VOLUME 23 - NUMBER 03 MAY-JUNE 1987

c JUNE 1987/$2.95 ·.: ENT 06 j Io 4796

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•SI•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center Volume 23, Number 3 May-June 1987 Fantasy States .............. 11 Midsection: Glasnost . ..... 33 Used to be a schoolboy lesson that The key, Comrade Gorbachev says, taught when the country heads for to the new Soviet Union suddenly is fantasyland, head for the hills. Ron- on everyone's lips: glasnost. Open- ald Reagan never had to know how ness. And nowhere is it more central GE was doing, so why on this si te- to policy than the arts. So the shelves the White House-do we lean? have rained down forbidd en films Richard Schickel documents RR's and the heavens produced new pro- penchant for political astral projec- posals that tempt Stalin's ghost. tion-the Eighties equivalent of his Harlan Kennedy calls it the Inter- Hollywood dreamwork. And J. Ho- national Word of the Year and mulls bennan and Chidanada Das its possibility (page 34), then thinks Gupta detail the Indian movie stars aloud about the life and films of An- who have parlayed their careers into drei Tarkovsky (page 44). Bob govemorships or seats in Parliament Strauss caught up to the Soviet art- and figure if Reagan could rise, Raj iv ists, writers, and bureaucrats who had better run for it (page 20). came courting American colleagues and coproductions (page 37). Bren- Working Girls ............... 25 da Bollag puts an appreciative eye on problem films, among them Fare- It's been easier recently to go see a well, started by Larissa Shepitko and celluloid hooker-who just happens finished by husband Elem Klimov, to be your kid sister on break from so- glasnost's new head of the film- cial work school-than it's been to maker's union (page 40). And Soviet find a real brothel under a red light emigre writer Alexander Batchan and with a leg dangling out a window. prompts Soviet critic and Filmmakers Karen Jaehne tells us two or three 'Union secretary, Victor Oyomin, to things we know about the spate of speak openly about the reel that has new working girl films. just come full circle (page 48). Also in this issue: man in a single bound. Orion star Mike TV: The Rebbe's Reach ...... 75 Medavoy tells Anne Thompson how he Lubavitcher rabbi Menahem M. Journals........ . ...... . .... 2 plotted his way to the top of production Schneerson doesn' t live in a theme park, The 37th Berlin film festival provoked execs and kept a low profile. doesn't promise a ticket to heaven, and wild things to emerge from world film- doesn't demand eight squadrillion dol- makers, and our mild things, Harlan Ken- New Directors/New Films .... 64 lars-Drelse. His cablecasts take Hasidic nedy and Amos Vogel, rattle their cages. The day after the Day the Earth Went Jewry from its 18th Century roots into Bang, some historian will unearth Ar- 21st Century orbit, Brooklyn-style. Mar- De Palma's Delectables....... 52 mond White's and Marcia Pally's reports cia Pally ponders his fundamental pull. Brian De Palma's guilty pleasures? This on the 16th New Directors/New Film is like listening to a shrink and a neuro- series, and know why. Books .................... 78 surgeon talking shop over a lunch of Robert Coover's A Night at the Movies blood sausage at the Melody Burlesk. Pensees: Fake 'Money' ....... 72 poked Lawrence O'Toole in his review- More organ music, please. You hadda be deader than a cue ball to er's ribs: only this witty novelist remem- be disengaged from Marty Scorsese's bers why lise twinkled so in Casa- Mike the Mogul ............. 54 interior monologue in The Color of blanca. He's nice, he cares, he wants a missile Money. He's back, all right, but his crit- Back Page: Quiz #25 ........ 80 freeze, and he leaps over tall bildungsro- ics missed how and why, ~ays hustler Cover photo: 'Hellcats ofthe Navy' Jimmy McDonough. Rack 'em, Fats. Co-Ed itors: Harlan Jacobson, Richard Corliss. Assistant Editor: Marlaine G licksman. Art Director and Cover Design: Elliot Schulman. Advertising and Circula- tion Manager: Tony Impavido. Business Manager: Sayre Maxfield . Production: Deborah Dichter Edmonds. West Coast Editor: Anne Thompson. Eu ropean Editor: Harlan Ke nnedy. Research Consultant: Mary Corliss. Circu lation Assistant: Deborah Freedman. Controlle r: Domingo Homilla, Jr. Ed itorial Inte rn : Gavin Sm ith. Executive Director, F ilm Society of Lincoln Center: Joanne Koch. Copyrigh t © 1987 by the F ilm Society of Lincoln Cente r. All rights reserved. The opi nions expressed in FILM COMMENT do not represent Film Society of Lincoln Center policy. Publication is made possible in part by support from the New York State Counci l on the Arts and the National E ndowment for the Arts. This publication is fully protected by domestic and international copyrigh t. Subscription rates in the United States: $14.95 for 6 numbers, $26.95 for 12 numbers. Elsewhe re, $37 for 6 numbers, $70 for 12 numbers, payable in U.S. funds on ly. New subscribers should include their occupations and zip c:odes. Distributed by Eastern News Distribu tors, Sandusky OH 44870. FILM COMMENT (ISSN 0015-119X) is published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Cente r, 140 W. 65th St. , New York NY 10023. Sec:ond-class postage paid at New York NY and additional mai ling offices. Postmaster: send address changes to FILM COMMENT, 140 W. 65th St., Ncw York NY 10023.

Berlin Chat WALL-EYED ground nuclear shelter in Hamburg, de- Watkins' bid to make us think rather than signed to house over 1,000 people sus- telling us what to think: A white question P icture so arbitrary a schism as The Wall tained by four electric rings for cooking. mark sometimes pops up on a black in any city other than Berlin, and you'd We tut-tut at media manipulation in the screen, and several seconds of silence en- think you were in a bad sci-fi fantasy writ- Canadian TV coverage of Reagan's state sue for further audience rumination. ten by Stephen King (on an off day), di- visit to Quebec and the accompanying rected by Lewis Teague or Wolfgang Pe- anti-nuclear demo. We hear a German Ultimately, The Journey's impact is the tersen, and shelved by Universal. East lady's horrified memories of the British softest of soft landings: 833 minutes of Berlin puts up with West Berlin, which bombing of Hamburg. parachute fall with a gentle \"plop\" just must be like living with a splinter under East of the Iron Curtain. Whenever the one's fingernail and not being allowed to Says Watkins in a special accompanying word \"evil\" crops up, it's usually accom- , remove it. And West Berlin makes the newspaper (yes, newspaper) that goes panied by footage of Reagan; the USSR is best of being marooned. with the film: \"May I ask you something? never represented by film of its leaders, only of its lovable people. There is pre- No wonder the film festival takes its p0- Heartless Grief. cious little debate in the film. For the most litical location seriously: Each year it en- Please do not think of The Journey as a part, Watkins' witnesses are rounded up, gages both sides and tries to show the narrative film in the traditional Hollywood positioned round a table, and then called common ground. Both sides duly meet in meaning, or as many of the story films in on to find different ways to give the direc- Berlin, check the ground out with mine the cinema today. tor the answers he wants. detectors, and then discuss their films at press conferences. Each year the Berlin \"The Journey does not have a begin- Most of the dialogue goes something Film Festspiele probably accomplishes ning; then an early 'attention-grabbing' like this: more in the way of low-level international violent scene; then a middle slow-scene; entente than is gained at a decade of high- followed by a sub-climax; final slow-scene Watkins: \"Lydia, would you say that level talks like that at Reykjavik. before the ultimate climax (which is often there should be more discussion in schools violent), and the final soft landing at the and colleges about the amount of money Even the failures at Berlin have a valor- conclusion. \" which is spent on the arms race and which ously crusading stature. The movie ad- could be spent on things like welfare and vance-publicized as the \"event\" of the All power to any attempt to create a new reducing unemployment?\" 37th festival was Peter Watkins' The Jour- syntax of cinema, although I never knew ney, a 141/z-hour documentary about the Hollywood scripts were written to quite Lydia [struggles to express herself]: peace movemeRt. The Brit helmer (The such rigid specifications. More power to \"Yes ... I think it's true the world would War Game, Punishment Park) has gone be better if we spent less on arms and about the world with camera and micro- more on things like welfare and ... reduc- phone to record a giant patch-quilt of in- ing unemployment.\" terviews with different families from far- flung countries. Watkins quizzes them The film's heart, as well as its head, about: war, racism, aggression, manipula- may be in the right place, but its hand tion, economic exploitation, objectivity seems to be mostly up its contributors' and truth, centralization of power, over- backs, operating them like glove puppets. coming barriers, the first glimpse, infor- mation, the journey, process. so it is at Berlin. You whir all round the known world without getting up out of We touch down in Australia to meet your seat. After two or three days of the Mr. and Mrs. Average Liberated Aussie. FilmFestspiele, you think you are living We meet the Smileys of Scotland, whose either in a global village or in a Tower of views on peace and detente are captured Babel. You'll either be agog at life's noisy on video and then presented to the Kolo- heterogeneity or see the world as a won- sovs of Leningrad. We witness the pro- drous, lucid whole: a place where every testing voices and faces of Polynesian na- prospect pleases and only the simulta- tives angry about French atomic testing on neous earphone translations are vile. Mureroa. We are as confused as the par- ticipants in a mock civil defense exercise These moods can also alternate daily. in Norway, set up by Watkins to expose One day it can be, \"Eureka! I've suddenly the insanity of government guidelines in a seen this wonderful connection between nuclear crisis. We goggle at the under- that Swedish film about violent wife- swapping, the Burkina Faso picture about striking coffee farmers, and the latest movie based on E.M. Forster, A Room with a Passage. The only connection 2

NEW! UPDATED thru 1983: \"The dean of reference works on movie matters\" -AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER For 20 years now, this marvelous book has stood all by itself as \"the one movie reference book I wouldn't . ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ and couldn't do without,\" in the words of Charles Champlin, veteran ftlm expert on the LA Times. But why another revision? Because... 1. In a live art, a reference book goes out of date fast when the entries aren't updated. 2. Leslie Halliwell keeps dreaming up new features to make Filmgoer's Companion a better companion. \"The definitive book ... With each edition it grows more indispen- The heart of the book is of course the profiles. Thousands upon thousands of sable.\"-Satunlay Review them, including... If you own an old edition, you're entitled to wonder what Mr. Halliwell could stars ... supporting players ... directors ... producers ... writers ... com- possibly think of to add to an already superb reference. Get set for some plea- posers ... cinematographers ... indeed, every major name and thousands sant surprises... of minor names. V' Now over 13,!XXJ entries - more than half either brand new, revised or For the actors, you get real name, bio, birth/death dates, films, TV series, awards. For the other filmmakers: career profile, films, awards. updated since the last edition. V' All new photos - a generous 109 of them. . \"There i'i no other comparable source.\"-library Joumo/ V' New J.:olumn format fits all the new and old data readably into a com- Several secondary features enhance the usefulness of the book, and the paratively trim 720 pages ( and the paper is thin enough to keep the pleasure it will give you: book from weighing you down when you use it). • Over 900 films that get individual entries V' EXTRA! 98 movie quizzes ... thousands of questions to test the hardiest • What goes on behind the camera - including definitions of technical terms ~. •trivia buff (with answers, of course). • Alternate American/British titles - over 700 ~text, wherever they ad~ flavor. We didn't count how many, but we estimate about 1,400. E.g., Billy Wilder to his cinematographer filming Sunset Boulevard: \"Johnny, keep it out of focus. [ want to win the foreign film award.\" Get the idea? This is one reference book that's RlN. \"One would be hard pressed to spot the omission of any significant film, film topic, or person connected with the cinema.\"-Choice V' .EXTRA! Delicious quotes by and about movies, sprinkled thruout the • Movie gaffes - some famous, some offbeat ~~~~~~~~ • Halliwell's HaIl of Fame: graceful short tributes to special people • Fictional characters (e.g. Mike Hammer) and series (e.g. The Falcon) • Some 250 recommended movie books • Over 300 movie themes, from Abortion to Zombies • EXTRA! A different kind of Dedication, wherein Halliwell drily recaIls 51 turkeys by Big Names \"Absolutely essential to all good movie buffs.\"-Chicago Tribune ~How to SAVE $40 on this \"indispensable\" reference ------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------~ • •How the Club Works Every 4 weeks (13 times a year) you get a free copy of the Club bulletin, PREVIEWS, .eyl~/~.'~.'AI ~.' which offers the Featured Selection plus a nice choice of Alternates: books on films, TV, MeICL... *music, oo:asionally records and videocassettes. If you want the Featured Selection, do *nothing. It will come automatically. If you don't want the Featured Selection or you do ·15 Oakland Avenue • Harrison, NY 10528 want an Alternate, indicate your wishes on the handy card enclosed and return it by the I enclose $2.49. Please accept my membership in the Club and *deadline date. 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is....\" (blah blah, insert according to and Horst-Gunter Marx trek across tourist motto is \"Have Advanced Ideas About taste). Yugoslavia exchanging certifiable co-pro- Lung Pathology, Will Explore Them\"- duction dialogue. He's padding along in insist on carrying out pneumo-surgical ex- The next day, shortly after breakfast, his dead father's WWII footsteps-was he periments, even if it means using cap- you start to see holes in your zeitgeist large a Nazi war criminal?-while she's also tured American airmen as guinea pigs. enough to drive a truck through. A visit to hunting up family roots. Of course they're the New German Cinema section- both basically \"searching for themselves. \" At worst, Kumai's movie sometimes re- where the latest Dorris Dorrie sex comedy High-kitsch high spots (apart from such sembles a splatter version of Dr. Kildnre; jostles with a hagio-pic about Caspar Da- dialogue treats as \"I can't take this much with close-ups of palpitating innards un- vid Friedrich, a kraut cops-and-robbers longer\") include skimpily clad Sukowa go- der the op-theater lights and even that old film with the new Kluge philosophical col- ing for a lone midnight punt on a lake un- schlocko favorite, the spurt of blood hit- lage-reveals that there is no unity in the der a moon-scudded sky, and Marx dis- ting the surgeon in the eye. Based on a same country, let alone on the same plan- covered playing a grand piano on a hotel true historical incident, the Aiharu affair, et. All is fragments! Tod und verkliirung! terrace, mutating into Anton Walbrook in and shot in the most austere black-and- Dangerous Moonlight. The audience white, The Sea and the Poison at its best There's truth, of course, in both view- roared its approval almost without break in has a chilling air of authenticity: the story points: so speaks the Janus face ofcompro- the film's final half hour, especially when ofone of those blinkered, messianic medi- mise. A film fest's purpose is to show how Herr Marx stepped on a mine and was cal crusades in which ambition comes first, diverse the world is, but also how different blown up. and conscience and compassion a joint countries can talk to each other with the second. language of cinema. And there are, if not There were seldom so many eve-of-war giant waves that dominate cinema at one or edge-of-war pictures in one festival: the Berlin chief Moritz de Hadeln, with time, at least subtle currents that move be- doomsday resonances of The Journey, the scalpel in hand and sweat-dabbing tween different cultures and countries. portrait of America hoist on its own gung- nurse at side, has been poring over the ho in Platoon, Kei Kumai's The Sea and open body of the festival for eight years Berlin 1987, for instance, showcased the the Poison from Japan , and Andrzej Waj- now, trying to improve its lung power, cinema's current fascination with da's A Chronicle of Amorous Accidents heart rate, intelligence, and general per- highly bizarre personal relationships. Is it from Poland. formance level. He's succeeded better because we're in the AIDS age, and bodily than the yearly wrangles about his con- fluids are off the menu , that people are be- The apocalypse in Chronicle is World tinuity of tenure suggest. This year he having in the wackiest manner? In Swe- War II, a gathering storm on the horizon of signed a three-year renewal contract-he den's Demons, we've got two married 1939 Poland. Adapting a novel by Ta- wanted five, his enemies wanted zero, a couples having an evening together that deusz Konwicki, Wajda is more interested bargain was struck-and it's about time makes Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the gathering than the storm. His teen- the milling festivalgoers gave him his due. seem like a White House dinner. They age hero (Piotr Wawrzynczak) is a butter- scream, agonize, dress up, undress, and fly-souled romantic who's fallen in love De Hadeln has improved the non-com- attempt suicide. One husband then ends with a rich man's daughter (Paulina Mlyn- petitive Panorama section, packing it with up being nailed to the floor by his jealous arska). He's so besotted with her that he good films, especially from the Third wife. Brazil's Vera won a Berlin Best Ac- climbs the drainpipe of her mansion at World and Far East. And he's improved tress prize for Ana Beatriz Nogueira at sea midnight, the dog barks, and the hero the once appalling Competition. Gone (al- in an overheated pother oforphanages and falls. Later trespassings are rewarded with most) are the days when irresponsible crit- lesbianism. And Dorrie's Fantasies begins gunshot in his rear from the girl's militaris- ics could wake up each morning, loiter as a flighty sex comedy-a meek, subur- tic dad. over their cheese-bratwurst-ham-salami- banite named Heiner Lauterbach falls in and-pate breakfast (nothing like it), and love with his wife's former schoolfriend, Wajda displays a surprising comic touch know they could skip (A) the morning film Katharina Thalbach-and then moves here. But by the time he has finished because it was a French-Canadian movie into l' amourfou , jealousy, and a climactic strewing the screen with the incandes- about sexual awakening during the seal- stabbing. cence of a light comedy romance, and culling season, and (B) the afternoon film, dancing a pavane to the idyllic past by because it was another Lina Wertmiiller T wo movies took the comical road to smearing his lens with vaseline, there's no ballbreaker in which Giancarlo Giannini depicting weird liaisons. In Claude room for the coming storm. The ulan hus- and a famous American actress make love Chabrol's Masks, what bizarre currents of sars stream briefly across the meadows on in the pouring rain while trying to match love-hate are going on between TV game- their way to the last cavalry charge in histo- lip movements to dialogue. show host Philippe Noiret and the girl (his ry, when Poland's quixotic horse soldiers ward) he's trying to poison in his country were mown down by Germany's tanks. De Hadeln's 1987 master stroke was to chateau? Or between Noiret and the other The lovers form a suicide pact as they lin- double the usual number of both the choice nurcases in his household: flame- ger by a river. And having given us 100 American and Russian movies: Platoon, wigged secretary Bernadette Lafont, vi- minutes of romantic prologue and charac- Children of a Lesser God, The Color of cious housekeeper Monique Chaumette, ter building, the film has cheated us of the Money, 'Night, Mother, and True Stories and the rest? Whatever the answer, this is film itself. in the main event, cheek by jowl with the a scintillating black comedy in the mystery pre-glasnost Alexander Sokurov's Heart- Kei Kumai's The Sea and the Poison less Grief, Gleb Panfilov's Theme, and mode-Agatha Christie goes Gallic-and turns on the incongruence of war and quo- Chabrol's best film in years. Elem Klimov's Farewell. tidian life. In May 1945, a Tokyo hospital Best of this year's Soviet pics, and Gold- Even funnier, though less intentional- experiences an influx of patients, an out- ly, is Jeannine Meerapfel's The Lovers. In flux of money, and a virtual moratorium en Bearwinner, was Theme. DirectorPan- this Yugo-German folly, Barbara Sukowa on new medical research. However, pro- filov delights in his shambling egotist of a fessors Hashimoto and Gondo-whose hero (Mikhail Uljanov), a playwright who 4

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Masashi Yamamoto's Robinson's Garden. less suspicious profiles. Berlin could do She retums to the scene in a night-lit To- without a wall. -HARLAN KENNEDY kyo ride of despair on a stolen bike, up leaves the hell of Moscow for a working hills, never stopping, pushing herself be- holiday in the old Russian town ofSuzdal. Two ICONOCLASTIC yond her limits. Yamamoto has made no He hopes to find peace and recharge his cuts; these taxing long takes are as real as inspiration. Instead, he discovers pain, ORIGINALS her exhaustion and passion. love, madness, breakdown, and wit are in no smaller quantities here-indeed, rath- I n Robinson's Garden, Masahi Yama- Kumi does not find her salvation. Ac- er greater-than back in the city. He falls moto's prodigious visual imagination companied by Jagataro's marvelous, in love with a girl (Inna Curikova). He's has created a series of sumptuously trance-like music and in surrealist tab- shaken out of his self-regard and forms poetic images in a magical tale of self-dis- leaux-waterfalls cascading from her new friendships. In the spirit of the old covery in present-day Tokyo. In shot after mansion's windows-the lush vegetation Carmen Miranda song, \"You can't make shot, Yamamoto calls up the uncanny; no reclaims the property. And Yu, the little amigos without breaking egos.\" explanations are offered for what tran- girl, continues a search the filmmaker spires in shimmering, kaleidoscopic se- clearly shares. No plot summary can do This eight-year-old, previously shelved quences. justice to the visual magic of the film, film doubtlessly rubbed the Soviet au- which premiered at this year's Berlin film thorities the wrong way: one of the charac- Kumi, the young protagonist, is dis- festival in Ulrich Gregor's indispensable ters is a Jewish dissident who decides to satisfied in an environment of drugs, sex, showcase of independent films , the Inter- emigrate to Israel, and each character and easy camaraderie. Sauntering through national Forum of Young Film. takes tums railing against Russian life and a Tokyo back alley, she discovers an aban- the state of its arts. The result is a high- doned building and overgrown garden. The unpredictability of Robinson's power caustic comedy. Almost every new Moving in, she changes her life. She cre- Garden is a precise index of its originality, line in Theme's long central dinner scene is ates her own hermetic world, fumishing arising from Yamamoto's strong structure. a rasher thrown into a pan to sizzle and rooms, garden, and paths with brilliant None of Kumi's thoughts and feelings are spit. And, throughout the film, minor pop colors and blinking neon signs. She ever expressed. Robinson's Garden characters-an eccentric traffic cop, a grows cabbages with the help of home- makes apparent the overarching codes of woman literature teacher-are pillars of made Rube Goldberg contraptions. mainstream cinema. Here, more often Soviet society who slyly, blithely leave than not, almost everything is explained or their posts for a moment or two to see if the A mischievous, anarchistic little girl, foreseeable. We live within conventional building will stand without them. What Yu, periodically drops in, acting out her boundaries, ambiguity is banished, and better film to mark glasnost? \"The day of unlimited freedom and flouting our bour- endings are sharply defined. Yamamoto, interesting meetings and open doors con- geois sense of propriety. Kumi's former however, assiduously avoids explanations tinues,\" declaims someone during the roommates--cute, noisy, irresponsible- and leaves us with something more pre- dinner scene, as the initially demure con- visit and almost wreck the place. Simulta- cious than closure in a story; its mystery. versation round th6 table tums into a riot- neously, there are intimations of the mys- ous to-and-fro of new guests and new her- terious presence, if not power, of ancient Both here and in his first work, Carnival esies about Russia. trees, vegetation, plants. Kumi falls ill; ofthe Night, Yamamoto's concems are so- solitude and gardening are not enough. cietal: civilization has reached an impasse. With Platoon as the Silver Bear runner- Strongly affected by the Hiroshima and up to Theme, the impulse to acknowledge Nagasaki bombings, Yamamoto dwells on self-inflicted wounds may be prelude to 6

Available Now- AtI12 \\Qlumes of The Motion Picture Guide ByJay Robert Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross e Title e0 0(])OO No te: o Motion Picture Guide's 0(19791 130m Lorimar/UA c The type size BEING THERE····· shown in th is o Critical Rating sample is smaller Year of Release PetE'r Sellers (Chonce), Shirley MacLaine (Eue Rond), Melvyn Douglas (BenJomr n than that of Rond) . Jack Warden (presidenf Bobby), Richard Dysar1 (Or Robert Allenby) , The Motion o(]) Original Running Time Richard Basehart (V/adm'T Skropinou), Rulh Artaway (Louise) , Dave Clenan Picture Guide. Production Company (Tho mas Franklin) , Fran Brill (Solly Hayes) , Denise DuBany (Jo hanna Franklin). o Releasing Company Olell Burbndge (LoloJ. Ravenell Keller III (Abboz) . Brian Corrigan (po/lcemon) , o Color or Black & White ~~~~~~he ~:~;~~'1B~~;:~n~,~~~tdJea~~~:~~~:·n7.rn:~':Ur ~~~~r: ~~~~;:,~: Q o Cast and Roles we \" Mun\" Bunoo (LewIs) , Henry B Dawkins (Billings) , Georgine Hall (Mrs o SynopsisI Analysis and Aubrey) , Nell Leaman (ConslOnce) , Villa Mae Barkley (Teresa) . Alice Hitson (Firsl Lady}. James Noble (Kaufman) , Sandy Ward (Sen Slipshod), Danna Hansen (Mrs Anecdotal Review Slipshod) , Mitch Kremdel (Dennis WOlSOn) , Katherine De Hetre (Kmney) , Sam f) Production Credits Weisman (Colson) , Elya Ba skin (KOrpoIOU) , Thann Wyenn (AmbClSS(]dor Gou/ridi) o Film Genre Perfection Never have two hours and len mm utes gone by so quickly, Sellers is an o Videocassette Availability mnocent illiterate who has lived In a house with an old man ever Since he can remember The old man dies and Sellers muslleave the cocoon He has never been e Motion Picture Guide's 10 the real world and only knows of It through watchlOg teleVision , hiS one and all · consuming passion On the streets. he IS hit by a limousme owned by MacLame who Parental Recommendation IS mamed to a kmgmaker. a man behind all the President\" s men (Douglas) Sellers' C) MPAA Rating honesty IS charming and his prosaic answers seduce Douglas and Mac Lame and eventually the PresidentlWarden m a sensational performance) Sellers becomes a Entries also include British and national celebrity by appeanng on hIS fa vori te medium, teleVision H,s answers 10 foreign titles whenapplicahle. ~~~~~,~:~:;~O~S ~~:n~~~~~u~n::'t ~~: 1~~~:~~:~i~:~~Z:) ~~tt t~: :U~il~~:; ~~~~ 0 film finds all sons o f hidden meanings to tus sImple words· His tru thfulness attras:ts the pohcy makers 10 the pohllcal pany and by the film 's end they are seriously conslde nng Sellers as a preSldenlla1 nominee That , 10 a nutshell, is the story. yel Ihe details would take many nutshells to cover Sellers hadn ' t been thiS good SLOce his early Bnhsh comedies MacLame is sincere and funny as the sex ·starved wife Douglas IS such a presenc~ on screen Ihat it's difficult to look at anyone else in a scene \" Douglas IS there The mOVie was made in Los Angeles. Washington, DC and at The Biltmore, Vanderbilt's IOcredible Nonh Carolina mansion As in the case of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKoo'S NEST. REfNG THERE look many Y\"\",S 10 get done It was wonh the wall Tho ugh ostensibly labeled a comedy, BEING THERE goes way beyond comedy, beyond sarire , and oul in lo a world of its own t·a~~d~:~~~~~~t~;~~~~~~;' ~.hJb:hnwM~~~1.~~~I~!~ ~~~~:a~',Sa~O~,e~~!:~ f) Schoppe , set d, Raben Benlon. makeup, Charles Schram , Frank Westmore (PR:C MPAA:PG ) oComedy 0 eCas. C) \"AlUm lover's treasure. . .a definitive reference work.\" the mail-in coupon.The price of The Motion Picture Guide is $750. Shipping is free throughout the United States. - Roger Ebert, co-host, \"Siskel & Ebert & The Movies,\" and Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for the ChicagoSulI-Times. For fastest service call us toll-free at 1-800-624-6283 In Iowa call collect at 515-247-7 500 Ext. 489 It's here!The wait is over!The most complete film reference work ever published is now ready for shipment in its entirety! Ifyouare Or send to: into film in a bigway, you must have the lZ-volume Motion Picture Guide in your personal library, at your fingertips, to .... CineBooks, Inc. consult with every film you see or buy. . . P.O. Box 11367 Principal authorsJay Robert Nash, creator ofmore than two CineBooks Des Moines, IA 50340 dozenencyclopedicworks, and Stanley Ralph Ross, award-winning TV and film writer/ producer, give you livelyand penetrating D' Please send me the complete 12-volume Motion Picture Guide reviews in their own highly personalstyles as well as their own on the payment basis indicated below. If I am not completely satisfied, critical ratings. 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The Street of Crocodiles. Radical contents and an aggressive hon- Dr. Caligari's somnambulist encounters esty are also found in the works of threatening situations and transforma- the scientists' predictions that no vegeta- writer Bruno Schulz and the Quay broth- tions: raw meat in a mechanized world tion would grow in these cities for dec- ers. A young Polish Jew, Schulz was killed evokes erotic response, and objects re- ades; yet plants-returned the following by the Gestapo in 1942, aborting a career semble body pares. The mannequins are year. that might have ranked with Kafka's. In 1986, two American-born twins, the Quay dissected and remodeled amidst clouds of Yamamoto says he is most influenced brothers, working in England, trans- dust. Monochrome textures are disrupted by American independent cinema. He formed Schulz' most famous story, The by color flashes. Moldy debris and decay- used Jim Jarmusch's cameraman, Tom Street of Crocodiles (in Philip Roth's ing mirrors witness the oblique mecha- Dicillo, and lighting designer, Jim Hey- \"Writers from the Other Europe\" Pen- nisms that pop into spasmodic action for man (Stranger Than Paradise). He also guin Series), into a film that must rank no apparent purpose. cites Bunuel, Dostoevsky, Altman, Su- among the most illustrious of international sumi Hani, Sadao Yamanaka, and the doc- animated art. Each shot, however brief, is held long umentary filmmakers of the Iwanami enough to display its inexplicability, yet company. Robinson's Garden's prescrip- When a blob of spit drops into the eye- the Quays' entire work is permeated with tion on how to live one's life is after per- piece of an ancient peep-show kineto- a whiff of 20th-century terrors lurking at haps Alain Tanner's Jonah in the Year scope, nightmare-ridden mannequins the borders of the narrative. The repet- 2000, but Yamamoto's film is at once less move through a series of bizarre events in itive, modernist, semi-abstract score by accessible, less humanistic, and existen- ambiguous, shadowy sets that barely Leszek Jankowski and the camera's tially colder. define themselves. We may be in Schulz' strong movements, tracking shots, and dubious tailor shop, where sex mingles pans evoke a universe beyond under- \"I only plan to make the kinds offilms I with fittings; some customers are handed standing, an ice-cold world devoid oflove. want to make and aim at nothing more ~rotic volumes for perusal, while others than a small circle of spectators,\" he says, are fitted in the front and simultaneously The Quays' animation is three-dimen- \"just like the audience for independent undressed in the back. A near-replica of sional. It utilizes puppets, but puppets for films in New York. What we need nowa- adults that are meant to disturb; they are days are radical, not prize-winning, con- ominous misfits, cherubic beings with tents and an aggressive honesty.\" concave cavities where brains should be, fat-faced child mannequins with trans- fixed eyes that seem blinded by nameless horrors. They may now inflict them, in tum, upon new victims. The Quay brothers evolved from Phila- delphia art students to taciturn, masterful conjurers of a specifically East European sensibility shaped by surrealism and Kaf- ka. Their somber, sealed-off, bizarre works-forever hovering between horror and black humor-are powerful objects manque. With harrowing techniques of expressionism and surrealism, they cap- ture the echo ofCentral Europe's wars and revolutions, and the suffocating provin- cialism ofentrenched ruling classes. In the whirrings of peculiar mechanisms, in the cruel transformations of puppets, and in the shadowy incomprehensible events, one senses Europe-the world-at the brink. The Quay brothers thus become heirs to an illustrious procession ofsuch kindred animators as Ladislav Starevich, whose puppets, once seen, cannot be eradicated from memory; Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica, who as part of the Polish avant-garde of the late Fifties created Dom, which featured an upsettingly alive strand of red hair; and the Czech genius Jan Svankmajer, about whom the Quay Brothers have made a wonderful film trib- ute. Kudos are due the Museum of Mod- em An and Film Forum for introducing the Quay brothers to the U.S.A. The Street of Crocodiles will premiere nationally, July 20 on PBS. -AMOS VOGEL 8

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Here's the Rest ofHim o ethod ToHis adness film by Richard Schickel COMMENT I t wilrhelp ifwe radically refonnulate the tenns of our bemusement. The problem is not that the President of the United States, the Leader of the Free World , the Occupant of the World's Loneliest Office, etc., used to be a movie actor, a creator of make-believe. The problem is that he used to be-probably still is-a movie fan , a consumer of make- believe, even an addict of it. This is a disturbing conclusion. So much so that even bold Garry Wills, whose Reagan's America: Innocents at Home leads one inescapably toward it, stops short of baldly setting it forth. And for good reason: it implies the most de- pressing things not only about Ronald Reagan but about ourselves and our in- finite capacity for delusion, political and otherwise. Like the rest of us, Wills has Ieamed to stop worrying and live with the idea of an actor-president. This is no small matter. It is, in fact, an aspect of one of the more in- teresting unremarked social phenomena of postwar American life: the general ac- ceptance of the idea that acting is a profes- sion, demanding of its practitioners a train- ing, discipline, and sobriety comparable to that required of lawyers, doctors, and the other grown-up occupations. To earlier generations, this notion would have been unimaginable, dumb- founding. But there it is. Three decades of joumalistic and talk-show debates about The Actors Studio and The Method; a similar span ofgeneral concem about Mar- Ion Brando's integrity; the rise of graduate education in the theatrical arts and crafts, and the decline of the tenn contract in Hollywood, which freed perfonners to pursue highly personal projects at the same time they were freed to express themselves with impunity on public is- sues and, for that matter, private morals- all of this encouraged movie actors to take their work, and their duties as citizens, more seriously. And encouraged the gen- 11

As he grows older, the line between provable and improvable truth grows ever more blurry-and, possibly, ever more important in evaluating his character and his \"peiformances.\" eral public to join them in this activity. It is saw it, was go along with them agreea- stories could be easily read by the mass au- ironic that Ronald Reagan, that least seri- bly-show up on time, learn his lines, dience. And, ofcourse, easily and endless- ous and least actorish of actors, a man no submit to the publicity process, and above ly replicated by moviemakers. one ever really thought of as a major talent all, not question the wisdom of their deci- So powerful was this capacity of his- or screen presence, should be the chief sions about his career. this urgent ability to create starring roles beneficiary of this change in our attitudes. The result was little short of miracu- for himself in the genre movies that he This point, quite correctly, worries lous. In his rise, as Wills nicely puts it, he wrote, produced, and directed for projec- Wills: \"On the one hand, some try to ex- was \"a winner, not a stunner; in his fall he tion exclusively on his own brainpan- plain Reagan's extraordinary success in was a fader, not a loser.\" And when he had that it survived his rise within the movie- politics by saying he gets by because he is reached near-ectoplasmic status as a mov- making community, a process that usually 'just an actor.' On the other hand, we are ie star, his mentors, having accumulated generates the kind of cynical heat that told he was not even a good actor-which no grievances against him, had no reason eventually dries out most of the imagina- seems to make his political success more to indulge the usually irresistible Holly- tions that devote themselves for very long mysterious. Which is it to be? Is he just wood habit to punish the weakened star to this line of work. Reagan's capacity to reading lines, following his script, using for his past arrogances. Instead, they stay fresh, delighted by the workings of theatrical skills, as President? Or did a man pointed Ron in a new direction, toward his own easy-striding imagination, is one lacking the depth for great roles in the the- the political illusion, within which one of his strengths. It is also, perhaps, the ater somehow acquire a knack for filling may also succeed simply by showing up on source of his remarkable youthfulness of the most responsible role in the world?\" time, learning one's lines, etc., etc. manner. How pleasant it would be if one felt these do not wish to imply that Ronald Rea- eagan somehow contrived to remain gan was without gift. In fact, he was what he was long before he came to questions to be apposite. For then we I Rcould fit the rise of Ronald Reagan into our standard explanation of success in Amer- hugely gifted-as a fantasist. Which is an the movies: profoundly suggestible. We ica: natural talent, solid training, honor- occupation that, until he showed us the all know that he entered showbiz as a radio able conduct in an honorable line of work, way, no one had ever regarded as likely to sports reporter for small stations in Iowa, and then, finally, the respect of peers and lead anybody anywhere very exalted. But where his specialty was, to use the polite public, translated in his case into the great- which now, perhaps, we might find a cer- contemporary word, \"visualization\" of est gift it is in our power to bestow. tain profit in re-examining. baseball games. The facts of a game pro- Wills' rhetorical questions are quite un- We can begin, prosaically enough, with ceeding in far-off Chicago were tele- answerable as posed. Reagan was clearly Wills' observation that Reagan was of the graphed to him, and he was required to not a distinguished actor, and though he generation that came of age as the movies create, on the spot, a full word picture of was sometimes a respectable one he was came ofage. He was born the year the first the game, right down to little red-haired just as often an incompetent one. Similar- studio opened in Hollywood; he was boys making spectacular catches of balls ly, it is hard to find any evidence that he graduated from high school the year talk- fouled into the stands. possessed a genius for the political gesture ies came in. His crowd was the one on In later years one of Reagan's favorite that awaited unlocking by changing times which the myth-making power of the anecdotes has the line going dead as a and circumstances. No, you cannot get movies shone with the piercing power of ball left the pitcher's hand, leaving silver- hold of this character with questions as the new. He was also of a place (small- tongued Dutch Reagan to improvise convenient as those posed here by Wills. town middle America) and of a class (the many, many foul balls-utterly untracea- Reagan's astonishing success, in not one lumpen bourgeoisie) that had a particular ble in the next day's box score-until ser- but two careers that have defeated men need for the transfiguring power of this vice was restored. Harmless fun, of with far higher gifts and far more ferocious mythology. In other words, the kind of course, and arguably a service to the high- ambitions, begins to make sense only if glory-dreaming he has his whole long life er truth. That is to say, Reagan's fictive you view it in utterly unconventional, in- indulged himself in was by no means embroidery did not distort the account of deed in utterly un-American terms. This unique to him. the game as it progressed-the hits, runs, and errors were all present and accounted way: What was singular about him was that for-and the rest was just entertainment. He succeeded as an actor, in the theatri- he probably would have dreamed his Also, possibly, good training in those on- dreams even if the movies had not been your-feet skills requisite to the successful cal sense of the word, precisely because he there to provide model scenarios for them. conduct of a Presidential press confer- The evidence is that he possesses-is refused to act, in the general sense of the possessed by-a unique, even awesome ence. capacity to project himself into fantastic In any case, as Wills observes, Dutch word. He refused to try to impose himself narratives, to tum personal history into on events, to shape them to his uses. wish-fulfilling, and morally exemplary, Reagan became in those years an uncri- Rather, he succeeded because he correct- fiction. And fiction of the precise kind that tical admirer of that school of sports re- ly saw his movie career as a lucky opportu- the movies, as he was growing up, were porting-exemplified in print by the nity proffered him by rich and powerful learning to conventionalize so that such likes ofGrantland Rice, on the air by a line men, men much cleverer than he was, to of performers beginning with Graham live within one of the most delicious of American fantasies. All he had to do, as he 12

McNamee and culminating in Bill ly the sort of legends around which you fident in observing that his taste for these Stem-who could not resist improving on would want to organize your life or your the historical record , particularly if their in- society. At best, they are fables for a high slices of life according to Reader's Digest ventions would lend an uplifting moral school sports banquet. point to an anecdote. It was at this stage has obviously had an influence on his auto- that Reagan began his fascinating lifelong But Reagan has a million of them, and biographical impulse. His life, as he likes association with George Gipp by retelling he goes on telling them to this day. One to retell it, is at every stage illuminated by Rice's basic \"win one for the Gipper\" leg- favorite has a World War II B-17 pilot or- similarly shapely and instructive dramatic end on one of his radio shows. The story dering his crew to bailout after their plane sequences. For example: He is playing stayed with him so powerfully that he pro- has been crippled by anti-aircraft fire, then football for Dixon High School and at a posed it as a screenplay soon after signing finding one of his gunners wounded and crucial juncture in a game commits an in- his Warner Bros. contract and well before immovably trapped as the plane starts to fraction undetected by the officials but spiral earthward. The boy is frightened, protested by the opposing players. One of he was himself cast as the Gipper in Knute but the pilot cradles him in his arms and the zebras puts it to young Dutch-did he Rockne-All American. He was still tell- says, \"Never mind , son, we'll ride it down or didn't he perpetrate a foul? Alas, \" truth- together.\" The Leader of the Free World telling had been whaled into me,\" so Rea- ing it, essentially unchanged, when he re- likes to use the story as evidence of how gan fesses up, apparently costing his team ceived an honorary degree from Notre our political system creates a morality su- a chance for the touchdown by which it ul- Dame in 1981. perior to that of the Communist system. timately lost the game. We owe to the re- Terrific. But if the only two.witnesses to lentlessly researching Wills the informa- A little research of the kind that White this exchange indeed rode their crippled tion that no game with an outcome of the House staffs can easily command-and plane down together, who survived to re- kind Reagan describes took place while he which, indeed, Reagan himself might count their dialogue? Is it from some old was playing for Dixon. have conducted at any point in his half- war movie the rest of us have forgotten, or century's obsession with the Gipper- a radio drama or a pulp story? No one Ashe grows older, the line between would have revealed a number of interest- seems to know, and the tale's provenance provable and improvable truth grows ing points about his story. The first is that is a matter of curiosity nowhere near as ever more blurry-and, possibly, ever Gipp himself was a thoroughly undesira- speculatively compelling--or as enigmat- more important in evaluating his character ble character, a pool hustler who smoked, ic-as the sources of Reagan's fondness and his \"performances. \" Another exam- drank, played pro football on the side, and for it. ple: He has honorably served his country regularly bet on Notre Dame games in in war, abandoning his screen career just which he played. In life he was never re- Be that as it may, one does feel con- as he was making the transition from B ferred to as \"the Gipper\"; and his death, before graduation, appears to have been hastened by his dissipations, which he never recanted. Still more interesting: no one ever heard of his deathbed request-that Rockne invoke his name sometime when a Notre Dame team was in need of inspira- tion-until the coach brought his weakest team into New York for the Army game of 1928. He spent the evening before it with Rice, trying out this preposterous inspira- tional yam on the sportswriter before feed- ing it to his team the next day. This may have been Rockne's biggest whopper, but it was by no means his only inspiring in- vention. For this most sacred icon of the American sports pantheon, this legendary builder of youthful character, was a con- genital liar, or (if you prefer the politer term, suitable to presidents as well as folk heroes) a mythomanjac. But, as the Lead- er of the Free World himself inquired at Notre Dame, \"Is there anything wrong with young people having an experience, feeling something so deeply, thinking of someone else to the point where they can give ... completely of themselves?\" Well . .. er .. . urn ... gosh. One won- ders: Are these higher truths, arrived at by climbing a ladder ofsmaller untruths, real- ly worth the cynicism they will inevitably engender? And how high, really, are these higher truths? They are not exactly Olym- pian in their richness, are they? Not exact- 13

The evidence is that he possesses-is possessed by-a unique, even awesome capacity to project himselfinto fantastic na\"atives, to tum personal history into wish-fulfilling, and morally exemplnry, fiction. pictures to A's. \"By the time I got out of friends. It is our not-entirely-conscious, the stances both men took toward their the Army Air Corps, all I wanted to do-in not-entirely-unconscious desire to re- work: modestly amused by the fuss it has common with several million other veter- shape the maddening ambiguities of reali- caused, unegocentric in their claims for ans-was to rest up for a while, make love ty into the form ofan old-fashioned movie: it-and innocently delighted in how to my wife, ' and come up refreshed to a narratively neat, psychologically gratify- much fame they achieved with so little ap- better job in a better world.\" Right. Unex- ing, with a beginning, a middle, an end, parent effort on their own behal£ Indeed, ceptionable sentiments. Except that they and above all, a central figure we have no Reagan seems to see his Hollywood career imply lengthy service far from the com- trouble rooting for--ourselves. very much as Warhol saw his career as an forts of home. But Reagan passed the war artist: It was a swell movie that he was entirely in Hollywood, assigned to \"Fort Which brings us to an amusing pair of lucky enough to star in. Roach\" (normally Hal Roach's Culver questions. Does this represent a basic hu- City studio), where he worked on air corps man need in search of a form that the Ronald Reagan did not break a sweat training films. He went home to wife Jane dreamy movies kindly provided? Or did breaking in. He was out covering the Wyman every night, except for a period the suddenly pervasive movies propose Chicago Cubs' spring training season on when she was away on a bond-selling tour. for us the kinds of transformations we had Catalina Island, off Los Angeles, when he Indeed, her wartime duties likely took her never before known we wanted or needed took a few hours off for screen tests and away from home for a longer period than to make? Who can say? What we can say obtained for himself the modest Warner his did. (though Wills does not) is that this is one of Bros. contract that was to be his first step the forms that modernism takes at the on the road to the White House. He And now memory grows even loopier. popular, unself-conscious level-and that seems to have found life around the studio It is 1983, and President Reagan is enter- Ronald Reagan is obviously, if astonish- fun, and both his own accounts and those taining the Prime Minister of Israel and ingly, one of the masters of modernism, in of others show him in these days to be a implies, or seems to imply, that he was his way the equal of Picasso, Joyce, and young man of no temperament and no im- part ofa Signal Corps unit filming the Nazi Gertrude Stein. age ofhimselfas actor at all. This would be death camps as they are liberated. More- his salvation, of course. For, Warners, in over, he moreovers, there was this one This is the Anny. the days of his apprenticeship was a-roil particularly moving piece of footage that Maybe the name we should actually be with rebellion. James Cagney (Reagan's he felt he ought to sequester, because he latter-day pal), Bette Davis, Olivia de Ha- felt someday people would question the evoking here, for purposes of comparison, villand, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, authenticity of the Holocaust and-sure, is that of a post-modernist, Andy Warhol, even, yes, Joan Leslie were in constant sure, that's the ticket--one day someone whose background class and geographic noisy conflict with Jack Warner, seeking did exactly that in his presence and he had background is not dissimilar from Rea- better parts, more money, a role in the this footage and. .. gan's and who, like the President, just sort choice of their roles. of seemed to dream himself to fame and Mr. Shamir was duly moved and im- fortune. As with the late foreman of The Not young Ron. He unassumingly did pressed. So wer~ Simon Wiesenthai and Factory, Reagan created a wonderfully leads in program features, small parts in a Rabbi Marvin Hier when they visited the seamless, and seemingly unconscious, few A's. He established himself most use- White House and were treated to the join between life and imagery, self and fully as Brass Bancroft, in the four pictures same story. It was only after it was repeat- works. Learned exigetes of both Reagan's comprising the Secret Service of the Air ed in the Israeli press and people here and and Warhol's work endlessly debate the series that Brynie Foy's B picture unit elsewhere started checking on it that Rea- question of whether or not it is art. How ground out. These pictures, Wills hints, gan's staff had to launch the most strenu- consciously did they shape the products prepared Reagan emotionally for his later ous \"containment\" effort of his presiden- that bear the stamp of their personalities? role as a real-life FBI informer against sus- cy up to that time. Ahem. Cough-cough. It is curious also to observe the similarity of pected Communists; Brass did a bit of un- You see. What he meant to say was. And dercover work in his time. Wills also sug- perhaps the visiting dignitaries misunder- gests that the Bancroft series may account stood Reagan; after all, English is not their for Reagan's devotion to the Star Wars native language. Obviously, if Reagan concept. In the last of these pictures Brass passed the war entirely in Hollywood it must defend from enemy agents the \"In- would have been a little difficult for him to ertia Projector,\" a device capable of be with a Signal Corps unit as the camps knocking enemy planes out of the air from were freed. \"Bill Stem the Colgate Shave a distance of four miles. Life may occa- Cream Man is on his way ...\" sionally imitate art for everyone, but it did so repeatedly in Ronald Reagan's career. Outrageous, on the face of it. Yet nei- ther Wills, collecting and recounting these In any event, he had no cause for com- stories, nor I, fascinatedly reading them, plaint. His career was moving ahead at a can quite summon the appropriate out- nice, but not unnerving pace. It did not rage. For we recognize in Reagan some- cost him sleep or recreation time-loss of thing we indulge in ourselves and in O\\lr 14

which are known to make him cranky, The American Foundation for AIDS Research even now. He got his good showy bit in and Knute Rockne and immediately thereafter The Film Society of Lincoln Center with the cooperation of Orion Classics an excellent second lead as George Ann- strong Custer vying anachronistically with present the American Premieres of Flynn's Jeb Stuart for de Havilland's hand JEAN de FLORETTE in Santa Fe Trail. The thing was not at all with the Westem it sounds, but rather a prepar- Yves Montand Gerard Depardieu Daniel Auteuil edness preachment, in which the two are in pursuit of Raymond Massey's John and Brown, who is made to stand in for Hitler, with good men being urged to stand up to MANON OF THE SPRING his raving bigotry before it is too late. San- with ta Fe Trail was also, about half the time, a Yves Montand Daniel Auteuil Emmanuelle Beart romantic comedy, with Flynn playing the from the novels by Marcel Pagnol smooth seducer and Reagan playing Cus- Directed by Claude Berri ter as the one thing he surely was not, an Alice Tully Hall amiable goof, the butt of Flynn's jokes and schemes, and ultimately the loser to Monday, June 22,1987 at 6:15 pm sharp him in their contest for the girl. Mr. Montand and Me Berri will attend the buffet Reagan hated the way Flynn kept up- during the interval between the films. staging him, but Santa Fe Trail estab- Tickets: $25, $50 and $100 lished once and for all the young player's All proceeds will benefit viability in big-budget pictures. Two years later he got his best role, the one that The American Foundation for AIDS Research stays everyone's critical hand in the at- For further information call Christopher Mason tempts to evaluate his acting career, that of at (212) 874A098 Drake McHugh in King's Row. His next 15 good part, and his last before entering the service himself, was again with Flynn and Massey in Raoul Walsh's Desperate Jour- ney, in which he was a Yank in an RAF crew, downed in occupied Europe and trying to fight its way back to England. Much of the film was played as knock- about comedy, and rather refreshingly so. Aside from This Is the Army, for which Wamers was able to borrow him back from the Air Corps to play the romantic lead, that was it for Reagan until 1947 and Stal- lion Road. Reagan's prewar movies repay study. They are the ones that define the lim- its of the untutored talent that, once he had asserted it, he did nothing to develop or refine. (Again the analogy with Warhol suggests itself.) Obviously, King's Row is central to this consideration, for though it must tiptoe around the incest theme that was crucial to the success of the best-seller on which it was based, and though poor, bland Robert Cummings was, a hopeless leading man, it was an energetic and memorable picture, with good character people like Claude Rains and Charles Co- bum interestingly cast, a wonderful look to it (the joint creation ofcinematographer James Wong Howe and production de- signer William Cameron Menzies), a grand Erich Wolfgang Komgold score, and the always adorable Ann Sheridan de- liciously present and down to earth. Above all, it gave Reagan what everyone

Colonel North's and Adm. Poindexter's spy stories must have sounded a lot like movie treatments as they outlined them to him, keeping them briefand punchy, the way Jack Warner used to like them. pretending to movie stardom must some- Bedtime for Bonzo. how obtain, a riveting scene, with a line as unforgettable as his \"Where's the rest of probably dressed up in a 19th-century sol- ally worthwhile. It is also, of course, the me\" when he wakes up to discover that a dier suit, and though he is kind of funny thing that goads actors, makes them dif- sadistic doctor has needlessly amputated sometimes, he is kind of jarring, too. ficult, hard for the studio manager to man- both his legs after an accident in a rail yard. Things work out for him a little better in age. They are, in effect, junkies ever in Desperate Journey. He is supposed to be a search of their fix, their passage out of en- In his reading of this movie, Wills, I breezy American kid who, under interro- trapping reality. think, errs seriously. He wants to take gation by Massey (playing a Gestapo even this one small thespic triumph away officer), resorts to jive talk in order to For Reagan, lacking the gift of tran- from Reagan, and so he insists that his big evade awkward questions, and he is genu- scendence, acting could only provide an scene is really Sheridan's (and Kom- inely funny in the scene. Timing was the extension of reality, not an escape from it. gold's). Bud ran it over and overthe other experienced radio performer's strong suit, Like the rest of us \"non-pros\" (to borrow night, and it is just not so. To be sure, the his only reliable technical skill, and he Variety's old, contemptuous term), he had preparation for it is all Sheridan's. The used it to good effect here. As for This Is to rely on private fantasies to make his way camera is long on her as she anxiously the Army, he was straight man to a vast out of the quotidian. And as with the rest awaits Drake's awakening from shock and troupe putting on a soldier show. As the of us, his dreams were fed, polluted per- anesthesia and his discovery that he has movie's only male romantic interest, he haps, by mechanized dream works, by been crippled. But once she responds to tries to evade Joan Leslie's advances on movies of the very kind he unimaginative- his first cry, mounts the stairs, and enters the ground that it was irresponsible to ly worked in. And by the movielike fanta- his room, they share the scene equally. marry while there was a war on and he sies that the rest of the media provided- She has three close-ups, he has two, and might be killed-yes, that one. But again, sportscasters, political commentators, there are three two-shots, two of which the part was comfortably within his mod- storytellers of every \"non-fictional\" kind distinctly favor him. Moreover, he does est range. who had mastered the basic American his famous line unimprovably: anguish movie trick, which is to tell whoppers in a and panic in his voice, in his facial expres- L ooking back on this work, we see realistic-seeming manner, tell whoppers sion, in his thrashing movements under clearly-was it ever clear to him?- of the kind Reagan is still genially telling the covers. And one gets no sense that the that he lacked the art to transform himself and believing. Oh, yes, absolutely believ- director, Sam Wood, had to cheat to cover through art. He was trapped within him- ing, as Colonel North and Adm. Poin- for Reagan. Hard to ask for anything more selfon the screen as well as off. Real actors dexter discovered to their delight. They from any actor. are in essence escape artists, or maybe looked like old-fashioned heroes to him, quick-change artists. It is the opportunity and so they could tell him just about any- No, Reagan's problems in King's Row to strut that gift that provides such fascina- thing and make him believe it--especial- occur earlier, when he is called upon to tion and payoffs, the thing that makes a ly spy stories that must have sounded a lot represent himself as a careless womanizer difficult and frustrating business occasion- like movie treatments as they outlined and ne'er-do-well heir to a small fortune. them to him, keeping them brief and He is supposed to provide the contrast to Cummings, who plays an eamest, idealis- tic medical student. At this stage of the movie Drake McHugh is not a nice guy, and Reagan is visibly uncomfortable, straining, in these passages. He does not exhibit the bom actor's relish at playing a heel; he exhibits the born politician's dis- comfort at being mistaken for one. He has no technique to help him get under this character's skin. Or to distract us from his own discomfort. Before he loses his legs, Drake loses his inheritance, and that re- turns Reagan's character to the emotional range where he was-and is---comfort- able in reality. It is the only realm where he ever learned to live persuasively, on the screen. His other work in the period reinforces this point. Take his Custer, for example. The relationship with Jeb Stuart is not the only anachronism in Santa Fe Trail. Rea- gan plays his role as a modem youth im- 16

punchy, the way Jack Wamer used to like all the wrinkles and wattles loom large. John Vallone them. For a while he could get away with it. In Learned His Craft It was not so important back before the later years Bedtime for Bonzo served him at NYU war, this limit under which he worked. He as The Hom Blows at Midnight served was acute guy, and young. And, as noted , Jack Benny; it was a funny-sounding title John Vallone got his degree in theatre a pleasant relief from all those artist types around which gag writers could cluster design from NYU. He's made his yeaming to breathe free. After the war, deflationary jokes about his career, the career in film and television-as pro- though, it was different. He wasn't so film that put ironic quotation marks duction designer on such films as young anymore, and the movies were around his \"stardom. \" Also, of course, li- Brewster's Millions , Streets ofFire, changing. Genre films, the conventions of berals and other cruel people could use it 48 Hours, Brainstorm, and the forth- which had done a lot of the actors' work for as a symbol of his fundamental lack ofseri- coming The Predator and as art direc- them, were losing their hold on the public. ousness. (\"Doesn't it bother you,\" asks a tor and Academy Award nominee for Now you had to bring something of your stoned joumalist in Oliver Stone's Salva- Star Trek. subtler awarenesses of self and world to dor, \"that this straight man to a chimp is the party up there on the screen. Hard for gonna be the next President?\") Actually, Other alumni of the Department of everybody, especially hard for Reagan. Bonzo is an agreeable farce, and he is ex- Design at NYU's Tisch School of the pert as the professor of behavioral psychol- Arts are production designers, art His wife of the time caught this drift ogy trying to maintain his dignity while directors, costume designers , and early. \"Button-Nose,\" better known as raising a baby chimp as a human baby. lighting directors for such films as FX Jane Wyman, came from a background and Moscow on the Hudson ; the televi- similar to, and not more tony than, Rea- He was 40 the year it was released. And sion programs , \"Murder, She Wrote,\" gan's. When they were courting she was it was obvious to him, if not to anyone \"The Equalizer,\" \"Late Night with making B's at Wamers too, and she fit in else, that he could not perpetuaUy sham David Letterman\" ; and MTY. chipperly with the gang of midwestem youth. He needed to do grown-up roles, t~nsplants, non-pros the lot of them, with roles without jokes. He loved the out- The Tisch School of the Arts' New whom Reagan ran socially-mostly to the doors, was proud of his skills as a horseman York City location gives students the beach and (odd for movie folk) to the mov- (that would be director Allan Dwan's chief opportunity to work with professionals ies, where they paid their money and took memory of him), and from youth, and like in every aspect of design for theatre, their place with the other non-pros in the just about every other male of his age, he film, and television. audience. But instinctively, the starlet had wanted to encompass the Westem sniffed the profession's possibilities for myth, intemalize and then project it. For more information, return the healthy escape from self and the quotid- Maybe he could rescue his career as an- coupon below or call (212) 598-2401. ian. By 1945 she had The Lost Weekend, other aging juvenile had done, by em- by '47 her first Oscar nomination (for The bodying that myth onscreen. But though -----------Fe-5/87 Yearling), a year later the big prize itself, he now had the crags to match the land- for Johnny Belinda. Hubby was left be- scape's, Ronny Reagan was no Jimmy Tiscb Scbool of tbe Arts hind to make a bitter quip, that he should Stewart. Watch him in Cattle Queen of New York University name Belinda as co-respondent in his di- Montana. He lacks the gravitas one ex- 721 Broadway, 3rd Floor vorce action. In other words, Wyman had pects ofthe classic westemer. He seems to New York , N.Y. 10003 found and entered the country of the float above this countryside, unrooted in it Attn.: Lloyd Burlingame, Chair imagination-one feels like writing \"the or in its history. Above all, he is innocent of healthy imagination\"-that Reagan could that radical self-sufficiency that is the es- Department of Design never locate. sence of the heroic westemer. Please send me information about your pro- gram in design: T hey tried to help him, the people who It is the same way with most of his other ran the town. Unlike most of the other attempts to break away from the selfhood o undergraduate 0 graduate actors, he had always treated them polite- that he was at last beginning to see as a pro- o I would also like information about sum- ly, gratefully, according them the respect fessional imprisonment. Maybe he should he had never been able to grant his alco- have played more soldiers and sailors. mer sessions. holic father, the shiftless shoe salesman Hellcats of the Navy, the picture now fa- Name _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ___ who had more than once shamed him. He mous because Nancy was his co-star in it, had been loyal to Jack Wamer. More im- is interesting not merely because it reveals Address _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ portant, he had remained faithful to the what prevented her from becoming a only agency he had ever had, Lew Was- star--<:oarse jawline-but as a signpost on City /State/Zip Code _ _ _ _ _ _ __ serman's increasingly powerful MeA. a road not taken by him. Somehow, in a They all saw him as an actor who had to uniform, going by the military book, he is 1._----------_ ..New York University is an affirmative action/equal stay within himself-these people really granted an authority, a maturity, unex- opportunity institution. are not stupid about their business; it's all pressed in his other postwar roles. This they ever think about. Basically, that costume does a job for him that westem- meant light comedy and romance, con- er's garb cannot. For to borrow from David temporary stuff. It also meant perpetual Reisman, whose terms were much on youth, which is actually easier to maintain everyone's lips in those days, a military and project in real life (and on television, man is classically other-directed (like Rea- where presidents star) than it is on the cru- gan himself), while a westemer is classical- elly magnifying big screen, which makes ly inner-directed (utterly unlike him). In any event, a trip to the comer video 17

One imagines him feeling he could leave things to Don Regan the same way he used to leave things to Lew Wassennan. Showbiz agents, the good ones, do not have hidden agendas parlor will demonstrate to anyone that off- • casting was not the answer for him. His last picture, The Killers, was his most ludi- crous. He's supposed to be this mysteri- ously crooked businessman, keeping An- gie Dickinson, hinting at offscreen sadism in his relationship with her while he plots the mail heist that will bring him the wealth with which he intends to buy re- spectability. But he cannot project men- ace in 1964 any better than he could pro- ject sexual banditry in 1941 as Drake McHugh. The Killers offers him only one scene within his range. For purposes of plot he has to dress up as a cop and direct traffic away from the scene of his crime. He has to be chatty, amiable, as he mis- directs motorists, and he is as relaxed and agreeable as can be. A nice and totally be- lievable liar. In short, he is positively presi- dential in the scene. Presidential, that is, as he has redefined the tenn in recent years. By the time he made The Killers, solu- -Knute Rockne-All American. But the real payoff was both more sub- tions to the Ronald Reagan problem tle and more immediate. His agents were in sight. He had made his own signi- grasp of the complex issues confronting looked upon his perfonnance as SAG's ficant contributions to this effort. In show- SAG was no more subtle than it was in the leader and saw that itwas good. Ifit played biz the unions are generally presided over White House. Talking with a paid union for an audience of professionals like de by either has-beens or never-weres, peo- staffer, Reagan wonders why they need to Havilland, it would play for a broader, less ple who take themselves seriously and go on insisting on a union shop in their ne- demanding audience. Reagan did not ob- thus seriously feel it when they are denied gotiations with employers. He thought ject or disbelieve. These men had been so proper stages on which to assert their gifts. the union was so popular, and doing such a good to him for so long, had been so, well, Reagan was not a dynamic Screen Actors good job, that it could prosper as a purely fatherly (in a way that his own father never Guild prexy. In Doug McClelland's use- voluntary organization. We know, of had been), so gently undisruptive of his ful compilation of eyewitness accounts of course, that Reagan vastly simplified-re- dreamy ways-why should he not follow his rise and decline in the business, Holly- cast in starkly melodramatic tenns, B- the drift they pointed out for him now? wood on Ronald Reagan, Olivia de Havil- movie tenns, if you will-the whole issue Why not give up the exhausting effort to land is quoted thus on his leadership: of Communist penetration of the unions. be something other than himself, which is \"What comes to mind is his affability and We know, too, that he was instrumental in what his late screen career kept demand- his gift for conducting Screen Actors Guild granting the SAG waiver that pennitted his ing of him? Why not relax back into the old meetings with adroitness and good hu- own agency, MCA, to enter film and TV simple, perpetually youthful self he had mor. I think he was always an instinctive production, thus facilitating its rise to its been so contented playing in his earlier politician, and a genial one.\" present eminence as the most powerful- movie days? Obviously, they had the right and stable-institution in the moving-im- of it. Reagan's too-temperate naturalism, Yes. Sounds right. He was finding a age industry. We know that ultimately it his lack of imaginative fire, may have way to playa president that was within his was MCA functionaries who arranged the limited his screen career, but these vety range. He was not taking charge of that real-estate transactions that provided him presidency any more than he could be said with the wealth to run for the presidency. to have taken charge of his subsequent governorship or his larger presidency. He was substituting agreeableness for author- ity, letting the mantle of office-the ge- neric conventions of the role, as it were- substitute for true characterization. It is the Hellcats ofthe Navy illusion writ large. There is, piled up in Wills' book, a huge body of evidence that Reagan's 18 ~

deficiencies had , his agents could sense, One imagines Reagan even less prepared among us is not?--can be anything but limitless possibilities in different venues. for characters like Poindexter and NOM , touched by his plight as he stands, at last, 'IV hosting, for staners. And after that.... with the ir hidden ideological agendas, not outside the theater, blinking at the light, to mention the starring roles they were in- trying to recapture the sweet cheats he had No. Not even Lew Wasserman is that tent on playi ng in the phantasmagoric spy so long and happily enjoyed inside. My sman. He was clearly a great agent in his movies running in their heads. Showbiz God ! At last he looks, and acts, his age. day-who else can we imagine getting a agents, the good ones, do not have hidde n million-dollar contract for Reagan out of agendas-not where their clients' inter- Still, he has a mighty consolation. His Jack Wamer?-but not even he could ests are concerned. picture ran longer and prospered better have imagined that politics was about to than any our minds' eye ever contemplat- become a branch of television in a wink of One is saddened. To be awakened so ed. And none of us had plot devices to history's eye. Or imagined this agreeable close to the end of this long-running match the boldness of his: a me ntal movie second-string client of his as the man who dream work of Reagan's, and to have the in which the star becomes a real movie would seal that deal. Showbiz is not instrume nt of his awakening be the yawp- star. And the n President! He is to this Mann'sDr. Faustus. It is a novel by some- ing and bayi ng of the press, which Lew form of dreaming what Alexander Ponnoy one named Irving. and his crowd had always been so good at was to another, less dangerous, and less in- tranquilizing. No movie fan-and who T his much , however, Wasserman teresting kind. ® knows, Reagan knows, everyone in showbiz knows: \"Yesterday they told you Samuel French's you would not go far .. . Next day on your Theatre & Fi~m Bookshop dressing room they've hung a star.\" In other words, the an of showbiz survival Booksellers of Plays and Film & Theatre books consists largely in riding the ups 'and the downs patiently-gracefully, if you can The world's oldest (157 years) play manage it. Look at Joan Collins. Look at publishers and authors agents have Dennis Hopper. LookatJane Wyman, for expanded their horizons ..... heaven's sake. While her former mate was getting elected to all kinds of things, she CALL or Write for our new couldn't--or maybe wouldn't-get elect- FILM BOOK CATALOGUE (free of charge) ed to The Love Boat. It is said she now gets $150,000 an episode for Falcon Crest. which includes books on............. That's the harum-scarum way of it. The Business of Film· Editing • Industry Directories Now, of course, Reagan got and-how Acting • Screenwriting • Screenplays • Music lucky. Until a couple of minutes ago. Directing • Animation· Cinematography • Makeup When it was rather forcefully borne in on Biographies & Studies of Film Directors him that, once in a while, Presidents really Lighting • Continuity • Special Effects must behave presidentially. What a rude and puzzling awakening. For most of his Order by phone: 800-8-ACT NOW (USA) adult life, he had operated under the un- 800-7-ACTNOW (Calif. only) spoken, but very firm , agreement that rules the relationship between \"talent\" Or by mail: and its agents and managers. It holds that the former is to be spared all the unpleas- Samuel French's Theatre & Film Bookshop ant details of career management. The idea is to free creative people from those 7623 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, Calif. 90046 distractions that might dilute or diven (213) 876-0570 their creative energies. Or from just hav- ing fun or dreaming along, enjoying one's VISA· MC. AM EX fame and forrune, if, as it was with Rea- gan, creativity was not a high priority--or, truth to tell , much of a possibility. The business types like this arrange- ment. They are pleased to think of their clients as willful children in need of practi- cal guidance. And they are inclined to be- lieve that when these clients mix too asser- tively into business affairs they blunt the creativity of the deal-making process. Modem movie stars tend to get a bit scratchy with this arrangement, but a lot of old-timers like Reagan got used to it. One imagines him feeling he could leave things to Don Regan the same way he used to leave things to Lew Wasserman. 19

\"Cut, Your Hugeness\" n e N. fR. in Daana Veera Soora Kama. t8 20 by Chidananda Das Gupta and J. Hobennan A specter is haunting Indian politics, the specter of cinema. To gain power, it seems that movie stars have nothing to lose except their make- up-and sometimes not even that. For years, the states of Tamil Nadu and An- dhra Pradesh have been governed by film actors. In a land whose problems often appear insoluble, star-pols M.G. Rama- chandran and N.T. Rama Rao (or M .G.R. and N.T.R., as they are known), and now Amitabh Bachchan, represent the kingdom of dreams, a vanguard of happy endings. India not only leads the world in cinema production, but there is probably no coun- try on earth where film is taken more seri- ously. Indian movies are culture, religion, and politics rolled into one. In 1982, when Amitabh Bachchan suf- fered severe abdominal injuries shooting his latest epic, it was front-page news throughout the country, whipping the en- ~ tire subcontinent into a frenzy. With dis- traught fans establishing a round-the- clock vigil outside his hospital, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi canceled a foreign trip to visit the superstar's bedside. As half the nation prayed for his recovery morning and evening, Bachchan's doctors issued hourly bulletins on his condition, while newspapers ran detailed daily updates. The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty aside, stars like Bachchan are India's only true nation- al figures. Before her death, Indira might have played the Amitabh card, but he en- tered politics only after her assassination. Then, at Rajiv Gandhi's behest, Bach- chan ran for Parliament in the Nehru fam- ily's home district. In December 1985, along with six other candidates from filmdom, he won a landslide victory. Dur- ing his campaign in Allahabad, Bachchan dismissed his film life as make-believe. Once elected, however, he was no longer to be seen, having returned to Bombay to complete his film assignments. (Some constituents filed a missing persons report with the police, adding a twist to the desig- nation MP. Meanwhile, militant fans formed associations to defend his reputa- tion.)

What manner of films tum their stars huge cinema theaters-all shining metal film cente r of southern India, 50-foot cut- into arbiters ofa nation's destiny? For and etched glass, dusted and wiped on the outs offi lm starsglowerdown upon pedes- the vast majority of the 9OO-odd features hour, their lobbies decked out with trians, patches of tinsel shimmering over made each year in India, the recipes hard- kitschy Christs and Krishnas leading their their many-colored costumes; rows of ly vary: dances and songs, cabarets and car devotees up shining ramps and escalators posters , large and small , cover all available chases, rape and mother-worship, fights with colored lights-are monumental in wall space, surround the open areas, and and love scenes (inevitably played in the size, and cleaner than most city hospitals. even festoon the trees. Set alongside copious lap of nature), high-pitched melo- mass-produced icons of the gods, these In Madras, capital of Tamil Nadu and drama with outrageous deus ex machina finales, thin storylines and sturdy actors connecting all the dots. Characters are types, not individuals, and multiple roles are common. As a Telegu reviewer has pointed out about the film Prema-Simhn- sana, \"K.R. Vijaya is both N .T.R.'s mother and wife.\" Naturally, N. T. R. plays both father and son. The threshold of suspension of disbelief is extremely low . Despite breast-beating by the intellec- tuals , the cinema is India's arbiter of popu- lar taste, the Pierre Cardin of the common man. Reinforcing religious orthodoxy and the social values of a bygone era, breeding contempt for the present, it is the cinema that promotes a powerful vision of good and evil, East and West, the scientific and the religious. Whatever is modem and Western is bad, especially the modem working woman. The village is good, the city is wicked; traditional values, religion , filial piety, patriotism, and the family hon- or must be upheld-but not before a Cook's tour of delectable sins, including rape and hip-wiggling, semi-nude dances. While the cinema plies its norms of be- N. rR. after entering politiCS. havior and attitudes, it has become more specifically the instrument ofa grass- roots revolt against the domination of elite culture. Andhra Pradesh has the highest number of cinemas, followed by neigh- boring Tamil Nadu. Both states are ruled by superstars of the screen. The cultural domination of the cinema has now turned into a political domination. As Tariq Ali notes in his recent biogra- phy of the Nehru family, these \"escapist extravaganzas\" suggest the Hollywood musicals of the Great Depression. \"The difference [is] that in India there is a per- manent depression and, as a result, a nev- er-ending stream of films. In the south in particular, this cinematic opium has be- come the religion of the masses. The ac- tors have larger followings than politi- cians.\" It is in this context that the rise of film stars the likes ofN.T. Rama Rao and M.G. Ramachandran must be seen. Like a tropical jungle speeded up by time-lapse photography, the cinema's power in southern India grows before one's eyes. Thousands of fan clubs rally to the support of their favorite film stars. The 21

garish images of celluloid divinity are screenwriter and actor named C.N. Anna- tue. A maidservant came back home ubiquitous. The stars adorn jewel!)', T- durai. Many of Annadurai's supporters sobbing; she had just seen \"M.G.R. kill- shirts, and other accessories sold in the ba- came from the Tamil film indust!)\" and ing a tiger to save his mother's life-in this zaars; according to the American research- they began to insinuate political symbols day and age. \" er Robert Hardgrave, \"A tattooist at and anti-Brahmin sentiments into their Moore market will embroider your skin movies. Observing that these references M.G.R. never entered the gray areas, with the everlasting image ofM.G.R. \" drew enthusiastic cheers from Tamil audi- not to speak of playing villains. \"Between ences, even non-DMK filmmakers began the mid-Fifties and the early Seventies, Religious scholar Mircea Eliade has playing to the balcony by making use of M.G.R. played in 100 films,\" film histori- commented on the collapse of the tradi- the party symbols. an S. Krishnaswamy reports. \"Not in one tional separation of myth and fact in India. did he die.\" Millions of religious-minded women pour The Congress party politicians dis- libations upon the lingam which they missed the DMK as little more than a fan Of course, M.G.R. never played gods know to be the symbol of the penis resting club, but it was to become the major force or mythological characters because the in the female, Eliade explains, but which in Tamil politics, a vehicle by which a DMK began on an anti-Brahmin platform. they have learned to see as a symbol of number of film personalities embarked To bring Christians into the fold (the Shiva, of a divine creative principle. As upon political careers. The 1967 election south has a long Christian tradition), they pour their offerings upon it, nothing proved a watershed, with Congress belat- M.G.R. launched The Life of Jesus is further from their minds than sex. The edly getting in on the act by counterstrate- Christ, on December 26, 1969. It was a cinema has stood this traditional relation- gizing with film stars Sivaji Ganesan and great occasion, which looked, according to ship of myth and fact on its head. Myth Padmini to promote Congress' cause. Robert Hardgraves, like \"a wedding of has become fact. Neither could touch the DMK's candidate the DMK and the Church, presided over for state assembly-M.G. Ramachan- by Christ himself. At the long table before The cinema is too palpable, too natural- dran, the Tamil Errol Flynn (referred to in assembled guests, M.G.R. ... was joined istic for its gods to remain mere symbols. A the press as the \"Idol of the Masses\"). on one side by the Archbishop of Madras particular quality of Indian film culture is The campaign reached delirious propor- and on the other by Chief Minister M. that stars are habitually referred to as \"film tions when M.G.R. was shot and critically Karunanidhi,\" then leader of the ruling heroes\" or \"film heroines,\" not \"actors\" or wounded by M.R. Radha-who had DMK. \"actresses\"-and this not only by fan played the heavy in many of his movies. magazines, but by critics as well. Stars are Conducting his campaign from his hospi- According to most observers, economic identified absolutely with their roles. Dec- tal bed, M.G.R. swamped his Congress ri- indicators reveal an overall decline in ades ago, when Prem Adib, a Muslim, val. Tamil Nadu. The spurt of industrial used to play the role of Rama, devout Hin- growth in the Fifties and early Sixties has dus would pick him up from the studio be- With the DMK triumph, Annadorai be- run out ofsteam; electricity is in chronical- fore he could take off his costume and came chief minister-nine out of his ten ly short supply, and so is water. Journalist makeup, and make him stand in their cabinet ministers plucked from the film S. V. Mani paints a lurid picture: \"Witness homes while men and women prostrated indust!),. After Annadorai's death two the rapidly expanding poverty scene: The themselves and worshiped at his feet. years later, however, the DMK was tom by thousands living like worms in the slums rival interests. The film writer Karunan- and pavements of Madras, the hundreds I n late 1979, a new political party led by idhi won the battle for succession but walking miles for a pot ofdrinking water in film star Dev Anand planned to oppose overreached himself when he tried to the villages, or the long water queues in Mrs. Gandhi in the upcoming elections. build up his son as a superstar, presumably the cities; human beings suddenly emerg- Enlisting a number of Bombay stars, the to produce a more pliable version of ing from sewage wells and shaking off the National Party ~attracted some 10,000 M.G.R. The party split, and in 1979, muck and slime.. .. This is the reality, the members in its first week of existence, not M.G. Ramachandran, leader of the new outcome of the politics of illusion.\" to mention the 200,000 potential voters All India Annadorai DMK (or AIADMK), who flocked to its first rally. Although the became chief minister. But for a brief in- Yet M .G.R. 's stardom doesn't seem to party disintegrated soon afterward-a terregum, he has remained so. have lost any of its luster. Fans still throng government tax raid against various film the theaters on opening night of reruns of world notables was taken as a waming- I n Tamil Nadu, as elsewhere, image can his films and battle supporters of rival its brief histo!), underscores India's long- be more potent than fact. M.G.R. stars, much like soccer fans in Europe or standing fusion of movies and politics. knows this well; M.G.R. does not see Latin America. Many will go without anyone, not even his cabinet colleagues- meals for days to buy a ticket on the black The political orchestration of film and including an erstwhile leading lady and his market. The All-World M .G.R. Fan As- politics is rooted in the cultural national- producer-until he has his cap on to cover sociation claims a following of 1.5 million ism of the Dravidian movement. Just as his baldness and his dark glasses to hide including a Youth Front, trained in com- the older Dravidian civilization of south- the pouches under his eyes. In the cine- ern India was subjugated by the Aryans ma, the M. G .R. image was almost scienti- bat skills. Last year, 26 Tamils self-immo- from the north, independent India came fically created. Film by film, eve!), seg- lated to bestow recove!), and good health to be dominated by northern leaders who ment of the proletariat was covered: a on M.G .R. when he lay critically ill in a persuaded the majority to accept Hindi as movie about fishermen, another about Brooklyn, New York, hospital. The publi- the national language. One year before rickshaw pullers, then one about nurses, cation of photos showing him in conversa- the constitution of 1950 specified Hindi as about clerks, and so on. In each, M.G.R. tion and full of smiles had a direct impact India's official language, the anti-Hindi, played the good man, a Robin Hood, dis- on the December 1984 election. The anti-north (as well as anti-Sanskrit and penser of justice and savior of the op- opposition party's strategy of capitalizmg anti-Brahmin) Dravidian Forward Move- pressed, the reposito!)' of traditional vir- on M.G.R.'s illness was vitiated, and ment (DMK) was founded by a Madras M.G.R.'s party again triumphed. After his recove!)', M.G.R. asked his party to pay one million rupees (about 22'

$80,(00) toward the cost of his treatment. foot as if to a shrine. In 198 1, the villagers Our most current catalog , 44 He then appealed directly to the people to ofPumuru built a temple with an image of pages (81/2 \"x11 \" ) with over 300 contribute to the party, so that it could re- the actor as their chosen diety. Thus, photos & accompanying text pay the state govemment, which had when NT R. campaigned for the job of (about 85 in full color, including bome the cost of his treatment. The re- chief minister, people not onl y recognized front & back covers!). Mailed sponse was overwhelming. the actor who had appeared in 292 films, with outside wrapper on receipt but now they saw a man who had crossed of $7.00 U.S. funds by first class I t took the cinema 20 years to come to over the line between character and actOr. mail. power in Tamil Nadu. In Andhra Pra- This time, NT R. 's script had the power Our new location, a gallery on desh, the Telegu-speaking neighboring to elicit more than tears. Now he moved 1932·F Polk St. (near corner of state, the process was considerably accel- wheels. Pacific Ave.), San Francisco, CA erated: 94109 . Open Mondays The main N.TR. film then playi ng in through Saturdays, 11 AM to 6 A 16th-ce ntury astrologer predicted Andhra's theaters was Bobbili Puli (The PM Pacific time. that in d1e 20th cenulry \"A Bania (mer· Tiger ofBobbili), about a much decorated chant) will bring freedom to the country,\" Indian army officer forced to become an CINEMONDE and \"A widow will rule India.\" Now, outlaw by the machinations of his villain- while the wonderful thing about 4OO-year- ous father. He escapes from prison, forms 1932·F POLK STREET old predictions is that they are eminently his own band of followers , rounds up the SAN FRANCISCO, malleable, Mahatma Gandhi did belong judge and police officers in a cave, and to a merchant community, and Indira treats them to a homily on the evils of 94109 Gandhi was indeed a widow. Early in modem society and the nature of true jus- 1982, NT Rama Rao, the superstar of tice. \"Whenever virtue is on the decline,\" Thi s film was Telegu films-an actor for 35 years, the he tells them in stentorian tones, \"I appear made secretly in Man of Steel in the T elegu version of Su- on earth to rescue the good and punish the order to portray perman, regarded by the largely illiterate bad.\" These are the words spoken by the true conditions of life in South Africa. rural masses as an avatar of Lord Krishna Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. This is the story of Zacharia .. . o ne of the himself-was asked to play the role of this hundreds of th o usa nd s of Africans forced astrologer and was given the book of pre- Bobbili Puli heralded N.TR. wherev- each year off th e land by the regime and into dictions. In its pages, he discovered that er he went. Riding in a 1942 Chevrolet sta- the go ld mines. around 1982-83, \"a man with a painted tion wagon, equipped with floodlights, a face will rule Andhra.\" Taking his cue, public address system, and a platform on On The Bowery NT R. sat up: \"But, that's me! \" Within a top, the god of cinema crisscrossed the few weeks he had formed a party, Telegu state's 275,000 square kilometers. The ..... an extraord in ary agonizin g document Desam (Telegu Nation) and was running members of N. T R. 's 600 fan clubs . .. filled with an overwhelming sense of for chief minister. served as his emissaries, and hordes of veracity and an un voiced compassion for the people came to his meetings. As soon as men who have surrendered thei r dignity for a In deciding that the prediction was the driver alerted him to an approaching drink. \" - Arrhur Knighr , Sa rurda y Relliew about him, N.T Rama Raowasnotbeing arrival, the candidate would climb through vain. At 59, the foremost film actor of An- a hatch on to the roof and speak to the Each video is S60. Master / Visa accepted or orders may be dhra Pradesh carried a considerable load of thousands-Dften entire villages-who prepa id (NYS residents add 8'/.%sales tax). Add $2 per tape paint on his face-his natural dark com- flocked to \"Krishna's Chariot\" as soon as lor shipping and handling and specily VHS or Beta. plexion ulmed a glowing pink that con- they heard it coming. Descriptions of trasted vividly with his jet black eyebrows N. T R. 's campaign eclipse the wildest mystic rlR€ VI()€O and bright lipstick. (Since N. TR. special- excesses of Beatlemania. Women threw ized in playing gods, the paint was a must, rose petals and broke coconuts; some even 24 HORATIO ST. #3F. NY NY 10014 for all gods, with the exception QfKrishna, washed the roads in N. T R. 's honor. At (212) 645-2733 are supposed to have fair skin.) The time one village, a young acolyte slit her wrist was ripe for a film actor with a god-image and smeared the star's divine forehead to take over the affairs of Andhra Pradesh: with her blood. the locals said that Mrs. Gandhi changed Andhra's chief minister as frequently as On election day, a record 21 million vot- her sari. Such frequent changes of the ed and, after nine months of inspired chief minister, dictated by New Delhi, campaigning, NTR. defeated Indira had caused deep resentment, compound- Gandhi's long-ensconced Congress party. ed by the problems ofcorruption and mal- As the large, handsome chief minister sat administration. straight on a big chair in his office, dressed in the saffron robes of a religious mendi- When N.TR. strolled about his Rama- cant, an earring dangling from his left ear krishna studio, employees prostrated (as prescribed by his astrologer), it was im- themselves at his feet, matching the possible not to remember the lines from moming crowd outside his house that his latest film about God appearing on shouted, \"Devadu! Devadu! God! God!\" earth. \"You have seen Bobbili Puli,\" as the divine hero appeared on his balco- N.TR. explained when asked about his ny. In the countryside, movie patrons de- policies. \"There is a man who always sides posited their shoes outside the theaters with the wronged sections of the people. showing N.TR.'s films, entering bare-

So naturally there is sympathy for the years, the evolution of modem India has lowly lives, bringing thrills to those who hero. That is the style of role I perform. So been guided by a Western-educated elite. subsist on dreams. the people expect good things to come of Mahatma Gandhi achieved an extraordi- my service to them.\" Soon after his elec- nary identity with the common man, yet Of the four southern states, two have tion, he took Sariyas (the renouncement of he had been schooled in England and had actor chief ministers; in the two others, worldly happiness), shaved his head, and practiced law, as well as ballroom dancing. Kamataka and Kerala, there are stars wait- declared , \"I am no longer the lustful and He was against the caste system and the ing in the wings. Kamataka's matinee gorgeous-looking Rama Rao, but a yogic feudal hierarchy, cornerstones of Indian idol, Raj Kumar, came out stridently in chief minister.\" social tradition, and valued the concepts of support of compulsory use of Kannada, individuality, freedom, and equality de- the language of the state, in offices, Humble in origin, superstar of a plebe- rived from the West. And today's India schools, and all governmental institutions. ian art, N. T. R. 's voice is that of the village owes a tremendous debt to Jawaharlal The present government of Kamataka is and the street, unencumbered by the Nehru-the son of a rich lawyer, a prod- handling the issue gingerly. niceties of the elite, and addressed to the uctofHarrow and Cambridge, the perfect heart rather than the head. Since leaving embodiment of the \"brown English- In Kerala, superstar Prem Nazir has college, he is reputed to have read nothing man,\" Macaulay's education plan for In- served notice. Kerala has the highest liter- except film scripts and religious scriptures. dia envisaged. acy rate in India, a large middle class, and a He tries hard to fulfill his campaign prom- highly politicized electorate. Newspaper ises-fast. He has no time for commis- Ifany leader could be said to be the total circulation is very high; libraries abound sions and expert committees. Police bru- opposite ofJawaharial Nehru, it is N.T.R. even in rural areas. Kerala also has a large tality is common. N. T. R has abused labor communist party which has been in power vayyari Bhamalli-Vagalamari Bhartalli. leaders and ignored attacks on harijans for long stretches and, unlike the rest of As N.T.R. and M.G.R. sit in their of- India, Hindus cannot dominate because (untouchables) by his upper-caste sup- fices deliberating matters of state, of large Muslim and Christian minorities. porters. He appears to be impatient with their painted faces and ornate bodies flick- Political commentators think Kerala will . the democratic process in the administra- er onscreen. These two political leaders be the last state to fall to the cinema, and tion-if not the election--of govern- are constantly seen frolicking with young perhaps it never will, although Prem Nazir ment. In many respects, N.T. R. has run girls, throwing punches at musclemen, or is the holder of the Guiness Book ofWorld Andhra Pradesh like a dictator. Indeed, an dancing like lunatics at nightclubs and on Records title for having acted in 600 N.T.R. vehicle with that very title, The mountain slopes, yet it does not daunt the films-more than N .T.R. and M.G.R. admiration of their subjects. On the con- combined. Dictator, was released in 93 theaters on trary. The gods have their own morals (~hy else be a god?) that mortal men re- Shortly after coming to power, N.T.R. the chief minister's birthday, May 28, gard as awesome. And so the supermen announced a grandiose plan for bringing 1983. ride their chariots across the wastelands of together all opposition leaders. It seemed impossible, but he succeeded-the great When India's 1986 international film assembly at Vijaywada became the largest festival was held in N.T.R.'s capital, the all-India gathering of non-establishment actor-chief minister took personal charge. parties ever seen. True to his dramatic in- He had the entire city of Hyderabad lit stincts, N.T.R. kept everybody in style, with colored lights, erected welcoming except himself He stayed in a hut, while arches, built elaborate fountains (despite other leaders were housed in stately build- the rationing of water), and widened ings. Agreement among the leaders was roads-all leading to the 4OOO-seat open- achieved on issues so broad as to be mean- air theater which had been especially con- ingless, but the assembly nonetheless sug- structed for the festival in only 90 days. gested a possible national alternative to In- N. T.R. was constantly onstage during the dira Gandhi. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India's opening ceremonies, standing beside the foreign minister for the three years of Mrs. podium, prompting or commenting upon Gandhi's political exile, declared that it whatever was being said. \"You will forgive was time India had a prime minister from me if I am overcome by emotion when I the south. In other words, N.T.R. would talk ofcinema,\" he declared. \"It nurtured be acceptable, it was hinted, to the oppo- me, promoted me, and made me what I sition parties as the national leader. am today.\" \"Andhra Pradesh has been a stage that In 1984, Mrs. Gandhi took advantage of has introduced me to the political scene of N. T. R. 's fund-raising trip to the U.S., the country,\" N.T.R. told an interviewer where there is a sizable population of Te- last year. While denying further national Iegu-speaking Indians, to dissolve his gov- ambitions, he maintained that \"God and ernment. Her attempt boomeranged. Po- my destiny lead me on, that is my belief.\" litical interference from New Delhi only Whether or notN.T.R. goes through with inflamed Telegu nationalism and en- auditions for the all-India post, his cine- hanced N.T.R.'s popularity. To wit: matic blend ofcosmetic politics and imagi- After Indira's assassination, her party won nary solutions has catapulted him on to the or improved its position in almost every penultimate platform of the Indian politi- state--except Andhra Pradesh. cal stage. The United States may be the first democracy to suffer rule by a movie It is not only in his southern origin or his star; it is likely that it will not be the last. ~ mythological image that Rama Rao is dif- ferent from the national leaders India has had for the past 40 years. For some 200 24

The Working Girls (I. to r.): Dawn (Amanda Goodwin), Molly (Louise Smith) and Debbie (Carla-Maria Sorey). by Karen J aehne the image of wome n for hire- and at a tions may have wormed the ir way into the time when onscreen sexual choice and ap- scenarios in which these contemporary Forget feminist forays, forget the pe tite is to the G reat Detumescence what hookers go about the ir business, the focus deathblow dealt hookers in the money and livi ng swell in T hirties' film s is clear: they are not just wome n of affairs; AIDS era, forget the cute classic at- were to the G reat Depression. No longer they are women of \" business\" affairs. Per- tempts to see the m as night nu rses going do bad girls simply do what they do best haps the simplistic misogyny of American beyond the call of duty. Everybody i before the film punishes them for it with society resists the te mptation to see what's making hooke r movies. Dutch feminist: death , reform , or marriage. In fact, most of up , pussycat, but prostitution has become Marlee n Gorris, American feminists, Brit- the contemporary hooke r movies stray be- equated with good manageme nt skills. ish Pythons, Burt Reynolds, Bob Hos-+ yond the love-for-sale subject into social kins, and we expect anytime now Debbie issues, psychosexual politics, state poli- Self-dete rmination has often elicited Does Dundee. tics, labor analysis, yu ppie comedy, child admiration for hooke r he roines from Julie abuse, cine matic plagiarism, and the topic C hristie in McCabe and Mrs. Miller to T he recent spurt of hooke r films, how- that really gets everyone hot-real estate. Jane Fonda in Klute, and most recently, ever, has redefined not only the genre but Louise Smith in Working Girls and Julie Whatever wom-out ethical assump- Walters in Personal Services. What sepa- 25

rates these girls working in celluloid from longer need endure. Pimps and johns are American past a tale of training in Pretty the traditional hookers is a common as- seen as sick and dangerous, while the hus- Baby. The outcry against this soft-focus sumption that a girl's body is her own ter- band has a severe but tractable problem: Frenchman's fantasy, which primed rain to be rented to whom and for what- all this, primarily, because violence Brooke Shields for prostitution (and star- ever price she may desire-ethics, against a working girl registers as deserved dom), objected to its romantic view of a romance, and dangers be damned. punishment, her just deserts, and more girl becoming a woman in the commercial than a mere professional risk. transaction of a New Orleans bordello. What with the collapse of moral argu- History, and possibly history alone (which ments against prostitution-at least, What seems objectionable about the alwavs baffles Americans), shielded Malle on the silver screen-danger persists as large number of hooker films in which from charges of perversion in his presenta- the compelling reason to condemn the hookers are killed is that, for the vast num- tion of this haven of sexuality, heart-rend- sexual marketplace, and surprisingly ber of women working, the percentage ing in its innocence, mind-boggling in its enough, it is not the health risks most hurt or killed is relatively small. (Women lack of critical perspective. feared from promiscuity, but rather the aren't all that stupid: even exposed street perils of the working girl , exposed as she is hookers have to develop a keen sense of Watching an unformed being delivered to men's Darker Impulses (sic). The truly men and the scent of trouble.) The narra- into the palms of prostitution challenges meretricious nature of this particular brand tive requirements, however, for a victim arguments for self-determination and of morality is irritating for its partonizing in need of a man's talent for revenge have choice. Pretty \"babies\" have no choice, proposition that prostitutes need men's left some indelible and diverse images in but choice should be available to women. protection against other irredeemably de- film history: from Hitchcock's Frenzy, Only the definition of prostitution has ob- viant men-even Clint Eastwood in Fassbinder's Berlin Alexarulerpl£ltz, de viously become as slippery as that of wom- Tightrope is not immune to the tempta- Palma's Blowout (where the killer stabs en. Working girls? Happy hookers? tion to hate hookers. the shape of a Liberty Bell on the stomach \"Belles\" de jour? There are perhaps only of his victims), the female-directed two or three things we do know about her, The prostitute must accept battery as Streetwalkin' (where the hookers suffer but while they never all make it into the an occupational hazard which wives no most at the hands of their pimps), to the same movie, her choices, remarkably impassive delicacy of Catherine De- enough, remain constant in adult hooker neuve, so young and so mauled, in Belle movies of recent vintage. de Jour. I A bodily, as it were, function of movies about cops and hookers is to go beyond F ilms about brothels have always of- mere entertainment to entertain mascu- fered something of an ever retreating line fantasies and/or feminine fantasia image of a bordello within a bordello with- about entering the taboo realm where ev- in a bordello. People pay for the thrill of erything's for sale, and it's a seller's mar- seeing people pay for thrills being per- ket. The fantasy genre gave moviegoers formed for great price by actresses who vicarious vacations from the workaday function as sex symbols, now cast in roles world of sex, public and private, and with- where they have to act out their symbolic out the burden of any cost analysis in social value and deliver on the promises of an or economic terms. Crossing the threshold image. So brothel movies featuring no of the cinematic bordello allows everyone stars seemed less meretricious than, say, to play the games of working girls, testing The Best Little Wlwrelwuse in Texas. The their own psychological limitations against lack of marquee value in Lizzie Borden's Working Girls, with its ho-hum nudity, those of the filmmakers. makes it breathtakingly naturalistic, pho- European and American filmmakers torealistic. The comparative' titillation val- ue of Terry Jones' Personal Services, in display very different attitudes, with the which Julie Walters shows little more than French in the rear guard from an American a curve of thigh and breast, is as old-fa- point of view. Louis Malle, for example, shioned as a Hogarth print of Naughty was almost driven beyond the pale of re- Nancy. spectability when he dug out of the

Marlene Dietrich stood at the apex ofthe acceptance ofan utterly compromised socialfabric, shot through with the glitter oflove for sale. Dietrich became a psychogram, inviting us to lookfor the \"FOR SALE\" sign on whatever cinematic material she lit up. Hookers whodo itfortheirown fantasy, passed the whorish lady, the ladylike which a nymphomaniac is denied her ap- such as Kathleen Turner in Crimes ofPas- whore and the whorish whore, standard petite. Au contraire, with a very European sion, aim to be eye-openers, even if there variations of the male-oriented spectrum; sense of surrealism, Bunuel inverts the is inevitably something hokey and forced while her detached familiarity invited in logic to prove that total sexual abandon is about her motivation. Her prostitution is the viewer a mild Brechtian verfremdung as religious a sacrifice as celibacy. Money treated as a theater for the psyche. The from role and genre alike; as in Ranclw is beside the point. thrills of danger and salvation are available Notorious, where her presence functions to her, butas.shedoesn'tdo itforthe mon- as a critique of the Westem.\" Dietrich Entire stretches of film history point to ey, she cannot be condemned. Unlike stood apart from most B-movie hookers as the balancing act of prostitution can- Klute, the therapy is the prostitution. As an untouchable, probably by dint of her celling out love (Blue Angel) and love as China Blue in Crimes, Turner manages to German origins. (In the decadent Old the bane of prostitutiori (Hustle and Ses- skirt the entire moral question, since she is Country, sin is more original than the sions). A demystification of the social val- not a \"real\" whore but only playing out her cheap thrills available in the U.S.) ue of prostitution-as a question of who fantasy in what Ken Russell would like to . does the selling and who profits from the believe is her freedom of sexual self-ex- The Europeans have always been sale-was long overdue when the nou- pression. Her style is parodic, and she prone to varnish prostitution with a patina velle vague's enfant terrible decided la goofs on her clients until she is pursued of glamor. The locus classicus and most coeur a sa raison, and it's l' argent. Jean- and attacked by an equally phony famous house of ill repute is Luis Bunuel's Luc Godard unceremoniously dumped \"preacher,\" that other goof, Anthony Per- Belle de jour. It's a given that Catherine the largesse of gold-hearted hookers and kins. A head-scratcher, nota heart-render. Deneuve's engagement in hooking is for the noblesse oblige of belles de jour, com- It's X-rating was an even further goof on reasons beyond the money and tubs of fun ing eyeball to eyeball with tradition. the raincoat brigade. in Personal Services. Deneuve's prostitu- tion provides her with a secret life and way Godard sees the whore in Marxist garb, If the proliferation of hooker movies is to explore her masochism physically at the as an emblem of the exploited worker in metaphoric or a mere reflection of the gen- hands of perverse fantasies, laid out in a Two or Three Things I Know About Her erallevel of prostitution in American life, most unjolly way. Her customers rrray be and Every Manfor Himself. In the former, as many argue, then the number of hook- ludicrous but they are never light, and Marina Vlady is forced to supplement her ers murdered onscreen points to some- Bunuel's intentions move into the meta- income by prostitution, and her alterna- thing even more global about the self-ha- physics of masochism. His peculiar genius tives as a shopgirl, hairdresser, factory tred that tums into self-destruction. Of was to deny the efficacy of punishment worker, or wife are viewed in due course. course, there is quite a movie tradition of visited on a masochist. Nobody can object She makes her choice in a pragmatic and the compromised woman as the scapegoat to the treatment of Deneuve, since she guiltless way, with the understanding that of a society in moral peril. puts herself into a situation where she is the money does not purchase her entire denied control, is sullied, and finds her being. She comes in pieces. And then she Marlene Dietrich stood at the apex of submission religiously joyful. She tran- tells her child of a nightmare about frag- the acceptance of ali utterly compro- scends (rather than escapes) her punish- menting into hundreds of pieces. mised social fabric, shot through with the ment. glitLer of love for sale. Dietrich became a In Every Man for Himself, Isabelle psychogram, inviting us to look for the Prostitution leads Bunuel's amateur Huppert represents commerce in an \"FOR SALE\" sign on whatever cinematic into danger only when love and passion in- amusingly allegorical mode. Once she material she bt up. As Carlos Clarens so tervene. That added danger excites her tries to hold back part of her fee, only to be aptly described her, \"Her range encom- even more. In the attempt to kill the man spanked by her pimp, who makes her re- who would reveal her secret life to her hus- cite after him: \"No one is independent. band, Deneuve's gangster boyfriend Not the whore. Not the secretary. Not the shoots her husband by mistake, paralyzing bourgeoise. Not the duchess. Not the him just as he becomes aware of his wife's maid. Not the tennis champion. Not the secret life. She must retire from her volun- schoolgirl .... Only banks are indepen- teer work to devote her life to caring for dent, but they' re killers.\" The pimp then her invalid husband, who will never again asserts that unlike the bank, he's not a kill- speak to her. But she has the dedication er, since he exacts only half. When Hup- and peace of a nun, freed to live in a world pert puts her sister to work later in the confined to sexual fantasy. Were it not for film, the roles are reversed. She advances Bunuel's proposal that Deneuve's salva- in Godard's quixotic view in the \"chain of tion requires a descent into carnal abase- being.\" ment, hot unlike the Christ-like model, Belle de jour would·seem to be yet another Another cynical parallel in Every Man tiresome tale of crime and punishment in for Himself between prostitution and filmmaking involves an elaborate Rube 27

Gorris hews thefeministfundamentalist line about hookers: Cooperate with men in their dangerous stereotypes ofwomen as the obsequious objects of desire, and you will become their victims. Goldberg sexual device, with the boss (as Gorris'Broken Mirrors. it were fast food, sex and sexuality have never been offered up as such undifferen- film director) determining the positioning men in their dangerous stereotypes of tiated commodities. Borden's every scene of two prostitutes and his male assistant in women as the obsequious objects of de- asks, \"Where's the beef?\" a sexual chain reaction, rehearsed first sire, and you will become their victims. with action, then with sound. The power of her ensemble of actors lies Through the camera's withering stare, in a depressing portrait of hookers driven the dry eyes of Borden's working girls tol- ''The whore's trade,\" said Godard in to taking control of their lives only after erate the customers. Men may go to hook- his apologia pro vita sua-style confes- having been subjected to the most ex- ers for what they can't get at home, but sions, \"brings more money to dried up treme humiliations of the bedroom. This they continually try to set up appoint- scriptwriters and producers than to pimps. bordello is not just a smorgasbOrd on a ments with hookers \"on the outside,\" less I myself am only a whore fighting against busy night; it's out of Dante, and the sort to avoid paying for sex than to prove their the pimps of cinema. The body of the of place no sane person chooses. Gorris' desirability beyond cash. Working Girls film ... is mine, and the image of 100 film is simultaneously recherche and resis- allows men's motives to be mixed but in- francs given in exchange for temporary tant, reminding us of D.H. Lawrence's sists that professionalism prohibits free- ownership of a piece of ass will remain the line, ''The cry of freedom is the rattle of bies, and the film is really about recogniz- image of 100 francs.\" chains.\" ing the need for reform-in labor law, not obscenity law. Working girls, per Borden, In very few films, notably Chantal T he defense of the working girl's choice don't need the protection of pimps or Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, is the frag- and the depiction of her actual control madams. mentation of prostitution seen in the over her clients makes Lizzie Borden's uniquely feminist perspective of the mad- Working Girls a very different, if equally Borden's heroine takes us through the ness of woman's work. With intellectual extreme, angle on hookerdom. It com- inner mechanics of a brothel as a work- integrity and cinematic rigor, Akerman bines the theater of sexual warfare with place, complete with a managerial attitude catalogues the household rituals of the pe- the astringency ofChantal Akerman, with leamed at'Disneyland. The madam, a tite bourgeoise as she cooks, cleans, and a pointed minimum of fantasy, paranoia, cross between Miss Piggy and Joan Riv- serves, keeping her son and her client or interference from beyond the walls of ers, is greed incamate with the moral ma- sealed off from each other. This mad the midtown Manhattan brothel where terialism of a finishing-school flunkee. housewife is nothing if not efficient, and trade can get quite brisk in the 24-hour Shot entirely within the confines of the her emotional compartmentalization de- time frame of the film. Seemingly shot at apartment-brothel, Working Girls makes rives more from the emptiness of her la- crotch-level, Working Girls rises out of one comment the clearest: it's claustro- bors than from her occasional tricks. The the paperback Marxist comer of the ide- phobic. Dispassionate sex scenes, sweaty numbing ritual of her routines provides ology of labor relations. Treated as though male embarrassment, comically perverse the world with its order. When finally she commits murder at the end of the film, the act stems from her meticulous sense that order, not her body, has been violated. The buried rage of a woman forced into prostitution finds a less tidy expression in Broken Mirrors, in which the hookers shatter their images in literal fulfillment of the title. In Broken Mirrors, Dutch direc- tor Marleen Gorris sees the order of a brothel called Happy House merely as contained chaos. Gorris' bleak vision of the atomized state ofworking girls-at the mercy of the film's men-permits not the curve of a smile in this arduous labor-of- love conflict. Danger is diverted into the film's parallel plot about a housewife kid- napped by a psychopathic killer, who also is a regular customer at the brothel. The women in the brothel either kill themselves or, if they stay, get sliced up. The psychopathic killer tortures the housewife to death, photographing her slow disintegration. Women everywhere, Gorris wants to say, are unsafe from men. Gorris hews the feminist fundamental- ist line about hookers: Cooperate with 28~

passion that reduces the clientele to sex love at the bordello. Here, in the fully \\NOEPENOEN\" lR\\LOG\" objects far more ridiculous than anything fitted brothel, Julie gives men a breather ON \\}\\OEO in Playboy or Penthouse-all contribute from being .. . well ... men . Her most to a discomforting view of the micro-poli- faithful regular announces, \"The future During the heyday of Black Humor literature in tics of sex as work, or work as sex. The lies in kinky people!\" Good old Brits- the early 60s, the core of darkness (inspired by film 's stiffservice-industry mixture ofanti- the past was always pretty kinky, too- the Cold War, the Death of God , and many other pornography and clock-watching, reduce and this movie makes kinky just so much then-burning social issues) was generally tem- prostitution to the tedium and repetition fun. (Why do they insist upon calling it pered by the humor wrapped 'round it by the of doing shift work at a sex factory. The \" F rench \"?) relentlessly grinning author. There's a long film's trick-infuriatingly- is the ulti- tradition of gallows humor, stretching back mate trick of trick-tumers, who in typical Personal Services makes many of the beyond Shakespeare to Chaucer, and forward reaction to the work ethic, try to get the points of Working Girls in desperately to . . well ... 1988. With this film the tradition of customer off with minimum frills: Work- blithe fashion , mostly because lovely the independent cinema's mock-Hollywood ing Girls strips all right, but chants, \"I re- madam Julie gives such a good party. Not humo\"r is turned inside out. fuse to entertain you.\" for her to exploit her colleagues, nor even her customers! At the height of her pow- B. Ruby Rich Where Working Girls trades erotic rev- ers, she runs the brothel's sex shebangs elry or conventional fantasies of like a fifth-grade teacher amidst unruly A MAN , A WOMAN , AND A KILLER is a tragic wealth and respectability for the implicit adolescents, making sure that the live les- epic, a love story, a documentary about drug call to reform the labor of love, Trading bian act precedes the 8mm pom movie, as addicts, a comedy, a portrait, a commentary and Places grants its heroine all her wishes. Ja- the agenda dictates. Surrounded by senile a tapestry. Mostly, however, it's a film about mie Lee Curtis is a hooker with a 14-<:arat sexual urges, she grows matronly as the violence. Not Peckinpah spleen-punching heart and a plan to retire at 28 with a pile of dialogue becomes instructive with such violence or Coppola bleeding-horses-heads T-bonds until she is rewarded for taking in maxims as \" Men want sex but don' t like . violence-by comparison these are cartoons, a down-and-out stock market sultan who it.\" With fascistic fervor, Julie has ways of embarassingly vapid, self indulgent and boring . leads her into a bonanza. Dan Ackroyd making them like it. Her energies surpass tums out to be the best trick she never even those of the authoritarian vice-squad . -Linda Taylor tumed, a regular laff-riot of business acu- that raids her. men. ••••• When Julie is brought before a tribunal The Monty Python version ofa brothel, on moral charges, who should take his A \"\"AN on the other hand , revels in the male fan- place as the presiding judge? Julie's most A \"\"OMAN tasy of everyone having a great time, tits constant bad boy, of course. Need we say AND A K'l.U:R and ass hanging out like one big wet more? The movie doesn' t. Will he tum dream that just can't dry up. Terry Jones' hypocrite and, at least, fine her? All Julie's ••••• direction of David Leland's wonderfully customers sit in judgment, it seems, as the funny script makes Personal Services a camera pulls back to reveal benches full of While Americans were paying $4 or $5 to have strokefor men's lib. With Julie Walters ex- he~ regulars done up in judicial regalia; their jangled state mellowed by Steven Spiel- panding into the sympathetic British ver- they are mockingly exalted to be her judge berg's fantastically successful fantasy ET, San sion of the Mayflower Madam, one Cyn- and jury. Will their enlightenment at her Francisco filmmaker Rick Schmidt was creating thia Payne (dubbed by fustian British hands affect their decisions about hook- EMERALD CITIES, his provocative, compassion- headline writers \"the luncheon voucher ers? Boys will be toys. So British. So un- ate \" howl \" at the gathering tide of nuclear madam\"), this portrait of a pro includes French. \" Iuna-cy,\" the psychic and physical violence, and the induction, training and advancement the deepening affliction of numbing cultural of an ambitious London girl into the corps Economic reasoning also informs the malaise. of \"personal services\" as a spoof of the premises in Bob Swaim's Half Moon Carry-On genre. Street and Neiljordan's Mona Lisa, which Vic Skolnick deal with high-class call girls rather than NEW COMMUNITY CINEMA Julie starts out as a waitress, but soon the institution of the brothel. Not for them she is into real estate or, at least, rent-col- the unromantic American view of Heat, Purchase your 3 cassette trilogy (specify Iecting, with the rental of flats giving way which requires lithe and pretty Karen VHS or BETA) for the special price of to more personal territory. Men come Young to perform throughout the movie $100 (plus $5 shipping/handling. Please searching for kindly acceptance and kinky with a badly battered face, opposite a sag- send money order payable to: indulgence in her rooms. Julie dreams of ging Burt Reynolds. Her visage stands as wealth and romance, but when her one fair warning that a hustler needs a hood as chance presents itself in the form of a date tough as Burt, if she's to roll with the high with Mr. Right, she sleeps through it. rollers in Vegas. This snuffing out of the fantasy in favor of her business success is a blow for capital- Young shares none of the deadpan in- ism , if nothing else. tellectual snobbery of Sigoumey Weaver in HalfMoon Street, where the presumed Julie's progression from a total na'if oldest profession in the world serves one about \"French polishing,\" for which she even older-Arab relations. Heat's moral- advertises, to mistress of all that she sur- izing makes it uninspired compared to veys limns the Perfect Python working Mona Lisa, where the dangers that threat- girl: She never admits to a possible un- en hookers are scoffed at as nothing more pleasant episode or loathsome labor of than the unenlightened panic of Cathy Tyson's chauffeur, Bob Hoskins. He 29

bursts in to \"save\" her from a kinky trick, only to be bawled out by her. Lack of pro- fessional respect, argues directorJordan, is at work. How else read the rococo irony of, the lyrics, \"Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have blamed you....\"? Despite the hint of censure, the prosti- tution in Mona Lisa is not desperate; it is as businesslike and as professional as any Wall Street deal. Cathy Tyson does not need Hoskins, however award-winning his portrayal of a eross between a bulldog and a fireplug, except as part of her busi- ness. She is the body of desire, he is her bodyguard-the only one without access to the body. For Tyson to embrace Hos- kins would be like Leonardo's Mona Lisa breaking into a grin. Sex is a commodity, not to be confused with love. A profile of Tyson in People reported that she chided her drooling companion, as they traversed Times Square, \"They're busy earning Bob Hoskins, Michael Caine and Cathy Tyson in Mona Usa. their liVings, for God's sake.\" body on the market should suffice. What ness, the first frankly Yuppie approach, Prostitution's new filmmakers may Swaim and Howard really share, however, which cheerfully contemplates the finan- right down to Howard's latest havoc in ciaI advantages of marketing sex. Outra- demonstrate an awareness ofthe felicity of Prettykill (\"Angel, hooker, killer, a night geous in its own time, Risky Business ap- metaphor between the brothel and busi- with her is full ofsurprises! \"), is an intense pealed to audiences who have since ness, but critics have been slower to get voyeurism about the skin trade. entered MBA programs, not brothels, and the point. City Paper critic Joel Siegel at- learned that business qua business is mea- tacked the ending of Mona Lisa because, Swaim began his obsession with mar- sured by its success, not by its dramatic \"Life, at its cruelest, would not be so ketplace sex by penetrating the raison desperation. Yuppie celluloid hookers heartless as to deny George's humility and d' etre of prostitution in his policier, La have about as much character as a bank inarticulate decency some compensation Balance. The vulnerable Natalie Baye statement and an equally depressing im- for the love he so selflessly strives for but turns tough, playing a tart in love with her pact, even if they do represent the healthy never quite attains.\" Life might. Myth pimp; this guarantees both the eroticism wouldn't, because in myth whores must of marginal characters and the safety of pragmatism of the new wave of working have hearts, preferably of gold. The same main-squeezes. It had an aura of emotion- girls. What with their elated work ethic, critic viciously attacked the businesslike al health within a well-researched, if glam- they have deflated the fundamental ritual attitudes and deromanticized aesthetic of orously tragic, view of cops and hookers- of watching Hollywood heroines suffer for Working Girls. like scorpions in a bottle. In comparison, our sins. These happy, prosperous hook- the enthusiastic violence visited upon ers make out like bandits both on and off T he rush to judgment by filmmakers Howard's hookers makes Swaim look like the screen. who persist in seeing prostitution as he benefitted from his many years learn- degrading and humiliating infuriates those ing the art of compromise as an American he Reformation of the Fallen Woman Twho view it as no more than a professional in Paris. Swaim's girls work for a living and recurs in the movies from Theda Bara alternative. Even when the Roger Cor- are saved by love; Howard's are punished to The Happy Hooker, from Joan Craw- man-style, low-budget producer Sandy for both. ford in Rain and Bette Davis in OfHuman Howard carves out a specialty in tabloid One of the movieland ironies of Bondi1ge to Liz Taylor in Butterfield 8 and presentations of the hooker's plight, such Howard's genre pieces is Season Hubley's Jane Fonda in Klute. While American sce- as Angel, Avenging Angel, Hollywood search for meaningful motivation in Pret- narios usually borrow their style from the Vice Squad, and Prettykill, the hooker is tykill. The actress, who had been George tabloids and their taboo from the Ten just another girl trying to beat the odds. C. Scott's daughter turned hooker in Paul Commandments (''Thou shalt not covet That is, until she comes up against vio- Schrader's Hardcore, a streetwalker in thy neighbor's ass-without ponying lence, upon which the camera trains its Vice Squad, a kept woman in The Key to up\"), Europeans work from the assump- loving eye more than upon sex. Rebecca, and a promiscuous groupie in tion that Woman Must Fall to deliver to Howard sold the public on Angel and its Escape from New York, claims her atti- man his most coveted accomplishment- sequel with the Manichaean tag line tude is non-judgmental. \"Even though Her Salvation. \"Honor student by day, hooker by I've played ladies of the night so often, I There seems something particularly night\"-an approach that Swaim tried to can't understand women doing anything worthy in the redemption of a woman fall- spit-polish by giving his HalfMoon Street they don't want to do.... I had a very en from the heights of BuflUeI'S surrealis- hooker post-graduate degrees and linguis- tough time being Heather in Prettykill- tic aspirations, or the intellectually precar- tic panache in Arabic. Some men simply all she really wants is a townhouse on the ious peaks of Jean Luc Godard, or the find it marvelous thata woman with brains East Side.\" Teutonic, operatic schlock of Fassbinder. could and would sell her body, presum- That motivation is not very different The ideological hegemony of most hooker ably on the theory that one part of the from Rebecca de Momay's in Risky Busi- movies \"puts the blame on Marne,\" all 30

right, yet even the new recognition of a © 1987 Movies Unlimited, woman's freedom to choose her life-mo- tivated by money or appetite, or by the o Enclosed is $7.95 ($5.95 + $2 shipping) cash, check 6736 Castor Avenue • Philadelphia, PA 19149 curiosity that took Byrd to the Pole-will 215/722·8298 not let her off the hook. Not for moral rea- or money order. Send your new Video catalog, plus sons, but for sexual ones. Her control periodic updates. NOTE: Foreign rmlers (except APO, leaves Man in the dust, and he just won' t Canada, Mexico) add $20 shipping/handling. be cut out ofthe equation: Hooker + Man o Enclosed Is additional $3.50 ($11.45 lolal, $31.45 = Way Out. foreign). Include your Adult Video Catalog. I am over Although we assume a greater sophisti- 18 years Old. cation, i.e., decadence, the Europeans can really run afoul of their Marxist agen- Name _____________________________________________________ da. Robert van Ackeran's Woman in Flames has a dominatrix defeated by her Address ____________________________________________________ boyfriend, also a prostitute, in an ending disastrously more literal than \"hearts City ___________________________ State _____ Zip __________ afire,\" when he discovers she doesn't just do her job-she is her job. The literary lu- Phone ( nacy of this made-in-Berlin hooker movie put Fassbinder's various meditations on prostitution in the relatively realistic camp. Fassbinder consistently insisted on the large view that prostitution cut across class and educational lines, as well as sex- ual deviance. It's hard to find someone in a Fassbinder film who is not prostituted at some level of interpretation, so thorough was his perception of the social application of the tricks of the trade. His transvestite in A Year of 13 Moons anticipated Ber- trand Blier's Menage by ten years with its assumption: To become a woman is to be forced into prostitution. Fassbinder also anticipated the \"dry hustle\" which director Joseph Losey per- mitted Isabelle Huppert in her ambitious rise in La Truite, but Fassbinder applied its principle to the entire country of West Germany by flashing the portraits of its post-war leaders at the conclusion of The Marri£Ige of Maria Braun. As Maria, Hanna Schygulla finds her way to the top of the new capitalist ladder by \"working\" her way up without ever yielding her inde- pendence. She pays no deference to hus- band Hermann, who is safely tucked away in a prison for the crimes that she commit- ted; he is, after all, the symbol of the past, the war, the Holocaust and all that. But just as Hermann retums home, Schygulla lights up near the open gas burner, and poof! The collapse of the West? No, part of the atmosphere. Fassbinder cannot be accused of \"pun- ishing\" his hookers, precisely because he uses the larger political context to validate his metaphor. This may have contributed to his original appeal; his attempt to trans- form Schygulla into a modem Dietrich was a kind of tribute to the \" let sleeping dolls lie\" theory of harlotry. According to this theory, compromise and prostitution are embedded in the mechanics of prog- ress, not to mention filmmaking, as Go- 31

dard has amply illustrated. The salient dif- ference between the European hooker and her American cousin is that prostitutes in Europe are perceived as part of a larger destiny. In the (brave) New World (that hath such creatures in it), they are either an aberration deserving eradication (Hard- core, Tightrope , Klute , Half Moon Street) or an inspiration to commerce (Risky Busi- ness, Trading Places, Best Little Whore- house in Texas) . But there's no letting them lie. I n Jerry Schatzberg's Street Smart, a case Terry.k>nes' Personal Services. Since it became love that has provided of malicious miscasting has Christopher the excuse for the death of many a movie Reeve playing a journalist looking for an How do we reckon the social cost of one hooker, sex has been detached from love angle on Times Square and settling for a dead hooker in exchange for a valuable and given the context of a woman's eco- different kind of lying. Street savvy Kathy lesson taught a yuppie media hound? nomic framework. Without love to re- Baker plays \"Punchy\" (also an apparent deem her, contemporary hookers no long- imperative). She's a simple street walker Until Lizzie Borden got hold of them, er need display their tragic hearts along with more heart than brains. True to her working class working girls were pre- with their other wares on-screen. Still, pimp, Punchy refuses Reeve inside info sented as too soiled to be redeemable. cinema street hookers seem so desperate about prostitution, but services him when The screen's most visible battered wom- to make a buck, or so stupid at it, that they he's ready for a straight job. Meanwhile, en, they are prey to pimps and police, after completely disregard the most overt wam- he's decided to jiveass the public with a their mostly vicious and sick clientele has ing signs. While the filmmaker takes a lib- literary magazine masterpiece about a eral bow for progress, the film gets away pimp, who resembles Punchy's main adone with them la Heat. In films about with meting out her punishment. man. Reeve's piece of fiction introduces very real dangers that drive Punchy to visit street hooking, women in scanty clothing Detached from a social and economic the D.A. , in a most unlikely and ill-timed are sexual bait-the psychopaths are ordi- context, the presence of so many victim- panic, that costs her life. Punchy is depict- nary men driven crazy by the sexual lure. ized prostitutes onscreen is just another ed as honest and knowing, a worthy bearer Clint Eastwood's Tightrope plays with way of frightening and controlling women of Reeve's secret until she is reduced to this, as it depicts a cop investigating hook- under the guise of a new liberality. Per- betrayal by the pimp's physical abuse. She er murders who is drawn into his own haps Hollywood's blase depiction of work- must die. Swiftly swept aside, the danger sado-masochism. Chasing the murderer, ing girls reflects less censorious attitudes to- of the streets is focused on Reeve's girl- Clint becomes the man who loathes wom- ward prostitution as a profession; it may friend , who is stabbed as a warning even en. Tightrope is the Eighties' meat grinder just be mythologising the whoredom of after she has left him over his associations version of the buyi ng-into-the-game the- the American way of life, now that every- with \"those dreadful people.\" thing has its price. sis of Billy Wilder's sprightly Irma La Baker as Punchy has a very practical at- Douce. As Irma, Shirley MacLaine cutely And what do these hooker movies think titude and a professional pride that belies about men? That they're all johns. Work- the film 's ultimate position on prostitu- corrupted Jack Lemmon on the naughty ing Girls advises, \"Once you know what a tion. In a telling scene with the D.A., who sidewalks of gay Paris. In the hands of Bil- man's sexual thing is, you'll never fear him wants information from her, Punchy tells ly Wilder, a transplanted decadent, the again.\" It will be a long time before camal him she knows what he really wants, film feels like a spoof of what Americans knowledge will be elevated onscreen or knows him better than he knows himself wanted to capture in their fantasies ofpret- anywhere else to a branch of epistemol- Infuriated , up-tight, angry about her at- a-portir Henry Miller. ogy. Meanwhile, some hooker movies are tempt at seduction, he orders her out. His becoming ideological labs, where com- indignation mirrors the audience's. His ir- The French parodied this \"genre\" merce becomes the catalyst for normaliza- rational abuse, however, parallels the even further 25 years later in Paul Vecchia- tion. Who knows? Maybe hooker movie john's who earlier beat up a hooker and Ii's Rosa la rosa,fiile publique, an attempt utopia will be more than a hassle-free triggered the plot. Street Smart points the at a musical in the \"working\" district of brothel; perhaps these no-collar workers finger at men who use hookers as vessels Les Hailes. With more customers than will rise in a union more perfect than copu- for their own ambition and anger, but she can handle without many a girlish gig- lation. takes the safe way out. gle, Rosa just charms, and charms, and charms, until her pimp throws her a 20th With thanks 10 Lhzie Borden, whose research and cowlscl were iruJis- To Schatzberg'S credit, the film makes birthday party, only to be interrupted by pensahle. no patronizing redemptive gestures, even SOJTIeone she has fallen in love with. For if it slides onto thin ice when Punchy is this she must die , but not without a final dispatched without futher ado, after be- sad song. traying to the D.A. the truth about the new joumalism. Reeve's retum to uncom- promising journalistic principles occurs only after he has strayed from them long enough to gain fame and street smarts. 32 ~

• ectl•on . 33

e e ovtet prtfl_ KlimovS Farewell. Communist Party S. U. Central Commit- release that were banned or shelved be- tee's secretary for ideology. So whatever tween 1966 and 1980. The controversial by Harlan Kennedy else this election was, it was not a sponta- KyraMuratova's 1971 The Long Goodbye, neous gesture from the rank and file. It Gleb Panfilov's 1979 Theme (which, when For Mykola and Roisa Rude,,]w was clearly, however, a gesture, since Kli- shown for the first time in the West, at the mov is the first change at the top of the Berlin Film Festival, won top prize), and I f there were an international Word of filmmakers union in 20 years. His prede- Tengiz Abuladze's 1984 Repentence, an the Year competition, the 1987 prize cessor was CPSU Central Comminee expose of Stalinist personality cults, are at would have to go to glasnost. Mil- member Lev Kulidzhanov, who many last seeing the light of day. lions of people who a year ago could feared would be glued to his post for life. not tell a glasnost from a glockenspiel now T here are two major problems with meet the word daily. It crops up on front Not content with introducing new clout glasnost. First, it will be a long time pages and news bulletins whenever East into the union, Gorbachev then over- before non-Soviet observers can know meets West. Glasnost: \"openness.\" hauled the leadership of Goskino. This how much the reforms now being imple- tired old beast is the Central State Com- mented represent through-and-through Cinema in the Soviet Union barely mittee for Soviet CinematographY---Dr liberation rather than a promise that can- comprehends the arrival of glasnost. Ap- Film Ministry, in essence-with respon- not be delivered or, finally, window-dress- proaching the 70th birthday of Lenin's sibility for script approval, finance, pro- ing for Western eyes. Russian filmmakers introduction of state censorship-No- duction planning, and censorship. In Jan- remember the Khrushchev thaw followed vember 9, 1917, when a machinery of uary, Goskino's chairman Filip Yermash swiftly by the Brezhnev winter, and the centralized control was introduced-film- fell to Alexsandr Kamshalov. Kamshalov's Prague spring followed swiftly by \"tanks makers have been conditioned to accept mission: to signal and effect a change in for the memory.\" The residual fear in an- state decisions, with the only appeal possi- attitudes, to supervise the relaxation of70 nouncing a cultural and political spring is ble directly to the presidium itself years of censorship laws, and to rescreen that, like the fate of Mao Tse-tung's and release some of the banned films. spring of \"a thousand flowers,\" Gorba- The first indications that the situation chev or the apparatchiks who survive him might be changing came in May 1986 with The union and Goskino are now plan- will lop their heads off once they stand up the Fifth Congress of Soviet Union Cine- ning to work together as equal voting part- and identify themselves. ma Workers. This event was opened by ners on major movie issues, from the vet- no less a luminary than Mr. Gorbachev, ting of new movie projects to the selection One of the obstacles to greater freedom and its main event was the election of the for entry of films at foreign festivals. Kli- in the USSR is that repression is an age-old new first secretary for the Cinema Work- mov and 20 colleagues-film directors, Russian tradition. Censorship does not ers Union, filmmaker Elem Klimov (of screenwriters, critics, Goskino representa- date from the storming of the Winter Pal- Agony, Come and See, and Farewell). Kli- tives-set up a Conflict Commission to ace but goes back over 400 years of auto- mov was voted in by a hand count after be- draw up a list of films to recommend for ing proposed by Aleksandr Yakovlev, the 34 ~

cratic rule, taking in the heyday of Russian Director Elem Klimov. subjects, ones that stand apart from politi- literature on the way. The phenomenon calor propagandist connotations and at the of the \"long novel\"-The Brothers Kara- the Soviet Union. same time avoid the deadening imprima- mazov, War and Peace, Anna Karen- \"It was the second film I made; it was tur of literary adaptation. They do not say ina-was itself a product of censorship. yes to the Soviet cultural-historical hege- For in 19th century czarist Russia, books never released. Or, rather, it was released mony, nor do they say no. They merely, were allowed to be published unmolested but just on three screens, in clubs, for in a phrase beloved ofTarkovsky, \"drink if-and only if-they exceeded a certain three days. It was politically unacceptable. from their own glasses.\" In a country that length. It was a story of peasants speaking quite forbids outright dissent, making deter- \"open\" language-dirty, colloquial-and minedly personal films is as close as most In modem Soviet cinema, not even that they talked about concentration camps, artists can get to defying the state, unless escape clause has existed. Three factors prisons, Stalin times, and things like that. they want to be locked away. have made it probably the most controlled It wasn't a dissident picture; it was just re- and ideologically \"directed\" cinema in the ality. But I was unlucky with the timing: I Even these filmmakers sometimes flirt world. Every movie script must be ap- was late by two years. When it was due to with subjects that are overtly subversive. proved by one of the State Cinema Com- come out, Khruschchev had just been re- In his native Georgia, Ioseliani made mittees set up in each of the 15 republics. placed by Comrade Brezhnev, and the Songthrush and Pastorale, films full of an \"It is they who make the final decision on 'thaw' had started to get a little frozen.\" off-kilter poetry and wry comedy. (Iose- it,\" Georgian director Georgi Shengelaya liani looks like Jacques Tati and makes explained to me recently. \"In judging the Konchalovsky's response, during the films to match.) He then went to Paris in project's suitability, they take into account rest of his film career inside Russia, was to 1983 to make Les Favoris De La L£lne, a its artistic quality, its commercial poten- stick mainly to patriotic themes (Siber- surreal black comedy about art forgery, tial, and its ideological content.\" ia£le), or to Party-approved masterworks prostitution, crime, and terrorism. He has from great literature (Uncle Vanya, A Nest an intriguing answer to the question \"Why Also, the state has complete control of Gentlefolk). In the latter tendency, he go to Paris to make a film like this?\" over a movie's distribution, deciding how comes uncomfortably close to the Bondar- wide or narrow its release will be. There chuk Syndrome: a tendency to shore up \"I wanted to look at the pure play of are three categories, ranging from nation- Soviet self-esteem by annexing pre-Soviet these market energies in a country where wide release in big theaters to minority literary classics (in Sergei Bondarchuk's they freely happen. You cannot make a club distribution, sometimes confined to case War and Peace, Boris Godunov) and film about fraud or corruption or prostitu- Moscow alone, for films like Tarkovsky's processing them into movies whose unin- tion in a country where they are forbidden or Paradjanov's. Finally, the state has the flected fidelity guarantees instant Party or where, in theory at least, they do not option of banning a movie completely, approval. It also guarantees instant inertia; exist. So the idea to make a spectacle of and of refusing to give a green light to any Masterpiece Theatre Soviet-style. human nature in its anarchic side is mud- other films from its maker. died by the fact that you must argue first Other filmmakers-notably Andrei that these things hilppen. In the West, There are apologists for this system Tarkovsky, Sergei Paradjanov, and even when they are illegal, people are who see no significant difference between Otar Ioseliani-have a different riposte to quite open that they exist.\" the ideological pressures of filmmaking in the dangers of censorship and ideological the USSR and the commercial pressures of pressure. They search for personal, auto- Invidious moral comparisons made by Westem cinema. ''There's no such thing biographical, or folk-cultural settings and the East about life in the West are one as freedom in any film industry,\" claims of the classic tools of Soviet censorship: Soviet emigre director Andrei Koncha- Life is corrupt and/or corrupting in the lovsky. \"Filmmaking requires an enor- West-including, of course, the West's mous amount of money, and it doesn't movies. In his book Sculpting in Time, matter if that money is state money or cor- Tarkovsky recalls his student days at Mos- porate money. People who pay for the cow's Soviet Institute of Cinematography: music order the tune. It's the censorship \"We didn't see enough films (and now, I of power or money.\" understand, institute students see even fewer), because teachers and those in au- If there is a difference in kind between thority were afraid of the baneful in- the random market prejudices and prefer- fluences of Westem films.... Of course, ences of studios or producers in the West this is absurd: How can anyone bypass and the monolithic ideological command- contemporary world cinema and still be- ments operating in the USSR, it also in- come a professional? The students are re- volves when, at what point, the filmmaker duced, as it were, to inventing the bicy- feel~ the clamp-before or after a film's cle.\" realization. The only \"random\" element is which political regime in the USSR hap- Paradoxically, looking at films by Tar- pens to be in power when a filmmaker kovsky or Paradjanov, you think they did wants to make or release his film. For even invent the bicycle. They did create a new if lucky enough to get a movie with a po- kind of cinema, with a style of imagery tentially troublesome subject made, a and narrative-surreal, oneiric, poetic- filmmaker can still find that Soviet history unlike anything being created in the has stolen a march on him by the time he's West. seeking to distribute the film-as Kon- chalovsky himself found out with Asa's The censorship-vs.-freedom debate Happiness, his only film to be banned in never lacks for those who argue that it does the artists good to have to invent the bicy- 35

c1e. These crusaders for the fecund in- those ofTarkovsky and Paradjanov-spar deed he isn't-why bother to give him a fluence of oppression on a culture point to away outside this arena altogether. large release? But what the program dis- the imaginative use of allegory in censor- covered is that his films are not even get- ship-ridden countries. If you cannot say Not that even aloofness keeps them ting through to the film clubs, where Par- something directly, disguise it: say it in safe. For the ultimate menace of censor- adjanov would be assured of a following. parables. ship is that it does not always confine itself The president of one regional film club to political-ideological matters. It can seek The trouble with allegories is that over out other margins and comers where new said that not only had Legend of Suram time their once clear subtext, and even thought or imaginings are being born. For Fortress not been shown in his town but some of their urgency, fades. In Soviet the new can itself be a danger: an energy cinema, allegory scar~e1y exists as a force for change in a society where change is the he had not seen a single Paradjanov film. worth reckoning with. Occasional contro- enemy. versial movies are made, like Elem Kli- Interviewer: \"What have you heard mov's initially banned film about Raspu- With the recent death of Tarkovsky (see page 44), Sergei Paradjanov is about this director?\" tin, Agony, which could be construed as a almost certainly the filmmaker with the most original vision now working in the Club president: \"I've heard his films are portrait of present oppression disguised as Soviet Union. Yet his career has been past oppression. But most such films could strewn with obstacles and interruptions. compulsory viewing.\" equally validly be construed as a portrait In the Sixties, he made two of the most The club, he explained, puts on films solely of past oppression, in which case, far from subverting or criticizing the present, imaginative Soviet films ever: Shadows of \"commonly regarded as difficult\" and Our Forgotten Ancestors and The Color of tries to show that these works \"get easier they shore up the status quo by implying Pomegranates. After completing the sec- somehow with the passage of time. \" They how much worse things were. This skep- are \"perhaps a little ahead of their time ond, the life ofa poet told in richly symbol- compared with the stock perceptions that ticism could also be applied to the spate of ic tableaux and an attempt virtually to are foisted on us by the run of films whose movies about the Stalin era, now being write a new hieroglyphic language for the artistic language could be termed elemen- cinema, Paradjanov was unable to work tary.\" It is important to discuss these films, thawed out in the era of glasnost. Do they for another 14 years. For most of that time he said, because otherwise they will be he was in prison on an obscure cluster of made completely unavailable for \"lack of represent self-criticism or self-congratula- charges, of which the only one identified interest. \" tion? for Western reporters was homosexuality (a punishable offence in the USSR). So which comes first, the lack of audi- Alexei f1etrenko in Rasputin. ence interest or lack of the film? One cer- Soviet directors I have quizzed about tain way to freeze the growth of a culture Sometimes, the past clearly is used to in- Paradjanov's punishment-including his is to use the congenial-sounding reason voke the splen.dors ofthe national char- fellow Georgians, Georgi and Eldar Shen- that a work is \"difficult\" as a pretext to gelaya--call it a tragic interlude while spare audiences the trouble of seeing it. acter-both now and then. World War II maintaining it had nothing to do with his Thus the easy and familiar are institution- films. Yet those films have had to struggle alized, the new and strange are ostracized, is a favorite stamping ground in Soviet desperately for exposure inside Russia, and the complainers will remain in a man- despite acclaim outside, and a recent Mos- ageable minority. cinema. In Bondarchuk's They Foughtfor cow radio program investigated the vicissi- Their Country, or in Larissa Shepitko's tudes surrounding the release--or virtual T he chill of censorship in the Soviet The Ascent, or Klimov's Come and See, Union is ingeniously multifold. (1) non-release--of his latest film, The Leg- Your film may not get funded if it is not there is no hint whatsoever that the strug- end ofSuram Fortress. ideologically acceptable. (2) If it is funded gles of Russians against Nazis has reflec- and made, it may not get released. (3) Ifit tive irony in the restrictions imposed with- The program announced that it had re- is released, it may be to so small an audi- in the Soviet Union. For Adolf Hitler can ceived letters complaining of the unavaila- ence that the fires ofdiscussion and enthu- you read Stalin or Brezhnev or Andropov? bility of Paradjanov's film. \"Has this siasm can never spread. The real function of these films is to keep film,\" one letter asked, \"like Paradjanov's reminding people, inside and outside the other works, really disappeared without a One kind of sentiment keeps recurring USSR, that Russia was then, and essential- trace?\" The program's presenter, having in conversation with Soviet directors. It is ly is now, a country of Good Guys fighting done some detective work, discovered spoken matter-of-factly and ungrudg- on the Right Side. (Western filmmakers that only 61 prints exist for the whole ingly, as if it were a natural law of human may question that assumption, but rather USSR (compared to several thousand for life. \"Every director has his own censor in rarely do they take the Nazis' side.) most movies). He contacted Valeriy Vik- his own head,\" says Otar loseliani. \"You torovitch Markov, head of the chief direc- know how far you can go and what you can When state propaganda and dissident torate for the provision ofcinema facilities, say,\" reflects Andrei Konchalovsky. And, parable prizefight each other in Soviet and asked why. Markov replied curtly, \"Naturally you do not include things that cinema, it's hard to find any clear instances \"The film has not been popular with audi- are ideologically unacceptable,\" per when parable wins out. And the most Georgi Shengelaya. original and imaginative movies of all- ences. If the filmgoer doesn't see Legend of Suram Fortress, he won't be missing The axiomatic quality of these remarks is their most chilling aspect. It is as if most anything. \" Soviet filmmakers believe this is the way The criterion of audience appeal is a of the world, not just of the USSR. When persuasive one. If a director like Parad- glasnost comes to Soviet cinema, it will be jahov is not likely to have filmgoers storm- ing the turnstiles by the millions-and in- a matter not just of thawing the icy grip of political censorship and the machinery of state control, but also of removing the cen- sor in the soul. ~ 36~

Reds Crawling All Over Hollywood-At Last Cinema Summit by Bob Strauss Cynicism and hope squared off with Vladimir Posner, Drew Barrymore and highschool student, all the intensity of a Rocky vs. Drago grudge match-and an juxtapositions that cropped up. My favor- Fay Kanin, Frank Schaffner, Tony Bill, equivalent degree of hype-when eight top Soviet filmmakers came to Hollywood ite was Anthony Edwards, who played Mel Shavelson, Charles Champlin, jer- to meet with their American counterparts. Dubbed the Entertainment Summit, the Tom Cruise's ill-fated navigator in Top ome Lawrence, and Robert E. Lee. Of six-day L.A. visit, followed by a three-day sojourn in New York, was designed to Gun, standing up to declare his kudos to the enemy within, only Sakharov teleplay help creative types on both sides of what Russo-Annenian director Sergei Mikae- the summit with \"On the part of the writer David Rintels and Rocky producer Iyan characterized as the Data Curtain to more realistically depict each other's peo- young actors here in this country.. ..\" Robert Chartoff made any of the discus- ples in films and television shows. Sec- ondary goals included spreading informa- There was also the meeting with the sions, and by all accounts they made them tion about how Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost is affecting Soviet media, and Caucus of Television Producers, Writers, rather quietly. Stallone himself sent re- drumming up some international produc- tion deals between Moscow and a major and Directors. Heavyweight TV packag- grets; he was too busy hunting locations Western studio or two. Elem Klimov, the censured director of Come and See, Fare- ers like Chuck Fries and Leonard Stem for Rambo III to attend. Kris Kristofferson, weLL, and Rasputin, kicked off the pro- had put together a reel ofwell-intentioned a good guy who resisted the Soviet occu- ceedings by declaring, \"The Russian clips from HiLL Street Blues, Family Ties, pation forces in Amerika, showed up to movie paratroopers have landed in Califor- nia. Except we're not armed; we come and other shows that portrayed Soviet watch one of the panels but split early to with open hearts and open arms, out- stretched with a feeling of friendship.\" characters in a positive light. Naturally, playa concert in Orange County. L ast May, a Klimov-Ied band of pro- the onscreen Russians bore no more re- The Americans appeared as committed gressives wrested control of the USSR's Cinematographer's Union from semblance to real people than our tele- to understanding, personal expression, the IS-year grip of Sergei Bondarchuk's Americans do, something Posner later and stereotype reduction as the Soviets. conservative, apparatchik-directed fac- pointed out in scathingly accurate and en- Summit organizer Mark Gerzon, a Har- tion. Cinema is in the vanguard of the Gorbachev reforms, and creative freedom lightening detail (the suffix \"ski\" is used vard-educated, Malibu-based producer is the new rule for Soviet films. judging by the candid comments and joyous sense of much more in Polish than in Russian, I who spent most of the last year working liberation expressed by all the visiting filmmakers-not to mention international learned). But the award for most embar- gratis to see that the whole thing came off. TV talking head Vladimir Posner, who un- accountably accompanied the delegation rassing display goes to the on-the-make The lightning rod for most of the cynid ~herever it went-a major loosening up has indeed occurred. Many local Russian screenwriters who tried to push their film altruist speculation surrounding the sum- emigres, by nature skeptical of any talk about freedom emanating from the vicini- proposals during a questions-from-the-au- mit event, Gerzon's profile is inevita- ty of the Kremlin, were genuinely amazed by what their countrymen were 'saying. dience session at the Directors' Guild. bly going to rise in some industry circles as Not so some members of the American a result of this; to assume that his stated press corps covering the summit. An in- dignant cry or two of \"Media Eventl\" T he turnout on the Hollywood side of concerns about \"seeing beyond political echoed above the din of good feeling, and the summit, while impressive rhetoric and media stereotypes\" and namewise, wasn't exactly cut from the building a safer future for his three young it was hard not to laugh at some of the same edge the Soviet team claimed to rep- sons were smoke screens for more selfish more absurd symbolic-substantive-sham resent. Participants were drawn mainly motives, though, would be doing the man from the respectable liberal establish- a disservice. The guy may be a little starry- ment: Sydney Pollack, Norman jewison, eyed, but he's true-blue to the core. His 37

wife's even a schoolteacher who resem- tastes, and who does not make art or typed image of anything, you're not get- bles Christa McAuliffe, for God's sake. money.\" ting to the bottom, the truth of what's go- ing on,\" he said. \"No one's saying you The Soviets comported themselves Victor Oyomin was repeatedly intro- have to make pro-Soviet movies, but that with good humor and charisma to bum. Ir- duced as one of the Soviet Union's biggest if you have an opinion about something, it repressible jokesters, they repeatedly film critics. He's six foot plus and 350- should be a well-founded opinion based made references to stupid, censorious bu- pounds. Although he made no effort to on information and knowledge. Not on reaucrats (of both the communist and big hide his delight over the Film Commit- stef(~otypes. \" budget capitalist stripe, natch), bad tee's ouster of the old conservative leader- filmmakers, and presidents who can't act. ship (Bondarchuk once tried to sue the Oyomin made the most convincing ar- Working for American studios was often critic over a review; Oyomin dared him to, gument for eradicating negative stereo- compared to working for the govemment- threatening to pen a bestseller about it if types following a clip from Solo Voyage, controlled Mosfilm: Mikaelyan spoke of he did), Oyomin had a somewhat more a.k.a. the Russian Rambo. Mter a bunch the 68 changes party-appointed ministers clear-eyed, less gung-ho ul1derstanding of of golfing George Will and Alexander requested on one of his films, which Jewi- the overall political situation than his Haig look-alikes plot a nuclear confronta- son said only slightly topped the 63 perpe- friend Okeyev exhibited. tion to further enrich their defense corpo- trated on his last production. ration coffers, Oyomin expressed shame \"So far, it's not the radicals that have over the director's blatant capitalist carica- At a Writer's Guild confab, Azerbaijani won, but only the reformers,\" Dyomin ex- tures (Needlessly, I thought. The film scriptman Rustam Ibragimbekov drew plained wistfully. ''The new film minister was an enjoyable hoot, and the character- wild applause from his SoCal colleagues has no differences with the members of izations to me anyway, got it about right.) when he suggested that all writers face a the union, the editors of film journals Oyomin suggested that, as certain racist three-part struggle against the director, views have become anathema to popular the bureaucrats, and finally themselves ff!ii' filmmaking, so too could certain xenopho- (\"Did you not confuse the order? I would've done it all the other way bic ones. around,\" Klimov riposted). And actress Ludmilla Chursina, the Soviet delega- T he Hollywood types were pulling for tion's sole female, delivered a number of the Soviet filmmakers' ultimate game charming, though mostly beside the plan--creative artists taking full manage- point, paeans to the glories of both sister- rial control of every aspect of the national and actorhood. , industry, from script approval to distribu- tion-since it clearly ain't in the cards over N Ot that the Soviets were always on Anthony Edwards. here. Ultimately, the quest for friendlier their best behavior (and what a worth- portrayals and international communica- less exercise in PR propaganda it would don' t dare dictate what we should write, tion superseded discussion of personal ar- have been if they were). Most of them- and the bureaucrats no longer interfere. tistic freedom. Nobody even remotely re- especially Klimov-displayed an annoy- But there's another danger pow. The new sembling David Lynch or Julien Temple ing knack for sidestepping pointed (or directors may tum into Bondarchuk types. came to the conference; in fact, those two hostile) questions with poetically phrased, The leadership could tum conservative, were talking about the real difficulties of rhetorical evasions. And Posner, a snazzy against the creative side. This is glas- distinctive filmmaking at a nearby Inde- dresser who early on positioned himself as nost.\" pendent Features Project seminar while the group's central and, to be fair, only the Soviets were shuttling from a English-speaking mouthpiece, quickly While the consensus is that the rabid schmooze session with the Warner Bros. lost his commentator's media cool when- red-baiting of many recent American pro- brass to the King Kong ride at the Univer- ever subjects such as Amerikil or the Sak- ductions and the cartoon anti-American- sal Studios tour. harov TV movie were broached. ism of some USSR product is regressive, censorship loomed uncofTIfortably over But cynicism dies hard, especially in And there were those nagging denunci- most participants' better judgment. Fay light of the summit's one concrete ations of \"bad\" filmmakers, obviously Kanin articulated the zeitgeist when she achievement: David Puttnam's closing aimed at Stallone and Milius but implicitly said, \"We don't like to feel that someone ceremony announcement that an Ameri- at their Bondarchuk as well. During a rare is defining right and wrong for us, what we can-Soviet co-production, a yet-unnamed break in the breakneck action-the Sovi- should do or feel. But w~ can begin to Columbia feature, will be produced by et delegates, as if determined to o.d. on have individual responsibility, without the someone \"[I] not only .. . admire a lot, but Hollywood concentrate, were taking government or the film industry control- someone who has an extraordinary reputa- meetings practically nonstop throughout ling it. The big job is for each of us to say, tion in the Soviet Union as a filmmaker,\" their stay-I asked Tolomush Okeyev, ourselves, I will not make that portrait, Stanley Kramer. the Kirghizian director of Snow Leopard even if it is convenient.\" and the only non-Caucasian working ei- While co-productions with Americans ther side of the summit, exactly what Anthony Edwards, who admitted the may be really why the Soviets came to this \"bad\" meant. jingoistic tone ofTop Gun was at odds with summit, I couldn't help but think that the summit's goals, offered a pragmatic sending Stanley Kramer to Moscow \"0 ur main task is not to allow films by understanding ofwhat needed to be done. fulfilled a prophecy implicit in comedy di- bad directors on the screen,\" he ear- \"The idea is that, dealing with a stereo- rector Eldar Shengelaya's opening day re- nestly explained. \"A bad director is one marks: \"In (Soviet) Georgia, we have a who serves certain policies, is an oppor- saying: 'He is not crazy who sits in the tunist, is not a professional, has backward tree, but the one who goes and visits him there.' \" ~ 38 ~

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te mov o. Stefania Stanjuta in Farewell. Among them is Klimov's own Farewell tion of a new dam. Klimov has created a at the 1987 Berlin festival (out of competi- darkly lyrical portrait of the process by by Brenda Bollag tion since Klimov, who had won the which a place where people live is sched- Grand Prize at the Moscow festival in July uled to be deleted from the face of the Among the most striking reflections of 1986 for Come and See (1985), was a earth. of the new cultural policy taking member of the Berlin jury). Based on a no- shape under glasnost is Soviet vella by Valentin Rasputin, Farewell was T he winner of this year's Golden Bear filmmaking. At its historic fifth congress first conceived as a film by Larissa She- was another formerly shelved film, held in Moscow 'On May 18, 1986, the pitko. Married to Klimov, Shepitko was a GelbPanfilov's The Theme, made in 1979. Union of Soviet Filmmakers submitted first-rate filmmaker in her own right. She Built around the familiar character of the virtually every aspect of the monolithic So- won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 1977 for artist in crisis, The Theme leads to the viet film industry to severe criticism. Nu- her gripping final work, Ascension. Mter snow-covered provincial town of Suzdal, merous resolutions were made, aimed not her death in an automobile accident in where the successful playwright Kim Ye- only at a major reorganization of the infra- 1979, Klimovcontinued work on Farewell senin retreats to write. There, virtually ev- structure for production and distribution, and finally completed it in 1983. eryone has something to do with litera- but at changes that would affect author's ture. Yesenin's interlocutors range from rights, film journals, the VGIK (the famous Farewell is structured around the de- the well-known Moscow author accompa- national film academy where Eisenstein, struction of a fictional Siberian island nying him to the dissident writer who Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and others called Matyora, rendered in extraordinary earns his living as a gravedigger; they are taught), and relations with literature and spaces and rhythms. The film advances like a catalogue of destinies that give him television. through a series ofconfrontations between reason to doubt and reproach himself. traditional ways and modernization; be- One of the first concrete actions under- tween two characters; between camera Among the writers is also Sacha (Inna taken by the union under new president movements coming from different direc- Churikova), the beautiful multilingual Elem Klimov was the creation of a \"Con- tions at different speeds; or again, be- museum guide whom he adores with all flicts Commission\" charged with \"review- tween movement and immobility. the fervor of his own despair. Sacha and ing all those films which for some reason or the little-known local poet about whom other were not shown on the screens.\" The camera rapidly glides along the she is writing a book provide Yesenin with Suddenly, films that had been locked into surface of the water toward Matyora, then further grounds for painful introspection. closets for years were released for distribu- stands motionless in its survey of the des- Even the traffic cop in Suzdal, who gal- tion. Some have already played in West peration on the faces of peasants awaiting lantly rivals Yesenin for Sacha's attention, European festivals . the island's submersion by the construc- 40

The Films of Dennis O'Rourke The Shark Callers of Kontu illustrates the effects of culture contact on the traditions associated with shark calling among YumiYet the villagers of Kontu . For these people the sharks have always had spiritual force associated with them . Men can control these This exuberant celebration of Papua New Guinea at the time spiritual forces to their own advantage, or protect themselves of the nation's independence festivities has been acclaimed from harm if they come in contact with the sharks through cor- around the world. It does not belong to the tradition in which rect ritual. Now the base of the culture which produced shark an all -knowing voice lulls the audience with loaded instructions calling has shifted . The influence of Western culture and for interpreting the world. Skillful and humorous editing of vivid especially the growing presence of Christianity has brought images mix with the sounds of voices, music and radio broad- many changes to the islands . Some of the more complex rituals casts to bring out a sense of wonder at a society composed of and beliefs associ'ated with shark calling have been lost over the surprising juxtapositions. years . When this film was made, there remained a vital tradition of both practice and bel ief that was able to endure the changes In this extraordinarily beautiful film, traditional tribal that this contact brought. When the men who now practice customs co -exist with the paraphernalia of British and Aus- shark calling die, this unique and dangerous practice will proba- tralian colonialism as well as the emerging institutions of inde- bly die with them . pendence. Each of these different elements of Yumi Yet transforms the others and gives them new meaning. Produced and Directed by Dennis O'Rourke Associate Producer Chris Owen Produced, Directed and Photographed by Dennis O' Rourke Photography by Dennis O'Rourke and Chris Owen 54 minutes 1976 Edited by Stewart Young Anthropologist Elizabeth Brower HALF LIFE: A Parable for the Nuclear Age 54 minutes 1986 Winner First Peace Prize 1986 Berlin Film Festival Yap ... How Did You Know We'd Like TV? Director's Award for Extraordinary Achievement U.S. Film Festival 1986 In 1979, during the negotiations leading up to the \"Compact of Free Association\" with the United States, the people of the This compelling and beautifully crafted film reveals the small Pacific island of Yap in Micronesia learned that they were effects of United States nuclear testing on the inhabitants of being given a television station and a steady supply of American the Marshall Islands, tiny atolls in the mid-Pacific. The film com- programs . These came complete with commercials for ham- bines declassified US Defense Department archival footage of burgers, deoderants, cars and carpet shampoo. All this was pro- the Bravo Nuclear Test with contemporary interviews of the vided free by the mysterious \" Pacific Taping Company of Los people of Rongelap. At least five hundred times more powerful Angeles .\" The 6000 residents of Yap were also supplied with a than earlier tests, Bravo was detonated at Bikini on March 1, small television studio and lightweight video equipment with 1954. Inexplicably, the islanders living on Rongelap and Utirik which they produce local news reports. Atolls were not evacuated as they had been in previous tests, even though Navy ships were available nearby. Fallout covered Many Yapese are opposed to television . They see it as a threat the ground two inches deep and children played excitedly in to their fragile culture and an outsider'S attempt to foist this first \"snow\" they had even seen . changes on them . Some believe that the \"Pacific Taping Com- pany\" is a front for a CIA conspiracy designed to create depen- Officials claimed that it was all a mistake, resulting from last- de~cy : a. nd promote American cultural values in a seemingly minute shifts in wind patterns. The evidence gathered in Half insignificant, but strategically important island . The film is a life presents a restrained but chilling picture of a cynical radia- compelling melange of unsettling images of natives living in tin tion experiment on a human population whose welfare had shacks drinking beer and staring at shiny new TV screens while been assigned to the United States at the close of World War II . advertisements for hair-remover, candy bars and air-condition- With terrifying calm, the film examines the facts leading up to ing float incongruously into the steamy jungle. the Bravo test, the role of the United States government in Mar- shall Islands nuclear testing and the long -term consequences of Produced and Directed by Dennis O'Rourke Bravo . In a sense, the Marshall Islanders are the first victims of 54 minutes 1980 World War III. The parable of Half life is a true one that haunts our past, present and future. For Other Information Contact: ~,: Written, Produced, Directed and Photographed by Direct Cinema Limited cmema 0 Dennis O'Rourke P.O. Box 69799 , Los Angel es , Cal iforn ia 90069 Edited by Tim Litchfield (21 3) 652 -8000 limited Music by Bob Brozman Film Research by David Thaxton and Kevin Green Associate Producers Martin Cohen, Laurence J. Henderson and David Thaxton 86 minutes 1986 The Shark Callers of Kontu A powerful film about disappearing cultures in Papua New Guinea For centuries, the villagers of Kontu, in Papua New Guinea, have gone to sea in frail outrigger canoes to call, trap and kill sharks by hand . Now, after a hundred years of colonization and intense missionary activity, only a few men still understand the magic rituals of shark calling . In this region, it was, until recently, easy·to find many men, both young and old, who regu- larly lured sharks to be caught by hand in a noose in the same manner as their ancestors. To the men of Tembin, Kontu, Mesi and other villages along New Guinea's central west coast, shark calling was the most tangible link with the traditions of the past during a time of rapid social change.

SPECIAL VIDEO OFFER! writes poetry. alive within its walls. I.v. MAGAZINE ~VOLUMES 1,2 & 3 By presenting Yesenin's world as a The Lit Lantern is likewise an explora- 3 one hour cassettes for $100 complicated web of different psychologi- cal tensions, Panfilov shapes the story of a tion of the ways in which a plot can be (plus $5 shipping/handling) writer's painful encounter with himself made to advance through the manipula- into a lucid reflection of the conflict be- tion of colors, movements, and sounds, \" Elizabeth Sher has taught T V. a few new tween anistic creativity and the demands more than through dialogue. Like Georgi tricks I \" -Steve Seid of a collective. \" Her guerilla approach cuts through the Shengelaya's widely acclaimed Pirosmani medium 's cool facade exposing the beauty, Brilliantly played by Mikhail Ulyanov, blood and terror that lurk beneath.\" the hero does not bear the name Kim Ye- (1971), which treated the life and work of senin by chance. He was bom, we are told the Georgian painter Niko Pirosmanish- -Suzanne Stephanac in the film, on the very day that the great Russian poet Sergei Yesenin committed viIi , The Lit Lantern is set in Tbilissi at the Send money order to: I.V. Studios, 985 Regal Road, suicide, leaving behind this final poem, Berkeley, CA 94708 (Specify VHS, Beta, Video 8) written with his own blood: tum of the century. In presenting the story of the painter Offer expires June 1, 1987 J'd accept everything, as it is, I accept it. Wano's struggle with poveny, Ajvasian uses a number of unusual methods: shots I would march in paths already are matched with reaction shots in ways traced. that consistently defy expectations; scenes are repeated; steep venical spaces I would give my very soulfor our are created and made to confront other im- October, our May. ages in which the peculiarly Caucasian way of being frontal dominates; music and But don't tell me lies and don't take color play highly dramatic roles. away my lyre. Through this jarringly unconventional Two Caucasian films, Sergei Paradja- treatment, Wano's story becomes more nov's The Legend of Suram Fortress than a historical anecdote. It acquires, in and Agasi Ajvasian's The LitLantern, have much the same way that Pirosmani's story did in Shengelaya's film, the breadth of an likewise had distribution problems since interrogation of the anist's role in society. their production in 1983. The films of Georgia, and to a lesser extent those ofAr- Another Armenian film, also made in menia, have long been recognized in the 1983, Bagrat Oganesyan's The Master West for their cinematography, the singu- ofthe Forest, tells the story ofan old forest larity of their methods of presenting a sto- ry, and for their ingenious use of tradition- ranger single-handedly leading an impas- al fables and allegories as a means of sioned crusade against modernization. dealing with controversial contemporary The typically Caucasian characteristics of Issues. narrative inventiveness and visual luxury are absent from Oganesyan's film. But, Paradjanov, an Armenian bom in Tbilissi, Georgia, was, according to Mira like Klimov's Farewell, it captures the in- and Antonin Liehm, \"The first to indicate the degree to which folklore and local ar- tensity of the bond between a rural culture tistic tradition could once again become a and the land, and the danger of its rupture. source of visual wealth in Soviet national It also maps out the polemic of a current cinema.\" Mter receiving enormous inter- problem, urging resistance when neces- sary. national acclaim for Shadows of our For- gotten Ancestors (1964) and Sayat Nova A far more contemporary view of envi- ronmental problems is ironically found in (1969), Paradjanov would for many years be unable to make another film. Insur- the classic Nine Days in a Year (1%1) by mountable objects were systematically placed in the way of his projects, and in Mikhail Romm. One of the rare 1974 he was arrested on charges of icon filmmakers to have succeeded in conserv- smuggling and homosexuality, and sen- ing his talent and integrity during the years tenced to six years in prison. of strict control under Stalin, Romm be- gan making films in the Thinies. His first In The Legend of Suram Fortress, Pa- work, Boule de suif(1934) would be the radjanov finally resumes his breathtaking last great Soviet silent. He later made Le- restructuring of the form of cinemato- nin in October (1937) and Lenin in 1918 graphic narrative. Stanling splashes of col- or, unusual sounds, and forcefulness in (1939), films from which he himselfwould framing characters and actions help tell the cut the footage of Stalin 20 years later. ancient Georgian tale of a fonress that mysteriously defies all attemps at recon- In 1%5, after having reconsidered the struction, and that continues crumbling validity of narrative fiction as a means for endlessly into ruin until the community's treating historical and political themes, he best-looking young man has been buried made Ordinary Fascism, a brilliant assem- blage of documentary images that show not only the atrocities of Nazism but also its powerful attraction, and the force of its daily indoctrination and manipulation. Nine Days in a Year, a son of Jules and 42

Jim of the nuclear era, follows the amorous c.ombine fiction and documentary in a SCARLETT vs. RUUT and professional rapport among two men new way. During W.orld War I, a small , _HOOK vs. fILM ___ and a woman, all three nuclear physicists. group.ofextravagan tly eccentric characters Romm isolates nine days of their lives and retreat into a mansi.on to pursue lives of , Now available in paperback! \\ presents them in the form of little ske tch- decadent evasi.on , while reality-which es focusing on a diversity of themes: the intrudes in the form .of newsreel footage- GONE WITH THE WIND danger of irradiation at the plant, the hu- inex.orably cI.oses in. By playing on the AS BOOK & fiLM mor and high spirits of love and friend- c.onfrontation between tw.o types of visual ship, the profound belief that nuclear universes, S.okurov f.orces us to w.onder Edited by RICHARD HARWELL energy is a boon to humanity, marital what happens when a Aagrantly fabricated The foremost authority on Gone With squabbles, and the development ofleuke- character like Captain Sh.otover l.o.oks at- the Wind here collects the most mia in one of the three protagonists. At- .or refuses to see--documentary images. important papers on the blockbuster tacked at the time of its release because its Are the troubling newsreel images in the novel. the smash hit movie, and the principal character was not deemed p.osi- film the inc.ontestable traces .of \"real\" shy Southern woman, Margaret Mit· tive, Nine Days in a Year (as well as events, .or d.o they show us the distant and chell, who started it all. It is without Romm's .other films) managed to remain def.ormed visi.on .of the inhabitants .of the question the definitive volume on the in distributi.on despite the controversies. Heartbreak H.ouse? 20th Century's most popular enter· Twenty-five years after its creation, Nine tainment. Days in a Year is still strikingly m.odem in T he recent appearance of these films , the .originality.of its narrative structure and and .of th.ose .of Alexei German (My 300 pages. 28 photos. in its thematic c.oncems. Friend Ivan Lapshin), Roman Balayan ISBNO-913729-6~3. Paper. $8.95. (Protect Me , My Talisman) , and Sergei Now at fine bookstores, or from T ragically, it would be in the reality of Sol.oviev (Cutaja, belaja i rjaboj [The Wild the publisher: the Ukranian town of Chemobyl that Dove]) indicate that the decisions made the themes .of irradiation and the evacua- by the Uni.on .of Soviet Filmmakers are to ITTl PARAGON HOUSE ti.on, respectively developed in Nine Days be taken seriously. They enc.ourage hope in a Year and Farewell, w.ould meet. that a framework can be c.onstructed to 2 HAMMARSKJOLD PLAZA Filmed in the m.onths f.ollowing the spec- permit inn.ovative ideas from diverse NEWYOR/\\ NY 10017 tacular accident that made Chem.obyl fa- sources. (212) 223·6433 m.ous, R.oman Sergeenk.o's feature-length documentary, Chernobyl, av.oids the great Thematically, S.oviet filmmakers have \"...a highly impressive work which , as a ethical and existential questions posed by reexamined the peasantry and the land; single-volume account of a period, sets the ficti.on .of a nuclear accident and does the problematic relati.onship between ar- new standards of scholarship in the field not aspire to the excruciating beauty.or the tistic creativity and social constraints; and of French cinema studies... .an ess~ntial haunting rhythm .of images .of the disap- they have raised questi.ons about history text for anyone with an interest in French pearance .of Matyora. that had been hushed up or glossed over. cinema (of any period) as well as one that While it is still too early to evaluate the ef- makes a substantial contribution to the Sergeenk.o .offers us n.o speculative fects that glasnost will have .on film pro- writing of film history.\" reAections about the principle of nuclear ducti.on , the rehabilitation of an entire -Ginette Vincendeau, Framework energy, .opting rather to examine the c.on- generati.on .of \"damned filmmakers\" who Paper: $27.50. Cloth $95.00 crete handling.of the tw.o m.ost immediate began making films in the early Sixties problems: the eVi\\cuati.on of the inhabi- and then suffered under Brezhnev f.or 20 At your bookstore or tants of the c.ontaminated area, and the years is gr.ounds f.or h.ope. cleaning and restoration of the plant. Far Princeton University Press m.ore graphically than Farewell .or The The indecisi.on anq hesitation .of the Master ofthe Forest, Chernobyl sh.ows the cultural p.olitics.of the Khrushchev era per- 1 Will iam Street, Princeton , NJ uu,nu __ day-to-day c.onsequences .of the destruc- mitted the realizati.on of Andrei Tar- ti.on .of the intimacy between man and his kovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1961), Otar envir.onment, and tolls a biuer f.oretaSte of I.oseliani's Stories About Things (1961), the future. Shepitk.o's Heat (1962), Klimov's Wel- come (also kn.own as We Welcome You) T he C.onAjcts C.ommissi.on also was (1964), and Paradjan.ov's Shadows of Our mandated with \"de-blocking\" the ca- Forgotten Ancestors (1964). F.or most .of reers.ofy.oung direct.ors wh.ose filmmaking these filmmakers , 20 years f.oll.owed in had been \"interrupted in an unjustified which their films were refused .or blocked manner,\" acc.ording to Klimov in Pravdil. during the c.ourse .of producti.on, .or were Among these was Aleksandr S.okurov, locked away .or banned from the screen. who was granted permission in June of Someh.ow, the \"sec.ond generati.on\" ofSo- 1986 to finish films he had been working viet filmmakers has survived. on at the Lenfilm Studios in Leningrad since 1980. F.or the first time since the destruction of the avant-garde at the end .of the Twen- Heartbreak House , the first .of these ties, Soviet cinema has a chance to reger- seen in Westem Europe, is freely adapted minate a structure to permit experimenta- from G. B. Shaw's play of the same name ti.on, to encourage the exchange and and constitutes an ambiti.ous auempt t.o explorati.on of what filmmakers kn.ow or can dream. ~ 43

A Thought in Nine Parts by Harlan Kennedy via-the same picture. All these empty streets with newspapers blowing along the ''The aim ofart is to prepare a person for sidewalks. By the way, where do all those death, to plough and harrow his soul, ren- newspapers come from in end-of-the- dering it capable ofturning to good. \" world movies? -Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time Nostalghia. T arkovsky. For him the end of the Andrei Tarkovsky spent 30 years world comes in a monochrome street plowing up movie convention so dealt with pain as much as pleasure, frus- that a new kind of cinema could tration (spiritual or sensual) as much as gra- in The Sacrifice. The crisscross patterns of grow. His imagery was one of reversal: op- tification, illogic as much as logic. In short, posites coexist or swap places. The world they attempted to stretch rather than people in panic are knitted in horrible si- is renewed when seen inside-out or mir- soothe. lence. Cries and grimaces are frozen on ror-reversed. Rain can pour down inside a their faces as they tack to and fro on a road Indeed, in the last decade or two, either surface stamped with the detritus of civil- room (Mirror); a miniature river valley, films or life stretched us so much, and ization, only an eerie distant ululation on sometimes so painfully, that we revolted the soundtrack. This glimpse of apoca- with hills and homes, can wind across the against all this \"art\" and began to go in lypse (shot in the same Stockholm street for-Serious Critical Revaluation of Pop- where Olaf Palme, Swedish prime minis- floor of a house (Nostalghia); a man's ular Narrative Cinema. ter, was assassinated) is seen twice in the movIe. childhood home and surrounding land- so perhaps Tarkovsky died of a dying scape can be enclosed in the embrace of a cause. Can the critic or filmgoer today The camera tracks back before the be made to think or to face artistic chal- surging crowds and then, panning down- ruined church (Nostalghia). lenges? European cinema has become an ward, passes over a vast sheet of mirror intellectual and imaginative wasteland. tracked with blood that spans the street. T arkovsky was quite possibly the last The best that France can contribute to the The sky is reflected, and the street seems of the old European art movie direc- festival potlatch each year is the latest Ta- to disappear into it. It's a surrealist's As- tors. An movies-ghastly phrase-were vernier or Beineix. sumptioIl: a Heavenward spiritual transla- those things we all went to at university. tion done with simple material props. It's a They were usually in black and white and Tavernier: Sensitive, intelligent, a fine sequence typical of Tarkovsky, who had three basic plots: (1) Tormented scarcely ever used trick photography to Swedish pastor tries to get in touch with colorist, a superb storyteller, a great direc- create a \"magical\" image. He took the God; (2) Alienated Italian woman gets lost world's raw materials and showed us how on volcanic island; and (3) Group of tor of actors. But breaking and remaking to see them in new forms and configura- moody characters swallowed up in a ro- the mold of cinema? tions, without any visual \"cheating.\" coco hotel wonder if they haven't been there before. _ Beineix: Sounds like a washing ma- It's hard to imagine any other film- chine. Is a washing machine with the maker today making this shot. Set a practi- As for going to these films, we won- knob turned toward \"bright colors\" and cal exam question, \"How would you de- dered if we hadn't been to them before as explicit scenes offront-loading a specialty? pict the end of the world in a single shot well. Every Godard picture seemed to without trick photography?\" and the most have Anna Karina, the intellectual's Betty Over in Italy there's a pair of brothers gifted director might be stumped. He'd Boop, making a one-woman Marxist- and a sort of large, distinguished gentle- probably end up reaching for the billowing Maoist statement about the vileness ofthe man wearing a tweed hat--oh, that's Fel- newspapers and cordoning offWall Street. West. Every Antonioni film seemed to lini. Well, he's not exactly a newcomer. Yet with Tarkovsky, the scene isn't even have Monica Vitti adrift in a twilight zone Over in Germany, in the aftermath of an effect. Its poetic incongruity is part of of urban anomie. And every Bergman Fasswendzog, the place looks completely the natural flow of his image-making. To movie seemed to have Max Von Sydow or blitzed: no one in sight. Spain, Scandina- disrupt and reorder the familiar world to Gunnar Bjomstrand as sepulchral party make new meanings is what poetry-in- poopers who were definitely not going to deed, all art-should be about. tell you a funny thing that happened on the way to the farm. Bergman, Antonioni, Fellini, Tar- kovsky took the surrealist's weaponry- However, the best of these films stuck the yoking together ofdisparate images- in the brain and made a nuisance of them- and turned it from the anarchic iconoclasm selves. They got into that part of the mind that was surrealism's founding impulse where dreams are made and showed a into a technique that could also make mor- frightening familiarity with the place; and al and humanist statements. The impossi- they suggested that there's a shared reality ble could be absorbed into the possible to between people. These European movies heighten or poeticize it. A cinema of ex- got into the machinery of conventional tended possibilities was created that could form and narrative and fouled it up. They 44

and shouLd have gone on growing. And Andrei Tari<ovsky. social things in his work: (1) His films had no clear plots; (2) would have but for the reaction against any height to which you can raise a hither- modem ism-against virtually all form s of They were not in color. Come to that, structural or stylistic intricacy-that has to unregarded director, I can raise one they weren't even in black and white. spread and intensified. That torchbearer higher. (Or in semiotic ·terms, you whip They kept switching between the two, 'or for modemism Bergman tumed from the being in half-tones of grey, green, brown, out your langue and I'll whip out my pa- or whatever; (3) They featured people bleakly monochrome complexities of Per- role.) with whom it would be no fun at all to sona to the (relative) naturalism and hand- spend a tennis weekend. Mystics, re- some colorings of Fanny and Alexander. Soon we were all living in moviedom's cluses, poets, manic depressives, and so equivalent of Easter Island: an Aku on; (4) The weather was usually bad. If it And whenever a filmmaker goes in for a Aku of proliferating totems that cast the wasn't raining it was foggy, and there were spot of surrealism or expressionism to- old gods in the shade. And on this sub- puddles everywhere; (5) The soundtrack tropic isle, we no longer had to like Berg- provided no possibility for a tie-in LP. day-like Coppola with Rumble Fish- man with his damned suffering and his When it wasn't clotted with dense conver- cold beaches you couldn't bathe on. We sation, it was completely silent for long, the film is patronized by critics as a bizarre could start making jokes about Antonioni aching stretches of time. And occasionally little hiccup in his career, a film he had to and his gnomic plots and ambulant hero- Andrei would throw in the distant sound make to get it out of his system. ines. And we could say ya-boo to Godard, of a buzz saw, or a dog barking, or some- who had swung all the way from populist one making strange high-pitched keening Why has this anti-modemist reaction criticism on paper to impenetrable Maoist nOises. taken place? Partly for political-ideological pamphleteering onscreen. But thanks to reasons. The push toward radical and What do you do with an unrepentant egalitarian ideals in the Sixties and after the seeds he and his Cahiers copains had Russian artist who makes life hard for everyone? Either you pay him lip service put the kabosh on elitist cinema. The Ca- sown, we could now guiltlessly enjoy a and if possible avoid his films , or you take rners du Cinema crowd (though they went whole lot of Hollywood movies we'd hith- a five-minute break from drooling over the erto had to crawl in and out of with shame. glory that is Hollywood and consider that on to make some fairl y elitist films them- In short, we were on the home stretch maybe Tarkovsky's films aren't difficult at selves) set the agenda for enthroning, or heading toward the New Hedonism in all. It is critics and audiences who are dif- rethroning, \"classical narrative cinema\"- both film criticism and filmmaking. We ficult. They insist that there's pain and as popular movies are now called in worthy were entering the age of Lucas, Spielberg, puzzlement in Tarkovsky's work when 800-page books devoted to showing how John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, Larry those qualities are largely of their own some directors can actually tell a story from Kasdan , and all. Everyone-not just in A to B. America but right across the free West- was hitting the pleasure trail. For Cahiers, nearly everything good was uncluttered or populist: John Wayne, Everyone except Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky still did the following anti- George Cukor, Renoirian pian-se- quences, Rossellini neo-realism, the win- dow-on-the-world naturalism approved by Bazin, the Hollywood cinema of what- next melodrama (Some Came Running, Rebel Without a Cause) , Hitchcock, Jerry Lewis. The trouble is that other critics in Britain and America began to believe that Cahiers really believed that this simple, accessible cinema was the crock of gold. They didn't appreciate that these F rench- men were critics-soon-to-be-filmmakers. The Cahiers crowd took movies that weren't considered to be masterpieces and invented reasons why they might or should be. It was like making a movie themselves. So Godard's critiqueofPrem- inger's Angel Face isn't a critique 'Of Angel Face, it's a Godard film in embryo using Angel Face as text and inspiration. Just as Le Mepris, a Godard film in reality, later used Some Came Running as ditto. Often the virtues Cahiers found in di- rectors like Hitchcock and Hawks were real virtues, and for that revaluation much thanks. But much of the time it was mere doodling or wishful thinking or hyperbole- for-the-revolution (\"Le cinema, c'est Ni- cholas Ray\"). Soon America caught on, and from our own writers we heard that Blake Edwards was a filmmaker of fur- nace-like inspiration and colossus stature. This soon became known as the hauteur theory. It operated on the principle that 45

--- making, much as a man might complain of first gave man godlike powers. house, or the white bird's feather of bene- an impeded view if he built a wall be- To make an emblematic union be- diction that plants a white streak in the tween him and what he wanted to see. hero's hair throughout Nostalghia-is a tween water and fire, our origins and our visitation mysterious and beautiful in its Tarkovsky's movies are \"about\" what aspirations, is the aim of Nostalghia's glo- own right, one of whose powers may be to they are. They are not impregnable invoke, or rhyme with, or blend with an schemes of symbolism. No good an has riously weird climactic scene. In real time idea or state of mind. Thus the pool of wa- anything to do with uncrackable codes or ter or puddle-Tarkovsky's favorite visu- impenetrable labyrinths. But the paranoid and a continuous take, to the patently ago- al motif of all-is at once a kind of mirror, filmgoer, whose brain has tumed to baby nized suspense of the actor, Oleg Jan- allowing a piece ofsky to lie on the ground food under the influence ofso much \"clas- kowsky, the hero walks the length and sical narrative cinema,\" is convinced that back of the drained and puddled pool car- (Heaven lying with Earth); it is a sugges- any movie devoid of a linear plotline and rying a precariously guttering candle and tion of flux and fluid uncertainty, dimin- takeaway emotions is out to get him. defying it to go out. When the near impos- ishing the authority of terra finna; and it is sible is achieved, it is merely confinnation purest painterliness, Iyricizing or liquefy- Tarkovsky's films use imagery to plow of Tarkovsky's creed: man's only hope of ing a landscape with an impulse no more up the hierarchical layering of the universe salvation is to rewrite the received verities symbolic than the ardst's intuitive sense we know. The primary message of his of the world and its possibilities. that a certain effect of light or texture in movies is simply what the imagery states: one pan of the canvas is the right one. No pan of life or nature is fixed in an im- Solaris. movable role; grace or change can come Ever since the post-Cahiers critics de- into a person's life when he orshe wakes to I n the same way that there are no ulti- cided to put \"classical narrative cinema\" the belief that contraries can connect, and mate obstacles to faith and imagination, under a magnifying glass and decode its the detennined poet-filmmaker can walk meanings, we've been told how a film blend, and even change places. In a poet's free without the crutch, or handicap, of should be read. You don't read Tar- onhodox narrative. And in the same way kovsky's films; they read you. You don't vision the relationship between oppo- that there are no opposites in life that can- decode Tarkovsky's films; their code is in- sites--eanh and sky, fire and water, past not meet or fuse, there is nothing in Tar- finite. You delight and exult in that in- and present, inside and outside, image kovsky's work that is ever merely, or even finity. and reflection, dream and waking-is mainly, a symbol. \"A\" (the image) does fluid and not fixed, and only our mulish not signify \"B\" (the meaning) in a frozen N ostalghia is an apt title in the context conviction that the world is an unshakable standoff on either side of an equals sign. ofcurrent cinema. The post-modem- structure of frozen, antithetical verities The image-be it fire or water, or a doll's ist populism that rules with critics and au- holds us back from glimpsing a reality out- diences today represen~ a wish to retum side ourselves. to the narrative virtues and verities of vin- tage Hollywood cinema. More than that, T arkovsky'S definitive film, and his the very stories and subjects of many hit best, is Nostalghia. Poised between movies today--critical and commercial- Stalker, with its sometimes creaky fu- are rooted in a yen for the past. We've ad- tureworld underpinnings, and The Sa- vanced, or regressed, from the stylistic crifice, with its sometimes excessive Berg- tributes to yesterday of films like the Indi- manizing, Nostalghia asks to be judged ana Jones romps or the Carpenter-Kasdan- De Palma school ofpaste-and-scissors pas- without reference to anything but itself tiche to movies whose stories themselves No outside genre or filmmaker is invoked. involve a retum to the past: Back to the Instead, it is pure..Tarkovsky, the joumey Future, Peggy Sue Got Married, and Co. ofa man's soul imaged in an endless inter- No culture, popular or otherwise, can play of opposites. The active, even turbu- spend all its time trying to get back into lent relationship between the present and the womb. Nostalghia showed the temp- the hero's impulse to hug the past-his tation in one man and how he fought it. nostalgia for his homeland, his research into the life of an 18th-century compos- Most Westem cinema today, supponed er-is mirrored in the sulphur spa hotel by the critics and the heyday they've ac- where he stays. Its bubbling pool is a place corded to popular taste, is not even trying where donnant energies, the eanh's to fight it. It's rerunning all its old movies memories, rise up from beneath the under the guise of new movies. We're liv- ground. Another buried reality that comes ing in a world of Nonna Desmonds. Tar- to daylight in the film is Erland Joseph- kovsky, and his peers and precursors in son's hennit: he is a man who locked him- the pre-populist European cinema, sug- self away with his family for seven years gested that life should be a struggle toward and now wanders the town railing against the uncomfortable light, never a surrender an unquiet, divided world. to the comfoning dark (of womb or movie theater). He set an example we will surely Josephson ends by buming himself eventually follow. Out of boredom, if not alive in an act of Holy Idiot sacrifice that is malnutrition, the movie world will even- tually realize that man cannot live by pop- a dry run for The Sacrifice itself In both com alone. ~ films, fire is the chosen destroyer. From eanh and water, our parent elements, we aspire to air and fire-and the last is the transubstantiating force whose stealing 46

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Dyomin (I.), Okeyev, and summit volunteer (r.). sons weren't allowed to make films. Now tions within the Moscow film community, they have had an opportunity to resume have created a sense of daring that \"we Victor Dyomin interviewed their arbitrarily interrupted creative would be fools not to seize and use.\" In a by Alexander Batchan work.\" second interview in the same paper, Kli- mov was asked whether he had oppo- When news about a quiet revolt in Last fall, Klimov visited New York, nents. He replied: \"Many.\" Where are the Soviet Filmmakers Union Washington, and Los Angeles, promoting they? the reporter followed. \"Every- during its fifth congress in May the largest showing to date of new and re- where,\" said Klimov. 1986 had reached the West, it attracted cent Soviet films in this country, which has the attention of many people but not nec- been extended to 20 American cities. It in- One of the main opponents of the essarily Sovietologists or Russian emigres. cludes formerly disgraced Sergei Paradj- Young Turks headed by Klimov, the Variety headlined that Elem Klimov, anov's new masterpiece, The Legend of longtime chairman of the powerful State hardly a household name to the paper's Suram Fortress, and Alexei German's Film Committee (Goskino), Filipp Yer- readers, had been elected new president controversial picture about World War II , mash, was removed from his position last of the formerly docile group, although his Trial on the Road. The latter was made in December and replaced by another party name did not even appear on the officially 1971 but released only last year and pro- functionary, Alexandr Kamshalov, who approved list of nominees. claimed by the Soviet film critics as the had been responsible for cinema at the best film of 1986. \"Our film industry has culture department of the Central Com- At the press conference in Moscow on changed a lot,\" Klimov has been saying at mittee of the CPSU. Yermash, one of the June 20, Elem Klimov announced that a numerous press conferences and public most conservative figures of Soviet cine- \"conflict\" commission was created to re- appearances in the West, \"and will change ma, was considered responsible for ban- view all films held up by censors. On Au- still more.\" ning controversial films such as Klimov's gust 9, in an interview published in Agony, recently released in this country as Since he has been elected the first sec- Rasputin. It was shelved for almost ten Pravda, K1imov also mentioned another retary of the Filmmakers Union, Klimov years, although it was awarded a prize in has spent much time abroad working to Venice in 1982. Gleb Panfilov's 1979 film, newly formed commission, the \"legal\" promote the new image ofthe Soviet cine- The Theme, was banned until recently, one. \"In the very near future,\" he prom- ma and Gorbachev's new policy of glas- partly because it dared to raise the issue of ised, filmgoers will be introduced to sever- nost, which is largely responsible for the recent Jewish emigration while not con- al hitherto unknown pictures by Kira Mur- radical changes within the decaying Soviet demning the would-be emigre. atova, Andrei Smimov, Bulat Mansurov, film industry. During an interview with Larisa Shepitko (his late wife) the Los Angeles Times last fall, Klimov Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance, expos- .... The commission, he said, is dealing said that he believes that political and ar- ing the crimes of Stalin's henchman, the not only with specific films but also with tistic forces , working in opposite direc- head of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, the creative careers ofcertain directors, es- had to wait for three years, as well as did pecially young ones, who for various rea- Alexei German's second banned picture, My Friend Ivan Lapshin, which shows the misery of Soviet life in the mid-Thirties. Now all those films are shown in Moscow to packed movie houses and openly dis- cussed by the leading Soviet newspapers. In another similar development, Kli- mov and his allies have been trying to lift ideological restrictions imposed on foreign films. Thus in early February, while visit- ing Paris, Klimov told reporters that soon Soviet movie fans will be able to see films ~y Federico Fellini. The Soviets have re- cently bought all of Fellini's pictures, in- cluding 81/2, which premiered at the Mos- cow Intemational Film Festival 25 years ago and was given first prize. Yet it has never been shown to the Soviet public. The first Fellini picture Soviet audiences will see is La Dolce Vita. Soviet audiences will also get to see Mi- chelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert and two Milos Forman pictures, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus. 4R