media? and 2) Will film One of a series of narrated University of California free anthropologists from some of the distortions of films on primates. De Vore also worked on a primate print (by replacing them with the distortions of film) film series for Education Development Center. These so that man can be viewed in a new light and thereby two series represent the best primate films available. expand our basic concepts? Chronicle of a Summer. 1960, black and white, 90 minutes; distributor Contemporary Films/ McGraw I do not know the answers to these questions. Most of t hem have received little, if any attention, 38 SPRING 1971
Hill; producer Anato le Dauman and Phillipe Lip- THE HUNTERS is undoubtedly the most popu lar chitz; director Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin; camera Raoul Coutard, Jean-Jacques Torbes and Michel ethn ographic film among anthropo logists today. Brau lt; theme student life in Paris. [An interview Since its com pletion , Marshall has continued to work wit h Rouch is printed in FILM COMMENT vo lum e on the Bushman footage, producing several shorter 4 number 2-3 1967.] films, and fi lm an ethnography of the Pittsburgh Dead Birds. ]963, co lor, 83 minutes; distributor Con- tempory Films/McGraw Hill; producer Film Study police. Center , Harvard ; director, scenario Robert Gardner ; Intrepid Shadows. 1968, black and white, silent, 18 camera Robert Gardner and Karl Heider; advisors minutes; distributor Center for Mass Com- Jan Broekhuyse and Peter Matthiessen; theme the munications, Columbia University; producer Sol culture of the Grand Valley Dani, Highalnd New Worth and John Adair; director, scenario, camera Guinea, with an emphasis on their warfare. Alfred Clah; theme Navaho culture as seen by the Navaho. The DEAD BIRDS expedition has provided us with an opportunity to experience another culture One of a seven -film series (NAVAHO FILM THEM- through the eyes of fi lmmaker Robert Gardner, nov- SELVES) from a research project designed to teach elist Peter Matthiessen (Under The Mountain Wall, Navahos the mechanics of filmmaking without im- Ballentine), and anthropologist Karl Heider (The posing Western fi lm co nven tions. 'The purpose of this Dugum Dani, Aldine P ublications). [Brief material work, according to Sol Worth and John Adair, was \"to on DEAD BIRDS is printed in FILM COMMENT see if motion picture fi lm, conceived photographed volume 2, number 1, 1964.] and manipulated by a people such as the Navaho Early Stone Tools. 1967, co lor, 20 minutes ; distribu- would reveal aspects of cognition and values that tor, producer University of California Extension may be inhibited, not observable or analyzab le when Media Center; director Clyde Smith ; camera William the means of investigation is dependent on verbal Heick and Gordon Mueller; advisors Desmond Clark exchange and part icularly when it is done in t he and Francois Bordes; theme the techniques of manu- language of the investigator.\" (From the CMC ca- facturing sto ne too ls. t a log.) Invisible Walls. 1969, black and white, 12 minutes; A \"technique\" or \" how to\" film demonstrating distributor University of California Extension Media how prehistoric man produced his stone tools. Be- Center; producer, director, scenario, camera Rich- cause it is so difficult to verbally describe t he process, ard Cowen and Lucy Turner; camera John Blaustein films like this one are an essential part of co urses theme a study in Proxemics-the use of space as a in archaeology. communication system. The Feast. 1969, color, 28 minutes; distributor Na- tional Audiovisual Center, Washington DC; produc- All people h ave a need to maintain a certain er, directo r, scenario, camera Timoths Asch and amount of distan ce around t hemselves (called ego Napo leon Chagnon; theme ritua l exchange among territory or personal space). This film demonstrates the Yanomamo of South America. what happens when your personal space is invaded by a stranger. An excellent illustration of the visual 'This film is t he best example of a co llaboration manifastations of culture. between filmmaker and anthropologist. The film The Lion Hunters. 1967, co lor, 68 minutes; distributor opens with a series of stills and a brief narration Contemporary Films/ McGraw Hill; producer Pierre which provides an a nt h ropological intrepretation of the event, then the feast is shown without comment- Braunberger, Films de la Pleiade; director Jean an innovative way to give the audience a framework Rouch; theme hun ting among t he Niger in Mali. for understanding another cu lture wit hout disrupting the film with a runnin g narration . The fi lms of Jean Rouch h ave not received the 4:Butte:1-A Lesson in Archaeology. 1968, color, 33 attention t hey deserve in the U.S. In addition to minutes; distributor, producer University of Califor- being the leadin g figure in European anthropo logical nia Extension Media Center; director scenario Don- film, Rou ch is one of t he founders of cinema verite ald Miller a nd Peter Schnitz ler; camera Tony Gors- and h as exerted considerable influence on Godard line; theme archaeology as anthropology . and Chris Marker. Although Rouch has made many films CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER and T H E LION HUNT- Probably the most artful film ever attempted in ERS are t he on ly ones available in the US. [Pho- arc haeology. Using an excavation of a Maidu Indian tographs from THE LION HUNTERS and material on village in Ca liforn ia, the film shows how an archae- Jean Rou ch is printed in FILM COMMENT volum e ologist is able to do an ethnography of a past cul ture. 4 number 2-3, 1967.] Grass. 1925, black and white, si lent, 45 minutes; Mulga Seed Ceremony. 1967, color, 25 minutes ; dis- distributo r University of California Extension Media tributor University of Californ ia Extension Media Center; producer, director, scenario, camera Merian Center; producer Australian Institute of Aboriginal C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack; titles Terry Ram- Studies, University of Sidney; director, scenario, saye and Richard P. Carver; theme annual migration camera Roger Sandall; advisor Nicholas Peterson ' of the Bakhtiari nomads of Iran. The Hunters. 1959, color, 73 minutes; distributor theme a fertility ceremony among t he Australia~ Contemporary Films / McGraw Hill ; director, sce- nario, camera John Marsha II ; theme t he quest for food aborgines. by t he !Kung Bushman of the Kalahari desert, Africa. Australians h ave been recording on film t he rituals and ceremonia l life of the aboriginal population since Baldwin Spencer brough t a camera to Australia in 1901. Recently two filmmakers, Ian Dunlop (Aus- tralian Commonwealth Film Unit), and Roger San- FILM COMMENT 39
dall (Institu te of Aboriginal Studies) have produced Bibliography a series of remarkable fi lm documents on t h e life- style of contemporary natives. The MUGLA SEED Arnheim , Rudolf, Film As Art. Uni versity of CEREMONY is one of these films. Because of the sacred nature of the film it must be shown outside .of Aus- Ca li fornia Press, Berkeley, 1964. tralia and t hen only to restricted audiences. Nanook of the North. 1920-21 , black and white, 70 Balicki, Asen and Quentin Brown, \" Ethnographi c minutes; distributor Museum of Modern Art (silent version); producer Revillon Freres, New York; direc- Filming and the Netsilik Eskimos,\" 1966 E.s.I. tor, scenario, camera Robert J. Flaherty; titles Carl Quarterly R eport: Pages 19-33. Education Stearns Clancy; theme Man versus the environment and Eskimo culture. Development Center, Newton, Massachusetts. Compared with GRASS , NANOOK has obviously h ad Birdwhistell, Ray. \" Film and Sound Training in t h e greater effect on documentary and anthro- pological film styles. Both filmmakers shared a fasci- Human Observation.\" Human Organization nation with man 's struggles with the environment and a desire to let the people tell their own story. Clearinghouse Bulletin, Volume 3, number 3, 1955, These two ideas h ave'formed the basis for the major- ity of a nt h ropological films since. pages 31-2. Now That The Buffalo's Gone. 1968, co lor, 7 minutes; distributor Creative Film Society, Los Angeles; pro- Calder-Marsh all, Arthur, The Inno cent Eye: The Life ducer, director, scenario, camera Burton Gershfield; theme The destruction of Indian cu lture in the Unit - of Robert Flaherty. Harco urt, Brace and World , ed States. New York, 1963. A sh ort creative statemen t which never fa ils to elicit guilt from t he yo ung \"white-eyes\" who see it Ceram, C.W., Archaeology of the Cinema. Harcourt, in my classes. Sucking Doctor. 1964, black and white, 45 minutes; Brace and World , New York, 1965. distributor University of California Extension Media Center; producer, director William Heick, Gordon Cooper, Merian, Grass. G.P. Putnams' Sons, New Mueller, David Peri, and Robert Wharton; camera William Heick and Gordon Mueller; theme the curing York, 1925. ceremony of t h e Kashia Pomo Indians of California. Michaelis, Anth ony , R esearch Films in Biology, The best film to come from t h e production unit that worked on the University of Ca lifornia's Ameri- Anthropology, Psychology, and Medicine. Academic can Indian Film series. THE SUCKI NG DOCTOR is a n un narrated record of a ceremony and comes as close Press, N ew York, 1955. as any film I know to giving yo u t h e illusion of being a participant. Regna ult, F., \"La Chronophotographie dans L'Ethnographie. \" Bulletin de Societe L 'Anthropologie; 421. Paris, 1900. Sorenson, E. Richard, \"A Research Film Program in the Study of Changing Man.\" Current Anthropology, Volume 8. number 5,1967, pages 443-469. Sorenson , E. Richard and C. Gajdusek, \"Investigation of Nonrecurring Phenomena: The Research Cinema Film. \" Nature, Volu me 200,1963, pages 112-4. Worth, Sol \"Towards a Semiotic of Ethnographic Film.\" A paper presented at t he 1968 American Anthropological Association meetings in Seattle, Washingto n. Worth, Sol \"The Development of a Semiotic of Film.\" Semiotica, Vo lume 1, number 3, 1969. 11111111 Tim Asch Movies have been used extensively in anthro- pology, t h ough, I fee l, inadequately. Too often the Ethnographic filmmaker has had eit her a superficial knowledge of the people he photographed or inadeq uate technica l Film skill. And frequently film has been used spuriou sly to illu strate a theme contrived by the filmmaker a nd Production imposed on his subject. Tim Asch is co-director of the Center for Docu- It is not eno ugh to have a reaso n for ethn ographic mentary Anthropology at Brandeis University. H e is filming, such as the desire to record \"primitive cul- film review editor of American Anthropologist. ture\" before it vanishes; one must have a method for shooting and editing footage which will not on ly justify t he tremendous expenditure of capita l and human effort but also provide usefu l documents t hat present as clearly as possible t he culture one is re- cording. To do this, the filmmaker should be a n anthropologist or shou ld fi lm with a n a nthropologist wh o has already studied the language and the society of t he people he wants to fi lm, particularly in re lation to specific problems t hat have serious scholarly rele- vance to this fie ld. 40 SPRING 1971
Occasiona lly fi lms have been made (both \" docu- ma de unless t he filmm aker has t horough anthro- men tary \" a nd \"feature\" fil ms) which are useful to pological trainin g, a backlog of fi eld experiences with a n t hropo logy. B u t as t hey were not made wit h t his t he fo reign society a nd a kn ow ledge of its la ngu age . goa l in mind , t heir va lu e is acciden ta l a nd stems fro m One can not h ope s uccessfully to fil m subtle rela- t he creator's abili ty to illu strate t hemes a nd patterns tionshi ps unless one understands t he meanin g of of socia l behavior unique to a particu lar cult ure. For t hese rela tionshi ps. exa mple, P agn ol's tri logy: MARIUS, F ANNY a nd CESAR; de Sica's BICYCLE THI EF; Satyajit R ay's P ATH E R In terms of t he basic method t h at one wou ld PANC H ALI, APA RA J ITO a nd TH E WO RLD OF APU; a nd em ploy to fi lm an other society, t her e is very little even Paddy Chayefsky's MARTY . agreemen t am ong t hose now ma kin g fil m. Individua ls have developed t heir own rheth ods a nd techniques R obert Fla herty 's fi lm, NANOO K OF T H E NO RT H to so lve problems a pplyin g to specifi c circ u mstan ces. a nd Jo hn M a rsh a ll's fi lm, THE H UNTERS , are part icu- R ecently, t he Cen ter fo r D ocumentary An t hro pology larly useful to a n thropo logy because t hey are t h e of t h e Ant hropology D epa rt ment at Brandeis U ni- best photographic doc u men ts we have of two impor- versity h as been considering ways by which ethno- ta nt prim itive gro ups. Both fil ms are prin cipa lly graphic filmm a kers can combine t h eir effor ts to concern ed wit h hu nti n g, but wit hin t he fra mework a commo n cause. We are sup portin g t h e desires of of two very differe nt en viro n me n ts: t he a rctic and ma ny, in promo tin g a n ationa l ethn ographic fi lm t he K a lah ari Desert. Both men selected a nd or ga n- archive, where such film wo uld not only be stored, ized t heir materia l around a specific t heme usin g bu t a lso wo uld be availa ble for research a nd use by t heir su bjects to express t heir own artistic concepts scholars, by teachers interested in cu rriculum devel- of primi t ive life. Because both where keen observers, opment , a nd by people tryin g to find materia l for t heir fil ms sh ow many details a bou t materia l cult ure entertainmen t. a nd socia l patterns which are useful to an t h ro - pologists. Sin ce M a rsha ll 's film is one of t he few film s M a kin g fi lm fo r a n a rchive t hat will be useful fo r which touches on unrehearsed socia l interaction a ll t hree purposes- research, curriculum developmen t a mong a primitive society, it is a n a nteceden t of t he a nd en tertain men t-does require some basic guide- ty pe of film to be ou t lined in t his article. lines for initia lly sh ooting t h e raw footage. W e feel t hat t he fi lmma ker will get t he best resul ts by work- Films made by professiona l an t hropologists are in g wit h a n a n t h ro pologist who kn ows t he la ngu age either made to illustrate a given aspect of a cult ure of t he people bein g studied, wh o has done a general or a cr oss cult ural study . F or example, Dr. Mar garet ethn ogr a phy ofthem , a nd wh o is involved in a specia l Mead's TRANCE AND DANCE IN BALI exhibits an aspect st udy of t heir society, such as rit u a l politics or social- of cult ure which wo uld be difficult to describe in ization. The ant h ropologist ch ooses the events to words. be recorded , a nd durin g t h e fi lming t he camer a ma n and t he sound ma n record th e even t in great detail, H owever, ma ny a nt h ropologists have used exten- fo llowin g as mu ch as possible a con tinuity of socia l sive narration t hat tells t he viewer what to look for in teraction between one or two individu a ls, wh ose in t he film . H ence, t he fi lm is not left to speak for perso na lities develop in relatio n t o other people. This it!=!elf b ut is \" used\" by t he an t hro pologist to illustrate m ethod of fil min g means t h at in t h e initia l archive a specific in terpretation of a n activity. M ost viewers film (a ll t he footage in t h e order in which it was un consciously accept photographic images as records sh ot), t h e structure of t he even t is dictated m ore of reality, a lt hough we a ll sh ould kn ow t hat \"tru t h \" by t he peo ple film ed t h an by t he filmm a ker. If one on film is a n entirely relative concept based directly shoots 75,000 feet of fi lm , one will come back from on t he integrity and knowledge of t he edi tor (e.g. t he t he fi eld wit h perh aps seven ty-five 1000-foot se- German documentary footage used in propaganda quences, explicatin g specific even ts in great detail. films during t he last war: excellen t footage , brillia n t - Each one of th ese even ts could later be edited into ly edited for a spurious use). a short film or t hey co uld be pu t together in to one la rge genera l fi lm . In most docu men taries segments of film compris- in g parts of many even ts are shot over a long period Often in t he past, however, t he 75,000 feet a ll of ti me: weeks, mon t hs or even years. The edi tor, consisted of bits a nd pieces of even ts, none of t hem who mayor may not have been t he photogr a pher, fi lm ed in detail. In t he result in g film , relationships rearranges a nd selects footage to express a n over a ll were cross edi ted a nd, t herefore, did not represen t feelin g or plot co nceived eit her by the photogra pher natura l social in ter action . (perhaps while sh ootin g) or by the edi tor. H ence, a fi lm a bout a n ative dance may well consist of footage We believed t hat t he a rchive sh ould get 75,000 ta ken of severa l dances. This can clearly warp t he feet of research film in t h e form of a n \" origina l\" or va lidity of t he data on dance, as ty pes of da nces \" master,\" wit h a ll t he indigenous sounds recorded which wou ld never occur at t he sam e seaso n migh t at t he time th e fi lm was ta ken ; plus a second so und be ju xtaposed. The t r ained a n thropologist would not track of narratio n which has as mu ch in form ation ma ke such a gross error, bu t t he reorienta tion of as t he a nt hropo logist a nd filmmaker can possibly even ts in time a nd t he squeezin g of t ime perspective brin g to bear on t he materia l t hey have viewed. In in a n'y fi lm ca n easily lead to a my riad of su btle a dditio n, tra nslations of indi gen ous speech are ma de, cases of misrepresen tation . whenever possible. The fi lm materia l, alo ng wit h t he written materia l, is t hen indexed a nd placed in a n I feel t hat a great opport uni ty is bein g missed in active archi ve where t he publi c can view a nd study not close ly photogra phin g socia l in teraction wit hin t he work. The fi lmm a ker / a n t h ro pologists can t h en a n ethogr aphic con text. Bu t such films can not be FILM COMMENT 41
go on to make many short films for teaching purposes and to edit sequences in order to judge their value or several general films for larger audiences. For example, John Marshall has filmed hours of the !Kung and to lend insight and direction to future filming. Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. THE HUNTERS was made from this footage. Now he has discovered that It would be extremely useful to show these films to by editing these events into small films , he can obtain a clearer image of !Kung Bushman social behavior native informants in order to hear their interpreta- than he could by making a larger, general film . tions of the events and their predictions about what Basil Wright 's film , SONG OF CEYLON , was the work of a creative man who went to another society and might follow and what to watch for . This also would became moved by its spiritual nature. He filmed the beauty he saw, in relation to the rhythms that he give added insight into the elements to fo cus on in felt inherent in that society. The film is beautifully constructed and beautifully edited; it is truly a work future films. In addition , the reaction of members of art. But the construct has been pieced together by the filmmaker, and by and large, any social in- of a culture to their own behavior may provide fur- teraction we see in the film has been edited together for us. We do not see the social interaction as it ther insights for the ethnographer. develops naturally. This is not a criticism: the film illustrates a very different method of making eth- Films do not compete with written ethnographies. nographic film than in Marshall's case, where almost all of the interaction occurs naturally. This is partic- They are merely a further way to con vey an under- ularly true in Marshall's latest film , THE THREE standing of a particular culture. Their validity de- DOMESTICS, which shows how the police of an Ameri- can city mediate three domestic arguments. pends on the support of written, ethnographic mate- On considering each sequence in greater detail, rial. The ethnographer who writes a book is able to it is best if each sequence should be photographed through the behavior and social interaction of a organize his material on the basis of his total knowl- pre-determined individual. One cannot hope to film a complete event, but one can film the event in so edge of a culture. Each note, each insight can be far as it relates to a specific individual. He provides the necessary theme, or constant element. In a revised when necessary in the light of further re- broader sense, an individual could be used to link together a series of sequences, thereby providing in- search. (This may be a liability as well as an asset.) sights into his varied relationships and activities within his culture. To a far greater extent, the anthropolo- One of the biggest technical problems in making gist/filmmaker is limited to his knowledge and a film is photographic field . If one takes a long shot that includes everybody, one has a confusing general insight at the time the footage was exposed and the picture with individuals and actions too far away to see in detail. But the closer one gets to his sub- situation noted. His future learning will aid in in- ject-to isolated movements-the faster one must cut terpreting the m~terial, but he can not express in away from the detail to show the movement or object in its larger context. One must be able to see the film any incidents or relationships which he did not external stimuli effecting movement. Close filming becomes a matter of integrating bits of behavior to specifically photograph. By filming sequences of form a whole, a problem which does not arise with long shots. The use of two cameras would ease this human behavior, as described, instead of random problem ; but for most field work, this is not feasible as it would probably destroy the indigenous social footage and by using a high precentage of the footage, environment. one will diminish one 's dependency on chance: the One of the main goals in filming a sequence is to film it in such a way that at any time, viewers chance that one happened to film and use the signifi- can agree on the location of the camera and each of the subjects. The essential footage, without cut- cant elements of an event. However, one can never aways or narration must form a coherent pattern. A film sequence must indicate a continuous flow of overcome one's reliance on whatever footage was action throughout and the audience must be in agreement about the relationship of space and time. taken and the angle in which it was taken. To date, few ethnographic or documentary films are constructed this way. Assuming the anthropologist to be well trained Finally, there are many advantages to developing and a sensitive observer, his chief tasks become that one's footage while still in the field. This gives one an opportunity to see the quality of one 's footage of interpreting and translating what he sees so that it will have meaning for others. Whenever the individ- ual decides to use film , he does so because he feels that this is the medium in which he can best express himself about a given subject. He hopes that through film he can avoid some of the pitfalls of unwittingly implying his own cultural categories in com- municating his field analysis. By culminating his field work with about 100 sequence on perhaps 15 individ- uals, the anthropologist could have a valuable record of specific, carefully selected events which illustrate key aspects of his study. He could still use his footage in traditional ways if he wished, but the method of filming described herein greatly enlarges the scope of the film 's use. By combining these films with other similar studies in an ethnographic film library, his material-written and filmed-would be available to many people for many uses. In order to create useful ethnographic film of a wide variety of cultures, it is essential that profes- sional anthropologists reevaluate the potential use of ethnographic film for teaching and research and actively support methods which will lead to footage which is useful professionally. A first step might well be the creation and su pport of a National E thnogra ph- ic Film Archive to make all the existing film avail- able and to encourage methods of filming which produce material suitable for anthropological re- search and for teaching. 11111111 42 SPRING 1971
an interview by Howard Suber JORGE PRELORAN miered in Buenos Aires seventeen films he had done for them, which constituted the most exhaustive series of anthropological films ever made In that country. There was immediate critical and public aclaim, especially for his feature -length film HER· MOGENES CAYO, which will be distributed in the United States by Image Resources, under the title IMAGINERO. Audience reaction to the film , a portrait of a religious image-maker in the Andean Plateau, forced the National Fund for the Arts to schedule six additional showings. In January, 1970, Preloran came for six months to teach at the UCLA motion picture division and to prepare his films for American release. In No- vember, 1970, his films were shown at the confer- ences of the American Folklore Society in Los An- geles, and of the American Anthropological Associa- tion in San Diego. This series of conversations, was conducted during the first week of November, 1970, by Dr. Howard Suber of UCLA's film department, and edited by him. HOWARD SUBER: The name ofRobert Flaherty will probably be invoked often when critics and audi- ences discuss IMAGINERO, for not since NANOOK have I seen a film that so beautifully captures a human being, that gives us a feeling for the individual. After seeing Nanook, one never forgets him. I think the same will be true of Hermogenes Cayo. Didyou begin ;:., by searching for such a person, or did you just hap· ~ pen to come across him? .tsi JORGE PRELORAN: Well, it was an accident, really. I was making several documentaries on the l) .~;; cultures of Northwestern Argentina, and spent a '\" great deal of time with the people there. I was espe- i::l cially fascinated by the Puna , the 12,000 foot-high Jorge Preloran is a 37-year-old bilingual Argentine plateau that was once the southern tip of the Inca filmmaker, who produced more than 25 documentary, Empire, where the Coya Indians live as ever in the anthropological and ethnographic films in his native starkest desert of Argentina. I kept returning there, land between 1961 and 1969, working in almost total documenting fiestas and celebrations, the Carnival, obscurity. In May 1968, he was the only South Amer- and pre-Colombian Inca rituals. ican filmmaker invited to present his work at the I guess when I first met Hermogenes Cayo, I didn't first Colloquium on Ethnographic Film at UCLA. In quite realize what was happening. While document- November 1969, Argentina 's Fund for the Arts pre- ing the feast of Our Lady of the Assumption in FILM COMMENT 43
Casabindo-a little hamlet so remote and forgotten to recreate with adobes a feeling of the Gothic arch', that you may not even find it in maps-a teacher and he even incorporated into its thick walls bottles told me of a man near her school who would be a very of different colors to imitate stained-glass windows. interesting subject. On my next trip, while I was He was the religious leader of the community, though visiting her, we just happened to meet Hermogenes it's hard to call a community an area where families walking to his son's home. He was tall-quite a bit live three to four miles from one another, and only taller than the average Coya. Unlike most of them, come together on special occasions such as Carnival he was an extrovert, a man full of confidence, a or religious festivities. natural leader. When I asked him about his work, he immediately led me to his oratory. Every dwelling During six months I kept visiting Hermogenes, in this region, no matter how small, has a little enjoying just being there with him, and trying to adjoining room that is used as a shrine, where they figure out what made me so fond of him and so keep images of their patron saints. In Hermogenes' relaxed.\" I saw him carve his naive Christs out of oratory there were several Virgins, a Christ, some cactus wood, which he made only for those who saints and an extraordinary urn in which a small ordered them-he would never have thought of mak- Virgin sat surrounded by paper flowers, money and ing them to sell in town to strangers. One day he small gifts she had acquired through the years. told me that he was not allowed to carry his Virgin in procession because the missionary priest of that Hermogenes was an image-maker, a craft originated region-a German-had told him that he was giving in South America by the Jesuits during the early the wrong example by living unmarried with a years of the Spanish Conquest, that eventually blos- woman, and with three children! For the last three somed to such proportions that most of the churches years he had been thinking of going through with along the Andes still preserve extraordinary treasures marriage but it was difficult to get all the arrange- of the Indians' work. In recent decades this art has ments ready. So I encouraged him to set a date, and died out almost completely, so to find an artesan we agreed that I'd film the ceremony and he would still working in this almost deserted area was an have pictures of the occasion. Then I set up the tape extraordinary stroke of luck. recorder and let him talk, asking him questions at times, encouraging him. I went back to town, typed After that, it was easy finding an excuse to visit it all up and then sat with m y two assistants to decide Hermogenes each time we went to the Puna. We just how we could use this material to shape a film averaged trips about once a month, and on each visit around it. And so Hermogenes, unknowingly, struc- I would always learn sorriething new about him. He tured his own film. had made himself a small bellows organ, copying one he had once repaired. He took apart an old accordion, A couple of months later we started shooting by and used the bellows for his organ. He used the reeds documenting his wedding during the feast of Our too, but only those of the black notes, because he Lady of Copacabana, February 2, 1966. From then wanted a pentaphonic scale, which was the only one on, I shot off and on for over a year, without really that sounded right to his ear. He learned to play trying to complete a film , just shooting sequences an organ in the church of Cochinoca; now he co uld each time I visited him, or planning for some event go into his own shrine and play and sing to the Virgin. that was going to happen in the coming months. I was shooting other films in the area, and would The oratory itself he built imitating a Gothic always take time to visit him. On ce I drove him for cathedral he had once seen. In 1946, he had walked ten hours to another village because they had told two and a half months to get to Buenos Aires, where him that the altar of the chapel there was all gold- he was deeply impressed by the Cathedral of the leafed, and he wanted to see that marvel ... I got Virgin of Lujan , a miracle shrine like Lourdes. To involved in his life in many ways, I was named retain some of the beauty he had seen, he managed godfather to a natural son of a natural daughter of his. He wrote letters to me in Buenos Aires, always in a most extraordinary style that recalled the writ- ings of the Renaissance. Once he showed me a note- book in which he kept the family records, It includ- ed a diary of his incredible trip to Buenos Aires. In the early years of the Peron regime, he and 174 other men and women walked 1,500 miles to ask for the ownership of the lands on which they lived that for centuries had belonged to the Church. In his journal I saw the awakening of a simple isolated man as he discovered the fertile lands of the south, where mar- vellous cities kept getting bigger, and where abun- dance was all around him. SUBER: You retell that journey in the film. Weren't some of the paintings you use there done by H ermogenes himself? PRELORAN: Yes. He ta ught himself to paint by imitating. But it was strange ... his paintings of the cathedral were done in a sty le and perspective that 44 SPRING 1971
...--. .,.;.....\"- t ..., Hermogenes Cayo in IMAGI NERO. [photo by L orenzo K elly 1 FILM COMMENT 45
wasn't what artists would use today, but rather the still have processions, the cult of images, the other kind of bird's eye-view painters in the 16th century religious festivities of that time, which of course have would have used. changed even in Spain; but there they remained exactly the same. SUBER: In so many ways, I have the feeling that a portion of history was preserved in this single SUBER: These Indians became almost more individual out there in the middle of the desert. In Spanish than the Spanish. fa ct, he reminds me of a Renaissance man, not only in his style, but also in the way his curiosity and PRELORAN : Right. Exactly! For example, the competence extended into so many areas. patron saint most co mmon in this region of the Puna is San Santiago. Santiago was one of the twelve PRELORAN: Well, wh at happen ed was that the apostles, who went to Spain to catechize, was ca lled Jesuits came in that area with the Conquistadores the \"warring saint\" and became the patron saint of in the 16th century and displaced the na tive religion. Spain. Through the centuries, he was always dressed And then it was frozen .. . absolutely fro zen. And the in the sty le of each epoch, so the J esuits, who accom- religion has not changed in 400 years. So today, you panied the Conquistadores, brought images of this 46 SPRING 1971
saint to America dressed like a 16th century Spanish he suggested Robert Gardner should see it. This gentleman, riding a white horse and trampling on evolved into an invitation to make the English trans- a Moorish soldier that represented the Devil. And lation of the fi lm at Harvard . There, with Gardner's today, all over the Andean region , you still find tha t co llabora tion , I set t o the task of editing the film the patron saint of the people is Sa n Santiago, look- down from 75 t o 52 minutes, and finding the best ing just as he did four hundred years ago. way to trans late the narration. SUBER: In the film, however, you don 't give us SUBER: Who was involved in the making of the this background. Was this because Argentine audio films ? ences would already know this? PRELORAN: Well, at the time, I was employed PRELORAN: No, Argentina is a middle-class at th e Universidad Nacional de Tucuman , in North - country , and the people who would see the film are west ern Argentin a . I was working for almost nothing, just as far removed from that life as Americans are. with hardly an y equipment: we only had a single But I go into all this in another film I did, and Bolex camera and a non-professional tape recorder. besides, I didn 't want IMAGINERO to be an educa - I had to beg a jeep from the manufacturer, and I tional film , but rather a portrait of a man . put 250,000 miles on it, until a tire blew out, over- turned the car, almost killing us. I had one assistant SUBER: I felt a great sense of loss, almost of at a time, first Lorenzo Kelly, from March of 1966 shock, when the film suddenly ends with Just a simple t o March of 1967, and then, from February, 1967 to little card telling us that Hermogenes died at the March , 1968, Sergio Barbieri. age of 60. I wanted it to go on. SUBER: You were a two-man crew. PRELORAN: I was shocked myself when I PRELORAN: Usually; occasionally three. At learned he died. I had no sense of urgency when I times, Rodrigo Montero, a musician and friend, was filming, and I didn 't even really think seriously would come along on a trip to help with the record- of how I was going to make a film out of the footage ing. Leda Valladares, a marvelous ethnomusicologist I'd shot. I had the loose structure we had mapped went along a few times, and in fact was there when out in the begining, but had no idea of how I was I recorded Hermogenes. The Fondo Nacional de las going to end it. Artes had given me a grant to do twelve films, I ended up giving them 23. Dr. Augusto Raul Cortazar, a SUBER: How did he die? well-known anthropologist in Argentina , had ar- PRELORAN: He was walking to his son 's home, ranged for the grant and was in charge of the anthro- seven hours away. He caught pneumonia, and that pological aspect of the project. He was a sensational was it . .. man to work with, always encouraging me, keeping SUBER: Couldn't he have been taken to a hospi- me going. tal, or a doctor? SUBER: So you worked with a minimum crew PRELORAN: Yes, in Abra Pampa, eleven hours and barely adequate equipment. walking distance from his home . . . You see him go PRELORAN: Well, I'd never even seen sync- to town in the film . sound equipment for 16mm at the time. In fact, it SUBER: When his boy sees a train for the first was only in 1969, when I went to Venezuela , that time. I saw for the first time an Eclair and a Nagra. I 'PRELORAN: And running water, out of a fau cet, hadn 't even heard of an Eclair! Now . .. I'm spoiled. you remember? Of course, they could have gotten SUBER: What's your shooting ratio? a truck to come out for him, but that wasn't the PRELORAN: Usually, 2V2 to 1. . . problem. He wouldn't go. He was a stubborn man. SUBER: 2% to I! ? He thought he'd recover OK, and didn 't want to go see the doctor; he was an independent cuss! PRELORAN: You must remember we have little means for making films in Argentina. We couldn't SUBER: And he died as a result . .. afford to waste any stock or equipment. We couldn 't PRELORAN : Yes. So, the shock of his death made even afford a color work-print, but used positive me go back to the footage I had, and I set about black-and-white, pushed to reversal, with the result trying to put it into shape, editing slowly between that you couldn't even see the expressions in close- the other films I was finishing. I went back to shoot up, the contrast was so bad. And I didn 't have a some coverage for transitions, and eventually mixed sound moviola, just a small viewer and a synchro- the sound, long after he had died. The result is a nizer with a sound head I made myself. Thus, when film which, even though I have seen it countless at last I went into a sound studio to mix, I would times, still has an emotional impact on me. I find hear my sound-tracks for the first time, and could it impossible to view objectively. And I soon realized only hope that the two or three tracks would be that the audiences who saw it reacted far more emo- correct. I'd hardly get accustomed to seeing and tionally than I had expected. For a month, in No- hearing the mix before it was over! Then I'd send vember of 1969, a series of 17 films that I had com- the original A & B rolls to New York for the answer pleted were premiered in a large theater in Buenos print, which could take 6 to 9 months to return and Aires under the sponsorship of the Fondo Nacional clear customs. So when I saw IMAGINERO for the first de las Artes. Several additional showings had to be time, I was seeing a film I had almost forgotten schedured for IMAGINERO , bringing the startling real- about, with color I had never seen, and looking so ization that the same people were coming back to much better than I had expected that it was an see it again . in credible t hrill. When I came to the United States, Alan Lomax , the anthropologist, saw it and liked it so mu ch that FILM COMMENT 47
SUBER: Did you set up or stage any of the scenes One of t he most importa nt goa l to achieve is in IMAG INERO? nat uralness, a nd a lt hough t here m ust be a secret to it, I h ave not been ab le to fat hom it. H owever, unl ess PRE LORAN : Not as such , but there was pre- t he subjects know yo u we ll a nd like and respect you, plan ning on my part. For instance, I asked him once t here will be tension on t he screen. The co ntentio n to make me six Christs an d t h at he sh ould fi nish t h at t he prese nce of t he fi lmma ker and crew may one of t hem, a nd t h e rest should be in various stages ch a nge t he whole fee l of a rit ua l is certa in Iy true, of carvin g and pain ting. In t his way I sort of took unless t here is a posit ive atmosphere, and I be lieve care of a ll t he image-ma ki ng in t he fi lm. Or we decid- t h at most people wh o li ve in nature a re mu ch more at- ed on a t rip to Abra Pampa so he could bu y t he t un ed to t he vibrations of hu man beings, a nd ca n read materia l fo r his pa nts; but once there, it was not yo ur in tent ions a nd attitude right off. T h us, if t here staged a nd t h e child was tru ly seein g a large town were some r ules t hat cou ld be set down in orde r to a nd a train fo r t h e first time. ensure good ethnographic film s, I would suggest t hat in the fi rst place, t ime be spen t we ll in advance of There was perh aps a certain subtle understandin g t he sh ootin g, just li vin g with t he people yo u 'll docu- I h ad with Hermogenes. He knew what I was doin g, ment . Since yo u cannot possibly film people t hat yo u a nd he was playing t h e game. But I am always do not like or respect, t here must be a n element of am azed h ow unself-conscious t h ese people are, a nd love involved. And yo ur assistan ts must be so well h ow t h ey can t urn off while t h ey are doing somethin g ch osen t hat t here'll be no problems of friction , or as if yo u were not arou nd. It is, of course, in relation emotion al issues fl aring up. to t h e degree of co nfi dence t h ey h ave in you . Her- mogenes and I became good friends. Even though I've a lso come to rea lize t h at if it's a n a nt hro- I'd be away for weeks at a time, it was always a po logist wh o goes in to film a given su bject t hat he joy to see each oth er again . .. much to tell, is studying, t h ere may be a tenden cy to be conde- presen ts ... And t h en, after a co uple of days, I'd scending, to document material cult ure or sma ll de- leave. Had I lived t h ere wit h t h em, perhaps we wo uld tails t hat may be really quite unim portant if t he fi lm have got on each other's nerves, and the ro uti ne of is to be conceived for a n a udience rather t h an for t h e h ouseh old would have beco me strained. I never other a n t hro pologists. got too person a l. F or example, I never asked him to sh ow me his bedroom, where I kn ew he slept on The ethn ogra phic fi lm has generally been shot by sh eep-skins a nd stored everythin g. He wo uld not h ave a n t hropo logists as part of t heir fi eld work, a nd on ly liked me to see t h at aspect of him, a nd I respected recently has t h ere been a ny effort to get professional t his; after a ll, I was not in terested in t he details of fi lmmakers in volved- t he most enco uragi ng experi- his sit uation , rather in a n image of his so ul. ence in t his line has been Asen Balikci's document ing t h e N etsilik E skimos. But t here is a problem invo lved SUBER: The film has been criticized by some as in t his ty pe of co lla boration . Where should t he stress not being really an ethnographic film, but something of t he fil m dwell? In materia l cult ure a nd details else, since you do utilize all the techniques and ar- t h at sh ow differe nces between one cult u re and a n- tifices of the filmmaker. oth er -leavin g us unsatisfied a nd bored- or should t he stress be on t he dramatic flow of even ts, wh ere PRELORAN: Oh, but when I made IMAG INERO t h e ways of doin g t hings are bro ugh t in-rath er unher- I h ad never even heard t he term \"ethnographic fi lm\". alded, in t h e con text of norm al rou t ines? If t his be It wasn 't un t il 1968, when I was invited to sh ow my t he case, I t hink t h at perh aps a n t hropologists should work at t he UC LA Colloq uiu m on Eth nographic. h ave more respect fo r t he int uit ion a nd creative Film, t h at I was to ld I made t hem. a bilities of th e fi lmm aker, wh o is trained basically to draw ou t th e dramatic conten ts of each sit uation. My fi lms dea lt wit h people doin g t heir t hin g, and Wit ness THE HUNTERS a nd DEAD BIRDS, which be- t hrough t h e many fi lms I have made, I slowly evo lved ca use t hey are buil t around a dramatic core h ave a style, or perh aps it ca n be best termed as a n ap- achieved t he stature of classics t hro ugh t he years. proach. From the docu men tin g of t hings a nd happen- J ohn Ma rsha ll 's sh ort episodes t h at have been cut in gs, I began to lose my feelin gs of guilt at in trudin g from his vast footage on the Kalahari Bushmen are in to other people's busin ess, and found t hat if t he a mong t he most extraordin ary hu mane a nd subt le a pproach is huma n e a nd respectful, they are deligh ted doc uments on huma n bein gs I have ever seen , a nd to let yo u in . So from co ld, impersonal narratio ns, t hey are certainly dramatic! gradu ally I found a need for ch a nge. I first opted for lettin g a poet of t he region make t h e narration, Now, I would add a furt her ingredient, t hat is on ce t h e film was edited. But t hen won dered why perh aps t he most diffic ult to achieve ... I fee l t hat I sh ould not let one of t he same cu lture comment it 's m uch more rewardi ng a nd fasc in ati ng to fo llow on t h e visua ls. This worked to perfection, so much a member of a particular cult ure a nd to learn through so t h at I got in fo r mation no a nt hropo logist would him t he mores a nd customs of t h at cul t ure, watchin g h ave given me, a nd my fi lms began to be aimed at him in teract wit h his fa mily a nd his society , th a n findin g out wh at t he people t h ough t of t hemselves, to take t he easier way of doc umen ti ng t he overview rather t h an what we- or an anthropo logist- th ought of a cul t ure a nd never quite getting to know t he of t h em. Finally, to have the recording of a ch aracter ch aracters except in a superfi cial a nd stereotyped actua lly guide in t h e sh ooting of t he fi lm seems to way. Th e t rend toward t he more persona lized type me t he best possible way of bein g as impartia l as of fi lmin g is now well estab lished in t h e documentary a human being can be ... I fee l t hat fi lmed in terviews fie ld, where t he sy nc-soun d eq ui pmen t ena bles a generally are a waste of time, fo r th e eye a nd ear should be complementary rather t ha n red unda n t. 48 SPRING 1971
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