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TRUFFAUT FRANQOIS The Story of Adele H.

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TRUFFAUT FRANCOIS Day For Night

The complete screenplay together with many photographs.

INGMAR BERGMAN Three Films (ThroughA Glass Darkly, WinterLight,The Silence)

Bergman'sability to combine the greatest universality with the most delicate intimacyof situation and characterizationgives his films somethingof the darkpower of myth.The qualityof Ingmar Bergman's writingis such thatthese scripts are almostas rewarding read as the to
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PRESS

VOL. XXIX, No. 4

Summer 1976

Editor's

Notebook
NEW PERIODICALS

ARTICLES
Celebration: Four Films by James Broughton Confessions of a Festival Goer TERRY SHEEHY 2

The long-awaited ReviewofFilm Studies ($14 Quarterly

per year for individuals, $22 for institutions; Redgrave Publishing Corp., 430 Manville Road, Pleasantville, N.Y. 10570) has gotten off to a solid start with its first issue. Featured are two long survey articles, on film acting and screenwriters; in addition, about 20 recent and fairly recent film books are given careful reviews. While not the quantum jump beyond other film periodicals that Redgrave's hard-sell advance publicity claimed, QRFS is a welcome addition to our periodicals resources. A valuable added feature would be a listing of "Books Received," with brief annotations, for books not deserving fuller review-the sort of thing we try to do in this issue of FQ. Enthusiasm (named for Vertov's film) devotes its first issue to Jean-Marie Straub and Daniale Huillet: interviews, shooting diaries, all unnervingly enthusiastic. Edited by Andi Engel; $8.50 for three issues, to 5 Beaufort Gardens, London SW3 1PU, England. Cinema Sourcebook, 211 Thompson St., New York 10012, will give you credits and snippet quotes from NY area feature reviews for $50 per year. Film Criticism, Box 825, Edinboro, Pa. 16412 ($4.00 per year, $1.00 per copy) is a small new journal with serious ambitions; its first issue contains an attack on the AFI, an interview on Adele Hugo's diaries, a funny account of a writer's attempts to see Fellini (he finally managed it-), and critical reviews. Film Form, Room 117, Squires Bldg., Sandyford Road, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE1 8ST, England ($5.00 per year) is a new British journal deploying semiotic machinery, for the most part, upon a wide variety of films; careful and intelligent analyses, but not notably readable.

GIDEON BACHMANN 14

From Militant Cinema to Neo-Realism: The ERICH KEEL Example of Pueblo Chico

17

SPECIAL FEATURE
Film Books: Another Round-Up at the FQ Corral 25

REVIEWS
Taxi Driver Ffor Fake
MICHAEL DEMPSEY

37

WILLIAMJOHNSON 42
ROBERT COHEN

A Page of Madness A Village Production of Hamlet

The Hart of London

47

MICHAEL JON STOIL

51

SETH FELDMAN 54
ERNEST CALLENBACH RANDALL CONRAD

Crossroads Diane

57 58

CONTROVERSY AND CORRESPONDENCE

On Screwball Comedy and Mrs. Noah
LEE POAGUE Vs. KARYN KAY

CONTRIBUTORS
62 GIDEON BACHMANN, our Rome Editor, now divides his time between Italy and Engiand. RONALD E. CLAIRBORNE is a black writer who lives in San Francisco. ROBERT COHEN is a film graduate student in [cont'd. on page 24]

COVER:

Diane

Nelson

Dreamwood.

in James Broughton's

FILM QUARTERLY is publishedby the University California of 94702. $1.50 per copy, $6.00 per year in the U.S. Press, Berkeley,California Elsewhere: $7.00 per year. Institutional rates slightlyhigher.Editor: Ernest Callenbach. Assistantto the Editor: Rose AnneWhite. NewYorkEditor: William Johnson.LosAngelesEditor: BostonEditor: Randall Conrad. London Editor: Farber. Stephen GinetteBillard.Rome ColinYoung.ParisEditor: Editor: GideonBachmann. Editorial Board: Andries John Fell, Hugh Deinum, Advisory AlbertJohnson,William McClung, J. Gray, BrianHenderson, Neal Oxenhandler. 1976 by The Regentsof the University California. of Views expressed in signed articlesare those of the authors. Copyright Indexedin Reader'sGuideto Periodical Art Second-class Literature, Index,Humanities Indexand BookReviewIndex. Published quarterly. postage Printedin U.S.A.Type:Freedmen's paidat Berkeley,California. Fremont Litho.ISSN: 0015-1386. Organization. Printing:

VOL. XXIX, No. 4

Summer 1976

Editor's

Notebook
NEW PERIODICALS

ARTICLES
Celebration: Four Films by James Broughton Confessions of a Festival Goer TERRY SHEEHY 2

The long-awaited ReviewofFilm Studies ($14 Quarterly

per year for individuals, $22 for institutions; Redgrave Publishing Corp., 430 Manville Road, Pleasantville, N.Y. 10570) has gotten off to a solid start with its first issue. Featured are two long survey articles, on film acting and screenwriters; in addition, about 20 recent and fairly recent film books are given careful reviews. While not the quantum jump beyond other film periodicals that Redgrave's hard-sell advance publicity claimed, QRFS is a welcome addition to our periodicals resources. A valuable added feature would be a listing of "Books Received," with brief annotations, for books not deserving fuller review-the sort of thing we try to do in this issue of FQ. Enthusiasm (named for Vertov's film) devotes its first issue to Jean-Marie Straub and Daniale Huillet: interviews, shooting diaries, all unnervingly enthusiastic. Edited by Andi Engel; $8.50 for three issues, to 5 Beaufort Gardens, London SW3 1PU, England. Cinema Sourcebook, 211 Thompson St., New York 10012, will give you credits and snippet quotes from NY area feature reviews for $50 per year. Film Criticism, Box 825, Edinboro, Pa. 16412 ($4.00 per year, $1.00 per copy) is a small new journal with serious ambitions; its first issue contains an attack on the AFI, an interview on Adele Hugo's diaries, a funny account of a writer's attempts to see Fellini (he finally managed it-), and critical reviews. Film Form, Room 117, Squires Bldg., Sandyford Road, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE1 8ST, England ($5.00 per year) is a new British journal deploying semiotic machinery, for the most part, upon a wide variety of films; careful and intelligent analyses, but not notably readable.

GIDEON BACHMANN 14

From Militant Cinema to Neo-Realism: The ERICH KEEL Example of Pueblo Chico

17

SPECIAL FEATURE
Film Books: Another Round-Up at the FQ Corral 25

REVIEWS
Taxi Driver Ffor Fake
MICHAEL DEMPSEY

37

WILLIAMJOHNSON 42
ROBERT COHEN

A Page of Madness A Village Production of Hamlet

The Hart of London

47

MICHAEL JON STOIL

51

SETH FELDMAN 54
ERNEST CALLENBACH RANDALL CONRAD

Crossroads Diane

57 58

CONTROVERSY AND CORRESPONDENCE

On Screwball Comedy and Mrs. Noah
LEE POAGUE Vs. KARYN KAY

CONTRIBUTORS
62 GIDEON BACHMANN, our Rome Editor, now divides his time between Italy and Engiand. RONALD E. CLAIRBORNE is a black writer who lives in San Francisco. ROBERT COHEN is a film graduate student in [cont'd. on page 24]

COVER:

Diane

Nelson

Dreamwood.

in James Broughton's

FILM QUARTERLY is publishedby the University California of 94702. $1.50 per copy, $6.00 per year in the U.S. Press, Berkeley,California Elsewhere: $7.00 per year. Institutional rates slightlyhigher.Editor: Ernest Callenbach. Assistantto the Editor: Rose AnneWhite. NewYorkEditor: William Johnson.LosAngelesEditor: BostonEditor: Randall Conrad. London Editor: Farber. Stephen GinetteBillard.Rome ColinYoung.ParisEditor: Editor: GideonBachmann. Editorial Board: Andries John Fell, Hugh Deinum, Advisory AlbertJohnson,William McClung, J. Gray, BrianHenderson, Neal Oxenhandler. 1976 by The Regentsof the University California. of Views expressed in signed articlesare those of the authors. Copyright Indexedin Reader'sGuideto Periodical Art Second-class Literature, Index,Humanities Indexand BookReviewIndex. Published quarterly. postage Printedin U.S.A.Type:Freedmen's paidat Berkeley,California. Fremont Litho.ISSN: 0015-1386. Organization. Printing:

24
a well-defined thematics and ideology--the struggle of liberation from national and foreign oppressors. Until 1971, the telling of the story of Bolivia in revolt was the essential moment in the definition of cine popular. With its latest film, Ukamau rephrases its aesthetic, putting more emphasis on the quality of expression. This could have easily led into the dead end of formalism. If it did not, it is because Ukamau developed the narrative in terms of the expressive possibilities of specific socio-cultural facts (the charango, the prejudice against Indians, etc.) and not in terms of cinematic stylization (montage, shots, lighting, etc.). Most scenes in Pueblo Chico fulfill two functions at least: first, an anthropological function, describing social facts and social attitudes of a certain community, and second, a structural function, integrating these descriptive elements in the narrative of the film. What Ukamau accomplishes is the creation of a coherent iconographic system in which meanings that evolve from individual objects and situations are codified into the larger conflict of Arturo and the Indians vs. the ex-hacienderos. It is this codification and the resulting iconography that define the expressive potential of Pueblo Chico. Unquestionably, Pueblo Chico is Ukamau's most Bolivian film. It comes as no surprise that the 1974 Festival of Valladolid in Spain did not recognize its distinct quality, and that a New York distributor refused to promote it in the United States. More relevant is the popular and critical success the film obtained in its own country, and the solution it offers to the impasse of militant cinema. The cin6astes of Ukamau could not have achieved so much without their commitment to the principles of neorealist politics and style, such as low-budget production technique and rather elusive ideology. The group is now working on a new feature that will focus on four neighborhoods in the capital city of La Paz, which also represent four different social classes. The fact that an individual from each barrio will write his own story indicates that Ukamau is further pursuing the challenge of neorealism. If Oscar Soria, Antonio Eguino, and their friends can realize their play, it may well be that Zavattini's concept of authenticity will become a new vehicle for the practice of cine popular.
NOTES

PUEBLO CHICO

1. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, "Toward a Third Cinema," Cineaste, 4 (Winter 1970-71), 8. 2. Jorge Sanjines, "Cinema and Revolution," Cineaste, 4 (Winter 1970-71), 13. 3. From a personal interview, taped in La Paz on January 23, 1975. 4. Andre Bazin, Qu'est-ce que le cindma? IV. Une esthetique de la realit&: le NMo-rdalisme(Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1962), p. 141. Parts of this volume appear in What Is Cinema? Vol. II (Berkeley & Los Angeles: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1971). 5. From a personal interview, taped in La Paz on January 22, 1975. 6. Interview with Soria. 7. Mario Cannella, "Ideology and Aesthetic Hypotheses in the Criticism of Neo-Realism," Screen, 14 (Winter 1973-74), 5-60. 8. Cannella, p. 34. 9. "Froma personal interview, taped in Buenos Aires on November 19, 1974. 10. From a personal interview, tapes in La Paz on January 29, 1975. 11. Jorge Sanjines, "Un cine militante," Cine Cubano, No. 68 (n.d.), pp. 45-47; "Cine revolucionario: La experiencia boliviana," Hablemos de Cine, No. 64 (April-June 1972), pp. 19-27; "La busqueda de un cine popular," Cine Cubano, Nos. 89-90 (n.d.), pp. 60-64; "Entretien avec Jorge Sanjines," Cahiers du Cindma, No. 253 (Oct.-Nov. 1974), pp. 6-21; "Entretien avec Jorge Sanjines," Jeune Cinema, No. 85 (March 1975), pp. 15-18.

CONTRIBUTORS, cont'd. Los Angeles.RANDALL our CONRAD, BostonEditor, is a film-maker, writer, and translator. MICHAEL DEMPSEYworks in film productionin Los Angeles. HANS EHRMANN a Chileanfilm journalist.SETH is FELDMANteaches film at the University Western of Ontarioand is co-editorof a forthcoming anthology on Canadian cinema.WILLIAM JOHNSON, NewYork our Editor,is authorof Focus on the ScienceFictionFilm.
KARYN KAY has contributed to Women and Film and

FQ; she lives and teachesin NewJersey.ERICHKEEL taught in La Paz for a year and is writinga dissertation on the sociologyof art and literature.STEVEN KOVACS[whom we inadvertently omitted last time] teaches film at Stanfordand was the co-producer of Arthurand Lillie. WILLIAM MURPHYis Film ArT. chivist at the National Archives, Washington,D.C., J. C. OGLETREElives in Albany, Georgia. LEE POAGUE teaches at Chico State Universityand has
[cont'd. on page 61] and has published in Film Comment and other journals.

written for Movietone News. ANTHONY REVEAUX

teachesfilm at San FranciscoState University has and

REVIEWS
shot of Diane running along the street to form a simple, haunting image.

61

You'd hope the resulting portraits, especially considering their extensive borrowing of documen"Could you do it once ... ?" The religious anxitary techniques, would begin to explore the classety, an earlier form of Diane's present neurosis, related conflicts which accompany the smallest upis a sublimated version of the child's wonder rootings in bourgeois society, putting a bit of perabout, and fear of, sex (particularly in view of the spective on competitiveness, ambition, and anxiemorbid connotation Diane's mother gave it). Being ty. Instead, films like Miriam Weinstein's Living fucked; being buried; losing salvation; yearning With Peter and We Get Married Twice and Liane for salvation (and for sex); "desperately wanting to Brandon's Not So Young Now As Then never get get away"; going to the city to be an actress instead beyond their own insipid cockiness. Ill-digested of getting "stuck" in a small-town working class-veritd techniques only serve these film-makers' all these things are interfaced. Diane leaves such compulsion to ridicule the social class they are still connections to your own speculation, using its con- uncomfortably close to, without either self-examitrasts and correspondences to show a few casual nation or compassion. suggestions. Diane is the story of one woman's flight from the Diane escaped the prairie, yet she now finds that fate an oppressive social order has in store. But a certain latent violence makes the world go round her flight is a self-perpetuating one: she escaped in Manhattan too, whether in the form of the de- the life of classmates who "graduated from high grading nude "appearances" that aspiring actors school and went on to stay there," but she still carand actresses have to take in stride, the male ries a full complement of conflicts inside her and strangers in the street, or the fellow who stars in she knows it. She mostly manages to be ironic Diane's final tale. about it. The makers of Diane, for their part, are The last scene of Diane consists of an uninter- capable of respecting Diane even as they penetrate rupted on-camera monologue in which Diane tells her defense. In order for you to experience this the story of a recent date that typically ended in a woman and perhaps see a bit of yourself, they demoralizing macho bedroom scene. This single have created a fascinating, and liberating, work of take is long (over one fifth of the film's half hour), art. -RANDALL CONRAD yet it is not broken by an inserted scenes: Diane performs by herself. You finally know all the background you need to: the accumulated context lends enormous resonance to the story, by turns humorous and odious, which Diane is telling. cont'd. The recent rash of portrait films is not necessari- CONTRIBUTORS, an artistic movement. If anything it is a phely contributed to Artweek, nomenon of passing interest to the sociologist: SHEEHY teaches at San QRFS, and FQ. TERRY Francisco State University. today a certain stratum of America's petty bour- MICHAEL JON STOIL is a political scientist who lives geoisie has the leisure and means to make films in Washington, D.C. about itself. As it turns out, the subject isn't We announce with shock and regret the sudden death usually interesting. Someone has become a film- (from a heart attack) of James Kerans, who until recently maker and intellectual instead of a housewife, was a member of FQ's Advisory Editorial Board. A doctor, or teacher. At some point the film-makers' hockey player in his spare time, he was vigorous in all lower-middle-class background embarrassed them things, and an enterprising and supportive person in his work as a teacher and stage director. He had been an -perhaps too they felt a twinge of guilt at surpas- early contributor to FQ; his wide learning, intelligence, their elders or schoolmates-and they picked sing sensitivity, genial cynicism, and careful judgment were up the camera to make home movies with a ven- endlessly refreshing while he served in the editorial geance. group. He will be greatly missed.

TERRY SHEEHY

CELEBRATION
Four Films by James Broughton
Mother's Day, for me, is one of the great films of film history.-PETER KUBELKA' James Broughton is not your ordinary model of an experimental film-maker. For one thing, he is 62 years old and has been making films since the early forties. For another, his films are popular with audiences, and make them laugh, feel, and sometimes even cry. And for a third, his films have a quality of formal grace and beauty that is largely forgotten in a period when fashionable experiment usually means the endless working out of pedantic structural formulas. Broughton is one of the few independent film artists in the United States to earn a living almost entirely through his art. Of course the non-narrative film as a whole has always gotten far less attention than theatrical features. In Broughton's case, the situation may be worsened by the fact that his films have an unfashionably affirmative attitude toward life. The themes in James Broughton's films form a circle, revolving around his life: an intricate pattern of relationships between men and women. In a Broughton film, theme and form are blended: images of freedom and bondage, independence and dependence, motherhood and slavery, love as seen from a Victorian view and love as sexual exploration. He touches audiences' hearts and minds because we can and do recognize ourselves. On walking into a packed auditorium (on the West Coast, at least, a new Broughton film always draws a huge audience) one feels the expectation of an event. The audience is never disappointed. If Broughton is there to talk about his films, the audience responds to him. He makes life an event, a celebration. He has a delightful quality, at once unpretentious, highly personal, and dryly cheerful. He prefaces his films with a few laconic words in his unhurried, amiable California tones. He is medium height with a slim figure. He carries himself with all the grace of a dancer, and uses his long fingers to gesture. Only recently he has grown a beard; it matches his silver hair. In this world of icy facts and cynical realism, Broughton gives people a sense of joy, of hope, without being at all goody-goody. He does this by the exemplification of the films themselves, and the message that informs them: love and continue to love, work through suffering until you understand that we have the right to be. In order to understand Broughton's films, we must look into that film history which is the tradition he comes from. Experimental film emerged in both Paris and Berlin in the early twenties. These films were subjective in theme with nonnarrative forms, and full of Freudian symbols, hints of a new social order, and dream-like images. Films like The Return to Reason (1923), Emak Bakia (1924), and The Seashell and the Clergyman (1926) employed film techniques that could be understood as parallel manifestations of ideas and forms being developed in contemporary painting, music, poetry, literature: dadaist, abstract, impressionist, cubist, or surrealist. The visual side of film at last challenged the narrative line, emphasizing line, colors, and shapes, while themes emphasized dreams, rituals, sexual metaphors. The tradition of experimental film-making in American cinema had its roots here. How did these come to America? Europe, in the late thirties, was plunged into fascism, and there was a massive migration of artists, writers and intellectuals to America. The provincial character of American cultural life was altered profoundly, and native talents were stimulated and liberated. In the middle forties, a new group of

BROUGHTON
film-makers began to work in San Francisco and New York: the Whitney Brothers, Harry Smith, Kenneth Anger, Sidney Peterson and James Broughton were in the forefront on the West Coast, Maya Deren (after making Meshes in the Hollywood) and Gregory Afternoon--1943-in Markopoulos in the East. Other remarkable filmmakers were, of course, soon to follow. Broughton was, to start with, a poet, and a witty and dexterous one. He recognized that film could express his life as he experienced it: frustrating, inhibiting, yet somehow exhilarating. He knew that he could show his own vision through the medium of film. Understanding that society's rules were repressing his freedom, he determined to create the world as he felt it. In the four films I discuss, Broughton's view of his world is most centrally represented. Mother's Day (1948) and Dreamwood (1972) are serious films. The Pleasure Garden (1952) and The Bed (1968) are comedies. But they all have one consistent theme of life as a celebration. This is where Broughton differs from most avant-garde films of the twenties, which tear and shriek against life; Broughton lives it. Broughton's vision has been with him since early childhood. One night when I was three year old I was awakened by a glittering stranger who told me I was a poet and always would be and never to fear being alone or being laughed at. This was my first meeting with my angel who is the most interesting poet I have ever met.2 James Broughton was born in Modesto, California, a small city in the cultural desert of the Great Valley, on November 10, 1913. His family, wellto-do Californians, soon moved to San Francisco.
Broughton's
scenium, curtain, a large stage, with wings and lots of scenery. I used to make shows in there and make my brother and other kids look at them. These shows were fundamentally based on the vaudeville acts at the Orpheum theater. Every Saturday afternoon, Aunt Marion took us to the Orpheum. There was a different show every week. On Sunday afternoons, we went to the movies. I owe to her my baptism in the silent film. They were so extraordinary. You never see them anymore; wonderful print stock, perfect projection and the entire orchestra playing. I think of these shows often. I remember the Orpheum as the magic proscenium: fantastic acrobats, the ballerina on horseback, the comedy, the drama. The programs all began with a cartoon: Felix the Cat, Gertie the Dinosaur. Or maybe a tenminute comedy with Larry Semon, or Charlie Chase, or Ben Turpin. The mixture of dance, drama, comedy, film all entranced me. I always had the feeling that all these elements just meshed. I lived for that.4

mother was a dashing young widow. So life was a bit peculiar."3 Broughton lived his formative years in a house which had a third-floor attic.
becauseit was for my brother . and that was marvelous

father died in 1918. " . ..

My

? and me. It was our private kingdom and this was important to me. No one ever came up there. This is where I really began making theaters of all kinds. I made a big alcove, got drapes, and made a stage. Here is where I kept my toy theater. Those wondrous German toy theaters with a pro-

In Broughton's film Loony Tom the Happy Lover (1951), this early introduction to silent comedy is reflected in a naive character, dressed in Chaplinesque baggy trousers and bowler hat, who moves through the countryside making love to all the ladies. When Broughton was nine, he was thrust into a military school, after the remarriage of his mother; he was to remain there until the age of sixteen. On reaching college age, he entered Stanford University. After three years, he left for New York in hopes of a writing career. Working on the New York Herald Times as a theater critic, he kept working on novels and plays trying to justify his writing, as a career, to his mother. When she died, he felt that he no longer had to try so frantically to succeed. When he was in New York he wrote a play called Summer Fury. Stanford University decided to produce this work and, encouraged, Broughton returned to California. In 1945, he met Sidney Peterson who attended a performance of Summer Fury. Peterson had seen experimental avant-garde films in Paris in the twenties, as a young sculptor, and suggested to Broughton that they make a film. Technical expertise was not peddled on every corner in those days, so Broughton studied the Kodak booklet How to Make Movies. Peterson borrowed a 16mm camera and, buying a roll of film at a time, they shot The Potted Psalm (1946). This film was made with high spirits but "also with serious intent, as we were aware of the

4
European avant-garde, and we wanted to make At about this same time, Frank Stauffacher, another experimental film-maker and enthusiast, arranged the first of a seies of film screenings called "Art in Cinema" at the San Francisco Museum of Art. He showed European experimental films of the twenties, including European classics by Man Ray, Fernand L6ger, Hans Richter, Luis Bufluel, and the film poet who was to have the major influence on Broughton's own work, Jean Cocteau. There was a printed program laying down the philosophy of the "art film" with a history of the avant-garde written by Hans Richter.
Of the contemporary film-artistsmentionedin the text, Mary Ellen Bute, Maya Deren, Dwinell Grant, Douglas Crockwell Hans Richterrepresent East Coast,and and the John and James Whitney,James Broughtonand Sidney Petersonand Oskar Fischinger the represent West Coast. OtherWestCoastfilm-makers had already who madefilms of merit,KennethAnger,CurtisHarrington, HarrySmith, closely followed by Jordan Belson and GregoryMarkolaterin the series.6 poulos,wereincluded film as art".s

BROUGHTON
form. The theme is one that carries throughout all his films: pain worked through to understanding, acceptance and finally joy. San Francisco, in the late forties, was in the midst of an explosion of creative energy. After the dispersion and disruption of World War II, poets, writers, actors, fine printers, theaters had sprung up; all the art forms were flourishing. Filmmakers flocked to San Francisco due to the fact that the experimentalists knew with certainty that a sympathetic and cultured audience did indeed exist and was waiting for their films. The production of experimental films increased: Curtis Harrington made Picnic (1948) and On the Edge (1949); Kenneth Anger Fireworks (1947) Gregory Markopoulos Psyche (1947), which he made while attending the University of Southern California; and Broughton made Mother's Day (1948).
Human pain is most evident in Mother's Day. I worked myself out of that in the quest for love for myself and everyone.'

Stauffacher asked Broughton and Peterson to show The Potted Psalm, which had turned out to be a film combining sex and death but showing both in a ambiguous and exuberant style.
The film createda sensation.The Societyof WesternArtlocal artistgroup, atte.aded second ists, a conservative its so performance as to be able to protestby walkingout en masseafterthe filmbegan.7

Broughton's life was happy during this period. He was sharing an apartment with Pauline Kael on Baker street.
Pauline was witty and charming. She decorated our apartment with junk furniture. It was very attractive and nothing cost over $4.00. We still have a wonderful friendship and I see her when I am in New York.0o

Broughton and Peterson never made another film together, though The Potted Psalm went on, via distribution through Amos Vogel's Cinema 16 in New York, to become a classic of the American avant-garde. They are two different artists with two separate visions. They had fun shooting the film, but when it came to editing, they clashed. In 1973, at an "Art in Cinema Revisited" showing of The Potted Psalm, I asked them if they would ever make another film together; they both looked astonished. "No!" they said in unison, and burst out laughing.8 Broughton considers The Potted Psalm his learning experience in film. In 1948, he began a new film that was to be his alone: his theme, his

Mother's Day can seem, to first viewers expecting an ordinary narrative, a random accumulation of tableaux-like images. But it is an associative exploration of the relationship between mother and son. It is not meant to be realistic or chronological or narrative: it is Broughton's emotional memory of childhood. The film adopts a onceupon-a-time imagery so that viewers can re-enter their own childhood as a time between reality and fantasy, a time when adults could seem more childish than the children. In theorizing about a film such as Mother's Day, we must not only look at the form but the way in which the message is accepted by the audience. Film is the art of the real because it registers the spatiality of objects and the space they inhabit. Yet, and this is the most important claim of film, the viewer suspends disbelief. What is hap-

BROUGHTON pening on the screen, manipulated images and narrative meaning, we accept. With the opening shots of Mother's Day, Broughton establishes the level of perception the film will operate on: quickcut, wry, allusive images that always have a poetic stylization about them. The opening shot is of a young, vaguely Keaton-like man sitting in the lap of a sumptuous female statue. He rests his head on the statue's stone breasts: the poet in his ultimate security with his muse. Soon we see Broughton's mother through a thin veil, intercut with shots of a revolving picture of a girl. The vague form of mother becomes clear, and we see her in a series of almost slide-show shots. Broughton is telling us how he perceived his mother: an insubstantial figure never really there for him. Howard Brubeck, composer of the music, uses a different beat for each of the six sequences of the film. "Mother was the loveliest woman in the world. And Mother wanted everything lovely." This, the first of the six ironic inter-titles, introduces a series of droll images of the people who filled Broughton's childhood: a man in a toga, a man wearing a tuxedo, a young couple sharing a kiss. Mother's reaction to the kiss is a frown: evidently sexuality is not "lovely." The early film-makers that Broughton viewed, as a boy, in the Orpheum theater tended to regard films as a means of reproducing theatrical performances. The camera very seldom moved. Action happened in front of the camera with people moving in and out of the scenes as if on a stage. Like these film-makers of the early teens and twenties, Broughton in this film seldom moved the camera. This sequence has but two camera movements; a dolly and a pan. The rest

of the shots are static. This form works because Broughton capitalizes on the rhythm he can create by the series of tableaux-like shots. The second section begins with the title, "Mother always said she could have had her pick." In a series of shots, different men offer their possessions to mother. She sits high up in a window frame, above everyone else, full of disdain and superiority as the men in her life parade themselves before her. Mother devours all the gifts. The suitors are left empty-handed. All but one disappears. He holds a whiskey bottle. As commonly happens with a Broughton film, here the laughter from the audience fades: we begin to see that Mother is a woman who destroys. "And she picked Father," reads the third title. Mother looks into her dressing-room mirror and we see Father facing her. Mother is appalled. Dressed in a fur coat, she plays with a doll in a wooden shack, exposing a marriage that is a facade: a surrealist image that makes the audience now know they are not watching a comedy. "Then Mother always said she wanted little boys and girls to be lovely." With this, Broughton introduces the isolated, childish adults that Mother's philosophy has produced and that most viewers, from middle-class backgrounds, recognize. These adults play childish games, experiment with covert sexuality, throw things. Mother looks very disapproving. Freudian symbols and the influence of Cocteau's Blood of a Poet are most prominent in this section as girls play with hoops, a boy watches a revolving bowling pin, Father sits in a chair and whacks a cane over his knee. Persons only make contact when they hit each other or steal something. This sequence is a premonition of future commercial feature films in which violence is always connected with the sexual act,

6
from Double Indemnity (1954) onward to our day. Mother's children's faces are unhappy and vicious. No one touches in affection, but only in repressed and covert sexuality. This sequence ends with Mother staring at herself in her mirror. "Because ladies and gentlemen were the loveliest thing in the world," reads the beginning of the fifth sequence. The children are now adults. If anything, their games are now worse. As an old lady talks and talks and talks at a tea party, Broughton cuts continuously to a young girl with a group of young men. The young girl tries to seduce, but only as a "nice" girl of the forties would do: a frantic game of "touch me, don't touch me." Mother repeatedly enters a door representing aging each time she does so; this is an admiring tribute to Maya Deren's Meshes in the Afternoon. The final title, "And so we learned to be loving, too" is followed by images that crowd the screen with persons who have been shown before. Father is cast aside in a series of shots that ends with his hat and cane being tossed out the window: Mother has finally got rid of him. Yet, Broughton finally lets us have hope: it comes through a young woman's love, which overcomes this possessive tyrant mother. Followed by a Pan figure (which is to recur in all Broughton's films), the young woman reaches for the hand of a young man. The final image is of Mother, alone and dominating the frame. Jack Stauffacher, a San Francisco graphic artist who plays Father, reminisced about the film:
Frank, my brother, did the camera work on this film. He loved working with Broughton who needed all the bodies he could get as actors. I went out and had one hell of a good time. Frank believed that Broughton had a cryptic film language. Mother's Day reflects Broughton's wide culture and sensitivity. He is a complete artist, a rare bird.'2

BROUGHTON
a celebrity. Anger and Harrington went on to Paris. Broughton and Sheets stayed in London, making friends with film people.
Basil Wright started a collection for us to make a film in England. This was The Pleasure Garden. Lindsay Anderson managed the location shooting in the ruins of the Crystal Palace Garden, following us all over Wardour Street to editing rooms, and nodded with a wry smile when this film won a special award for fantaisie poetique at Cannes complete with an embrace of James by Jean Cocteau.'3

They began shooting The Pleasure Garden. The struggle for money was constant. The film was long-40 minutes-and Broughton's only film shot in 35mm. (The British were still innocent of 16mm equipment at this time.) The actors, English artists who donated their time and energy to make this film, were to become famous in the English film and television industry. Hattie Jacques starred in most of the Carry On Doctor films and now has her own television series. Lindsay Anderson has gained international fame as a director. Sir Michael Balcon is head of British television. (He wished to do a documentary on Broughton when he visited London in 1974; Broughton did not have the time but has promised to return.) These people gave their time to Broughton because they believed in his work. They saw in his films what the American film industry did not: a clear vision of society and its limitations. As Basil Wright, the documentary film-maker, wrote, "We worked with him because of Broughton's films at Edinburgh. We had never seen anything like them. We wanted to make film as art. We were correct. The Pleasure Garden remains a clasSiC.''14

In 1950, Broughton decided to go to Europe. America had become a land of Joe McCarthy, the Korean War, and atomic bomb shelters. He sent four films ahead, including Mother's Day, to the prestigious Edinburgh Film Festival, in hopes they would accept one. Traveling with Kermit Sheets, Kenneth Anger, and Curtis Harrington, Broughton reached England to find all four of his films had been selected for the festival. He was

The film opens on two women-the heroine, Bess, and her funeral-loving aunt. These two women represent, respectively, the search for personal freedom and society's regulations and restrictions. As the titles are superimposed over a shot of the Crystal Palace Gardens, Broughton's voice recites the theme of the film:
What is your pleasure please? What is your secret private pleasure? Would you expect to find it in the open air in a more or less public park? You might if the world were a garden of love. But in this particular garden, you are more apt to find desire locked up. Here, one at a time, come the curious strangers seeking what pleasure they can in a midsummer's afternoon dream.

BROUGHTON
As in Mother's Day, Broughton introduces his characters in the first sequence. They move through the garden doing what each dreams he/ she wishes to accomplish: the search for personal love and meaning. Movement happens within the frame and reminds the audience of ballet with rhythm in a limited space. A fairy tale of grace and charm, it reminds us of beloved parents spinning tales of a beautiful captive princess needing only a handsome prince to save her. This film has all the elements of such a fairy tale. Images of a hunter starting to shoot, a birdwatching lady staring through field glasses, a young girl wanting to be as beautiful as the statue she admires, a sculptor longing to create, flow past our eyes. Bess and Aunt Minerva move through the park with Auntie (the bad fairy) reminding Bess to be proper. Carrying a heavy book of rules, Bess goes alone into the park. (How many of us remember all too well the book of rules we entered our own parks with ?) Bess, wrapped in a dark coat and prim hat, scurries by the nude statues and the men who pass her. Encouragingly, she does give furtive side glances to the statues. Now the villain, Colonel Paul K. Gargoyle, enters the park. He represents Broughton's view of all government with its don't and bureaucrats. Gargoyle goes around the park scolding, forbidding, and covering male statues' genitalia, but with his hand lingering over-long: the so-called good as the action of the repressed. He is the villain, all right: he rushes up to people and pulling them apart scolds, "This is indecent." The sculptor sits at the feet of his creation and asks, "Is it beautiful? Is it beautiful enough?" Gargoyle walks by with a sign that reads, "No litter, please." Bess sits on a bench and reads her book of rules; her face is sad. But now the hero of this fairy tale enters the park. We know he is the hero because he is wearing a white cowboy hat. His name is California Sam, and audiences respond to him with delight. Aunt Minerva and Gargoyle manage to get him locked up. Everyonein the park is unhappy except Gargoyle, who goes off gloating, "A good day's work." The good fairy now comes to the rescue. We all know her because she has a elegant dress on with

a MAGIC shawl. Followed by a Pan figure, who throws flowers, the good fairy sees the misery Gargoyle and Aunt Minerva have caused. Taking her magic shawl from her plump shoulders, she proceeds to tear down prohibiting signs, gives confidence, grants wishes, and does all the wonderful acts good fairies do. Bess has helped Sam escape from prison and they move happily together while Aunt Minerva searches for them. When Aunt Minerva catches up to them she hits Bess and throws Sam to the ground. Just in time, the good fairy comes around the corner. Sam asks the good fairy, "Are you magic?" "There is still a little magic in this mad old world," the good fairy says, to the audible satisfaction of the audience. But Gargoyle has returned. With the help of Aunt Minerva, who has stolen the magic shawl, they round up all the people. "Dignity or death," growls Gargoyle. A major problem arises when two boys and a girl say they are all together. This begins a search, in a very official book, for the rules on menage trois. Bess comes up and grabs the magic shawl, and a tug-of-war ensues. The good fairy, now dressed in tulle and lace, dances up to the warringpeople. Waving a wand over the bad people, she puts an end to the war. "You shall be as dead as official art and the rest will live for the heart," she sings. Sam and Bess, hand in hand, go off together. We know they will live happily ever after.
famous was Garden my loveletterto England; ThePleasure forits poetsandgenuine lunacy.I5

Though Broughton loved making film with the English artists, The Pleasure Garden put him in debt for years. (Broughton says Lindsay Anderson encouraged him to make a long film instead of the

8 10-minute film originally planned.) The Pleasure Garden also had costly sync dialogue and songs. Broughton believed that this film would make him famous. He was mistaken. Nudity, suggestion of homosexuality, menage at trois, corruption of government officials, were not subjects to be tolerated in the United States in the late fifties. Broughton stayed in Europe four year. Experimental film lost its sense of continuity and contact with an audience during this time. Broughton turned back to plays and poetry. He was not to make his next film for thirteen years, the film that was to make him famous. After returning home to the San Francisco area, Broughton went into Jungian analysis. In late 1959, he met Suzanna Hart.
I sawJamesperform manytimes. He wouldreadhis poetry or introducehis plays at the Playhouse.(KermitSheets was one of the directorsof this theatercompanyin San I becausehe was someoneI Francisco.) was veryimpressed At always on admired. that time he wasleaning heavily a silcane. 1thoughthowromantic. didn'tlearnuntil I ver-topped laterhe had brokenhis ankle. We married December in of 1962.11

BROUGHTON the late sixties, when this was acceptable on film. The Bed is again the quest for love and identity, all love being beautiful and human and not a matter of pain and guilt. A friend of Desloge's, Sue Breitrose, commented on the shooting:
Everybodywas happy because they were all so good together. This was the time of the flower children ih San Francisco. There was a lot of group activities and this film was a pastoral extension of that feeling. As they shot the film most of the people were naked most of the time. There was a freedom that was lovely.'

In the Spring of 1968, a young graduate student from Stanford University, Bill Desloge, came to Broughton suggesting that they make a film. Broughton said no. Desloge pestered Broughton. Jacques Ledoux, curator of the Royal Film Archives of Belgium and organizer of experimental film festivals at Knokke-le-Zoute, sent Broughton, along with many other experimental film-makers, a huge box of free raw stock.'" Desloge finally convinced Broughton. The shooting began in the summer of 1968. Broughton had no script, as he had had no script for the other films. The ideas developed every day as personalities and artists flocked to the home of Marin County guru-carpenter Roger Somers. Poet Alan Watts, photographer Imogene Cunningham, critic Grover Sales were but a few that were to populate this film. (Sales is seen on the screen for six seconds but people still tell him they remember seeing him.) This film has a once-upon-a-time theme as did Mother's Day and The Pleasure Garden. The surface theme is the bed and what happens in the bed; but the second level is the freedom to express human sexuality. The time had come, in

Broughton edited the film in director John Korty's old studio on Broadway in San Francisco. In the fall, it was first shown at San Francisco State University, where Broughton teaches. For most of the audience, the experience was beautiful. "How dare you leave out all the morbid things of life?" shouted one exception. Broughton was stunned until he realized that for most people unless life is gloomy it "ain't deep." But Broughton had discovered, by this time, that life is a union of opposites. If most of the world wants exclusively to have misery reinforced, Broughton says no. He will celebrate life. The Bed opens with a shot of green trees and hills, sounds of birds and the madcap, electronically treated harpsichord music of Warner Jepson. A white-painted iron filigree bed moves magically down a hill. (It was actually pulled by heavy outof-frame ropes and Desloge remembers this part of the film as sheer torture.) After revolvingplayfully like the tin-type in Mother's Day, it comes to rest in a green meadow like some pastoral altar. A young couple, representing Adam and Eve, lie naked on the bed. Adam chases Eve around the bed trying to join in mutual love. Failing, they grab hands and run off into the forest (Jungian symbol for life). Presumably this is Broughton's vision of our First Parents' expulsion from the Garden of Eden. A naked Pan sits on the antique bed's head frame and wails a tune on a saxophone. Broughton himself, sans clothes, appears seated in the lotus position; a snake, symbol of sexuality. is coiled in front of him. Thus far the prelude, which generally draws a mixed audience response; some are uncomfortable, some enjoying the nudity; at any rate, audience tension is high. People begin to move to the bed and around it and some

in it; some hold hands, some are naked, some dressed. By proximity to the magic bed, they will all confront their individual sexuality. The then 78year-old photographer, Imogene Cunningham, carries a baby and places it on the bed. Strange bedfellows join in permutations and combinations in the bed: three teenage girls with two boys, a middle-aged couple, a man writing; a man and woman exchange tops and bottoms of their pajamas and end up naked on the bed making love. People prepare to go to bed; to leave the bed, to reach the bed; some are hurried, some are slow. A man dressed in denims slowly puts his boots on and gets into the bed. (At this, for the first time, the audience laughs freely. Tension is lightening.) Nudity, pubic hair, penises take a few frames to get accustomed to. A night-gowned lady, played by Marge Harvey, Broughton's costume designer, looks for a man under the bed and finding him (Kermit Sheets) rushes away. A girl leaps from the bed, naked, onto a motorcycle passing by. A naked young man finds a snake-lady poised over him. There is a sudden quiet as the snake-woman moves up the body of the nude man. The audi-

ence is more comfortable with the next tigerwoman. She is chased by the aging but cherubic painter, Jean Varda, in a costume resembling Fellini's hero in 8-1/2. The audience explodes into laughter when the tiger-woman turns on the now exhausted Varda and leaping on his back, rides him. Varda jumps off the bed and the tigerwoman runs after him. A naked, fortyish black woman and a young white man, dressed in a suit, play out a reverse master/slave role. He washes her breasts as she casually smokes a cigarette, looking very much like the Queen of Sheba must have looked as David knelt before her. All these human beings--young, middle-aged, and old, the wise, the silly, the beautiful, the weird-act out the reality/fantasy of what humans can do or think they would like to do in bed. These people pre-date Last Tango in Paris by six years and have much more fun. The next sequence introduces the spiritual happenings in bed. A doctor/priest, played by poet and Zen proselytizer Alan Watts, moves around the bed administering Holy Communion to a dying man. His movements are in slow motion;

10
Broughton wants to express the ceremony and pomp of this experience. The man, as he is dying, pulls up the sheet over his own face, thereby exposing his huge white feet. Broughton has cheated death of its fear. This is followed by rapid shots of a great many nude people all piled in the bed waggling their feet at the camera, as if to ask, "death where is thy sting?" The last sequence brings all the people together as they circle the bed. Pan plays his saxophone. Adam and Eve return to the bed. They are now able to join in love. The final shot is of Broughton bowing his head to the snake in the acceptance of human sexuality, as the bed, now empty, moves away down the hill. Audiences respond to this film because of its beautiful visuals, its joy, its humor, and its realistic acceptance of sexuality. There is no heavyhanded preaching of sexual freedom itself. The old, the young, the middle-aged play out their sexuality with grace. Viewers know the visuals are not meant to shock but to express the beauty of one's own gift of sexuality; one's own natural right to sexuality. The Bed made Broughton famous; it was shown throughout the United States and Europe, much more widely than most experimental films. It was one of the first films with "frontal nudity" that was not classified as pornographic. Broughton called The Bed "a horizontal prayer of affirmative eroticism."'9 It seems safe to predict that it is a work that will last. In the early sixties, Bruce Baillie, a film-maker who had attended San Francisco State and the London Film School (among various schools he had attended) returned from a two-year stay in Europe. He worked on the docks unloading bananas, lived in a Volkswagen beetle with his dog, and began showing and making films. He founded Canyon Cinema, "a floating underground theatre"'2 in a tiny town in the redwoods called Canyon. A new generation of film-makers began to coalesce in the San Francisco Bay Area. They again had a showcase for their work: Baillie, Bruce Conner, Robert Nelson, Gunvor Nelson, Dorothy Wiley, Jordan Belson, to name but a few. By 1965 the interest in experimental film had increased. There were many theaters to show them;

BROUGHTON
Intersection, Cedar Alley, The Presidio, The Surf, and numerous coffee houses. But Broughton's influence on these film-makers was limited. They were a generation who were busy with other concerns than poetic fantasies; Broughton remained a classicist, a sophisticate, as aloof from social satire as from total film abstraction. Only in Stan Brakhage's Anticipation of the Night (1958) or Ron Rice's The Flower Thief (1960) can Broughton's influence be suspected. In 1968, Jacques Ledoux organized the Second Experimental Festival of Knokke-le-Zoute, reaping over 300 entries from all over the world, many made with the film stock he had earlier dispensed. The Bed won a first prize. Broughton's film was seen by European directors such as JeanLuc Godard, Roman Polanski, Agnes Varda, and Alain Resnais, and by critics and other film people from many countries. As with painters and poets, experimental film-makers have always been each other's best audience. But now there was a new growing audience made up of people interested to see the films and learn from them. But Broughton turned from the sure-fire success of The Bed's imagery and theme and began a new film, Dreamwood. Twenty-four years had passed since he had analyzed his relationship with his mother in Mother's Day. He wished now to analyze his relationship with the world. The images in Dreamwood are rich in myth, difficult to "read" at first viewing. Most American audiences have little classical sophistication and they seemed confused as well as bored with the "new" Broughton. For the first time, the audience was aware of camera movements in a Broughton film and didn't appear to appreciate them; moving camera, zooms, superimpositions and special optical effects. It was not until the film had been in distribution for several years that audiences began to respond with admiration to the lush visuals and mythical representations of the characters. John Schofill, who shot most of Dreamwood, believed the film had failed until he saw it again in 1974. Schofill, himself a most accomplished experimental film-maker, now considers Dreamwood a masterpiece and has purchased his own print in order to view it repeatedly.

BROUGHTON
Somewhere there is a forest somewhere at the center of the world there is a forest of dream, a sacred wood, a grove of initiation. Somewhere there is what there has always been the lair of the Great Goddess, the bed of the ultimate rapture."'

11
Dreamwood's images reflect Schofill's precise mind. When he left for Chicago to start his new job at the Art Institute, Fred Padula took over the camera work. The opening shot is a half moon as it moves through the sky. This shot is superimposed on a morning sky. The camera zooms in on a naked young man lying on the ground of a forestthe forest, as in The Bed, representing the world. This is the hero who next will be seen in his tower, away from toil and trouble. He looks out from the tower over an industrial complex. Over this is superimposed the face of Alchemina, Daughter of the Wise.24(The camerawork has great influence on the emotional impact of this film. The pace is never hurried; scene after scene dissolve into one another, moving the audience with a trance-like rhythm.) In this sequence, Alchemina's face is constantly superimposed over the different shots: she is seen not only as a woman but as a symbol. The hero tears his picture off the wall and throws the pieces out the window.25As he stares out, Alchemina lies on the ground; above her stands a middle-aged couple. She holds a silver ring in her hands. The couple lift her to her feet and take her to a limosine. As she is driven away, she looks back. The hero leaps from the tower window. The audience reaction is one of anticipation; can he reach her in time? He tries to follow them; unable to catch them, he runs as if in a dream, his body moving forward but carrying him nowhere. In Broughton's Jungian psychic universe, Alchemina represents the hero's anima being abducted by the First Parents. He must follow. He has begun his journey into self. The camera pans with the hero as he races down a long pier. When he comes to the end he looks out over the water. A boatman magically appears and hands up the silver ring. The audience is now caught up in this dream; knowing that, as in our own dreams, characters appear and disappear without our questioning how or where they got there. Charon, for it is he whom the boatman represents, rows our hero across the river Styx: the river of death and rebirth. This prelude to the film fades out as a half moon again races across the sky. The following images show the hero's rite of passage. When he reaches shore, the hero must climb

This poem, read by Broughton at the beginning of Dreamwood, is the theme of Broughton's that has been in all his films: the journey toward self and love. Broughton's marriage with Suzanna has been a happy one. They have two children: a girl, Serena, and a boy, Orion. They are as attractive and charming as their parents. Broughton's relationship with his son is very good. His daughter and he admire each other but seem shy of each other. Mrs. Broughton understands her daughter, and balances her role as artist, wife, and mother with grace.
James needs a lot of freedom. He needs to be left alone. He goes out to his studio after breakfast. I see him again for dinner. In the first years of our marriage this was hard but now I also need this freedom. When he goes off to teach or lecture in New York or Europe, the children and me eat trash food, go to awful movies . . . and 1 am always delighted to have him come home.22

In Dreamwood, the great archtype of Mother has been extended in Jungian terms to include the whole great mystery of the Great Mother in her many forms and in her universality.
The protagonist of Dreamwood is not intended to be a specialized, developed personality: he is as personally uncharacterized as the hero/Heroine in a fairy tale.23

Dreamwood is the most serious of Broughton's film. It is not to be taken as one person's adventure, but every human's quest for the true self. This film is a direct homage to the mythical films of Jean Cocteau. Shooting began in July 1970. From the first it proved to be difficult. Schofill took two hours to make one set-up; Broughton's usual time was twenty minutes. Broughton and Schofill struggled from the first, yet Schofill was justified. He is an artist and his cinematography is some of the most beautiful ever shot in experimental film history.

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a high cliff. (The conquest of a mountain is a universal symbol for struggle; the German mountain films are of such struggles.) A crone dressed in red stands watching him. Representing a good force in his initiation, she puts the silver ring of Alchemina on his wrist, and she hands him an ax as he moves off into the forest. The forest becomes more dense. The hero sees a person dressed in the outfit that Alchemina's abductress wore. The person stares into the mirror of an ornate dressing table, like the one seen in Mother's Day. The hero approaches and is reflected in the mirror. The person turns and we see it is Father. He offers gifts to the hero but the hero throws off his influence. The hero smashes the dressing table and mirror. He strikes Father. There are many shots of this action repeating, as in Mother's Day, the scene where mother enters and re-enters the room. After this scene, Broughton seems to have said a final farewell to the memory of his mother. Again as in Mother's Day the hero now encounters characters that are memories of Broughton's growing into manhood: a naked young man, a nun, a naked young woman, children. The nun, in her encounter with the hero, removes her gown and throws it over him; this is after she has commanded him to remove his clothes. The nun represents the Mother Superior of the forest who prepares him for entry. (Audiences are very uneasy here. Priests and nuns are not to be seen as sexual beings; old repressive traditions die hard in American audiences.) Another myth is exploded as we see a child in a tree. He is not the ideal child; he leaps from this tree like a savage and is joined by other small savages. They force the hero to the ground. The camera whirls as the children grapple with the hero, representing his loss of innocence. A naked girl is seen next as she moves through the forest. The hero follows her as she enters a sun-lit pool. We have seen such pools only in our dreams, pure water reflecting the sun's warmth. All of us have wanted to cleanse our sins amid such pastoral beauty. Naked young women lolling around the pool disappear, as the hero enters the water. He begins to splash water on his naked body. A blonde woman, who stands in the middle of the pool, beckons to him. He goes to her and as he starts to

BROUGHTON
embrace her, she struggles to drown him: he must pay the price for daring to approach Artemis in her bath. At this unclassical viewers gasp in surprise, only realizing during the next scene that the hero had violated a rule of the forest. He wakes to find himself outside the forest. He must begin his quest again. The hero climbs a hill. Audiences are by this time very aware that the people he encounters are not your everydayaverage characters; we wrack our faint memories of Greek mythology. Alchemina is constantly superimposed over the visuals. The hero meets the Amazon, Hippolyte, dressed in modern black leather and whip and overcomes her. He encounters Lilith, who takes her pleasure with him. Women in the audience applaud his submission; the men enjoy. With these last two encounters, Broughton's wry humor gleams through the serious text. Next the hero must fight the Woodsman, who represents the practical knowledge of the world. The Woodsman sends him on his most difficult climb; to where old Queen Hecate lives. Overcoming his fear, he kneels before her.26He is reborn. A superimposition of Alchemina holding a dove fills the screen. She looses the dove as a symbol that the hero has met all the challenges. The final sequence is the hero's celebration with the world. He lies on the ground. He kisses the earth. The screen goes to white, then becomes very bright as a symbol of the earth accepting his homage. He disrobes. Again putting his body against the earth, he caresses the ground. Surroundedby a grove of trees, he makes love to the earth. Superimposed is a shot of Alchemina over his body. Sun and moon bless him by flooding him with their light. His anima and animus have joined; he is whole. On viewing Dreamwood and Jean Cocteau's Orphee, we may easily recognize the similarity of themes: the search for love and the covenant with death. Broughton said, "You cannot live fully until you have come to terms with your own death."27 The hero of Dreamwood is like the other heroes of Broughton's films. They conquer, but only after trials and pain. Broughton neither preaches nor scolds, but holds up to his viewers a poetic realization of what they can achieve if they fight through their own rites of passage. Broughton's audiences

BROUGHTON
know that under the once-upon-a-time myth world of a Broughton film there is a solid psychological reality for those who will seek realization as a whole human being. Death, eros, hope, despair, love, and sorrow are the natural fate of mankind; we can meet them with humor, strength, wisdom, and joy. Mother's Day, The Pleasure Garden, The Bed, and Dreamwood express this triumph of humanity.

13
24. James Broughton's Schemata. "Do you know how little you know?" "Who are you?" I asked her. "I am your agony, I am your joy." 25. Reminiscent of Mother's Day: the past being disregarded. 26. The mythical challengers have all been played by the same woman, Margo St. James. 27. Broughton, p. 25. BIBLIOGRAPHY Books The Playground, Centaur Press, San Francisco, California, 1949. The Ballard of Mad Jenny, Centaur Press, San Francisco, California, 1949. Musical Chairs, Centaur Press, San Francisco, California, 1950. An Almanacfor Amorists, Collection Merlin, Paris, France. True and False Unicorn, Grove Press, New York, 1957. The Right Playmate, Pearce and Bennett, San Francisco, California, 1964. The Water Circle, Pterodactyl Press, San Francisco, California, 1965. Tidings, Pterodactyl Press, San Francisco, California, 1965. Look In Look Out, Toad Press, Portland, Oregon, 1968. High Kukus, Jargon Books, Raleigh, North Carolina, 1969. A Long Undressing, Jargon Society, New York, 1971. Films Mother's Day, 1948. Adventures ofJimmy, 1950. Four in the Afternoon, 1951. Loony Tom The Happy Lover, 1951. The Pleasure Garden, 1953. The Bed, 1968. Nuptiae, 1969. The Golden Positions, 1970. This Is It, 1971. Dreamwood, 1972. High Kukus, 1973. Testament, 1974. Water Circle, 1975. Erogeny, 1975. Plays Summer Fury, in The Best One Act Plays, New York: Dodd Mead, 1957. The Last Word. in Religious Drama 3. New York: Meridian Books, 1959. Burning Questions, produced at The Playhouse, San Francisco, California, 1958. The Rites of Women, produced at The Playhouse, San Francisco, California, 1959. Bedlam, produced at the O'Neill Theatre Foundation, Waterford, Connecticut, 1969. Poems in Anthologies Faber Book of Modern American Poetry, ed., W. H. Auden, Faber & Faber, London, 1956.

NOTES 1. Kubelka is a well-known experimental film-maker himself, in Vienna. 2. James Broughton. A Long Undressing. New York: The Jargon Society, 1971, p. 3. 3. James Broughton. Interview with author, San Anselmo, California. January26, 1976. 4. Ibid. 5. Sidney Peterson. Interview with author, San Francisco, California, May 10, 1973. 6. David Curtis. Experimental Cinema. New York: Dell, 1971, p. 69. 7. Peterson, p. 5. 8. "Art in Cinema Revisited". Interview with author, San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, California. July 20, 1973. 9. Broughton, p. 4. 10. James Broughton. Interview with author, San Francisco, California, April 23, 1973. 11. Kermit Sheets. Interviewwith author, San Anselmo, California, April 24, 1973. 12. Jack Stauffacher. Interview with author, San Francisco, California. April 17, 1973. 13. Sheets, p. 8. 14. Basil Wright, letter to author, London, England. December 28, 1973. 15. James Broughton, interview with author. San Francisco, California. October 29, 1973. 16. Suzanna Broughton, interview with author, San Anselmo, California. June 11, 1974. 17. Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Bruce Conner, to name a few. 18. Sue Breitrose, interview with author, San Francisco, California, June 25, 1974. 19. James Broughton. Sunday Examiner & Chronicle. San Francisco, California. April 7, 1968. 20. Statement for Program at the Film Center, Gallery of Modern Art, New York, October, 1966. 21. James Broughton. Schemata for Dreamwood. 22. Suzanna Broughton, p. 18. 23. James Broughton, interivew with author, San Francisco, California. December 22, 1974.

14
Evergreen Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, "San Francisco Scene," Grove Press, 1957. Silver Treasury of Light Verse, ed. Oscar Williams, New American Library, New York, 1957. A New Folder. ed. Daisy Aldan, Folder Editions, New York, 1959. The New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen, Grove Press, New York, 1960. Erotic Poetry, ed. William Cole, Random House, New York, 1963.

BROUGHTON
Mark In Time. Glide Publications, San Francisco, California, 1971. America ForeverNew, Crowell, New York, 1968.

Recordings San Francisco Poets. Evergreen Records, New York, 1958. The Bard and the Harper. MEA Records, Sausalito, California, 1965.

GIDEON BACHMANN

Confessions of

Festival

Goer

In 1976 film festivals will be 40 years old. On this occasion, Gideon Bachmann asks a few pertinent and vexing questions concerning this institution, based on his observations of Venice, Cannes, London, Tehran, and other festivals. The pattern set by the London Festival has been followed closely by the New York Festival and to some extent by the San Francisco Festival and more recently by the enormously successful Los Angeles Filmex: all aim at their resident film enthusiasts, and have gradually minimized directly society involvement and expensive publicity gimmickry.
I wasn't there when Mussolini invented film festivals by starting one on the Lido of Venice in 1936, but I've seen the newsreels: prancing starlets then as they have remained in Cannes today, prince Volpi and Vittorio Mussolini surrounded by them descending the beach steps of the Excelsior Hotel. Only German and Italian films were shown, of course, but it helped prolong the tourist season. After all, the Lido hotels were and are, largely, owned by the Volpi family. Since then, according to Variety, more than 500 communities the world over have tried to copy the starlet-tourism-cinema formula. It was a good idea when it was started, but it's dying. Slowly but surely it's being taken over by the "big-city formula" pioneered by the London Film Festival, which brings films directly to viewers without the intermediary of snobbish screenings to critics and professionals on a sexy but remote beach. The question is: to how many viewers? I used to travel to festivals because they were the first place where the important films showed, and often the only place where they could be seen whole. Today I go because often festivals are still the only place where important films can be seen at all. Because despite everything the commercial structure of the cinema system hasn't changed, and a good film continues to have little chance to go beyond festival presentations, unless it contains the magic ingredient, the film alchemist's dream potential: salability. And quality, of course, doesn't guarantee salability. (If I could answer the question "what does?" I wouldn't be here eking out a living by writing.) If you do write about films, however, or if you make them, festivals are useful aids in propping

BACHMANN and out to an atrocity of a multiple dome constructed by a pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright's on an arid hill fifty miles into the snowy foothills north of Tehran-only to be told by a somewhat faded English lady who paints here, "waiting to be discovered" by more than her Persian husband, that what counts is the harmony of the spaces, not whether all this pomp corresponds to Iranian social and political reality. London does the opposite: by modestly providing films that cannot be seen in other ways, it is part of the social and political reality of the city. The free tickets are given primarily to those who could directly help the films make their public way: distributors and cinema owners, and only a few to the press and invited guests. This "big-city formula" addresses itself directly to those, perhaps few, who are the final audience for the engaged film. As a result there is no waste and no competition, and the system is well on the way towards covering its own cost (this year, close to 70%). This is the basic formula for eliminating the expensive middleman, and thus perhaps, in

17 some people's interpretation, the formula for a socialist festival. Eventually, the films made for this kind of event, and for the kind of people it addresses itself to, can become less expensive as well. Dropping the need to compete with the blockbusters will free this engaged cinema and reduce its cost, and perhaps the blockbusters will simultaneously be freed of the need to make a claim to art. The best sights, and perhaps the best indications that this development is already underway, were, both London and Tehran, the faces of the people in the long lines that were forming, often in biting cold, outside of the screenings. Those Iranian students in their blue jeans, mixed with figures hidden in traditional veils, were no different in their avidity to see the Chaplin or Antonioni retrospective from their equivalents on the South Bank. It may be limited in size, but the public for the good film exists, and it exists everywhere. What we must do is adjust our structures to their needs.

ERICH KEEL

From
The

Militant

Cinema
of

to

Neo-Realism:

Example

Pueblo

Chico

El nuevo cine, the new Latin American cinema, translated by some as "militant cinema" or even "guerilla cinema," is in crisis. Political film directors in Argentina have withdrawn all their films from public showings in fear of reprisals from rightwing terrorists;most young Brazilians, including Glauber Rocha, have proclaimed the death of cinema n6vo; and in Chile film production has virtually come to a halt under the military government of Pinochet. The situation in Bolivia is hardly different. In this chronically revolutionary and seriously underpopulated country, filmmaking has always been in a critical state. The only

regular producer of feature films, the militant Ukamau collective, nearly collapsed when Brazilian-backed officers staged a violent coup d'etat which put an end to all left-wing activities. By making political and stylistic concessions, Ukamau just managed to survive, and on March 7, 1974, the group could finally premiere its fifth feature, Pueblo Chico (Small Town). The advent of this film was hailed by the national press, and rightly so; despite some flaws in the acting of the leads, Pueblo Chico gives magnificent evidence of the political realism of Ukamau, and the artistic talent of its new director, Antonio Eguino.

The theme and story of Pueblo Chico are eminently Bolivian, which may create the false impression that Ukamau has little deviated from its earlier political commitments. The film attacks one of the central controversies in contemporary Bolivian politics-the Agrarian Reform. Decreed shortly after the 1952 Revolution, the measure led to significant changes in the socioeconomic structure of the country. The class of Creole latifundistas was expropriated and disappeared, and much liberated land was returned to the Indians. Finally, after 400 years of slavery and servitude, the natives became fully integrated citizens. But the Revolution created new unreconcilable divisions in the country. While few except the landed aristocracy disputed the necessity for reforms, everybodydisagreed on how to administer them. After swift initial successes, a seemingly endless period of strife followed until, in 1964, General Barrientos deposed the 12-year-old, demoralized MNR government.To restore "order" Barrientos decided to restrict union and political activities among peasants, and to favor private enterprise and foreign capital. Eventually he succeeded in subverting revolutionary progress with a rhetoric of revolution that was persuasive enough to turn peasants against the guerrillas of Che Guevara. Set in this regressive period of the late sixties, Pueblo Chico tells the story of Arturo, a student of sociology, who is returningto his town to reversethe

stagnant order in favor of the campesinos. His father, Don Lucas, hires him to oversee the remaining parts of what was a large estate before the Agrarian Reform. But Arturospends more time in the near-by Indian pueblo. He begins to improve the teaching of children, organizes help for the sick, and assists community elders in making political decisions. The Indians are impressed by his presence. It seems he fills the people with a new sense of pride and courage to demand and assert their rights. But as he gets more deeply involved, the whites and mestizos of the town decide to rid themselves of Arturo, who personifies the growing Indian threat. Don Lucas dismisses his son, a new teacher is appointed to the Indian school, and worst of all, the town leaders bribe the agricultural commission into getting land back from the Indians. Suddenly, Arturo is isolated. Even his fiancee, Arminda, and his universityfriends object to his involvement, and as he hears of threats against his person, he knows that he must give up and leave his home town. Oscar Soria, who founded Ukamau together with director JorgeSanjines, has writtenthe scripts to all its films. For Pueblo Chico, he developed a plot which through the character of Arturo manages to x-ray a typical small Bolivian town and thereby implicate today's propagators of the age-old conspiracy against Indian emancipation. One may disagree with Soria on why the Bolivian revolution remained unfinished-it seems he blames too much

PUEBLO CHICO
the unholy white-mestizo alliance and is not critical enough ofArturo's gentle but inadequate approach to his task. One may also regret that Soria chose a bourgeois characteras dramatic vehicle instead of a protagonist from the workingor peasant class, as in the earlier films. Still, there is a pervasive and authentic concern for the social inequalities in Bolivia, and it is this concern that brought about the favorable response to Pueblo Chico. Highschool and university students sympathized with Arturo's plight, and campesinos, Bolivia's vast majority, saw much of their own experience reflected in the images of the stifling conditions in the countryside. Pueblo Chico succeeded with a very heterogeneous audience, and (naturally) critics have sought to explain the artistic merits that led to such a rare success. They failed, however, to ask why Ukamau could finish its film and have it distributed in the country at a time independent directors throughout Latin America were being relentlessly harassed and silenced. At this point, it is no small matter to mention that Pueblo Chico was officially praised by the censor at its preview, and that it was later shown to cadets at the military academy of the capital. Praise has hardlybeen the prevailinggovernment response to the film-making activity of Ukamau, though on one occasion Sanjines, Soria and their friends did get encouragement from authorities. Their first short, the programmatic Revolution (1962), was banned after then President Paz Estenssoro had personally insisted on seeing it. In 1964 the new Barrientos regime invited the young film-makers to head the Bolivian Insititute of Cinema, for which they made Ukamau (1966), their first full-length feature. (It was not until 1967 that Sanjines and Soria named their group "ukamau," a popular expression in Aymara meaning "that's it.") At its premiere the minister in charge of the Institute discovered he had been duped-the cineastes had given him one scriptwhile they filmed another. As a retaliatory measure he closed the Institute and refused to pay the remaining bill for film development, which prompted the Argentine laboratoryto destroy the originalcopy. Blood of the Condor, made in 1968-69 at great personal sacrifice to its producers, was first barred from national screens because the American Embassy objected to

19
its denouncement of the Peace Corps; but, hard-pressedby the protests of priests, journalists, and students, the governmentwas forced to lift the ban. Ukamau's next project, Los caminos de la muerte (The Roads to Death), never even reached the screen. After three quarters of the shooting had been concluded, Antonio Eguino, then cameraman, took the exposed material to a West German laboratory, where for inexplicable reasons the film was ruined in the process of development. Jorge Sanjines suspected sabotage, and the shooting was never resumed. Instead, Ukamau began work on the now famous Courageofthe People, the last film Sanjines was to direct for the group. In August 1971, just after that film had been completed, General Banzer toppled the populist regime of Torres and initiated a hard-line anti-Communist dictatorship. Sanjines was immediately expelled from the country and The Courage of the People banned. The crackdowndeprivedUkamau of badly needed revenues from the planned national distribution, and it left the group leaderless. In Europe, too, the film faced difficulties. Italian State Television (RAI), which had produced The Courage of the People and obtained distribution rights for European countries, was upset with anti-American statements made in the film. There was some furor and name-calling at the Seventh Festival of Pesaro. Italian critics there praised The Courage of the People, and RAI finally decided to cut some controversial scenes and distribute the mutilated version. Such continuous harassment of the work of Ukamau is the norm in the experience of politically engaged film-makers in Latin America and to a

20
certain degree the inevitable response to their combative attitudes. El nuevo cine must be understood as a phenomenon growing out of the guerrilla movements that swept the continent in the sixties, and if the partisans of Ukamau never went as far as calling the projector"a gun that can shoot twenty-four frames per second,' they did believe that film could "create a consciousness for liberation."2 In that respect, the expulsion of the Peace Corps from Bolivia in the wake of Blood of the Condor was their most spectacular political achievement. But General Banzer made it clear from the beginning that he would not tolerate dissent in any form. This, as much as its own financial difficulties in the years following 1971, compelled Ukamau to make concessions or go underground. As Oscar Soria has said: "Today, I distinguish between the cinema that is needed, the films we would like to make-and the cinema that is possible."3Thus, in the planning and realization of Pueblo Chico, his group was driveninto a politics of style that finally led to a neorealist picture. To varyingdegrees, Ukamau has produced all its features along the lines of the Italian praxis of the forties-authentic settings, blend of professional and nonprofessional actors, and an adherence to local speech and customs. For the shooting of Pueblo Chico, Ukamau moved crewand equipment to a small town in the mountainous privince of Chuquisaca. Some of the group had explored the town and countryside earlier to assume the participation of the natives-participation which would involve more than mere permission to film their community. Ukamau wanted the Indians to enact situations from their lives, and part of Pueblo Chico's success is the achievementof that ambition. But spontaneous cooperation would not have occurred without letting the Indians speak Quechua and without the careful choice of a lead, Juan Carlos Aguirre, who knew their tongue. The confidence that the Indians have in Arturo in the film is the same that they gave Aguirre during the realization of the film. One day, director Eguino was strolling through the community, met an old Indian woman, and, as the script anticipated a conversation with an aged person, immediately called the lead and the crew. Aguirre's task was simple: he had to greet the woman, Mama Jesusa,

PUEBLO CHICO
give her a sack of flour and improvisea dialog. The result is a scene of strong emotional impact. Mama Jesusa speaks with perfect ease and sincerity about sorrows that are hers and not invented by the scriptwriter-her husband has died, and all her sons have left her to look for a better life in La Paz or Argentina. She talks to Arturo as if she had known him for a long time, and as if she were oblivious to the camera and film technicians working around her. Evidently, the crew had a feeling for the psychology of the Indian, and Aguirre had to master the language of Mama Jesusa. The concern for the proper speech of a certain region or class (as in the case of the peculiar Spanish spoken by mestizos) is just one element that has contributed to Pueblo Chico's quality of authenticity and verisimilitude. Another is the accurate observation of customs. The Bolivian people have almost a compulsive tendency to express their character in a continuous festival of religious holidays, public ceremonies, and private fiestas. Ukamau took, therefore, meticulous care in recreating the general ambience as much as the correct details of the folklore. Take for example the filming of the picnic to which Arturo is invited by his white friends. According to the script, Arturo had to perform a cueca, a popular dance, which Aguirre interpreted in the typical slower style of his hometown Cochabamba. As the people of Chuquisaca like their cueca fast, Ukamau asked a young man fromt he region to substitute for Aguirre and then filmed the dance so that one cannot tell the difference between the two actors. In view of the
CHICO. Aguirre and MamaJesusa in PUEBLO

PUEBLO CHICO
seriousness of Pueblo Chico's subject matter, such concern for accuracy may appear trivial; but if one believes that social conflicts can only be represented when they grow out of a correct anthropology of society, as the neorealist directors did, then Ukamau's effort was not in vain. The wayPueblo Chico was financed is perhaps as interesting and significant as its mode of production. To begin with, Antonio Eguino set up a budget of one million pesos ($50,000). A Bolivian bank then approved a substantial credit on the basis of a 24-page cost estimate. To meet the anticipated one million pesos, Ukamau had to turn to private donors, among others to Zulma Yugar's father, who was willing to contribute if his daughter, a pop-singer, was given the role of the female lead. The deal made, it turned out that Yugar was not as talented as expected, and her acting accounts for some of the weakest moments in the film. When shooting was well under way the bank had not yet made a single payment and eventually, toward the close of filming, the credit was trimmed to half the originally approved amount. Thereafter, only improvisation could keep the project afloat. The principal actors were granted no more than small advances, and the campesinos, responsible for a good half of the acting, settled for two thousand pesos plus some timber for a new school. Finally, Eguino, a professional photographer with a studio on Prado, La Paz's most elegant avenue, had to sell part of his private camera equipment in order to buy film stock. Producing a feature film against such odds is something of a miracle-a far cry from the practices of the industry in Europe and the United States. Ukamau's experience, however, is not unlike that of many Italian neorealist directors in the forties. During the years of Resistance and Liberatin, the Italians turned to a cinema that was "poor" in a very radical sense: they dispensed with stars, studios, and extras in order to give better evidence of the effects of social injustice and misery. But as Visconti's later "expensive" career dramatically illustrates, poverty was not the sole impetus (moment) in the fashioning of neorealism, it was just its beginning. Essential to the making of the style was a new aesthetic orientation, particularly

21
toward the question of the film as narrative. Instead of shaping their fictions according to dramatic, ideological or psychological categories, neorealist directors structured the elements of film-image, dialogue, music, noise and writtenwords-in terms of the social fact. Andre Bazin came to call this method "phenomenological," a very adequate description of their attitude toward both filmic material and reality.4 Ukamau's recent stylistic interests have shifted precisely toward this type of narrative. Their previous films were shaped and controlled by a strong will to manipulate art and reality in favor of a certain ideological message: in Ukamau music served to underline the suspenseful revenge of the Indian hero against the mestizo villain, and in Blood of the Condor, both the caricature of Peace Corps members as well as the flashbacks that unravel the fatal Peace Corps activities are narrative devices to evidence the need for revolution. Such blatant contrivance and distortion are altogether alien to Pueblo Chico. Here, the social fact and fabric, the Indian pueblo, the class of ex-hacienderos and Arturo's campaign, are first and foremost made to exist on the screen. For that reason, most scenes unfold at a slow pace. Moreover they are often repetitious in mode and motif: the idea of a merry-making Bolivia is introduced with the student picnic, asserted with the Indian harvest festival and the Christmas party given for the officials of the agricultural commission, and finally rounded off with a marvelous street dance by the whole town. Of these four scenes only the Christmas party directly sustains the plot--it shows the occasion on which Don Lucas and his friends bribe the officials into dispossessing the Indians of land. All the others serve little to push forward the intrigue; even their bearing on the film's theme, the frozen Agrarian Reform, is oblique. They exist on the screen to suggest a milieu that is highly immune to incursions of social change; but the order in which they appear, their chronology, is very much of subordinate interest and import. They could have been edited differently, without much affecting the development of the story. The same holds true for the above-mentioned conversation between Arturo and the old Indian

22
woman, and for many more scenes. Editing is, therefore, no longer the decisive narrative artifice that it was in the earlier films, from Revolution to Blood of the Condor; nor is dramatically conceived dialogue for that matter. Pueblo Chico's quality of consistency and continuity is to a much larger extent achieved in the manner of the epic: it begins to take form and grow with the increasing weight of the slow but steady accumulation of scenes and sequences within the film. As the phenomenology of the "small town" keeps projecting bits and pieces of evidence, of social facts, the film gathers narrative momentum, and finally reaches the point of no return--the sad fact of Arturo's failure to start the needed revolution. The narrative strategy of Pueblo Chico adheres to the major tenets of any realist aesthetic, namely, verisimilitude of character and setting, and plausibility of action. What distinguishes the style of Pueblo Chico, and what further relates it to films such as Sciusciai De Sica, (1947) or Il cammino della speranza Germi, (1950), is the reluctance to set forth a political program or thesis, or to assume even a precise ideological point of view. Considering the eminently political nature of the many shortcomings of the Agrarian Reform and the defeat of Arturo's commitment to save the Reform, such indifference may surprise us, but it explains the contradictory responses the film has elicited. For example, Luis Espinal, critic for the liberal-Catholic daily Presencia, attended a discussion about Pueblo Chico in which a young officer spoke up, anxious to know whether Arturo would join the guerillas.5 Students on the other hand hardly speculated about such radical possibilities. In Soria's experience, Pueblo Chico "was received with great enthusiasm at the university . . . many students sympathized with Arturo."6 Defeatism has indeed gotten the better of Bolivian students since their ruinous guerrilla adventure in Teoponte (1970) and the later successive purges of Banzer's secret police. Before leaving his town, Arturo does mention that he is going to do something, though what that will be, he does not say. Ukamau has ingeniously left the ending open, suggesting the feeling of ambiguity that exists throughout the film. For example, Pueblo Chico

PUEBLO CHICO
never names the culprits of oppression the way The Courage of the People does. The reason is simple enough: designating the historical-political framework, so significant in militant cinema, is not the task of the neorealist aesthetic. Linguistically speaking, the phenomenology of reality depends on the connective "and" rather than "because" or "therefore," and, as a result, Pueblo Chico is pledged to offering evidence about Indian life, about its foes and its friends. Ukamau could do no more, for a single frame pointing to the despotic rulers in the capital would have given them reason enough to confiscate the entire film. In resorting to political ambiguity, Soria's group materially saved the rest of its story; and in relying on the phenomenological narrative developed by Italian directors, it succeeded in giving its political maneuver stylistic coherence. With a view to the neorealist crisis of the fifties, one may be suspicious about the truce Ukamau has entered with the betrayers of the Bolivian Revolution. Mario Cannella has analyzed that crisis at length.' He has shown that its roots were the "inter-classism" which the Left and Christian Democrats practiced in the forties to coordinated their struggle against the Fascist enemy.8 Neorealist directors supported and represented this policy of liberation in their films, but when ten years later the alliance was no longer needed, the idea of inter-classism was finally exposed for what it was, that is, false opportunism. It ideologists were discredited; and so was neorealism. Ukamau's present armistice with the regime is not altogether different from the neorealist compromise, except that in Bolivia film-making as such is in question, which was never the case in Italy, not even in her most chaotic moments. Ukamau, therefore, followed a politics we might call pragmatism rather than opportunism when it decided to trade ideological correctness and clarity for survival. In the words of Humberto Rios, a Bolivian director of militant films now living in Buenos Aires, "the importance of Pueblo Chico is to test possibilities which would allow cinema to exist in Bolivia.'"9 With Pueblo Chico, Ukamau has asserted that there can be cinema in Banzer's Bolivia and that the neorealist film is one of its genuine possibil-

PUEBLO CHICO

23

ities. Obviously there are others, such as the New to overcome its crisis. The early films of RosseWave film, the classical documentary, or the llini, De Sica, and Germi provided perhaps the documentary in the mode of cinema verite. But best cinematic grammar to work with in that Soria and Eguino chose none of these alterna- difficult moment, but a price had to be paid. It tives, and not without good cause. If their models was inevitable that Ukamau reintroduce the had been Jean-Luc Godard or Chris Marker, they individual protagonist, a figure the group had would have practiced a cinema admired by come to reject for smacking too much of Western cinephiles in the capital and discussed by critics ideology and culture; that a fictional story take at European festivals. However, in the words of the place of the reconstruction of historical Eguino, Ukamau "makes films for a specific events; and that finally the political aggressive audience . . . films for national use, for the language be completely eliminated. In sum, middle class and the popular groups of Bolivia, working within the neorealist conventions inand not for the elite."10The irony of its militant volved a retreat from the radical sociology of cinema was that it prompted successive regimes Fanon and Freire which had so strongly into force Ukamau into isolation, and at times even fluenced Ukamau's previous position toward cine underground. And nothing would have been more popular. But neorealism was also the cause of what is alien to Ukamau than clandestine activity, sepanew and most attractive in Pueblo Chico. rated from the Bolivian majority. In ten years of intense practice and discussion, Through its unique blend of fiction and social Ukamau has gradually developed and perfected documentary, it proposed a method that despite an aesthetic for a cinema that is to reconcile art, bourgeois limitations could engage specific poppolitics, and the social reality of Bolivia. The ular notions or situations in the writing and major issue debated by the group and expounded filming of a narrative. For example, Arturo likes by Sanjines in numerous interviews, manifestoes, to play the charango, a small guitarlike instruand essays is the making of a cine popular ment that is a favorite with Indians and mestizos ("popular cinema") in which Bolivians create and but is ridiculed by Don Lucas and whites in enact their proper stories while the members of general. Don Lucas says that Arturo "should be Ukamau merely offer their technical and organi- polite and proper in everything, in his friendzational skills." Their most radical efforts at ships, his conduct, even in drinking and playtranslating this idea of popular cinema to the ing." After all, in his family "there were screen are The Roads to Death and The Courage ministers." In another scene it is Arminda, his of the People. Both films were inspired by conventional middle-class fianc6e, who reprihistorical incidents (Courage, for example, by the mands him. She has heard that Arturo drank massacre of miners in 1967) and produced with chicha, a liquor that natives distill from corn, and natives whose acting talents were considered less danced with an Indian girl at a feast of the relevant than the fact they had witnessed or acted pueblo. She is disgusted, not with Arturo's in the original events. But as Ukamau conceived drinking and dancing, but rather with the them for partisan purposes, authorities interfered company he kept. In her opinion, Indians are even before they could be seen by those who had "dirty and beasts." If Arturo's quarrels with Don participated in their making; and in view of the Lucas or Arminda are obviously dramatic, other politics of cine popular, this was a worse setback moments are more descriptive. There are some than critical failure. marvelous scenes that document how Indians After the exile of Sanjines, in the fall of 1971, teach their children Spanish, build a school, or Soria, Eguino and their remaining collaborators celebrate harvest. But whatever the narrative needed a new approach if they wanted to continue mode or situation, the material of Pueblo Chico is making films "for national use"-films intended always part of the reality of Bolivia. for an audience either illiterate or misinformed by The same was the case for Ukamau, Blood of foreign propaganda. Obviously the example of the Condor, etc., except that in those films, the neorealism was instrumental in helping Ukamau material was selected and ordered on the basis of

24
a well-defined thematics and ideology--the struggle of liberation from national and foreign oppressors. Until 1971, the telling of the story of Bolivia in revolt was the essential moment in the definition of cine popular. With its latest film, Ukamau rephrases its aesthetic, putting more emphasis on the quality of expression. This could have easily led into the dead end of formalism. If it did not, it is because Ukamau developed the narrative in terms of the expressive possibilities of specific socio-cultural facts (the charango, the prejudice against Indians, etc.) and not in terms of cinematic stylization (montage, shots, lighting, etc.). Most scenes in Pueblo Chico fulfill two functions at least: first, an anthropological function, describing social facts and social attitudes of a certain community, and second, a structural function, integrating these descriptive elements in the narrative of the film. What Ukamau accomplishes is the creation of a coherent iconographic system in which meanings that evolve from individual objects and situations are codified into the larger conflict of Arturo and the Indians vs. the ex-hacienderos. It is this codification and the resulting iconography that define the expressive potential of Pueblo Chico. Unquestionably, Pueblo Chico is Ukamau's most Bolivian film. It comes as no surprise that the 1974 Festival of Valladolid in Spain did not recognize its distinct quality, and that a New York distributor refused to promote it in the United States. More relevant is the popular and critical success the film obtained in its own country, and the solution it offers to the impasse of militant cinema. The cin6astes of Ukamau could not have achieved so much without their commitment to the principles of neorealist politics and style, such as low-budget production technique and rather elusive ideology. The group is now working on a new feature that will focus on four neighborhoods in the capital city of La Paz, which also represent four different social classes. The fact that an individual from each barrio will write his own story indicates that Ukamau is further pursuing the challenge of neorealism. If Oscar Soria, Antonio Eguino, and their friends can realize their play, it may well be that Zavattini's concept of authenticity will become a new vehicle for the practice of cine popular.
NOTES

PUEBLO CHICO

1. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, "Toward a Third Cinema," Cineaste, 4 (Winter 1970-71), 8. 2. Jorge Sanjines, "Cinema and Revolution," Cineaste, 4 (Winter 1970-71), 13. 3. From a personal interview, taped in La Paz on January 23, 1975. 4. Andre Bazin, Qu'est-ce que le cindma? IV. Une esthetique de la realit&: le NMo-rdalisme(Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1962), p. 141. Parts of this volume appear in What Is Cinema? Vol. II (Berkeley & Los Angeles: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1971). 5. From a personal interview, taped in La Paz on January 22, 1975. 6. Interview with Soria. 7. Mario Cannella, "Ideology and Aesthetic Hypotheses in the Criticism of Neo-Realism," Screen, 14 (Winter 1973-74), 5-60. 8. Cannella, p. 34. 9. "Froma personal interview, taped in Buenos Aires on November 19, 1974. 10. From a personal interview, tapes in La Paz on January 29, 1975. 11. Jorge Sanjines, "Un cine militante," Cine Cubano, No. 68 (n.d.), pp. 45-47; "Cine revolucionario: La experiencia boliviana," Hablemos de Cine, No. 64 (April-June 1972), pp. 19-27; "La busqueda de un cine popular," Cine Cubano, Nos. 89-90 (n.d.), pp. 60-64; "Entretien avec Jorge Sanjines," Cahiers du Cindma, No. 253 (Oct.-Nov. 1974), pp. 6-21; "Entretien avec Jorge Sanjines," Jeune Cinema, No. 85 (March 1975), pp. 15-18.

CONTRIBUTORS, cont'd. Los Angeles.RANDALL our CONRAD, BostonEditor, is a film-maker, writer, and translator. MICHAEL DEMPSEYworks in film productionin Los Angeles. HANS EHRMANN a Chileanfilm journalist.SETH is FELDMANteaches film at the University Western of Ontarioand is co-editorof a forthcoming anthology on Canadian cinema.WILLIAM JOHNSON, NewYork our Editor,is authorof Focus on the ScienceFictionFilm.
KARYN KAY has contributed to Women and Film and

FQ; she lives and teachesin NewJersey.ERICHKEEL taught in La Paz for a year and is writinga dissertation on the sociologyof art and literature.STEVEN KOVACS[whom we inadvertently omitted last time] teaches film at Stanfordand was the co-producer of Arthurand Lillie. WILLIAM MURPHYis Film ArT. chivist at the National Archives, Washington,D.C., J. C. OGLETREElives in Albany, Georgia. LEE POAGUE teaches at Chico State Universityand has
[cont'd. on page 61] and has published in Film Comment and other journals.

written for Movietone News. ANTHONY REVEAUX

teachesfilm at San FranciscoState University has and

at Another LastRound-Up the FQCorral

The coverage presented below is not exhaustive by any means; it omits, for instance, certain mass-market exploitation titles for which we have not been sent review copies; also, some books are out for extended reviews that are not yet in hand. Reviews not carrying another signature are by Ernest Callenbach.
MOVIE-MADE AMERICA of Movie A SocialHistory the American By RobertSklar. New York: RandomHouse, 1975. $12.95. (Random House, 1975). 340 pp. $12.95.
A blurb on the cover of this book calls it "the history of the American movie." However, it is less a history of the American movie than a history of the industry itselfhow it originated, who controlled it, the studios, their management and financial practices, and the impact of certain key events like the Great Depression, World War II, the anti-communism of the fifites, and television. It is clearly not a history of the films themselves, the stars, the directors, of whom there are numerous omissions, but rather the system that gave rise to them. Sklar's principal contribution can be found in his argument that movies fundamentally challenged the existing order of values. In tracing the development of the movie industry Sklar contrasts the social impact of films against traditional middle-class values, which unfortunately are never quite clearly defined. He describes periods when they stood in clear opposition to those values and when, in times of crisis, they combined to reinforce one another. At the turn of the century during the infancy of the industry movies first gained their popularity among the working classes of this country, among the great unwashed, unshaven, the immigrant, the poor. Yet ironically the production and content of films were controlled by Anglo-Saxons or WASPS, men like Edison, Dickson, Porter, Blackton, and Griffith, who essentially shared the same values as the institutions of social control-the churches, reform groups, press, and police. During the Progressive Era, according to Sklar, there was collusion between these institutions and the great Motion Picture Patents Company monopoly to maintain culturally the status quo. "To put forward the idea that the men who founded the movies were lawless buccaneers and unscrupulous fortune hunters obscures the essential fact that before 1910 the movies were as completely in the hands of respectable established Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans as they were ever to be." When this first generation of movie entrepreneurs consciously tried to broaden the class appeal of their product to include the educated middle class, they to a certain extent deserted working-class audiences, leaving a vacuum that was filled by film-makers with significantly different backgrounds. Laemmle, Zukor, Fox, and others represented this new generation of independents, largely Jewish in origin-immigrants experienced in retailing and merchandising. This generation in revolt established the studio system that formed the modern motion picture industry. In the eyes of the guardians of the cultural status quo the foreign character of this popular industry automatically made it suspect. Sklar analyzes the work of early comic film-makers to illustrate the challenge posed to the social order. Mack Sennett debunked all forms of authority in his films. Chaplin, drawing upon his English work-class background, ridiculed pomposity and sharpened the differences between the extreme ends of the social scale. The movies, with their inherent myth-making capabilities, propagandized an image of sexuality, dress, and social behavior that brought down the shroud of censorship. Similarly the lifestyles of the stars titillated and scandalized the protectors of morality. The founding of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association in 1922 was an effort to present a united

26
front to the public, to ward off outside censorship and show that the industry could police itself. During the twenties movies and movie-makers seemed to challenge respectable American values and institutions. Movies, according to Sklar, were in fact a major factor in the "reorientation of traditional values." Yet, on the other hand, film-makers were deeply committed to "capitalist values, attitudes and ambitions that were part of the dominant social order." The relationship between Hollywood and these values did not change until 1934, the year in which the Breen Office was founded. Joseph I. Breen would have absolute power to approve or reject movies made by the major studies according to criteria set down in an industry production code. Its enforcement dramatically restricted the expression of adult themes and encouraged simplistic portrayal of good and evil where, for example, "the guilty must be punished" and "the audience must not be allowed to sympathize with crime or sin." Spurred on by the changes in the national mood brought on by the New Deal, prodded by the Catholic Legion of Decency, Hollywood directed its enormous powers of persuasion to preserving the basic moral, social, and economic tenets of traditional American culture. Sklar discusses the work of Disney and Capra during the thirties to illustrate this thesis. The early Disney cartoons reflected an essentially amoral, idealized world of fantasy that was at once exhilirating and liberating. By 1933 when the effects of the Depression had taken hold Disney cartoons began to change: they began to moralize, they began to warn that life had rules that had to be followed. Sklar sees the popularity of Disney's Three Little Pigs (1933) as stemming from the "confident, purposeful spirit of the early New Deal." Capra, a major director of the Depression period, propagated myths of small-town America, the resourcefulness of the individual, the ability of the common people to control their own destiny. As Sklar begins to deal with World War II and the years following the book becomes much less satisfactory, due to a more general treatment. Two items that he selects for discussion in relative detail are the gangster genre known as film noir, discovered and labeled as such by French critics, and the controversy over the two House Un-American Activities Committee motion picture hearings in 1947 and 1951, including the subsequent blacklisting of screen writers who stood accused. This reprehensible episode in the history of American films fostered a new wave of conservatism and irrelevance as studios avoided making films that took "controversial" stands on political and social issues. Considering the large body of literature on the studios

FILMBOOKS
and the motion picture industry Sklar covers a great deal of familiar territory. Nevertheless, the total picture that emerges renders this book a satisfying, skillfully written narrative that makes an important contribution to our understanding of the social impact of movies on contemporary American society. -WILLIAM T. MURPHY

LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA: AND FILM HISTORY Burns.UCLA Latin American Center,Los By E. Bradford Angeles, 1975. $3.95.
As its title implies, this book has a double intent but neither side is fully developed. The more theoretical pieces on the utilization of film in the teaching of history may be useful for convincing traditionally minded academics that this is indeed feasible and recommendable. However, an original paper developing the film-history relationship in terms of Latin American

UNIVERSITY OFCALIFORNIA PRESS BOOKS

[Since the UC Press also publishes this journal, we do not give extended reviews to its books.] Muybridge: Man in Motion. By Robert Bartlett Haas. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1976. $18.50. A biographical study of the "godfather" of motion pictures-the man who first captured instantaneous motion on film and projected it on a screen. A readable and copiously illustrated volume, providing a compact story of Muybridge's surprisingly dramatic life and giving undistorted examples of his work as a still photographer. The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement Founded by John Grierson. By Elizabeth Sussex. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1976. $11.95. Weaves a connected story out of interviews with the living survivors, putting the received history into a somewhat new light. With illustrations from the major films.

26
front to the public, to ward off outside censorship and show that the industry could police itself. During the twenties movies and movie-makers seemed to challenge respectable American values and institutions. Movies, according to Sklar, were in fact a major factor in the "reorientation of traditional values." Yet, on the other hand, film-makers were deeply committed to "capitalist values, attitudes and ambitions that were part of the dominant social order." The relationship between Hollywood and these values did not change until 1934, the year in which the Breen Office was founded. Joseph I. Breen would have absolute power to approve or reject movies made by the major studies according to criteria set down in an industry production code. Its enforcement dramatically restricted the expression of adult themes and encouraged simplistic portrayal of good and evil where, for example, "the guilty must be punished" and "the audience must not be allowed to sympathize with crime or sin." Spurred on by the changes in the national mood brought on by the New Deal, prodded by the Catholic Legion of Decency, Hollywood directed its enormous powers of persuasion to preserving the basic moral, social, and economic tenets of traditional American culture. Sklar discusses the work of Disney and Capra during the thirties to illustrate this thesis. The early Disney cartoons reflected an essentially amoral, idealized world of fantasy that was at once exhilirating and liberating. By 1933 when the effects of the Depression had taken hold Disney cartoons began to change: they began to moralize, they began to warn that life had rules that had to be followed. Sklar sees the popularity of Disney's Three Little Pigs (1933) as stemming from the "confident, purposeful spirit of the early New Deal." Capra, a major director of the Depression period, propagated myths of small-town America, the resourcefulness of the individual, the ability of the common people to control their own destiny. As Sklar begins to deal with World War II and the years following the book becomes much less satisfactory, due to a more general treatment. Two items that he selects for discussion in relative detail are the gangster genre known as film noir, discovered and labeled as such by French critics, and the controversy over the two House Un-American Activities Committee motion picture hearings in 1947 and 1951, including the subsequent blacklisting of screen writers who stood accused. This reprehensible episode in the history of American films fostered a new wave of conservatism and irrelevance as studios avoided making films that took "controversial" stands on political and social issues. Considering the large body of literature on the studios

FILMBOOKS
and the motion picture industry Sklar covers a great deal of familiar territory. Nevertheless, the total picture that emerges renders this book a satisfying, skillfully written narrative that makes an important contribution to our understanding of the social impact of movies on contemporary American society. -WILLIAM T. MURPHY

LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA: AND FILM HISTORY Burns.UCLA Latin American Center,Los By E. Bradford Angeles, 1975. $3.95.
As its title implies, this book has a double intent but neither side is fully developed. The more theoretical pieces on the utilization of film in the teaching of history may be useful for convincing traditionally minded academics that this is indeed feasible and recommendable. However, an original paper developing the film-history relationship in terms of Latin American

UNIVERSITY OFCALIFORNIA PRESS BOOKS

[Since the UC Press also publishes this journal, we do not give extended reviews to its books.] Muybridge: Man in Motion. By Robert Bartlett Haas. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1976. $18.50. A biographical study of the "godfather" of motion pictures-the man who first captured instantaneous motion on film and projected it on a screen. A readable and copiously illustrated volume, providing a compact story of Muybridge's surprisingly dramatic life and giving undistorted examples of his work as a still photographer. The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement Founded by John Grierson. By Elizabeth Sussex. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1976. $11.95. Weaves a connected story out of interviews with the living survivors, putting the received history into a somewhat new light. With illustrations from the major films.

FILM BOOKS
cinema would have been the logical solution and given this series of essays far greater coherence. Joan Mellen's essay on "Fictional Documentary" is introduced by E. Bradford Burns with the statement that it '"appliesperfectly to the young filmmakers who emerged in Latin America during the 1960s. " (p. 47, my italics). The film-makers used by Mellen to develop her ideas (Costa-Gavras, Godard, Pontecorvo, Montaldo, Losey) do not lack contacts with Latin American fictional documentaries, but there are equally important differences. The European films mentioned are mostly made with respectable budgets and obtain regular distribution at home and, in many cases, abroad. The Latin Americans, on the other hand, in most instances work with shoestring budgets and sometimes fail to obtain adequate exposure in the directors' own country. The reasons are to be found both in the reluctance of a U.S.-controlled commercial establishment to allow them suitable distribution and in local censorships. Even when these difficulties are overcome, distribution on a Latin American scale is practically impossible for the same reasons. On another level, the Latin Americans tend to be more (or differently) engaged in a political sense. They are committed to a struggle in which film is but one facet, one more means to a revolutionary end, and they face hazards unknown to the Europeans-such as exile, the present fate of film-makers like Sanjines, Rocha, Ruiz, Littin, and others. Of course the above only applies to one type of Latin American film and does not cover the industrial output of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Such films are ignored in Burns's book, just as they are usually neglected in the syllabi of U.S. courses on Latin American cinema. Yet they are indispensable for a global view and a great deal can be gleaned from them on a socio-historical level. The "fictional documentaries" not only gain in stature when compared with industrial production, but the latter is also indispensable for the study of cultural dependency, a major problem in Latin America. Another void in the book is its limited view of Cuban films. This is serious, for Cuba is the only Latin American country that has been able to develop its films without being subject to the strictures that prevail on the rest of the continent. Shorcomings like these are largely due to the unavailability of the films in the U.S. On the other hand, Burns's bibliography is excellent. This book should perhaps be considered as a modest beginning and one can only hope that, in due time, a more comprehensive study of Latin American cinema will follow. -HANS EHRMANN

27
THE CUBIST CINEMA D. NewYork:NewYorkUniversity By Standish Lawder. Press (AnthologyFilm Archives, Series 1), 1975. $11.75, paper.
The avant-garde film of the twenties was a unique fusion of painting, poetry, theater, and thought which burst forth in spontaneous creation without visible precedent, pursued by visionaries who were attracted and driven to the kinetic promise of the motion picture when their twentieth-century imaginations could no longer be contained within the easel or remain quiescent upon the page. Experimental cinema is now seeing its third generation in the young men and women who today are setting out to specifically and directly become film-makers. Some of them will even become film artists. In that halfcentury which is the corpus maximus of film's brief blink of history, the seventies find us once again in the art gallery and the museum as structuralist and conceptual film resonates with theory and practice shared with the other visual arts. It is only appropriate that we now reexamine the elusive, contradictory roots of the European avant-garde which opened up independent directions in film. With The Cubist Cinema we are afforded a holistic overview which reveals the organic, hybrid vigor which characterized the dynamic interrelationships between film and modern art crystallizing in the pioneering work of Richter, Eggeling, Ruttman and L6ger. Lawder posits L6ger'sBallet Micanique as the epicenter and summa of the movement. The stated goal of this book, to focus on interaction and synthesis rather than strict art history or cinema study, is satisfactorily realized. The author has consciously designed the structure and rhetoric of the work to be equally accessible from art and film pointsof-origin as well as from other areas of interest. In the first chapter, "Modern Painters Discover the Cinema," the formative shaping of film as art, science, and industry are outlined in an informed and evocative manner which permits us to share their worldview. Unlike so many histories of the cinema where those coalescent years from 1895 to 1916 are seen as but the doormat to the picture palace, here we can sense cinema as did Shaw and Cocteau: a new avenue characterized more by its possibilities than by its limits. In the eclecticism of early exhibition, the trick films of M6lies and Porter and the popular scientific shorts which included extreme slow-motion and microcinematography were often viewed by these artists, on a screen yet undisciplined by the compression and depth of the narrativeproscenium. The shared stimulus between film and art is discussed with letters and articles by Pablo Picasso, Georg Lukacs,

FILM BOOKS
cinema would have been the logical solution and given this series of essays far greater coherence. Joan Mellen's essay on "Fictional Documentary" is introduced by E. Bradford Burns with the statement that it '"appliesperfectly to the young filmmakers who emerged in Latin America during the 1960s. " (p. 47, my italics). The film-makers used by Mellen to develop her ideas (Costa-Gavras, Godard, Pontecorvo, Montaldo, Losey) do not lack contacts with Latin American fictional documentaries, but there are equally important differences. The European films mentioned are mostly made with respectable budgets and obtain regular distribution at home and, in many cases, abroad. The Latin Americans, on the other hand, in most instances work with shoestring budgets and sometimes fail to obtain adequate exposure in the directors' own country. The reasons are to be found both in the reluctance of a U.S.-controlled commercial establishment to allow them suitable distribution and in local censorships. Even when these difficulties are overcome, distribution on a Latin American scale is practically impossible for the same reasons. On another level, the Latin Americans tend to be more (or differently) engaged in a political sense. They are committed to a struggle in which film is but one facet, one more means to a revolutionary end, and they face hazards unknown to the Europeans-such as exile, the present fate of film-makers like Sanjines, Rocha, Ruiz, Littin, and others. Of course the above only applies to one type of Latin American film and does not cover the industrial output of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Such films are ignored in Burns's book, just as they are usually neglected in the syllabi of U.S. courses on Latin American cinema. Yet they are indispensable for a global view and a great deal can be gleaned from them on a socio-historical level. The "fictional documentaries" not only gain in stature when compared with industrial production, but the latter is also indispensable for the study of cultural dependency, a major problem in Latin America. Another void in the book is its limited view of Cuban films. This is serious, for Cuba is the only Latin American country that has been able to develop its films without being subject to the strictures that prevail on the rest of the continent. Shorcomings like these are largely due to the unavailability of the films in the U.S. On the other hand, Burns's bibliography is excellent. This book should perhaps be considered as a modest beginning and one can only hope that, in due time, a more comprehensive study of Latin American cinema will follow. -HANS EHRMANN

27
THE CUBIST CINEMA D. NewYork:NewYorkUniversity By Standish Lawder. Press (AnthologyFilm Archives, Series 1), 1975. $11.75, paper.
The avant-garde film of the twenties was a unique fusion of painting, poetry, theater, and thought which burst forth in spontaneous creation without visible precedent, pursued by visionaries who were attracted and driven to the kinetic promise of the motion picture when their twentieth-century imaginations could no longer be contained within the easel or remain quiescent upon the page. Experimental cinema is now seeing its third generation in the young men and women who today are setting out to specifically and directly become film-makers. Some of them will even become film artists. In that halfcentury which is the corpus maximus of film's brief blink of history, the seventies find us once again in the art gallery and the museum as structuralist and conceptual film resonates with theory and practice shared with the other visual arts. It is only appropriate that we now reexamine the elusive, contradictory roots of the European avant-garde which opened up independent directions in film. With The Cubist Cinema we are afforded a holistic overview which reveals the organic, hybrid vigor which characterized the dynamic interrelationships between film and modern art crystallizing in the pioneering work of Richter, Eggeling, Ruttman and L6ger. Lawder posits L6ger'sBallet Micanique as the epicenter and summa of the movement. The stated goal of this book, to focus on interaction and synthesis rather than strict art history or cinema study, is satisfactorily realized. The author has consciously designed the structure and rhetoric of the work to be equally accessible from art and film pointsof-origin as well as from other areas of interest. In the first chapter, "Modern Painters Discover the Cinema," the formative shaping of film as art, science, and industry are outlined in an informed and evocative manner which permits us to share their worldview. Unlike so many histories of the cinema where those coalescent years from 1895 to 1916 are seen as but the doormat to the picture palace, here we can sense cinema as did Shaw and Cocteau: a new avenue characterized more by its possibilities than by its limits. In the eclecticism of early exhibition, the trick films of M6lies and Porter and the popular scientific shorts which included extreme slow-motion and microcinematography were often viewed by these artists, on a screen yet undisciplined by the compression and depth of the narrativeproscenium. The shared stimulus between film and art is discussed with letters and articles by Pablo Picasso, Georg Lukacs,

28
Arnold Sch6nberg and Wassily Kandinksy revealing the anticipatory excitement with which they discussed their projects and plans for films which, though unrealized, give testimony to their visions of the "seventh art." The relatively unknown works by Leopold Survage are integrated into this milieu, as his sequence-designs for an abstract film to have been titled Le Rhythme Colore (1913) are brought to light. Had the war not intervened, his screen concept could have presaged Walter Ruttman's Opus I (1921) as the first abstract animated film. Music as a parallel path of abstraction had already been subsumed by such painters as Kandinsky and the Delaunays as well as within the overt analogy of Survage's work, and even years before the sound film the early film artists saw music's articulation of form in time as a more meaningful model for their concepts than narrative dramatic continuities. Both the Futurist and the Cubist painters were fascinated by film. The Futurists like Balla, Marinetti, and Bragaglia siezed upon the experiential sensation of movement and irresistible change. But, as Michael Kirby points out in his Futurist Performance (New York: Dutton, 1971) cinema somehow never became central to that movement, and nothing remains to us now of the two known Futurist films Vita Futuristica and II Perfido Incanto (1916) but powder burns and a ghostly afterimage. Lawder asks the primal question, "Are there Cubist films? To what extent did the Cubists use the medium to release the implied movement of their paintings into an actual passage through space and time?" (p. 21). Though the author does not choose to begin with Cezanne, he demonstrates how the Cubists were intensely concerned with vision over object. Fragmentation, simultaneity, the juxtaposition of different aspects of scale and view: all were forces in Cubist painting which first found cinematic expression in the abstract films of collaborators Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling, and of Walter Ruttman, as " . . . the avant-garde film movement followed a course similar to modern painting in the twenties, that is, from a rigorously geometric and abstract style, as in De Stijl or the Bauhaus aesthetic, to the hallucinatory content of Surrealism in the late twenties." (p. 35). A reasonably fair and balanced account of Richter and Eggeling is given, their similarities and differences and then the divergence to personal styles as their unique transpositions from drawn forms to kinetic movement were so painfully achieved. In Eggeling's Diagonal Symphony (1921-23) the emphasis was the articulation of line as objectively analyzed movement, and Richter's Rhythm 21 (1921) the rhyththmic counterpoint of planes and implied spatial volumes within the configuration of the frame. Their work brought to screen surface the viability of abstract film and the urgent need to continue. In two chapters, one which centers around Abel Gance

FILM BOOKS
and then another focussing on Marcel L'Herbier. are found richly woven accounts of the aesthetic cross-pollinization and intellectual chain-reaction which is really the central theme of The Cubist Cinema. The poet Blaise Cendrars was a friend and war-comrade of Fernand Leger, and his attraction to film as evidenced in his written work found a kinetic outlet through his close association with Abel Gance, the herculean director whose films such as Napoleon (1926-27) were so well-known by Jean Vigo and others of that later, newer wave. Cendrars was responsible for the memorable montage sequences in La Roue (1922-23) which delivered explosive multiplicities of vision combining men, machines, and motion and which influenced L6ger as to the validity of film's artistic potential. L'Inhumaine (1924), directed by Marcel L'Herbier, with its intriguing, complex and deliberately modern settings by painter L6ger, architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, and director Alberto Cavalcanti, gave L6ger the opportunity to experiment with Cubist imagery, pre-stylized for recording on film. This chapter goes on to relate its stylization with the heady precedents of German Expressionism and other contemporary experiments in sciencefiction art of the twenties: Friedrich Kiesler's decor for Karel Capek's stage play R. U.R., and Otto Hunte's vast designs for Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926). With Lawder's usual technical perception, he describes various advanced image-making devices which were so indicative of tropisms in visual thought of the time. The pivotal work and enduring manifesto of Cubist cinema is Fernand L6ger's Ballet Micanique (1924) and justly occupies the major focus of this book. As an art student, school projectionist, and as a teacher, this reviewer has seen Ballet Micanique at least fifty times ... yet with each re-viewing, it yields yet more subtle facets and conjunctions of vision. Lawder comments early on of that perennial albatross of film scholarship, the difficulty of "reading the text," and here answers that need with a detailed shot analysis and a series of 300 key frame enlargements. The film's complexity demands it, and its relatively short running time of 15 minutes and 12 seconds permits it. We are thus able to continually refer to the "text" as the formal analysis of the film breaks down the continuity into an introduction, seven parts (Prismatic Fracturing, Exercises in Rhythm, Titles and Numerals, etc.) and then an epilogue discussing elements and relationships. When composer George Antheil announced that he was seeking a motion picture to accompany his new musical piece to be called "Ballet M6canique" it was the young American cameraman Dudley Murphy who, encouraged by Ezra Pound, agreed to film it provided that L6ger would collaborate. While the film is L6ger's vision, Murphy had a strong contributory influence, perhaps

FILM BOOKS
not unlike that of Gregg Toland to Orson Welles, as Murphy introduced the painter to the prismatic lenses which so entranced him, and was skilled in editing where L6ger had yet no experience. Ballet MWcaniqueis an explosive, complex barrage of visual contradictions and surprises, in which there are only one or two transitions which fall within the realm of "normal" cutting. Total montage without a single dissolve, it is a Cubist prolegomenon of disorientation, multiple viewpoints, and kinestasis. In addition to the shot analyses and frame enlargements in the appendix, the book strengthens its thesis by the inclusion of analogous illustrations of paintings and graphic, such as L6ger's The City (1919) which contained the perceptual seeds of Ballet M&canique. Time and time again we are shown some of the most direct correspondences between painting and film we might care to imagine. Examinations of the work of Germaine Dulac such as La Coquille et le Clergyman (1928) and Richter's later Film Study (1926) are seen as some of the more notable films of the growing avantgarde influenced by Ballet MWcanique,which the poet Soupault so aptly described as a "terrible and magnificent flag of life" while Dada and Surrealism went on to lay siege to the screen in the late twenties. There are many areas and artists that Lawder could have discussed in much further detail, such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, but he seems to have achieved that which he set out to do. Rather than a broad, sweeping history of the avantgarde, the concentration here is on the synaptic interrelationships between the minds and hands that built it, and the vortex of life-forces which created and sustained it. The major faults of the book fall within that realm of the papyrus substrate of publishing practice to which every author, to a degree, falls victim. In terms of overall scholarly production values, the composition and proof-reading of the text might well have been polished off at the San Francisco Chronicle on a New Year's Eve. Some of the most interesting reading resides in the notes, which illuminate many dramas in avant-garde art and life. The page-numbering of the notes section is quite askew, as the book's production layout included the intervening appendix as if it had numbered pages of text, so that upon first referring back to the main body of the text for referencs from some of the notes, it seemed as though a Cubist joke were being played where we were being led on to words that did not exist. A quick renumbering by the reader can solve that crisis, but the price in paper of over eleven dollars discourages its full distribution among scholars and students that it deserves, and which was so contrary to the author's intentions. Nor were the pages of the shot analyses bound facing the corresponding frame enlargements within the appendix.

29
Even since 1968, which was the approximate cut-off date of Lawder's personal research, there have been too few scholarly works which document the early avantgarde. Louise O'Konor's Viking Eggeling 1880-1925 Artist and Film-maker Life and Work (Stockholm Studies in History of Art, 1971) researches Eggeling with the thoroughness of an Egyptologist, and William Moritz's The Films of Oskar Fischinger (Film Culture No. 58-5960, 1974) carefully integrates and analyses the career of that Prometheus of the abstract film. The Cubist Cinema presents a much-needed point-of-view in film and art history and furthers the "legitimacy" of their interface at a time when perhaps we are just beginning to understand the confluence of the visual arts which, Cubist-style, we have prismatically diffracted into seven or eight different "arts." -ANTHONY REVEAUX

JOHN FORD
and By JosephMcBride Michael New Wilmington. York: Da Capo, 1975. $4.95.
After a somewhat alarmingly lachrymose (but perhaps suitably Irish) opening chapter by McBride on Ford's funeral and last days, this volume settles down into a sensitive, intelligent, and not idolatrous study of an artist who, it is clear, will be continually issued in Revised Editions by every generation of critics. McBride and Wilmington are not put off by Ford's sentimentality or racism; in their eyes his art triumphs unmitigatedly over his historical circumstances, as they see his characters triumphing, however ironically in some cases, in their stories; even Ethan and Scar, in The Searchers, "have sacrificed themselves to make civilization possible. . . . It is the story of America." But the analysis is closer and more subtle than such occasional dithyrambics might indicate. Nobody has yet dealt with Liberty Valence in as complex and convincing terms as do McBride and Wilmington, for instance; and though they are weak on The Searchers (where what Lindsay Anderson so cautiously called "neurosis" appeared in a Ford character for the first time), they handle many difficult films, like Ford's abominable favorite The Sun Shines Bright, with aplomb. The best book yet written on the master, and particularly valuable for its way of teasing out complexities where only thumping oversimplification had seemed to be. The old curmudgeon might even have liked this book well enough to vouchsafe some wisecrack about it.

FILM BOOKS
not unlike that of Gregg Toland to Orson Welles, as Murphy introduced the painter to the prismatic lenses which so entranced him, and was skilled in editing where L6ger had yet no experience. Ballet MWcaniqueis an explosive, complex barrage of visual contradictions and surprises, in which there are only one or two transitions which fall within the realm of "normal" cutting. Total montage without a single dissolve, it is a Cubist prolegomenon of disorientation, multiple viewpoints, and kinestasis. In addition to the shot analyses and frame enlargements in the appendix, the book strengthens its thesis by the inclusion of analogous illustrations of paintings and graphic, such as L6ger's The City (1919) which contained the perceptual seeds of Ballet M&canique. Time and time again we are shown some of the most direct correspondences between painting and film we might care to imagine. Examinations of the work of Germaine Dulac such as La Coquille et le Clergyman (1928) and Richter's later Film Study (1926) are seen as some of the more notable films of the growing avantgarde influenced by Ballet MWcanique,which the poet Soupault so aptly described as a "terrible and magnificent flag of life" while Dada and Surrealism went on to lay siege to the screen in the late twenties. There are many areas and artists that Lawder could have discussed in much further detail, such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, but he seems to have achieved that which he set out to do. Rather than a broad, sweeping history of the avantgarde, the concentration here is on the synaptic interrelationships between the minds and hands that built it, and the vortex of life-forces which created and sustained it. The major faults of the book fall within that realm of the papyrus substrate of publishing practice to which every author, to a degree, falls victim. In terms of overall scholarly production values, the composition and proof-reading of the text might well have been polished off at the San Francisco Chronicle on a New Year's Eve. Some of the most interesting reading resides in the notes, which illuminate many dramas in avant-garde art and life. The page-numbering of the notes section is quite askew, as the book's production layout included the intervening appendix as if it had numbered pages of text, so that upon first referring back to the main body of the text for referencs from some of the notes, it seemed as though a Cubist joke were being played where we were being led on to words that did not exist. A quick renumbering by the reader can solve that crisis, but the price in paper of over eleven dollars discourages its full distribution among scholars and students that it deserves, and which was so contrary to the author's intentions. Nor were the pages of the shot analyses bound facing the corresponding frame enlargements within the appendix.

29
Even since 1968, which was the approximate cut-off date of Lawder's personal research, there have been too few scholarly works which document the early avantgarde. Louise O'Konor's Viking Eggeling 1880-1925 Artist and Film-maker Life and Work (Stockholm Studies in History of Art, 1971) researches Eggeling with the thoroughness of an Egyptologist, and William Moritz's The Films of Oskar Fischinger (Film Culture No. 58-5960, 1974) carefully integrates and analyses the career of that Prometheus of the abstract film. The Cubist Cinema presents a much-needed point-of-view in film and art history and furthers the "legitimacy" of their interface at a time when perhaps we are just beginning to understand the confluence of the visual arts which, Cubist-style, we have prismatically diffracted into seven or eight different "arts." -ANTHONY REVEAUX

JOHN FORD
and By JosephMcBride Michael New Wilmington. York: Da Capo, 1975. $4.95.
After a somewhat alarmingly lachrymose (but perhaps suitably Irish) opening chapter by McBride on Ford's funeral and last days, this volume settles down into a sensitive, intelligent, and not idolatrous study of an artist who, it is clear, will be continually issued in Revised Editions by every generation of critics. McBride and Wilmington are not put off by Ford's sentimentality or racism; in their eyes his art triumphs unmitigatedly over his historical circumstances, as they see his characters triumphing, however ironically in some cases, in their stories; even Ethan and Scar, in The Searchers, "have sacrificed themselves to make civilization possible. . . . It is the story of America." But the analysis is closer and more subtle than such occasional dithyrambics might indicate. Nobody has yet dealt with Liberty Valence in as complex and convincing terms as do McBride and Wilmington, for instance; and though they are weak on The Searchers (where what Lindsay Anderson so cautiously called "neurosis" appeared in a Ford character for the first time), they handle many difficult films, like Ford's abominable favorite The Sun Shines Bright, with aplomb. The best book yet written on the master, and particularly valuable for its way of teasing out complexities where only thumping oversimplification had seemed to be. The old curmudgeon might even have liked this book well enough to vouchsafe some wisecrack about it.

30 THE JOHN FORD MOVIE MYSTERY

FILMBOOKS

because its title, subject and even the author's approach to the material are strikingly similar to Donald Bogle's By Andrew Sarris. Bloomington:Indiana University highly acclaimed Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks of a couple years ago. Press, 1976. No pricegiven. Leab's book is no less literate nor scholarly than Sarris valuably fills in some lacunae in the usual Ford Bogle's, and while it may be somewhat less comprehenfilmography, but the book is mainly a rambling sive it is equally informative (and includes foreign films excursion through the films. Sarris has become such an unlike Bogle). The author writes in an entei'taining, eminence that his style begins to sound pontifical subjective style which occasionally sacrifices depth for (though he has never adopted the regal-semiotic "we"); flippancy. From Sambo to Superspade is a thoroughly enjoyable and in this text he also indulges a perilous passion for protracted alliterations, sometimes several popping up book. The only problem is that Bogle has already on one page, which can annoy the hell out of a reader. covered the same ground, and while Leab is just as articulate and well-researched as his predecessor, his The analysis sometimes seems offhand compared to the deferential complexity of McBride and Wilmington, but book lacks the original perspective and insight to make this is also an advantage we get from Sarris's position; it stand up beside Bogle as a complementary volume. For the prospective student of black film history the and no Irish loyalty (he is, I think, a Greek?) holds him back from writing "So much for the scenario and its decisive factor in choosing between the two may be the ridiculous contrivances." He is the kind of urban critic fact that while Bogle's book is available as a low-priced who might normally be disposed to ignore or belittle paperback, Leab's goes for a hefty $15. -RONALD E. CLAIBORNE Ford ("Steinbeck and Ford share a kind of half-baked faith in the verities of outhouse existence, and a sentimental mistrust of machinery"-there he goes again!) but who still found room in his pantheon for FILM REVOLUTION AND "one of the cinema's greatest poets," even if they were on opposite sides of the town-and-country problem.

Indiana UniverBy James Roy MacBean.Bloomington: sity Press, 1976. $15.00 cloth, $4.95 paper.

With this book (of which about two thirds originally appeared in Film Quarterly) MacBean consolidates his Editedby Liz-Anne Bowden.New York:OxfordUniver- reputation as one of the leading critics who have sity Press, 1976. $24.95. seriously applied Marxist ideas to film in the past decade, and especially to the works of Godard. Added Like all encyclopedic works, this one contains occaare an extensive introduction, a blistering attack on sional summary statements likely to cause foaming at Metz's "avoidance of ideology and cloak of scientifithe mouth among some readers (Resnais "decidedly city," and several other essays. An important contribuliterary"?) but the descriptions of films and film-makers tion to post-Bazin film thinking. Illustrated. are terse, concrete, and generally telling. The volume in general is a parallel effort to the less expensive twin paperbacks by Sadoul, but its cut-off date was toward the end of 1974. Technical and industrial terms are also THE NEW WAVE included (flashback and block booking, for instance). Illustrated. A solid reference work.

OXFORD COMPANIONFILM TO

By JamesMonaco.NewYork:Oxford Press, University 1976. $15.95.

FROM SAMBO SUPERSPADE TO TheBlackExperience Motion in Pictures By DanielJ. Leab. Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1975. $15.00.
If you should happen to get a feeling of dji vu about this latest study of blacks in cinema it is probably

Acute biocritical studies of Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. Monaco deploys a good deal of background information about the film-makers and their particular circumstances, their pre-feature work both critical and in film-making, and their ideas as expressed in interviews; this gives added depth to his critical analyses, which are workmanlike, politically aware, and readable.

30 THE JOHN FORD MOVIE MYSTERY

FILMBOOKS

because its title, subject and even the author's approach to the material are strikingly similar to Donald Bogle's By Andrew Sarris. Bloomington:Indiana University highly acclaimed Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks of a couple years ago. Press, 1976. No pricegiven. Leab's book is no less literate nor scholarly than Sarris valuably fills in some lacunae in the usual Ford Bogle's, and while it may be somewhat less comprehenfilmography, but the book is mainly a rambling sive it is equally informative (and includes foreign films excursion through the films. Sarris has become such an unlike Bogle). The author writes in an entei'taining, eminence that his style begins to sound pontifical subjective style which occasionally sacrifices depth for (though he has never adopted the regal-semiotic "we"); flippancy. From Sambo to Superspade is a thoroughly enjoyable and in this text he also indulges a perilous passion for protracted alliterations, sometimes several popping up book. The only problem is that Bogle has already on one page, which can annoy the hell out of a reader. covered the same ground, and while Leab is just as articulate and well-researched as his predecessor, his The analysis sometimes seems offhand compared to the deferential complexity of McBride and Wilmington, but book lacks the original perspective and insight to make this is also an advantage we get from Sarris's position; it stand up beside Bogle as a complementary volume. For the prospective student of black film history the and no Irish loyalty (he is, I think, a Greek?) holds him back from writing "So much for the scenario and its decisive factor in choosing between the two may be the ridiculous contrivances." He is the kind of urban critic fact that while Bogle's book is available as a low-priced who might normally be disposed to ignore or belittle paperback, Leab's goes for a hefty $15. -RONALD E. CLAIBORNE Ford ("Steinbeck and Ford share a kind of half-baked faith in the verities of outhouse existence, and a sentimental mistrust of machinery"-there he goes again!) but who still found room in his pantheon for FILM REVOLUTION AND "one of the cinema's greatest poets," even if they were on opposite sides of the town-and-country problem.

Indiana UniverBy James Roy MacBean.Bloomington: sity Press, 1976. $15.00 cloth, $4.95 paper.

With this book (of which about two thirds originally appeared in Film Quarterly) MacBean consolidates his Editedby Liz-Anne Bowden.New York:OxfordUniver- reputation as one of the leading critics who have sity Press, 1976. $24.95. seriously applied Marxist ideas to film in the past decade, and especially to the works of Godard. Added Like all encyclopedic works, this one contains occaare an extensive introduction, a blistering attack on sional summary statements likely to cause foaming at Metz's "avoidance of ideology and cloak of scientifithe mouth among some readers (Resnais "decidedly city," and several other essays. An important contribuliterary"?) but the descriptions of films and film-makers tion to post-Bazin film thinking. Illustrated. are terse, concrete, and generally telling. The volume in general is a parallel effort to the less expensive twin paperbacks by Sadoul, but its cut-off date was toward the end of 1974. Technical and industrial terms are also THE NEW WAVE included (flashback and block booking, for instance). Illustrated. A solid reference work.

OXFORD COMPANIONFILM TO

By JamesMonaco.NewYork:Oxford Press, University 1976. $15.95.

FROM SAMBO SUPERSPADE TO TheBlackExperience Motion in Pictures By DanielJ. Leab. Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1975. $15.00.
If you should happen to get a feeling of dji vu about this latest study of blacks in cinema it is probably

Acute biocritical studies of Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. Monaco deploys a good deal of background information about the film-makers and their particular circumstances, their pre-feature work both critical and in film-making, and their ideas as expressed in interviews; this gives added depth to his critical analyses, which are workmanlike, politically aware, and readable.

30 THE JOHN FORD MOVIE MYSTERY

FILMBOOKS

because its title, subject and even the author's approach to the material are strikingly similar to Donald Bogle's By Andrew Sarris. Bloomington:Indiana University highly acclaimed Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks of a couple years ago. Press, 1976. No pricegiven. Leab's book is no less literate nor scholarly than Sarris valuably fills in some lacunae in the usual Ford Bogle's, and while it may be somewhat less comprehenfilmography, but the book is mainly a rambling sive it is equally informative (and includes foreign films excursion through the films. Sarris has become such an unlike Bogle). The author writes in an entei'taining, eminence that his style begins to sound pontifical subjective style which occasionally sacrifices depth for (though he has never adopted the regal-semiotic "we"); flippancy. From Sambo to Superspade is a thoroughly enjoyable and in this text he also indulges a perilous passion for protracted alliterations, sometimes several popping up book. The only problem is that Bogle has already on one page, which can annoy the hell out of a reader. covered the same ground, and while Leab is just as articulate and well-researched as his predecessor, his The analysis sometimes seems offhand compared to the deferential complexity of McBride and Wilmington, but book lacks the original perspective and insight to make this is also an advantage we get from Sarris's position; it stand up beside Bogle as a complementary volume. For the prospective student of black film history the and no Irish loyalty (he is, I think, a Greek?) holds him back from writing "So much for the scenario and its decisive factor in choosing between the two may be the ridiculous contrivances." He is the kind of urban critic fact that while Bogle's book is available as a low-priced who might normally be disposed to ignore or belittle paperback, Leab's goes for a hefty $15. -RONALD E. CLAIBORNE Ford ("Steinbeck and Ford share a kind of half-baked faith in the verities of outhouse existence, and a sentimental mistrust of machinery"-there he goes again!) but who still found room in his pantheon for FILM REVOLUTION AND "one of the cinema's greatest poets," even if they were on opposite sides of the town-and-country problem.

Indiana UniverBy James Roy MacBean.Bloomington: sity Press, 1976. $15.00 cloth, $4.95 paper.

With this book (of which about two thirds originally appeared in Film Quarterly) MacBean consolidates his Editedby Liz-Anne Bowden.New York:OxfordUniver- reputation as one of the leading critics who have sity Press, 1976. $24.95. seriously applied Marxist ideas to film in the past decade, and especially to the works of Godard. Added Like all encyclopedic works, this one contains occaare an extensive introduction, a blistering attack on sional summary statements likely to cause foaming at Metz's "avoidance of ideology and cloak of scientifithe mouth among some readers (Resnais "decidedly city," and several other essays. An important contribuliterary"?) but the descriptions of films and film-makers tion to post-Bazin film thinking. Illustrated. are terse, concrete, and generally telling. The volume in general is a parallel effort to the less expensive twin paperbacks by Sadoul, but its cut-off date was toward the end of 1974. Technical and industrial terms are also THE NEW WAVE included (flashback and block booking, for instance). Illustrated. A solid reference work.

OXFORD COMPANIONFILM TO

By JamesMonaco.NewYork:Oxford Press, University 1976. $15.95.

FROM SAMBO SUPERSPADE TO TheBlackExperience Motion in Pictures By DanielJ. Leab. Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1975. $15.00.
If you should happen to get a feeling of dji vu about this latest study of blacks in cinema it is probably

Acute biocritical studies of Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. Monaco deploys a good deal of background information about the film-makers and their particular circumstances, their pre-feature work both critical and in film-making, and their ideas as expressed in interviews; this gives added depth to his critical analyses, which are workmanlike, politically aware, and readable.

30 THE JOHN FORD MOVIE MYSTERY

FILMBOOKS

because its title, subject and even the author's approach to the material are strikingly similar to Donald Bogle's By Andrew Sarris. Bloomington:Indiana University highly acclaimed Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks of a couple years ago. Press, 1976. No pricegiven. Leab's book is no less literate nor scholarly than Sarris valuably fills in some lacunae in the usual Ford Bogle's, and while it may be somewhat less comprehenfilmography, but the book is mainly a rambling sive it is equally informative (and includes foreign films excursion through the films. Sarris has become such an unlike Bogle). The author writes in an entei'taining, eminence that his style begins to sound pontifical subjective style which occasionally sacrifices depth for (though he has never adopted the regal-semiotic "we"); flippancy. From Sambo to Superspade is a thoroughly enjoyable and in this text he also indulges a perilous passion for protracted alliterations, sometimes several popping up book. The only problem is that Bogle has already on one page, which can annoy the hell out of a reader. covered the same ground, and while Leab is just as articulate and well-researched as his predecessor, his The analysis sometimes seems offhand compared to the deferential complexity of McBride and Wilmington, but book lacks the original perspective and insight to make this is also an advantage we get from Sarris's position; it stand up beside Bogle as a complementary volume. For the prospective student of black film history the and no Irish loyalty (he is, I think, a Greek?) holds him back from writing "So much for the scenario and its decisive factor in choosing between the two may be the ridiculous contrivances." He is the kind of urban critic fact that while Bogle's book is available as a low-priced who might normally be disposed to ignore or belittle paperback, Leab's goes for a hefty $15. -RONALD E. CLAIBORNE Ford ("Steinbeck and Ford share a kind of half-baked faith in the verities of outhouse existence, and a sentimental mistrust of machinery"-there he goes again!) but who still found room in his pantheon for FILM REVOLUTION AND "one of the cinema's greatest poets," even if they were on opposite sides of the town-and-country problem.

Indiana UniverBy James Roy MacBean.Bloomington: sity Press, 1976. $15.00 cloth, $4.95 paper.

With this book (of which about two thirds originally appeared in Film Quarterly) MacBean consolidates his Editedby Liz-Anne Bowden.New York:OxfordUniver- reputation as one of the leading critics who have sity Press, 1976. $24.95. seriously applied Marxist ideas to film in the past decade, and especially to the works of Godard. Added Like all encyclopedic works, this one contains occaare an extensive introduction, a blistering attack on sional summary statements likely to cause foaming at Metz's "avoidance of ideology and cloak of scientifithe mouth among some readers (Resnais "decidedly city," and several other essays. An important contribuliterary"?) but the descriptions of films and film-makers tion to post-Bazin film thinking. Illustrated. are terse, concrete, and generally telling. The volume in general is a parallel effort to the less expensive twin paperbacks by Sadoul, but its cut-off date was toward the end of 1974. Technical and industrial terms are also THE NEW WAVE included (flashback and block booking, for instance). Illustrated. A solid reference work.

OXFORD COMPANIONFILM TO

By JamesMonaco.NewYork:Oxford Press, University 1976. $15.95.

FROM SAMBO SUPERSPADE TO TheBlackExperience Motion in Pictures By DanielJ. Leab. Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1975. $15.00.
If you should happen to get a feeling of dji vu about this latest study of blacks in cinema it is probably

Acute biocritical studies of Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. Monaco deploys a good deal of background information about the film-makers and their particular circumstances, their pre-feature work both critical and in film-making, and their ideas as expressed in interviews; this gives added depth to his critical analyses, which are workmanlike, politically aware, and readable.

30 THE JOHN FORD MOVIE MYSTERY

FILMBOOKS

because its title, subject and even the author's approach to the material are strikingly similar to Donald Bogle's By Andrew Sarris. Bloomington:Indiana University highly acclaimed Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks of a couple years ago. Press, 1976. No pricegiven. Leab's book is no less literate nor scholarly than Sarris valuably fills in some lacunae in the usual Ford Bogle's, and while it may be somewhat less comprehenfilmography, but the book is mainly a rambling sive it is equally informative (and includes foreign films excursion through the films. Sarris has become such an unlike Bogle). The author writes in an entei'taining, eminence that his style begins to sound pontifical subjective style which occasionally sacrifices depth for (though he has never adopted the regal-semiotic "we"); flippancy. From Sambo to Superspade is a thoroughly enjoyable and in this text he also indulges a perilous passion for protracted alliterations, sometimes several popping up book. The only problem is that Bogle has already on one page, which can annoy the hell out of a reader. covered the same ground, and while Leab is just as articulate and well-researched as his predecessor, his The analysis sometimes seems offhand compared to the deferential complexity of McBride and Wilmington, but book lacks the original perspective and insight to make this is also an advantage we get from Sarris's position; it stand up beside Bogle as a complementary volume. For the prospective student of black film history the and no Irish loyalty (he is, I think, a Greek?) holds him back from writing "So much for the scenario and its decisive factor in choosing between the two may be the ridiculous contrivances." He is the kind of urban critic fact that while Bogle's book is available as a low-priced who might normally be disposed to ignore or belittle paperback, Leab's goes for a hefty $15. -RONALD E. CLAIBORNE Ford ("Steinbeck and Ford share a kind of half-baked faith in the verities of outhouse existence, and a sentimental mistrust of machinery"-there he goes again!) but who still found room in his pantheon for FILM REVOLUTION AND "one of the cinema's greatest poets," even if they were on opposite sides of the town-and-country problem.

Indiana UniverBy James Roy MacBean.Bloomington: sity Press, 1976. $15.00 cloth, $4.95 paper.

With this book (of which about two thirds originally appeared in Film Quarterly) MacBean consolidates his Editedby Liz-Anne Bowden.New York:OxfordUniver- reputation as one of the leading critics who have sity Press, 1976. $24.95. seriously applied Marxist ideas to film in the past decade, and especially to the works of Godard. Added Like all encyclopedic works, this one contains occaare an extensive introduction, a blistering attack on sional summary statements likely to cause foaming at Metz's "avoidance of ideology and cloak of scientifithe mouth among some readers (Resnais "decidedly city," and several other essays. An important contribuliterary"?) but the descriptions of films and film-makers tion to post-Bazin film thinking. Illustrated. are terse, concrete, and generally telling. The volume in general is a parallel effort to the less expensive twin paperbacks by Sadoul, but its cut-off date was toward the end of 1974. Technical and industrial terms are also THE NEW WAVE included (flashback and block booking, for instance). Illustrated. A solid reference work.

OXFORD COMPANIONFILM TO

By JamesMonaco.NewYork:Oxford Press, University 1976. $15.95.

FROM SAMBO SUPERSPADE TO TheBlackExperience Motion in Pictures By DanielJ. Leab. Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1975. $15.00.
If you should happen to get a feeling of dji vu about this latest study of blacks in cinema it is probably

Acute biocritical studies of Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. Monaco deploys a good deal of background information about the film-makers and their particular circumstances, their pre-feature work both critical and in film-making, and their ideas as expressed in interviews; this gives added depth to his critical analyses, which are workmanlike, politically aware, and readable.

FILMBOOKS FILM GUIDE 1976 INTERNATIONAL

31

BRIEF LISTINGS
seems bea decline inaverage to both and sales.Wehope quality likely thatthe newQuarterly Review Film of Studies be ableto provide will a forum critical for of we part coverage a considerable of the output; will thenconcentrate reviewing books on those which of special are concern in the lightof ourcritical theoretical interests.In the listings and of we below, briefannotations a large however, oncemoreprovide of in proportion the booksreleased the past year or thereabouts. Asterisks indicate which titles seemto warrant acquisition libraries by in serious to area,orbyindividuals seeking attempting holdings thefilm build substantial a collection filmbooks.Unless otherwise of signed, annotations by Ernest are Callenbach. The Academy Awards: A Pictorial History. By Paul Michael. (Third revised ed.) New York: Crown, 1975. $9.95. *Adventures with D. W. Griffith. By Karl Brown. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976. Paperback, $4.95. A welcome reprint of the book Kevin Brownlow called "the most exciting, the most vivid, and the most perceptive volume of reminiscence ever published on the cinema." America in the Movies. By Michael Wood. New York: Basic Books, 1975, $10.00. A pleasant but lightweight series of essays on thematic patterns; it goes through your mind agreeably but leaves behind many rather endearing cop-outs, such as "What was all this about, and what happened? Fascinating questions, to which I don't really have the answers." The author is English, but centers on American films of the forties and fifties; he doesn't seem to know much about films from anyplace else, and thus tends to give American culture a uniqueness it doesn't always deserve (the Gabin pictures from France in the thirties, for instance, clearly display the "revelling in loneliness" that Wood calls unique to us). In short, the book would not be very satisfactory if considered as serious film history or cultural history, but it is good lively reading, takes you back over many movies you love and hate, and is delightfully short. American Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory oq/ Popular Film. By Stuart M. Kaminsky. Dayton, Ohio: Pflaum, 1974. $7.95 paper. It may be the inherent ambiguities of genre studies which make them fascinating. This one uses some key films as exemplars (Little Caesar of the gangster film, The Killers of film noir, etc.). and in some chapters ranges over a huge catalogue-of "big caper" movies, horror films, musicals, comedies, and so forth-in which the coverage becomes skimpy.

Editedby Peter Cowie. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, Note: 1976. $4.95. Film books to out havecontinued pour frompublishers despitewhat
Now up to 608 jammed pages, this valuable annual features capsule articles on Cacoyannis, Cassavetes, Coppola, Fassbinder, and Zanussi, with the usual worldwide production and reference-resource coverage.

AND AWAY: HOLLYWOOD VIETNAM LOOKING 1975. $8.95. By JulianSmith.NewYork,Scribner's,

Julian Smith is a certifiable film freak, and sees plenty of television too; and in this astonishing piece of sociopolitical history written through the cameras' partially or non-seeing eye, he carries out a tour de force of cultural analysis that is also enormously depressing: a portrait of a nation lost in a morass richly of its own devising, psychologically and geopolitically. The war is over, but the war goes on, for it was always a projection of the murderous side of the American psyche, and it reached the screen only through the most resistant of psychological defenses. "Vietnam went underground in the movies," Smith writes, "tunneling into our subconscious, a true phantom of Hollywood, surfacing in strange places, taking off its mask only briefly." He documents those surfacings with sensitive readings of the few centrally relevant films of the war and its aftermath, together with a wealth of fringe films; and he places the study in the context of films about those other less problematic wars, World War II and Korea. This is an intelligent, reflective, melancholy book, about far more than the films which hold it together, and appealingly personal in approach.

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE TheManWhoInvented Moving the Picture Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. By Kevin MacDonnell.
$12.50. From its subtitle on through its text, this coffeetable book is marred with errors of iact and irritatingly cavalier handling of the photographs (which are misidentified, flipflopped, silhouetted, cropped). It does, however, reproduce with good-quality printing many of the Muybridge's fine studies of Alaska, the Modoc War, Central America, etc.

FILMBOOKS FILM GUIDE 1976 INTERNATIONAL

31

BRIEF LISTINGS
seems bea decline inaverage to both and sales.Wehope quality likely thatthe newQuarterly Review Film of Studies be ableto provide will a forum critical for of we part coverage a considerable of the output; will thenconcentrate reviewing books on those which of special are concern in the lightof ourcritical theoretical interests.In the listings and of we below, briefannotations a large however, oncemoreprovide of in proportion the booksreleased the past year or thereabouts. Asterisks indicate which titles seemto warrant acquisition libraries by in serious to area,orbyindividuals seeking attempting holdings thefilm build substantial a collection filmbooks.Unless otherwise of signed, annotations by Ernest are Callenbach. The Academy Awards: A Pictorial History. By Paul Michael. (Third revised ed.) New York: Crown, 1975. $9.95. *Adventures with D. W. Griffith. By Karl Brown. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976. Paperback, $4.95. A welcome reprint of the book Kevin Brownlow called "the most exciting, the most vivid, and the most perceptive volume of reminiscence ever published on the cinema." America in the Movies. By Michael Wood. New York: Basic Books, 1975, $10.00. A pleasant but lightweight series of essays on thematic patterns; it goes through your mind agreeably but leaves behind many rather endearing cop-outs, such as "What was all this about, and what happened? Fascinating questions, to which I don't really have the answers." The author is English, but centers on American films of the forties and fifties; he doesn't seem to know much about films from anyplace else, and thus tends to give American culture a uniqueness it doesn't always deserve (the Gabin pictures from France in the thirties, for instance, clearly display the "revelling in loneliness" that Wood calls unique to us). In short, the book would not be very satisfactory if considered as serious film history or cultural history, but it is good lively reading, takes you back over many movies you love and hate, and is delightfully short. American Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory oq/ Popular Film. By Stuart M. Kaminsky. Dayton, Ohio: Pflaum, 1974. $7.95 paper. It may be the inherent ambiguities of genre studies which make them fascinating. This one uses some key films as exemplars (Little Caesar of the gangster film, The Killers of film noir, etc.). and in some chapters ranges over a huge catalogue-of "big caper" movies, horror films, musicals, comedies, and so forth-in which the coverage becomes skimpy.

Editedby Peter Cowie. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, Note: 1976. $4.95. Film books to out havecontinued pour frompublishers despitewhat
Now up to 608 jammed pages, this valuable annual features capsule articles on Cacoyannis, Cassavetes, Coppola, Fassbinder, and Zanussi, with the usual worldwide production and reference-resource coverage.

AND AWAY: HOLLYWOOD VIETNAM LOOKING 1975. $8.95. By JulianSmith.NewYork,Scribner's,

Julian Smith is a certifiable film freak, and sees plenty of television too; and in this astonishing piece of sociopolitical history written through the cameras' partially or non-seeing eye, he carries out a tour de force of cultural analysis that is also enormously depressing: a portrait of a nation lost in a morass richly of its own devising, psychologically and geopolitically. The war is over, but the war goes on, for it was always a projection of the murderous side of the American psyche, and it reached the screen only through the most resistant of psychological defenses. "Vietnam went underground in the movies," Smith writes, "tunneling into our subconscious, a true phantom of Hollywood, surfacing in strange places, taking off its mask only briefly." He documents those surfacings with sensitive readings of the few centrally relevant films of the war and its aftermath, together with a wealth of fringe films; and he places the study in the context of films about those other less problematic wars, World War II and Korea. This is an intelligent, reflective, melancholy book, about far more than the films which hold it together, and appealingly personal in approach.

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE TheManWhoInvented Moving the Picture Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. By Kevin MacDonnell.
$12.50. From its subtitle on through its text, this coffeetable book is marred with errors of iact and irritatingly cavalier handling of the photographs (which are misidentified, flipflopped, silhouetted, cropped). It does, however, reproduce with good-quality printing many of the Muybridge's fine studies of Alaska, the Modoc War, Central America, etc.

FILMBOOKS FILM GUIDE 1976 INTERNATIONAL

31

BRIEF LISTINGS
seems bea decline inaverage to both and sales.Wehope quality likely thatthe newQuarterly Review Film of Studies be ableto provide will a forum critical for of we part coverage a considerable of the output; will thenconcentrate reviewing books on those which of special are concern in the lightof ourcritical theoretical interests.In the listings and of we below, briefannotations a large however, oncemoreprovide of in proportion the booksreleased the past year or thereabouts. Asterisks indicate which titles seemto warrant acquisition libraries by in serious to area,orbyindividuals seeking attempting holdings thefilm build substantial a collection filmbooks.Unless otherwise of signed, annotations by Ernest are Callenbach. The Academy Awards: A Pictorial History. By Paul Michael. (Third revised ed.) New York: Crown, 1975. $9.95. *Adventures with D. W. Griffith. By Karl Brown. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976. Paperback, $4.95. A welcome reprint of the book Kevin Brownlow called "the most exciting, the most vivid, and the most perceptive volume of reminiscence ever published on the cinema." America in the Movies. By Michael Wood. New York: Basic Books, 1975, $10.00. A pleasant but lightweight series of essays on thematic patterns; it goes through your mind agreeably but leaves behind many rather endearing cop-outs, such as "What was all this about, and what happened? Fascinating questions, to which I don't really have the answers." The author is English, but centers on American films of the forties and fifties; he doesn't seem to know much about films from anyplace else, and thus tends to give American culture a uniqueness it doesn't always deserve (the Gabin pictures from France in the thirties, for instance, clearly display the "revelling in loneliness" that Wood calls unique to us). In short, the book would not be very satisfactory if considered as serious film history or cultural history, but it is good lively reading, takes you back over many movies you love and hate, and is delightfully short. American Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory oq/ Popular Film. By Stuart M. Kaminsky. Dayton, Ohio: Pflaum, 1974. $7.95 paper. It may be the inherent ambiguities of genre studies which make them fascinating. This one uses some key films as exemplars (Little Caesar of the gangster film, The Killers of film noir, etc.). and in some chapters ranges over a huge catalogue-of "big caper" movies, horror films, musicals, comedies, and so forth-in which the coverage becomes skimpy.

Editedby Peter Cowie. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, Note: 1976. $4.95. Film books to out havecontinued pour frompublishers despitewhat
Now up to 608 jammed pages, this valuable annual features capsule articles on Cacoyannis, Cassavetes, Coppola, Fassbinder, and Zanussi, with the usual worldwide production and reference-resource coverage.

AND AWAY: HOLLYWOOD VIETNAM LOOKING 1975. $8.95. By JulianSmith.NewYork,Scribner's,

Julian Smith is a certifiable film freak, and sees plenty of television too; and in this astonishing piece of sociopolitical history written through the cameras' partially or non-seeing eye, he carries out a tour de force of cultural analysis that is also enormously depressing: a portrait of a nation lost in a morass richly of its own devising, psychologically and geopolitically. The war is over, but the war goes on, for it was always a projection of the murderous side of the American psyche, and it reached the screen only through the most resistant of psychological defenses. "Vietnam went underground in the movies," Smith writes, "tunneling into our subconscious, a true phantom of Hollywood, surfacing in strange places, taking off its mask only briefly." He documents those surfacings with sensitive readings of the few centrally relevant films of the war and its aftermath, together with a wealth of fringe films; and he places the study in the context of films about those other less problematic wars, World War II and Korea. This is an intelligent, reflective, melancholy book, about far more than the films which hold it together, and appealingly personal in approach.

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE TheManWhoInvented Moving the Picture Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. By Kevin MacDonnell.
$12.50. From its subtitle on through its text, this coffeetable book is marred with errors of iact and irritatingly cavalier handling of the photographs (which are misidentified, flipflopped, silhouetted, cropped). It does, however, reproduce with good-quality printing many of the Muybridge's fine studies of Alaska, the Modoc War, Central America, etc.

FILMBOOKS FILM GUIDE 1976 INTERNATIONAL

31

BRIEF LISTINGS
seems bea decline inaverage to both and sales.Wehope quality likely thatthe newQuarterly Review Film of Studies be ableto provide will a forum critical for of we part coverage a considerable of the output; will thenconcentrate reviewing books on those which of special are concern in the lightof ourcritical theoretical interests.In the listings and of we below, briefannotations a large however, oncemoreprovide of in proportion the booksreleased the past year or thereabouts. Asterisks indicate which titles seemto warrant acquisition libraries by in serious to area,orbyindividuals seeking attempting holdings thefilm build substantial a collection filmbooks.Unless otherwise of signed, annotations by Ernest are Callenbach. The Academy Awards: A Pictorial History. By Paul Michael. (Third revised ed.) New York: Crown, 1975. $9.95. *Adventures with D. W. Griffith. By Karl Brown. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976. Paperback, $4.95. A welcome reprint of the book Kevin Brownlow called "the most exciting, the most vivid, and the most perceptive volume of reminiscence ever published on the cinema." America in the Movies. By Michael Wood. New York: Basic Books, 1975, $10.00. A pleasant but lightweight series of essays on thematic patterns; it goes through your mind agreeably but leaves behind many rather endearing cop-outs, such as "What was all this about, and what happened? Fascinating questions, to which I don't really have the answers." The author is English, but centers on American films of the forties and fifties; he doesn't seem to know much about films from anyplace else, and thus tends to give American culture a uniqueness it doesn't always deserve (the Gabin pictures from France in the thirties, for instance, clearly display the "revelling in loneliness" that Wood calls unique to us). In short, the book would not be very satisfactory if considered as serious film history or cultural history, but it is good lively reading, takes you back over many movies you love and hate, and is delightfully short. American Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory oq/ Popular Film. By Stuart M. Kaminsky. Dayton, Ohio: Pflaum, 1974. $7.95 paper. It may be the inherent ambiguities of genre studies which make them fascinating. This one uses some key films as exemplars (Little Caesar of the gangster film, The Killers of film noir, etc.). and in some chapters ranges over a huge catalogue-of "big caper" movies, horror films, musicals, comedies, and so forth-in which the coverage becomes skimpy.

Editedby Peter Cowie. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, Note: 1976. $4.95. Film books to out havecontinued pour frompublishers despitewhat
Now up to 608 jammed pages, this valuable annual features capsule articles on Cacoyannis, Cassavetes, Coppola, Fassbinder, and Zanussi, with the usual worldwide production and reference-resource coverage.

AND AWAY: HOLLYWOOD VIETNAM LOOKING 1975. $8.95. By JulianSmith.NewYork,Scribner's,

Julian Smith is a certifiable film freak, and sees plenty of television too; and in this astonishing piece of sociopolitical history written through the cameras' partially or non-seeing eye, he carries out a tour de force of cultural analysis that is also enormously depressing: a portrait of a nation lost in a morass richly of its own devising, psychologically and geopolitically. The war is over, but the war goes on, for it was always a projection of the murderous side of the American psyche, and it reached the screen only through the most resistant of psychological defenses. "Vietnam went underground in the movies," Smith writes, "tunneling into our subconscious, a true phantom of Hollywood, surfacing in strange places, taking off its mask only briefly." He documents those surfacings with sensitive readings of the few centrally relevant films of the war and its aftermath, together with a wealth of fringe films; and he places the study in the context of films about those other less problematic wars, World War II and Korea. This is an intelligent, reflective, melancholy book, about far more than the films which hold it together, and appealingly personal in approach.

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE TheManWhoInvented Moving the Picture Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. By Kevin MacDonnell.
$12.50. From its subtitle on through its text, this coffeetable book is marred with errors of iact and irritatingly cavalier handling of the photographs (which are misidentified, flipflopped, silhouetted, cropped). It does, however, reproduce with good-quality printing many of the Muybridge's fine studies of Alaska, the Modoc War, Central America, etc.

32
Basil Rathbone: His Life and His Films. By Michael B. Druxman. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1975. $10.00. Biography, synopses and brief critical comments, credits, critical quotes. *The Birth of the Talkies. By Harry M. Geduld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975. $12.50. As Geduld notes, this is not an aesthetic analysis of the great change in film that occurred with the coming of sound-an alteration which indeed some future author may well consider to be a transition from one art form to another, vastly different (or so we might, so late in the day, suspect from the fact that Rudolf Arnheim's arguments in Film as Art have never quite faded away, and indeed seem to be regaining force from unexpected semiotic sources). Instead, it is a meticulous historical study which reveals, among other intriguing facts, that a film of the opera Don Juan preceded The Jazz Singer; and the author discusses Lights of New York, the first all-dialogue picture, in detail, rescuing it from undeserved critical ignominy. While not the most exciting reading, this book deserves to be in the collections of all serious film students and libraries with film holdings. The Blue Dahlia: A Screenplay. Edited, with an Afterword, by Matthew J. Carbondale: SouthBruccolN. ern Illinois University Press, 1975. No price given. With John Houseman's memoir in which he recounts how Chandler agreed to write the balance of the script with his forbidden ethanol for inspiration, at huge medical and mental cost, in order to finish the filming before Alan Ladd returned to the army. The Afterword rehearses some little known facts (Chandler had a British education, published his first novel at 51) and the circumstances of production. Buster Keaton's The General. Edited by Richard J. Anobile. New York: Avon, 1976. $5.95. One of the "Film Classics Library" series-reconstructions by frame enlargements (about 2,000 of them), sometimes cropped for motives of economy but of good photographic quality. The next best thing to owning a print. Cagney: The Actor as Auteur. By Patrick McGilligan. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1975. $12.00. By a contributor to The Velvet Light Trap, this is considerably more thoughtful than the usual Hollywood biography, and is mainly oriented to discussion of the films rather than Hollywood gossip. The case for Cagney as sometime auteur is modestly stated and carefully argued. *Chaplin's Films. By Uno Asplund. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1976. $10.00. Credits, detailed synopses,

FILM BOOKS
and brief critical notes on all the films. Updates Theodore Huff's coverage and provides some new statistical information. The Cinema of Dirk Bogarde. By Margaret Hinxman and Susan d'Arcy. South Brunswick and New York: A. S. Barnes, 1974. $12.00. Picture book, with a brief introductory note by Joseph Losey. Cinema of Mystery. By Rose London. New York: Crown, 1976. Paper, $2.95. Picture book-vampires, etc. Cinema, the Magic Vehicle: A Guide to Its Achievement. By Adam Garbicz and Jacek Klinowski. Metuchen, N.J., Scarecrow Press, 1975. $18.50. Credits and thumbnail critical notes on a variety of (mostly very familiar) films, through 1949. Cinematics, by Paul Weiss. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975. $8.95. Rambling discussions of film aesthetics, interrupted betimes for footnotes by assorted other hands, all of whom seem to know rather more about film than the author, who is billed as a distinguished philosopher and likes to deliver profundities such as "At the same time, it is the director who must attend to what it is that cinemakers can do." Crossroad to the Cinema. By Douglas Brode. Boston: Holbrook Press, 1975. $5.95. A paperback anthology for class use. "Cut, Print!" The Language and Structure of Filmmaking. By Tony Miller and Patricia George Miller. New York: DaCapo Press, 1976. $4.95. Mainly a glossary of industry slang and terminology, originally prepared for the authors' actor-training school. Dancing in the Dark. By Howard Dietz. (New York: Quadrangle, 1974. $10.00) Autobiography of Hollywood composer who was also an MGM publicity man. Dear Boris: The Life of William Heny Pratt, a.k.a. Boris Karloff By Cynthia Lindsay. New York: Knopf, 1976. $12.50. The Debonairs. By James Robert Parish and Do E. Stanke. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1975. $25.00. Nostalgia book-Melvyn Douglas, Cary Grant, Robert Montgomery, etc., etc. Differentiating the Media. Edited by Lester Asheim and Sara I. Fenwick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. $5.95. (Proceedings of a UC Library School conference.) As libraries deal more and more in non-print media, librarians must learn to develop sensitive selection procedures to cope with the torrent of material they confront; the papers in this volume respond to this challenge.

FILM BOOKS
*Eisenstein: Three Films. Edited by Jay Leyda. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. $7.95. Shooting scripts for Potemkin and October and a treatment for Alexander Nevsky. The Elvis Presley Scrapbook. By James Robert Parish. New York: Ballantine, 1975. $6.95. Every Day's a Matinee: Memoirs Scribbled on a Dressing Room Door. By Max Wilk. New York: Norton, 1976. $8.50. Theater and Hollywood reminiscences. The Fairbanks Album. Drawn from the Family Archives by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. $19.95. Fifty Major Film-Makers. Edited by Peter Cowie. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1976. $20.00. Essays drawn from the first ten years of Cowie's International Film Guide. Most of the undoubted auteurs, and a few long shots: Haanstra, Ivens, Schorm, Franju, etc. Film and the Critical Eye. By Dennis DeNitto and William Herman. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. 1975. $6.95. A textbook, with an introductory section (including a glossary of film terms) and detailed, careful, rather pedestrian analyses of 20 mainlne classics. *Film Criticism: An Index to Critics' Anthologies. By Richard Heinzkill. (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1975. $6.50) Enables you to locate which of about 40 anthologies contain reviews of which films, so that if you want to know what Kael had to say about Morgan! you can go into a library and find it painlessly. Film Directors Guide: Western Europe. By James Robert Parish. Metuchen N.J.: Scarecrow, 1976. $11.00. A simple listing of film titles. *Film Programmer's Guide to 16mm Rentals (Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition). 1,500 new entries in this continually useful reference guide. $8.75 to individuals, $10.75 to institutions, from P.O. Box 6037, Albany, Ca. 94706. Filmed Books and Plays 1928-1974. By A.G.S. Enser. New York: Academic Press, 1975. $24.00. *Filmguide Series. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975. $1.95 each. Odd Man Out, by James DeFelice. Triumph of the Will, by Richard Meran Barsam (includes translations of the speeches). Filmmaking: A Practical Guide. By Carl Linder. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1976. $9.95. Linder is an experimental film-maker with a bizarre talent that, perhaps unfortunately, does not come

33
through (he is now a film teacher) in this useful but not essential textbook. A Fine Mess! Edited by Richard J. Anobile. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. 1975. $9.95. Frame-byframe reconstructions of excerpts of several Laurel & Hardy films, including the marvellous Music Box. The effect of reading, however, is like letting somebody else flip the cards of a Mutoscope, and will only make you want to see the films, which is not terribly difficult to accomplish these days. From Hollywood. By DeWitt Bodeen. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1976. $15.00. Carefully researched "career articles" from the pages of Films in Review, Screen Facts, and Focus on Film, including filmographies. The 17 subjects range from Theda Bara to John Barrymore; most were mainly silent stars. The Glamour Girls. By James Robert Parish and Don E. Stanke. (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1975. $17.95) Anecdotes, credits, illustrations, about Joan Bennett, Rita Hayworth, Audrey Hepburn, Merle Oberon, et al. "Godfrey Daniels!" Verbal and Visual Gems from the Short Films of W. C. Fields. By Richard J. Anobile. New York: Crown, 1975. $8.95. Frame enlargements with dialogue. Goldwyn: A Biography of the Man Behind the Myth. By Arthur Marx. New York: Norton, 1976. $9.95. The Great Gangster Pictures. By James Robert Parish and Michael R. Pitts. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1976. $15.00. The Historian and Film. Edited by Paul Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. $13.95. Essays on the use of film as source material, in teaching, and in production for academic purposes ("writing" history with film). Hollywood and After: The Changing Face of Movies in America. By Jerzy Toeplitz. Chicago: Regnery, 1975. $5.95. This is a sincere but rather distant Polish view of recent American cinema. It gives us a wonderful rendition of Rap Brown declaring that "Violence is as American as cherry cake." (The explanation, you may ferret out in the notes, is that Toeplitz is quoting Brown from an Italian publication, and his Polish version has then been translated by a British-speaking Pole.) And its accounts of underground doings are not always accurate-it was I, for instance (goddammit!) who founded the Canyon Cinemanews, and not Bruce Baillie, though he founded Canyon Cinema (as the curious may read in some casual reminiscences by Chickie Strand and myself in the current News, available from Room 220,

34
Industrial Center Bldg., Sausalito, Calif. 94965). But the book is intriguing as an indication of what an intelligent film enthusiast from distant parts (Toeplitz ran the L6dz film school and now heads the Australian film school) makes of the curious evolutions of our cinema. -E.C. Hollywood Babylon. By Kenneth Anger. San Francisco: Straight Arrow (Simon & Schuster), 1975. $14.95. The re-issue of Anger's "underground" hot number was long awaited, and Straight Arrow as its last gasp designed the book with irrepressibly sleazy flair. Somehow, however, the major impact is that Anger himself falls into the pattern its publisher said accounted for the success of the expose magazine Confidential: "Americans like to read about things they are afraid to do themselves." Which Anger displays with sordid delight: killings, perversities, venalities, suicides, lawsuits, assaults, character assassinations, sexual marathons, etc. Perhaps the problem is that it is hard to get back into the peculiarly American prurience with which the public regarded the glamorous Hollywood people: "How terribly dreadfully (yum!) naughty!" The decline of stardom has unsuspected benefits after all. The Hollywood Posse. By Diana Serra Cary. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. $8.95. This has the ring of a ghostwritten Hollywood autobiography, but since the author was silent child-star "Baby Peggy" and her father a cowboy stuntman, it covers some intriguing virgin territory, and may be tolerable if you aren't allergic to "novelized" dialogue that warn't never spoke. Hollywood's Other Men. By Alex Barris. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1975. $15.00. A picture book about actors who often played luckless suitors. Hollywood's Other Women. By Alex Barris. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1975. $15.00. Picture book about actresses who played rivals, mothers, true and false friends, etc. The Horse, The Gun and The Piece of Property: Changing Images of the TV Western. By Ralph Brauer and Donna Brauer. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1975. $10.00 (cloth) $4.00 (paper). Notes on thematic questions about Bonanza, Gunsmoke, etc., with asides on Dylan's John Wesley Harding, Nixon's views on law-and-order, and other more or less relevant matters. Not in the same intellectual league with Calder (see below). How to Make It in Hollywood. By Wende Hyland and Roberta Haynes. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1976. $8.95.

FILM BOOKS
No, not what you think; an agent and actress interview performers, producers, and casting directors, who mostly explain the enormous odds against anyone, especially performers, ever getting anywhere in Hollywood, despite their own unaccountable successes. Humphrey Bogart. By Nathaniel Benchley. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975. $12.50. An unusually interesting Hollywood biography. The Impact of Film. By Roy Paul Madsen. New York: Macmillan, 1973. $12.95. A huge textbook that attempts to merge considerations of film and TV and cover everything from cinematic syntax to predatory audience-analysis. The technical information is at a low level (video's inability to handle night scenes, for instance, is omitted from a list of "defects and limitations") and the advice is cynical ("Appeals to ambition and anxiety are primarily what sell goods and services . . . ") but not clever enough to be really dangerous. *Index to Critical Film Reviews in British and American Film Periodicals, 1930-1972. Compiled and edited by Stephen E Bowles. New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1975. In two vols, $26.50 the set. Enables reader to locate rapidly over 20,000 reviews of some 6,000 films. Also locates 3,000 reviews of some 1,200 books about film. Jack Nicholson Face to Face. By Robert David Crane and Christopher Fryer. New York: M. Evans and Co. 1975. $5.95. This looks and feels like your ordinary sleazy picture book about a star. It isn't. It comprises interviews with many of the people who have worked with Nicholson, as producers, writers, fellow performers, directors, etc., plus commentary by the authors (young movie nuts) and filmography. James Dean: A Biography. By John Howlett. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976. $4.95. John Wayne and the Movies. By Allen Eyles. Introduction by Louise Brooks. South Brunswick, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1976. $15.00. The Judy Garland Souvenir Songbook. Compiled and edited by Howard Harnne. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. $14.95. Kate: The Life of Katharine Hepburn. By Charles Higham. New York: W. W. Norton and Co. 1975. $7.95. A chatty, entertaining Hollywood biography. Kiss Hollywood Good-By. By Anita Loos. New York: Viking, 1974. $7.95. Loos, who wrote more early films than anybody can easily credit, was a bright, resourceful, canny woman who probably wore more easily in

FILM BOOKS
person than she does in 200 pages of reminiscences, in which the strain to be witty is too often unpleasantly obvious. Her attitudes on sex, from her snideness about feminism to her cynical twenties "lightheartedness," seem ultimately merely anti-sexual: the age-old American puritanism in charming and cheerful disguise. Laurence Olivier. By John Cottrell. New York: PrenticeHall, 1975. $10.95. Mainly about his theater work. Mary Shelley's Monster: The Story of Frankenstein. By Martin Tropp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. $7.95. Frankenstein on stage, screen, and page, up through Mel Brooks' version. Interesting background on Mary Shelley's hard life. *Masterworks of the German Cinema. Introduction by Dr. Roger Manvell. New York: Icon Editions, Harper & Row, 1974. $8.95 (cloth), $4.95 (paper). Scripts for The Golem, Nosferatu, M, and The Threepenny Opera. The Milos Forman Stories. By Antonin J. Liehm. New York: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976. $15.00. A fascinating protracted conversation with Forman about his work up to Cuckoo 's Nest. Movie Making: A Guide to Film Production. By Sumner Glimcher and Warren Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. $9.95. Elementary guide to film technique; has useful photographic illustrations showing effects of different lenses, camera positions, lighting, etc. The occasional diagrams are less useful and even in one case (parallax error) downright erroneous. The Movies on Your Mind. By Harvey R. Greenberg, M.D. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975. $10.95 (cloth), $4.95 (paper). Carries on the tradition begun by Wolfenstein and Leites, of basically Freudian interpretations of movies as psychic indicators. The psychoanalyst author writes zippily and entertainingly, but without any overwhelming insights; he approves of Durgnat, but never equals Durgnat's subtlety. *My Life and My Films. By Jean Renoir. New York: Atheneum, 1975. $10.00. While it overlaps with some information already published in interviews, this is charming Renoir, and a necessary complement to the Durgnat, Braudy, and Bazin books. Nathanael West: A Comprehensive Bibliography. By William White. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1975. $8.00. *The Novel and the Cinema. By Geoffrey Wagner. Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Press, 1975. $15.00. Thoughtful, if not overwhelmingly origi-

35
nal, reflections on a variety of aspects of an old and probably eternal problem. Over My Shoulder: An Autobiography. By Jessie Matthews. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1976. $8.95. Political Change: A Film Guide. By James Morrison and Richard Blue. Minneapolis, Minn.: Audio Visual Library Service, 1975. $3.95. Brief essays on a variety of films useful in classes on economic development and political change. With source information. *Reeling. By Pauline Kael. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. $12.95. Our best critic, from 1972-75, with a foreword. Richard Winnington: Film Criticism and Caricatures 1943-53. Selected with an introduction by Paul Rotha. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. $18.00. Winnington was a London critic who is unaccountably compared by the jacket blurb to Agee, Bazin, and Delluc. Most of the book is made up of short reviews written in a flashy journalistic style, shallow in background knowledge and often cheaply unperceptive; occasionally an odd film (for instance Zinnemann's The Men) touched Winnington into a brief moment of seriousness and thought. But a first-class critic he was surely not. Scarlett, Rhett, and a Cast of Thousands: The Filming of "Gone with the Wind." By Roland Flamini. New York: Macmillan, 1976. $13.95. It must have required considerable intrepidity on Flamini's part to go up against Gavin Lambert's beautifully written GWTW. The resulting volume is much longer than Lambert's, and more thorough in its research, so to some extent it will supplement the earlier book, despite being less intelligent, less dramatic in form, and less readable. Curiously, however, Flamini omits an occasional tidbit found in Lambert-for instance, that Vivien Leigh received for playing Scarlett only about a third of the sum Selznick spent on screentesting alone. The Search for Sam Goldwyn: A Biography. By Carol Easton. New York: Morrow, 1976. $8.95. The Selznick Players. By Ronald Bowers. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1976. $15.00. Detailed career studies of David O. Selznick and eight of his contract players (Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Jennifer Jones, et al.), brief career studies of eight miscellaneous players (Hildegarde Knef, Louis Jourdan, Alida Valli, et al.), plus a long section on the production of Gone with the Wind, and various appendixes on Oscars, etc. -J. C. OGLETREE The Short Film. By George Rehauer. New York: Macmillan, 1975. $12.50. Annotated guide to films in widespread classroom use. The comments are dead-pan

36
summaries and non-evaluative, and not always terribly perceptive. (Of the brilliantly poetic Day After Day: "A commentary made up of thoughts which might be going through the minds of the workers accompanies the film.") 16mm Film Cutting. By John Burder. New York: Hastings House, 1975. Paper, $7.95. Text edition of this very well illustrated handy-dandy editing guide. Speed: Cinema of Motion. By Werner Adrian. New York: Crown, 1976. Paper, $2.95. Picture book-cars, airplanes, etc. *A Standard Glossary for Film Criticism. By James Monaco. New York Zoetrope, 31 East 12th St., New York, N.Y. 10003. Handy 32-page listing of common terms.

FILM BOOKS
Tod Browning, Don Siegel (Hollywood Professionals, Volume 4). By Stuart Rosenthal and Judith M. Kass. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1976. $2.95. United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars. By Tino Balio. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976. "Business history" is a very special kind of operation, and this is probably the first such to appear about a movie corporation-in this case, one formed by a group of talented, headstrong (often indeed, mulish), ambitious artists. The book documents the business dealings that made and later unmade the firm; it is, unfortunately, weak in its portrayal of the human events that lay behind the directors' minutes, the marketing reports, and so on, with the result that the book makes pretty dry reading for those interested in films rather than the film business. The most interesting aspect here is the role of Joseph Schenck in revitalizing the corporation. But many great film-makers besides the founders (Chaplin, Griffith, Fairbanks, Pickford) participated in UA's history--among them Keaton, Sternberg, and Lubitsch-as well as a host of Hollywood's major machers: Goldwyn, Disney, Zanuck, Selznick, et al.

*The Super 8 Book. By Lenny Lipton. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books (Simon & Schuster), 1976. $6.95. The author of the best introduction to film technique (Independent Film Making) turns his irreverent but tech-freak eye onto the rapidly developing Super 8 field. While, in principle, Super 8 can do everything that 16 can, in current practice you face problems with printing, "autoshredding" projectors, paucity of avail- The Vampire Film. By James Ursini and Alain Silver. able stock options (and universally pre-striped stock), N.J.: A. S. Barnes,1975. $10.00. Cranbury, etc. Not for the rank beginner. Lively and sometimes *Voices from the Japanese Cinema. By Joan Mellen. wry style. New York: Liveright, 1975. $12.50. An unusually Their Hearts Were Young and Gay. By Marc Best. well-prepared-for series of interviews, by an intelligent (Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1975. $10.00) Forty and concerned critic. Includes Kurosawa, Imai, Ichimore child stars to go with the 50 in Those Endearing kawa, Shindo, and many others; Susumu Hani and his Young Charms by the same author. A book W. C. wife Sachiko Hidari are especially interesting. With Fields would have appreciated. extensive introductions to each interview. *There Must Be a Lone Ranger: The American West in The Western. By Allen Eyles. Cranbury, New Jersey: Film and in Reality. By Jenni Calder. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1975. $8.95. A kind of mini-encyclopedia, Taplinger, 1975. $8.95. The British author of this study listing performers, directors, writers, cameramen, and may be classically U and never have set foot in the actual historical figures. territory, but she has done her homework in novels, *Western Films: An Annotated Critical Bibliography. and history. Thus she is in position to discuss films, certain things not often discussed, such as the impor- By John G. Nachbar. New York: Garland Publishing tance of the post-Civil War social chaos to the Western; Co., 545 Madison Avenue, 1975. $12.00. Lists articles and books up to about mid-1974; thus omits Will and she is not afraid to draw unpleasant conclusions, such as that Sergio Leone's "vicious and amoral" The Wright's structuralist study, Sixguns and Society. (Grossly overpriced for 98 pages.) Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, with its "savage brand of humour," must be preferred to Peckinpah's The Wild World Film & Television Study Resources: A Reference Bunch, with its "muddled attitudes." An acute, dense Guide to Major Training Centers and Archives. By and sophisticated book, giving almost as much atten- Ernest D. Rose. Provides information on 85 archives tion to prose fiction as to films; with an intriguing and 375 professional training programs in 76 countries. bibliography of source books. The author has seen more Available free to persons and institutions in the Third (and older) Westerns than the authors of the more World; for others, DM 29.00 to: Verlag Neue Geselltheoretical treatments of the genre, and is a fairly vivid schaft, D-53 Bonn-Bad Godesberg, Koelner Strasse writer. 149, West Germany.

37
New York folklore, Travis cannot talk much about his obsession. He feels so alienated that he either clams up or rambles half-coherently, to a puzzled fellow driver, to Palantine-just enough to hint at his dammed-up rage. Isolated, afraid of people, almost uneducated, Travis can do little but seethe to himself, complain to his diary (narrated in snippets on the sound track), and drive all night even in the most dangerous neighborhoods because he has so much trouble dropping off to sleep. Seeking an outlet for the "bad ideas" in his head, he focuses on Palantine, somewhat as Arthur Bremer did on George Wallace, and resolves to kill him. This fixation mingles with the hatred he comes to feel for Iris's pimp, which makes him oddly akin to the assassin in Nashville. Except for a cryptic reference to a tour of duty in Vietnam, Scorsese and Schrader avoid trying to explain him with personal details, psychologial data, or even the Marxist analysis which the film clearly invites; and this is all to the good. The hellmouth in which Travis is trapped is explanation enough for his impacted loneliness and self-hatred, his utter bewilderment over how to conquer them, his sense that he has failed "to become a person like other people." In a complete turnaround from his pinwheeling, offthe-wall Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, De Niro has brought Schrader's brilliant conception alive with expert minimalism: hooded eyes, stiffly loping gait, a crinkled shadow of a grin during moments of uncertainty. Along with Scorsese's electric montages of gothic Gotham, De Niro's embodiment of this lost man is the film's most affecting element. But once it has conjured Travis up, Taxi Driver does not really know what to do with him, other than baptize him in blood. Schrader uses Bressonian motifs, such as narration which describes what we already see, to make the film's climax look like the work of fate. But there is a thin line between this approach and plain old sloppy plotting. The devious, opportunistic way in which Taxi Driver handles Iris and Betsy exposes its muddled thinking. Iris the 12-year-old whore and Betsy the sophisticated political activist both enter Travis's life by chance, and he battens onto each for opposite reasons. Iris he wants to save

Reviews
TAXI DRIVER
Director:MartinScorsese. Script:Paul Schroder.Producers:Michaeol Music: andJuliaPhillips, TonyBill. Photography: and Michael Chapman. Columbia. Herrman. Bernard

In Taxi Driver, New York City is a steaming, polluted cesspool and Travis Bickle's cab a drifting bathysphere from which he can peer at the "garbage and trash" which obsess him: whores, pimps, junkies, wandering maniacs, maggotty streets, random violence. It's definitely a subjective vision-the film locks us into his consciousness-yet not solipsistic, inasmuch as the grisly avenues and their cargo of human flotsam could be observed by anyone walking or riding there at night. The screenwriter, Paul Schrader, also wrote a book entitled Transcendental Style in Film, * and he has gone out of his way to make us take one of its subjects, Robert Bresson, for his main inspiration. Actually, it is Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer (released after the book was published) which Taxi Driver suggests most. Bresson made his Paris more romantic and even comic than Martin Scorsese has done with Manhattan. But both have created memorable portraits of glowing, phosphorescent urban nights, from which isolated human novas flare briefly before the darkness swallows them back again. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) sees everything more or less silently from behind the wheel of his cab: a groping couple, presidential candidate Charles Palantine, a demented husband raving about firing a .44 into his wife's pussy, a sub-teenage hooker named Iris trying to flee a pimp, a hip blonde Palantine worker called Betsy who first rejects him and later stares at him in fascination after he has accidentally won fame for gunning down Iris's pimp during the film's horrifying climax. Unlike the gabby hackies of
*University of California Press, 1972.

i z

owl?:

. . . . . . ..

Director Martin Scorsese cast himself as the

jealous-husband passenger in TAXI DRIVER.

from her sordid life; Betsy he hopes will save him. Travis never overtly searches for Iris; until the end, each encounter with her occurs unintentionally. But he boldly makes a date with Betsy by striding up to her desk and sweet-talking her. If we challenge either circumstance on grounds of simple plausibility, we are sure to be told that both are predestined, that-to cite the subtitle of A Man Escaped--" the wind blows where it will." But this particular wind blows from a wind machine. One of the movie's set pieces is a breakfast between Iris and Travis, during which he tries to persuade her into going back to her midwestern home. But she wants nothing to do with that; Ohio is boring, and her parents hate her. This piece of motivation is so hackneyed that it sounds like a parody of the conventional "explanations" which the movie has otherwise tried to reject. But it helps make us conclude that Travis is right. Life in the American heartland may be dull and

repressive--the droning voice of Iris's father eventually confirms that-but at least it is not seamy or perilous. Jodie Foster brings a scary precocity to her part, and the movie flirts with the possibility that Iris prefers her street hustler's existence. Still, the whole sequence works mainly as a set-up for the climactic violence. The script graphs matters out to make us feel a merger during the bloodbath of Travis's twin impulses: to destroy the garbage and to save Iris. The gruesome carnage is supposed to be a rite of redemption, for the two of them and even for the city. Betsy, in her incandescent loveliness and white dress, becomes Travis's icon of purity, plucked by his eyes from the engulfing evil of the city. When they chat at a cafd during a break in her workday, he tells her that she is a lonely person. It sounds like the oldest snow-job in the world. But we know that we are supposed to believe it because, a few moments earlier, the movie violated its restriction to Travis's point-of-view in order to show Betsy with a glib co-worker who

REVIEWS doesn't really respect her. This, plus a snatch of "fatalistic" narration describing the chat before it happens, is meant to disarm our doubts abut the likelihood of the whole encounter, and set us up for the next stage-when Travis wrecks his hopes by taking Betsy to a hard-core porno movie on their next date. Deeply offended, she rejects his apology and drops him. Frustrated in his attempts to reach her again, he concludes that she is as cold and distant as the other people swirling around him. With all chance of a relationship TAXI DRIVER gone, Travis now has only one safety valve left-gunplay. The plotting of this sequence is inept yet tion is understandable, and he had piqued her cunning. Travis's gaffe is difficult to accept. He interest enough for her to go out with him despite claims not to have known that any other kind of their obvious differences. So why couldn't she movie exists or that pornography would upset the accept his regrets and continue to see him? Just woman he has cast as his rescuing goddess. Who as Three Days of the Condor eliminates its female can believe that a cabdriver, seeing and hearing lead halfway through its story so that it can lapse every variety of human kinkiness, spending hours into a routine but supposedly more commercial himself in scummy stroke houses, would be this shoot-'em-up climax, Taxi Driver dumps its naive? But just as these objections come to mind, principal woman just when she has began to so does the thought that Scorsese and Schrader suggest more interesting narrative choices than are fully aware of them, that we are to swallow one more blood-and-guts ending. Possibly, even them anyway as proof of just how isolated from probably, there is little hope that Travis could human life Travis has become. Scorsese has even have a relationship with Betsy or any other gone on record with the observation that Travis's woman (no indication of homosexuality appears). mistake with Betsey is an unconscious act of But Scorsese and Schrader abandon the possibiliself-destruction. Nothing in the sequence explicit- ty too easily, if they ever even considered it. For ly backs this statement up. But it sounds just reasons that may be as much intellectual and plausible enough to make us incline to give him emotional as commercial, they prefer the cerand Schrader the benefit of the doubt. Once we tainty of blood to the chance of love. do that, we can then accept the withdrawal of Scorsese's New York-bred angers and obsessions, not to mention his Catholic background, Betsy, which leaves the decks cleared for action. In order to clear those decks, however, Taxi have become well-known through his movies and Driver overlooks, maybe deliberately, other op- interviews. So have the repressive Protestant tions. For the sake of argument, let's accept the fundamentalism of Schrader's youth and the notion that Travis would take his dream woman difficulties of his life in Los Angeles before he to a porno movie. Why does she have to be broke into the studio system in 1972 with his disgusted by it? The writing of her scenes in the screenplay for The Yakuza.* These factors sugcampaign office, along with the casting of Cybill gest that money alone does not motivate their deShepherd in the part, invites us to view her as a sire to end Taxi Driver with a blood feast, though it worldly young woman. Why does such a woman would be silly to discount money altogether. But necessarily have to storm out of a hard-core on top of all of this, Schrader must have had an theater as though she had never even heard of additional motivation: the desire to have the "dirty movies?" Or as if Travis had forced her to movie conform to his formulation of "transcenenter it in the first place? Or, even granting this much, why must she be so coldly unforgiving of *See especially a lengthy interview with Richard Thompson in his mistake? His apology is sincere, his explana- Film Comment, March-April 1976.

40
dental style." Any brief summary of its elements is bound to be oversimplified. But, as he analyzes it, its constituent parts are: a detailed, nondramatic presentation of everyday life, in which "nothing is expressive" of psychology, ideas, or any sort of readily paraphrasable meaning; the disparity which results when "human density" is added to this cold, flat mundaneness, causing us to be emotionally stirred and to accept on faith the decisive action taken by a character in order to break through it; and a concluding stasis, defined as "a form which can accept deep, contradictory emotion and transform it into an expression of something unified, permanent, transcendent." The style seeks to embody everything in life which cannot be explained psychologically, economically, dramatically, or through any other kind of rational means. It attempts to express "the inner unity of all things," to "maximize the mystery of existence." Schrader declares Bresson and Ozu its prime practitioners, adds elsewhere that he wrote his first script under its guidance, and has undoubtedly thought of it in connection with Taxi Driver. But, leaving aside any debate over the validity of the style, the film has become a travesty of it. In Transcendental Style, Schrader quotes Amedde Ayfre to the effect that the slightest flaw or lack of conviction will destroy any film seeking to use this approach. Bresson writes his own scripts; Ozu collaborated with a scenarist who saw eye-to-eye with him. But Martin Scorsese is probably the least transcendental director imaginable. He wants immersion in the immanent, not transcendence of it. Much of Taxi Driver is indeed a meticulous presentation of "the everyday." But Scorsese's temperament and personal style are too sensual, kinetic, volatile, fevered for the transcendental as Schrader has outlined it. He seems to favor scripts whose looseness allows him to slip favorite vignettes or improvisations into them without strain. He tends to pour his own intensity into sketchy screenplays, often trying to obscure their faults and thinness with virtuoso camerawork and hot-wired acting. When he has a genuinely complex center to work with, like the anguished, priest-ridden hood Charlie in Mean Streets, his work has a passion which few other directors can match. But when his prota-

REVIEWS
gonist becomes too simple, as in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, a bundle of confused contradictions like Travis, or when his plots become mere collections of scenes, as happens with Alice and Who's That Knocking at My Door, his volatility, exciting as it remains, comes to seem little more than hype. A colder, flatter, more Bressonian version of Taxi Driver is easily imaginable and perhaps would have worked better even without script revisions. But Schrader, of all people, should know that Scorsese is not the director to make this version. As for disparity and decisive action, Taxi Driver cannot hope to attain either because of its slippery plotting, which deprives its movement toward violence of any fatalistic quality. Just before he buys a load of guns in preparation for his attempt on Palantine's life, Travis's diary states that, after days and days of life's uneventful drift, "suddenly there is change." Like the narration which precedes his first conversation with Betsy, this remark seems intended to make us view what follows-in this case, the violence-as fated. In his book, Schrader cites the religious paradox of becoming truly free by choosing one's predestined fate. But if one's fate is indeed predestined, then so is one's choice (or rejection) of it. Travis's narration would have us believe that he is taking "decisive action" by accepting a fate which he cannot alter. But bad plotting, rather than predestination, has brought him to this point. Like the fate in Godard's My Life to Live, this one is, as Pauline Kael put it, "crosseyed." So is the coda, during which Travis, acclaimed by the media because the pimps he killed turned out to be gangsters, accepts Betsy as a passenger in his cab, drops her off, then drives away, rejecting her tentative interest but retaining her image in his rear-view mirror. Has his explosion purged him of his rage? Permanently or temporarily? The first seems unbelievable, and the second renders the whole movie a virtually pointless psychodrama. Instead of stasis, the scene expresses the desperation of the filmmakers to find a playable ending for the movie. Schrader's allusions to Bresson tend to seem almost as forced. From The Diary of a Country Priest, he has borrowed its protagonist's Holy Agony--with both words operative, because his

REVIEWS goal seems to be the canonization of Travis as a mythic icon or secular saint, a lowlife Christ come to cleanse the temple of moneylenders. When Palantine pontificates about the suffering of "we the people," the phrase seems calculated to include Travis, who even wears a "We the people" campaign button during his failed attempt on the candidate's life. When a fence lays out his inventory of guns for Travis, painstakingly cataloguing the caliber and power of each, the movie becomes laughably fetishistic. But the intention was apparently sacramental; Travis and the fence handle the weapons like chalices, set them down in their cases like hosts on a paten at High Mass. The miscalculation is almost sublime. With much of the audience simply gasping at the arsenal and turning on to the scene's sexual undertones, its tonier aspirations become a joke, like Travis's Bressonian lament that "I think I've got stomach cancer." Travis has neither the religion of Bresson's priest nor the Dostoyevskian rationale of his pickpocket. Scorsese is not the director for even deviant saints; the tortured, guilty Charlie is more his meat. When it finally comes, the climax of Taxi Driver certainly does have a rush of emotion which could be palmed off as characteristic of the transcendental "decisive action." But it is only a revenge movie cliche; like the shark attacks in Jaws, it provides a purely physical jolt and obtains nothing more than a reflex reaction. When necks are gushing, blown-off hands are flying, and brains are spattering the wall, we cannot help jumping with shock (pleasurable or otherwise), but that has nothing to do with anything as lofty as redemption. During this scene, Taxi Driver reduces itself almost to the squalid level of Death Wish, the kind of adrenalin-pumping, unprincipled revenge melodrama which will do anything to arouse its audience. Despite the current cry in Hollywood for "pure entertainment" and a return to old-fashioned storytelling, most of today's screenwriters are no better at either than Schrader is, which is why they so often head straight for this genre. It's the easiest type of script to plot; just establish a lantern-jawed hero, kill off his wife and kids and dog, throw in some picturesque torture such as breaking both his legs or grinding off his hand in

41 a garbage disposal, then turn him loose. As simple-minded as this mechanism is, its raw power is irresistible to many audiences no matter how stupidly and cynically it is used. Taxi Driver never becomes this simplistic, but the revenge movie's relentless build-up to a bloody climax is hard to derail once it gets going and perhaps too brutally driving to be contained by even a flawless application of transcendental style. When Travis prepares for violence with calisthenics, target practice, dieting, fast-draw exercises before a mirror, and a Mohawk haircut, these ritual preparations, this Puritan shriving of the body, looks like a weird cross between a bull-fighter donning his suit of lights and a priest vesting for Mass. It does no good to remember that this is an ancient movie gimmick (see Electra Glide in Blue, for instance) or even that Lee Marvin parodies it hilariously in Cat Ballou. The inherent roller-coaster force of this sequence can neither be denied nor, in this movie at least, controlled. As a result, during the shootout, the audience doesn't get redeemed; it just gets off-or gets sick. Not that Scorsese and Schrader are necessarily crass; violence is easy to misjudge in film, not only because it has been so widespread for years but also because it is generally photographed in fragments, with so much special effects technology that it can seem like a game for the film-makers. Whatever the case, their violence here is less redemptive than laxative, its impact morally and artistically useless. So when Scorsese then launches a spectacular series of crane shots over the corpses and the spent guns, the sequence cannot help appearing hypocritical. If Taxi Driver had unleashed its firestorm, say, halfway through its running time and -then had gone on to show Travis dealing with the changes in his life brought on by this catharsis and the resulting fame, it might have become an analysis of contemporary confusion rather than an example of it. In any sense of the term, it fails to transcend because its makers are caught in too many contradictions. Scorsese has an enviable feeling for film, Schrader a knack for evocative premises in addition to an often incisive critical mind. But, separately or together, both need a healthy dose of redemption from half-baked -MICHAEL DEMPSEY ideas.

42

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F FOR FAKE
Writtenand directed by Orson Welles. Photographed Christian by Odessoand GaryGraver.Musicby MichelLegrand.

The film itself comes on as a piece of fakery--a shell game, in fact. Orson the sleight-of-hand expert shuffles his scenes and gives us plenty of patter while we wonder where he's hidden the central theme. I started out by picking the scenes with art forger Elmyr de Hory (even his name is probably a fake), who can fool experts with his Matisses and Modiglianis. The mystique of greatness in art; the irony of art treated as a commodity-this was a theme already glimpsed in Citizen Kane, with the hoard of crated treasures that no one ever enjoyed. Now Welles plays at greater length with the irony. Hory casually burns a "Matisse" and signs Welles's name to a portrait: art as commodity is a joke, with thousands of dollars hinging only on a personality, a name. But the joke has a twist. Since Hory paints not copies but "originals," he doesn't consider himself a forger. "I don't feel bad for Modigliani," he says, smugly, about one of his creations, "I feel good for me." The faker who fools himself along with the experts-surely that's promising enough material to sustain a whole film?* But Welles is already pushing another shell toward us. This is Clifford Irving, who appears onscreen simply as Hory's biographer. Between the filming and the editing of F for Fake, however, he emerged as a faker in his own right. By referring to the Howard Hughes hoax in the narration, Welles introduces a different kind of irony and sets up a dramatic tension between what's seen and heard: when Irving is onscreen most viewers will probably, as I did, scrutinize him for some hint of his secret. Still, it soon becomes clear that neither Hory nor Irving is sitting on top of the central theme. The star of the film is Welles himself. He is the narrator; he appears repeatedly onscreen; and he
*That was probably the objective of Fran9ois Reichenbach, whose documentary footage Welles has incorporated into the larger pattern of his own film.

presents a condensed survey of his career as actor and director. The persona he chooses to project is unmistakable: he opens and closes the film by performing magic tricks; as narrator, he appears in his magician's cloak amid the flashing screens of a TV control room; and at the climax of the film, after the semi-documentary study of Hory, Irving and himself, he fabricates an anecdote about Picasso, a beautiful woman and a set of fake paintings.' Clearly, Welles is casting himself as another faker alongside Hory and Irving, and the most outrageous of the three. Though he plays the role tongue-in-cheek, it's too insistent to be dismissed merely as a joke. There is an obvious sense in which a film-maker like Welles can be considered a fake: after all, is a screen adaptation of Shakespeare, Kafka, Dinesen, etc. any more original than a Matisse or a Modigliani by Hory? Ironically, F for Fake breaks out of the pattern: it's the first Welles film to reach the screen with an original script to his sole credit.2 It is also his first completed film to be based on a documentary subject, and this shifts the question of fakery onto new ground. Is the documentary footage any more real than the rest of the film? Can the unreal elements (such as the Picasso anecdote) and processes (editing, voice-over, music, etc.) convey just as much or even more sense of reality? Where is there most fakery and most reality in this hybrid of a film? Here we come face to face with the central theme of Ffor Fake, which is nothing less than a quirky commentary on the ontology of the film medium. It's a truism that the film seems closer to real life than does any other art form, but not for the obvious reason: the film does not necessarily transmit any more information about reality. But neither painting nor theater can permit such a casual proliferation of apparent variables as the film: lighting, color, object movement, camera movement, foreground and background, different places and times, dreams, memories, hallucinations and-as Welles demonstrates in F for Fake-creations in its own or other media. Our experience of reality comes to us through a similar casual multiplicity of channels, and it is this rather than any one-to-one correspondence between channels that accounts for the "realism" of the film. The qualification is important: the

iTF
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fact that (for example) our real life lacks a background score or that the film lacks tactile sensations does not compromise the similarity. This specious realism is an asset, but often a dubious one. It accounts for much of the charm of unsophisticated popular movies, in which spiritual vacuity is redeemed by physical fullness. (This can rarely happen in other media: I'll watch but won't read westerns.) But the charm can become dangerous as sophistication creeps in and popular movies play with more ambitious but superficial ideas-a trend that has been particularly marked in the US since the early sixties. The result can easily be seen by comparing two very different films on similar themes. The Sugarland Express was a hyped-up John Garfield vehicle (They Made Me a Criminal, Dust be My Destiny) with colorful action spread over familiar attitudes of sentimentality and mild rebellion; Badlands, by contrast, avoided the facile charm and gave a disturbing cool view of its delinquents. While the latter failed to please the supposedly more discriminating audiences of the seventies, The Sugarland Express turned out to be a profitable stopover on its director's way to Jaws. The specious realism that is so easy to achieve with film can deceive not only audiences but also film makers-including many whose goals seem higher than Steve Spielberg's. It's ironic to look at four recent, highly praised films that are concerned with exposing fakery-in the worlds of country music (Nashville), beauty contests (Smile), international journalism (The Passenger) and bygone Hollywood (The Day of the Locust)--

and see how they all resort to fakery themselves. They create a rich sense of multi-channel activity, notably in their perpetual motion around real locations (Nashville, Santa Rosa, Hollywood and -with The Passenger--the world) and in their use of different modes of reality (public, staged, and recorded events as well as "normal" interactions), and there's nothing wrong with all this except that it serves to conceal melodramatic plot devices, good/bad stereotyping of characters, heavy-handed satire and a general inertia of perception and imagination. If it conceals these things from the film-maker too, then you have a Hory who thinks he's a Modigliani. Not surprisingly, some feature film-makers react more or less overtly against the specious realism of their medium. They have a choice of two basic strategies: either to reduce or to augment the (apparent) number and/or intensity of the information channels. To take historical examples, German expressionism opted for reduction, using stylized sets and acting, while the French avant-garde augmented conventional filmmaking methods with symbolic objects and gestures and lavish trick photography. Of course, neither approach offers any guarantee of integrity; each can be followed because it seems chic, and each can be abused. The film-maker who chooses one of them can be reasonably certain only that he will find it harder to achieve a big popular success.3 Welles is one of the augmenters. In spite of his obvious debt to expressionism, he uses such elements as stylized sets and lighting in addition

44

REVIEWS

to, not in place of, their realistic counterparts; this is true even in his most expressionistic work, The Trial. In his fiction films the larger-than-life approach makes itself felt immediately in extreme dynamic contrasts-between light and dark, foreground and background, whisper and shout, etc.-which induce a kind of hyperesthesia in the viewer. In F for Fake, with its documentary veneer, the individual images and sounds are more "normal" and the immediate hyperesthetic effect comes from the exuberant editing. Welles's approach to film making involves many risks. Even at his best, the critical praise he earns is often qualified by such terms as "showy" or "bravura." And any weaknesses are likely to be spotlighted by the hyperesthetic effect. This certainly happens in F for Fake, where the confusion as to who or what is the central subject is compounded by stylistic diversity (readymade documentary footage, narrative scenes, semidocumentary sequences, fictional sequences, film clips and stills) and continual shifts of tone (ironic observation, reminiscence, speculation, mystification, humor). In addition, a few lengthy sequences reach the point of tedium all the sooner because Welles has accustomed the viewer to expect rapid changes; and on one of these sequences-the climactic Picasso anecdote-he has let his hand rest so heavily that it crushes both plausibility and amusement. So if Welles's approach is showy, it is certainly the reverse of cosmetic. Better still, it does not offer a merely superficial complexity, like the four films I mentioned earlier. The range of dynamics that makes an immediate impact on the viewer's senses is reflected in contrasts on all levels. In fact, one of Welles's main strengths throughout his career has been his ability to focus on contradictory impulses in life, enlarging and clarifying them without oversimplification. In F for Fake he rounds up polarities that have appeared in his previous work and gives them even greater play than before. Doing and dreaming are probably the most obvious of these contradictory impulses, since they are embodied in the films' protagonists (which usually means in Welles himself as actor). Sometimes-not in the best films-the poles

appear separately, with a considerable loss of tension: Arkadin, whose love for his daughter never gains more life than a plot requirement, is all power and action; so in a different way is Clay in the Immortal Story-a juggernaut of the Protestant work ethic. At the opposite extreme lies Joseph K, all dreamer: what happens to him in The Trial, as depicted by Welles, resembles the passive experience of a hallucinogenic trip. But the archetypal protagonist is Kane, the man of power and vigor haunted not only by his lost childhood but by unattainable desires. Macbeth and Othello are passive men of action; Falstaff protects his indolence with great energy; a petrified dream of love and justice impels Quinlan in Touch of Evil to frame his suspects. In F for Fake the poles coexist in Welles himself: as narrator, magician, and master of ceremonies he is the visible driving force behind the film, and yet from time to time he lapses into the minor key, musing on the past or speculating fatalistically on the future ("Our songs will all be silenced; but what of it? Go on singing"). Even the restless and loquacious Hory and Irving are trapped in reflectiveness. There are odd scenes of a pet spider monkey clambering over a silent Irving, and an even odder, superb sequence when Welles asks whether Hory ever forged signatures on his imitative paintings: Hory says no, Irving (in a separate scene) says yes, and Welles crosscuts to and fro between them as each retreats into an uneasy, protracted silence. In some of Welles's films the opposition of doing and dreaming is closely linked with conflicting attitudes toward change: eagerness and welcome on the one hand, regret and resignation on the other. Kane is a mover and shaker of others who can never quite move or shake himself; Eugene Morgan, in The Magnificent Ambersons, opts for the automobile even though he guesses that it may change the world for the worse as much as for the better; Prince Hal breaks up the camaraderie that Falstaff wanted to last for ever. In F for Fake, Welles starts out by cutting impatiently from scene to scene as he introduces new characters and topics; then, foreshadowing the speculative mood referred to above, he inserts an enigmatic scene of himself

REVIEWS seated in a Paris garden, immobile as the trees around him change through the four seasons. However hard you try (he seems to be saying) there are certain things in yourself you cannot change: in his case, the desire for both change and permanence. In F for Fake Welles probes deeper than ever before into the polarities of truth and falsehood, reality and illusion. Since these duos have been much abused by film-makers, and even more by critics, I should stress that I'm not talking about the facile ambiguities that can be read into almost any film. True, Welles has always enjoyed teasing the viewer with superficial manipulations of apparent reality-the distorting effect of shadows, reflections, and wide-angle perspective; juxtapositions of different times; equivocal compounds of studio settings and locations (which nearly always stand for some different place or, as in The Trial, for no place at all)-and he sets similar traps in Ffor Fake with his magic tricks and with his mixtures of documentary and fictional footage and of different pasts and presents. But in nearly all of his films the ambiguities extend into a deeper level, where they are often overlooked. It isn't surprising that a Marxist-inspired critic should see nothing more in Kane's character than a sinister attempt to persuade the working class that millionaires are unhappy.4 But even a sympathetic critic takes Welles to task for his sincere delivery of Kane's Declaration of Principles, failing to realize that Kane could believe he is telling the truth at that moment, excited by the idea divorced from the reality.5 As with doing and dreaming, of course, in some of Welles's films the conflict between truth and falsehood takes a more rudimentary form (the deliberate hypocrisy of Franz Kindler in The Stranger, of Elsa Bannister in The Lady from Shanghai, and of Iago) than in others (the various self-deceptions of Macbeth, Quinlan, and Falstaff); but with his own persona in Ffor Fake it reaches a new level of complexity, beyond Clifford Irving (at the Kindler/Elsa Bannister level of those who fool others) and beyond Hory (at the Kane level of those who also fool themselves). Welles the tongue-in-cheek illusionist contends before our eyes with Welles the serious film-

"Yourobedient servant- Orson Welles"

maker, and it's impossible to tell which comes out on top. On the serious side, the whole of F for Fake is keyed to visual brightness and clarity, with no deceptive mirrors, no chiaroscuro, no twisted perspectives; even the magic tricks take place outdoors or in well-lighted public buildings. And after the Picasso anecdote, Welles makes an immediate confession: "I promised to tell you the truth for an hour. . . . But for the past 17 minutes I've been lying my head off." Still, can we take this candor at face value? Couldn't he be confessing one deception in order to distract us from others? After all, he does end the film the way he began it-with a magic trick. The ambiguity of Welles's role in F for Fake would be trivial by itself, but it leads right into the film's central theme: What is the relation between film and reality? In suggesting an answer to that question, Welles the film maker breaks new ground. As Jean Mitry has pointed out,6 Kane starts from a fixed present to explore fixed events in the past; it is based on an objective view of the relation between past and present. Thus there is an implication, most obvious in the final scenes of Rosebud, that fragments of reality can be fitted together to make sense, and that the film can faithfully mirror both the fragments and the process. This implication persists with varying force in nearly all of Welles's subsequent films: many are set in a "finished" past (especially Othello and Chimes at Midnight, whose main

46

REVIEWS

events are encapsulated in a flashback); those set Chimes at Midnight, Welles uses none of the in the present (The Stranger, The Lady from familiar devices to suggest that the "flashbacks" Shanghai, Touch of Evil) are concerned with the are any more distant than the "present" scenes. unmasking of hidden realities (the illusive fair- Long before Robbe-Grillet expounded the theory ground mirrors are smashed, for example, and behind Last Year at Marienbad, Welles had been Michael walks out of the shadows into daylight); creating films in which the only true present is the and The Trial, set in dream time and at first sight viewer's. the most existentialist film in the canon, invokes This is the most striking aspect of the struggle a cosmic observer who can summarize Joseph K's between reality and illusion in Welles's work. The experience in the fable of the door and the guard. viewer's present-the audiovisual experience-is There seems to be a clear parallel between this so vivid and hyperesthetic that one would be observer-incarnated by Welles-and the narra- tempted to call it real if it were not so clearly tor/master of ceremonies of F for Fake. But the unreal: timeless and placeless. Except for the reality he's observing here is far from fixed, as the newsreel in Kane, Welles's contemporary feature changed role of Clifford Irving demonstrates most films make no reference to current events, and he dramatically; and in presenting the activities of handles the documentary footage of Ffoir Fake in Irving and Hory, Welles does not claim to know such a way that it is usually impossible to tell just any more than the viewer about what's really when and where a scene was taken. He is far less concerned than Fellini or Bergman with hitching going on. Throughout F for Fake, in fact, he rejects any his private visions onto familiar landmarks. This subjective world could be stifling-if it did privileged view of reality, making it clear that the fragments he records do not, simply by virtue of not contain powerful reminders of the real world being filmed and edited, represent any quintes- in its contradictions: doing and dreaming, persential pattern. By continually jumbling together manence and change, truth and falsehood. These scenes that belong to different modes of reality, are the patterns Welles chooses to impose on the he reminds the viewer that the fragments are fragments of sight and sound that make up his fragments-and that the documentary footage of films, and they carry conviction not because of Hory and Irving is no more "real" than the image any precise statement they make but through of himself in the magician's cloak. At the same their dynamism, the swinging and shifting of time, he demonstrates that the fragments can their polarities. indeed be built into a pattern: from his own The dynamism that runs through all of Welles's jumble he selects a famous painter, a beautiful films, undermining the specious realism of the woman, the idea of imitation and the idea of audiovisual experience and establishing a broader pride in imitation, and comes up with the Picasso sense of reality, may at times seem overblown. anecdote. Obviously it is the film-maker, not the Viewers may then wish for something cooler in the process of recording reality, that determines this way of film-making: Ozu or Godard, Antonioni pattern; somewhat less obviously, although the or the varied practitioners of specious realism. (I anecdote is false, it forms part of a larger pattern do this myself: I'd like to see F for Fake on a (the interplay of reality and illusion throughout F double bill with Straub's Chronicle of Anna for Fake) that can be recognized as true. Magdalena Bach.) But no matter where they turn Looking back at Welles's earlier films from the they can't escape fakery; they merely find it under vantage point of F for Fake one can see that another disguise. The door that's intended for nearly all of them are looser, less "fixed," than film makers (to paraphrase the fable in The they first appeared. Rosebud does not explain Trial) is labeled with an F .. . F for Film, F for away the ambiguity of the Declaration of Princi- Fake. -WILLIAM JOHNSON ples; the unmasking of Elsa and Arthur Bannister does not dissipate the miasma of evil that clings NOTES to The Lady from Shanghai; and in Othello and 1. He also caricatures himself as an actor, perhaps unintentional-

REVIEWS
ly, by addressing to a waiter the film's most dramatically delivered and Shakespearian line: "Would you take these away, please, and bring / The steak au poivre." 2. Because he used Reichenbach's footage, Welles's originality may still be challenged. However, unless Welles relied heavily on Reichenbach's organization of the footage, which seems unlikely, the challenge carries little force. In a collaborative medium like the film, few creations can be original in the same sense as a painting. 3. Generalizations must be made with caution, since film-makers who follow the same strategy need have nothing else in common. Reducers include Godard, Jancs6 and Bresson; augmenters, Fellini, Kubrick, Rivette. 4. For example, Charles W. Eckert in an aside in "The Anatomy of a Proletarian Film: Warner's Marked Woman," FQ, Winter 1973-74. 5. Charles Higham in The Films of Orson Welles (University of CaliforniaPress, Berkeley, 1970), p. 28. 6. Esthetique et Psychologie du Cinema (Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1965), p. 403.

The wife in PAGEOF MADNESS

A PAGE MADNESS OF
Kawabata. Teinosuke Photography: Director: Script:Yasunari Kinugasa. Films. Kohei.Contemporary Sugiyama

As obscure as the Japanese silent era is in general to most of Europe and America, the early history of the Japanese avant-garde is almost unknown. It is thus with keen interest that we greet the re-discovery of Teinosuke Kinugasa's 1926 film, A Page of Madness (Kurutta Ippeiji). This silent feature by the director of Gate of Hell is thought to be the earliest experimental film ever made in Japan, and was found in 1971 in an old storeroom of Kinugasa's home. The film was an independent production-for the Kinugasa Motion Picture League-produced while Kinugasa was under contract to the Shochiku Studios, and was made with the assistance of a group of writers, founders of the literary magazine The Age of Letters. Among them was the novelist Yasunari Kawabata, who is given credit for the film's original screenplay. Not being discernible within a larger avant-garde film movement, however, A Page of Madness tells more about its director than about the birth of Japanese experimental cinema. Although of little commercial influence, the film takes up the themes of fate and the innocence of

individual helplessness which dominate much of Kinugasa's later work. Put together "by the feel of the shots," as Kinugasa has said, A Page of Madness is a blend of visual metaphor, fantasy, hallucination, and simple flashback. The film begins in an atmosphere of anxiety and darkness with a violent rainstorm edited in a staccato rhythm and highlighted by images of the angular collision of water onto concrete. There are a series of cut-aways to the interior of a mental institution, and this outside eruption of nature becomes a reflection of human suffering. Alternating between the storm and the institution, the two main characters, the husband and wife, are introduced. Locked in her cell, the woman hallucinates a scene from her memory, seeing herself as she attempts to drown herself and her daughter. We infer that the horror has been sufficient for her to go insane. The husband has hidden his identity, and now works as the asylum janitor in hopes of re-establishing contact with his wife. The film confronts the problems which the husband faces in penetrating the wife's defenses, and follows him as his failure plunges him into a confrontation with his own sanity. The film culminates in a long riot sequence which suggests the husband's total loss of self-control. Primarily because of its chiaroscuro lighting and its romantic view of suffering, A Page of Madness is reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; however, there are fundamental differences. Unlike the German Expressionists, Kinugasa does not distort the planes and surfaces of the decor. The corridor and the individual cells of the institution are often photographed in

REVIEWS
ly, by addressing to a waiter the film's most dramatically delivered and Shakespearian line: "Would you take these away, please, and bring / The steak au poivre." 2. Because he used Reichenbach's footage, Welles's originality may still be challenged. However, unless Welles relied heavily on Reichenbach's organization of the footage, which seems unlikely, the challenge carries little force. In a collaborative medium like the film, few creations can be original in the same sense as a painting. 3. Generalizations must be made with caution, since film-makers who follow the same strategy need have nothing else in common. Reducers include Godard, Jancs6 and Bresson; augmenters, Fellini, Kubrick, Rivette. 4. For example, Charles W. Eckert in an aside in "The Anatomy of a Proletarian Film: Warner's Marked Woman," FQ, Winter 1973-74. 5. Charles Higham in The Films of Orson Welles (University of CaliforniaPress, Berkeley, 1970), p. 28. 6. Esthetique et Psychologie du Cinema (Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1965), p. 403.

The wife in PAGEOF MADNESS

A PAGE MADNESS OF
Kawabata. Teinosuke Photography: Director: Script:Yasunari Kinugasa. Films. Kohei.Contemporary Sugiyama

As obscure as the Japanese silent era is in general to most of Europe and America, the early history of the Japanese avant-garde is almost unknown. It is thus with keen interest that we greet the re-discovery of Teinosuke Kinugasa's 1926 film, A Page of Madness (Kurutta Ippeiji). This silent feature by the director of Gate of Hell is thought to be the earliest experimental film ever made in Japan, and was found in 1971 in an old storeroom of Kinugasa's home. The film was an independent production-for the Kinugasa Motion Picture League-produced while Kinugasa was under contract to the Shochiku Studios, and was made with the assistance of a group of writers, founders of the literary magazine The Age of Letters. Among them was the novelist Yasunari Kawabata, who is given credit for the film's original screenplay. Not being discernible within a larger avant-garde film movement, however, A Page of Madness tells more about its director than about the birth of Japanese experimental cinema. Although of little commercial influence, the film takes up the themes of fate and the innocence of

individual helplessness which dominate much of Kinugasa's later work. Put together "by the feel of the shots," as Kinugasa has said, A Page of Madness is a blend of visual metaphor, fantasy, hallucination, and simple flashback. The film begins in an atmosphere of anxiety and darkness with a violent rainstorm edited in a staccato rhythm and highlighted by images of the angular collision of water onto concrete. There are a series of cut-aways to the interior of a mental institution, and this outside eruption of nature becomes a reflection of human suffering. Alternating between the storm and the institution, the two main characters, the husband and wife, are introduced. Locked in her cell, the woman hallucinates a scene from her memory, seeing herself as she attempts to drown herself and her daughter. We infer that the horror has been sufficient for her to go insane. The husband has hidden his identity, and now works as the asylum janitor in hopes of re-establishing contact with his wife. The film confronts the problems which the husband faces in penetrating the wife's defenses, and follows him as his failure plunges him into a confrontation with his own sanity. The film culminates in a long riot sequence which suggests the husband's total loss of self-control. Primarily because of its chiaroscuro lighting and its romantic view of suffering, A Page of Madness is reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; however, there are fundamental differences. Unlike the German Expressionists, Kinugasa does not distort the planes and surfaces of the decor. The corridor and the individual cells of the institution are often photographed in

48
medium and long shots with a naturalistic perspective. In direct contrast to Caligari, there is nothing to suggest that the main action is being told through the eyes of a madman; the story evolves within the historical present and maintains a spatio-temporal integrity which allows the action to unfold with little contextual ambiguity. Neither does Kinugasa show an affinity for what Lotte Eisner saw as the Germans' "eerie gift for animating objects." (The Haunted Screen) The asylum which could refer to a larger madness inherent in the psyche-Kracauer's observation of "a deep and fearful concern with the foundations of the self' (From Caligari to Hitler)-even this is secondary to the institution's main function which is to provide an arena for the final confrontation between a man and his illusions. Page does use tilted camera angles, swish pans, and funhouse mirror effects, but these convey a variety of distinct psychological impressions each a consequence of either the wife's pathology or the husband's intermittent trauma. The basic difference then between A Page of Madness and the German Expressionist films is that in Kinugasa's work tragedy falls upon one individual whose plight is symptomatic of no one but himself. There is no sense of societal dispair, nor is there any substantial link between contemporary reality and a national psyche. In Japan before World War II, Kinugasa was the undisputed master in creating films of great romantic mood. His 1935 feature, The Revenge of Yukinojo (Yukinojo Henge, Toho) is one of his best, and although an action melodrama, the film is significant in relation to A Page of Madness. In the later film, Kinugasa conveys the same dark feelings of apprehension and anxiety, but here he creates imagery using elements borrowed from Japanese theater. This is a natural choice since Kinugasa began his professional career as a stage actor, and has subsequently spent almost equal time working in both media. Yukinojo is about the exploits of a famous kabuki actor of the Edo period (1915-1867), and in the film, Kinugasa uses well-known kabuki conventions-the music, costume, and the rudiments of the mechanical stage-for the mysterious feelings they connote when they are isolated from the stage perfor-

REVIEWS
mance. For Page's storm, the opening of Yukinojo substitutes the large darkened area under the kabuki stage. The lighting is full of shadow as the hero (Kazuo Hasegawa) stands against a mass of mechanical apparatus waiting for his cue. An image of his dead mother is superimposed on some ropes nearby as a drum on stage announces his entrance. These sounds and the surreal imagery create a metaphorical tension which is sustained throughout the film as Kinugasa cuts back and forth between the stage action and Yukinojo's machinations to avenge the death of his parents. In this way, Kinugasa uses the dark mood of the opening in a manner quite similar to A Page of Madness, in which all future action in colored by this initial atmosphere of mystery. Page's strong sense of mood allows the film's shifting points of view to appear remarkably consistent. To this end, there are three major elements which Kinugasa draws together: the present-tense story, the hallucinations and flashbacks, and the opening storm. The man's dreary janitorial duties; his frustrated confrontations with his wife; the madness he fears himself nearing; his dream of recapturing the happiness of a past festival; his nightmare of the riot; all these experiences and their interplay form a pattern which creates a picture of the psychology of obsession. This fascination is a recurring theme in many of the best Japanese novels adapted to the screen; thus it relates Kinugasa to the men of literature who helped shape A Page of Madness. Tanizaki's The Story of Shunkin, Kobo Abe's The Face of Another, Akutagawa's stories "Rashomon" and "In a Grove," and Mishima's later Temple of the Golden Pavilion and Thirst for Love are a few prominent examples that also picture forms of loneliness and isolation in which A Page of Madness shares. Because there is no cinematic precedent for Kinugasa's film, this link between Page and one major motif of the modern Japanese psychological novel suggests that the film did not appear out of a total ideological void. A Page of Madness begins by questioning the discrepancy between behavior and motivation. A dancer wearing her stage costume is intercut with the storm sequence, as she performs pirouettes on a stage. She spins with quick jerking movements

REVIEWS
as the camera tracks backward to reveal her behind the bars of an asylum door. Kinugasa cuts away to the husband peering through the door, which is followed by a shot from his point of view. The woman now wears only a drab asylum smock against the gray institutional walls; her movements are frantic and her figure is pathetic as she twirls uncontrollably. Because the dancer's reality is shown first without reference to the asylum, and only then does the husband's view place her behind bars, we begin by identifying with the husband. His perception is thus a bridge between the insane and the audience's desire for clarity. As the sequence continues, the husband moves from the dancer's cell to his wife who is isolated in an adjoining cell. He enters her cubicle and tries to talk to the woman, but she only looks at him blankly. As he leaves, a button falls from his coat, and he watches as the wife tries to balance the small disk on her head. While it continually slips to the floor, she spies the drain in the middle of the room, and here Kinugasa superimposes her hallucination of the attempted drowning. By visualizing this particular individual image, Kinugasa clearly pictures a causal relationship between experience and insanity. Although we never learn the significance of her trial with the button, we do know it is motivated by a logic of its own. Later when the wife passes the dancer's cell, she applauds, her frantic movements suggesting that the insane do communicate among

49
themselves. As the husband leaves the dark area of the cells, the corridor is claustrophobic-there is oppression in the locked doors and in the deep shadows. At this point, the husband's motivation is ambiguous because he is merely a passive observer. As the actions and fantasies of the wife and dancer show, however, there is a marked difference between experience itself and one's perception of that experience. It is, therefore, evident that the husband is gaining a tremendous amount of emotional energy from his observation which will later transform his experience into action. Emotion produces the experience in a pure form from which a complete system of personal logic is fashioned. (The logic of emotion can be either healthy or insane, but it is always personal.) As the film progresses, the husband's emotional involvement eclipses all objective rationality in proportion to his increased physical activity. When he takes action, trying to reason with his daughter and attempting to force his wife's escape, his physical power is inhibited by the fact that he has become obsessed with the idea of family and freedom. This is simply the psychic process of frustration,,but in view of Kinugasa's sense of the fatalistic universe, it illustrates the role and function of passive involvement. The middle sections of Page show the husband's deepening depression as he confronts his daughter, and as he further attempts to bring his

The
asylum

in

PAGE OF

MADNESS

50
wife out of her withdrawal. The daughter is introduced again in flashback, in the husband's recollection of a cheerful past experience. He sits in his room as the sun shines in through an open window, and he recalls a past festival. The world is alive with activity as he and his small daughter make their way through a crowd of cheerful faces. Back in the present, the daughter, now matured, arrives at the asylum to visit her mother. She is shocked to find her father, and when he tries to dissuade her from going inside, she reveals her plans to marry. The daughter pushes past the old man and enters the corridor where the woman is confined. She is horrified by the pathetic sight, and flees, flinging herself out through the large asylum gate. Throughout the entire film, the husband's flashback of his daughter is the only part of his past which is actually shown; therefore, the joy which permeates his memory places him higher on his rose-colored pedestal, making his fall immeasurably greater. There is immediate tension when the two meet, consequently the daughter forces the final break between the husband and his past. His physical isolation becomes mirrored in the emotional void between father and daughter. He can touch her hand, but not her heart. His memories get him nowhere, and all but the cold reality of the present seems little more than fantasy. As the middle part of Page ends, the husband tries to force his wife to escape. When she becomes frightened, they struggle, and the other inmates are drawn into the conflict which turns into the film's riot sequence. The anxiety the husband feels propels him among the mass of bodies, and then fear for his own life forces him to tear violently in all directions. He imagines that his daughter is caught in the middle, and he begins to hallucinate a nightmarish vision. His daughter appears in a wedding gown pursued by a wild bearded patient who is dressed as the groom. The husband sees an automobile inside the corridor, and then the doctor who wears the vestments of a priest prepares to marry the strange young couple. The sharp black and white contrasts and the juxtaposition of the car and the inmates suggest the twin pianos of Un Chien Andalou, and the sequence is generally remark-

REVIEWS
able for its rather dadaist overtones. All sense of objective reality collapses, and the husband becomes caught within his own fantasy. The husband fights to extricate his daughter, but by shooting images in extreme close-up and with tilted angles, Kinugasa suggests that the husband is powerless against the weight of his own increased subjectivity. Abruptly, the quick movements of the inmates and the fast succession of images are halted. Three of the inmates are shown in one static, medium shot, isolated by themselves, as they sit calmly side-by-side. The husband places noh masks over the faces of each, and then, in extreme close-up, he places an okina (old man) likeness over his own. The agitation of the riot has become the norm of the sequence, and the stillness of these two shots becomes the purest lantasy-it is as if suddenly the husband were floating in the middle of a holocaust. In the film's final shot, the husband is again alone sweeping the darkened hallway as the true meaning of his psychological reality has become hopelessly obscured. This final image of isolation, of the husband almost completely absorbed by the walls and floor of the asylum is a picture of irony at its end. Although the husband's voluntary commitmenthis choosing a life behind bars-is prima facie an act of free will, the emotional toll it extracts is unredeemable. What sense of hope he may have gained in first seeing his wife within the same edifice, he has now lost in this final emotional defeat. Since the opening shot, the husband has been forced to sacrifice his spiritual freedom for a dream of reconciliation over which he has had no control. Kinugasa suggests that like free will, physical freedom is also an illusion. Because the husband is at the mercy of powerful emotions beyond his control, he has succumbed to the most basic weakness of which man is susceptible: he has been tricked into putting all his faith into a sense of his own past which is no longer efficacious, and which will ultimately leave him debilitated and alone. Even though A Page of Madness is assured a lasting place in the history of the Japaaese avant-garde, its theme, like those of Kinugasa's other films, is manifestly traditional. With the

REVIEWS exception of his 1947 film Actress (Joyu, Toho), Kinugasa's heroes are firmly commited to (Even taining the concept of the nuclear family. main-. this film however, which follows the life of Sumako Matsui, Japan's first modern stage actress, advocates conservative values in the woman's personal life if not in her professional.) The husband's basic motivation in Page is to be re-united with his wife, and his complete impotence to force her to leave the asylum is his final heartache. As in so many of Kinugasa's films, his heroes search for an ideal-either of a model woman, or for the re-unification of a divided family--and because this goal is so continually elusive, the rewards it promises are truly exceptional. As Page illustrates, this quest is most often greater than the central characters themselves. Death acts as an outlet of escape for the brother in Crossroads (Jujiro, Kinugasa Motion Picture League, 1928), Matsui in Actress, Lady Kesa in Gate of Hell, and the geisha in White Heron (Shirasagi, Daiei, 1958); the wife in Page chooses insanity as does the heroine of The Story of a River Downtown (Kawa No Aru Shitamachi No Hanashi, Daiei, 1955); the husband in Page as well as Yukinojo and the heroes of Gate of Hell embrace a memory of the past which reduces or partially obscures the failure of their present ordeal. (In Gate of Hell, this transformation of failure involves the final strength Moritoh feels by becoming a monk, and the righteousness Wataru gains in his self-pity.) This rather melancholic attitude Kinugasa considers inspiring because of the ideal it acknowledges, and for the infinite emotional capacity it bestows on the individual. -ROBERT COHEN

51

director, Krsto Papic, and co-scenarist Ivo Bresan. More significantly, in its Balkan context, it is a statement which can be construed as an attack against ideologues and Communist Party bureaucrats-the interest groups who are leading the recent campaign for a return to socialist realism throughout most of Eastern Europe. Socialist realism consists of a broad range of guidelines and prohibitions imposed on artists by Eastern European communist parties. In content, socialist realism demands an "optimistic" ending and typically incorporates effusive praise of all aspects of the regime, particularly the communist leadership. Stylistically, socialist realism calls for sluggish editing and immobile camerawork. Krsto Papic belongs to the generation subjected to socialist realism before the "thaw" of the fifties. As a documentarist (Hello Munich, Special Trains) he would be especially threatened by a return to the enforced falsifications and stylistic rigidity of this artistic "doctrine"; nevertheless, he is confident that such a return is impossible. Like many of his generation, he sees his country advancing irresistibly toward "true socialism," with the works of the more creative Yugoslav artists reflecting this movement. The documentarist's interest in subjective truth was clearly important in choosing the thematic aspects of the original Hamlet which are encountered in Papic's film. As in the original, the characters in A Village Production of Hamlet are in conflict over a problem of hidden truth and reality. The young man who plays Hamlet in the village production is searching for concealed evidence that will prove his father innocent of a charge of embezzlement. The corrupt president of the local agricultural collective is equally concerned with truth-in his case, like that of King Claudius, the difficulty is to manufacture reality through deceit. At the conclusion of the film, A VILLAGE PRODUCTION OF HAMLET seem to have worked totally in favor of the events president, in a very un-socialist-realistic manner. The Yugoslav feature-length entry at the 1974 The actor's father has submitted to public presBerlin Film Festival came as welcome proof that sure and committed suicide, the romance between the supposed ideological retrenchment in Yugo- "Hamlet" and "Ophelia" has been destroyed, and slavia may not be as serious as many fear. The the protagonist's attempt to discredit the president film, A Village Production of Hamlet, is an has been met with censure and ridicule. Nevertheoutspoken political statement by its scenarist- less, the audience is still left with the impression

REVIEWS exception of his 1947 film Actress (Joyu, Toho), Kinugasa's heroes are firmly commited to (Even taining the concept of the nuclear family. main-. this film however, which follows the life of Sumako Matsui, Japan's first modern stage actress, advocates conservative values in the woman's personal life if not in her professional.) The husband's basic motivation in Page is to be re-united with his wife, and his complete impotence to force her to leave the asylum is his final heartache. As in so many of Kinugasa's films, his heroes search for an ideal-either of a model woman, or for the re-unification of a divided family--and because this goal is so continually elusive, the rewards it promises are truly exceptional. As Page illustrates, this quest is most often greater than the central characters themselves. Death acts as an outlet of escape for the brother in Crossroads (Jujiro, Kinugasa Motion Picture League, 1928), Matsui in Actress, Lady Kesa in Gate of Hell, and the geisha in White Heron (Shirasagi, Daiei, 1958); the wife in Page chooses insanity as does the heroine of The Story of a River Downtown (Kawa No Aru Shitamachi No Hanashi, Daiei, 1955); the husband in Page as well as Yukinojo and the heroes of Gate of Hell embrace a memory of the past which reduces or partially obscures the failure of their present ordeal. (In Gate of Hell, this transformation of failure involves the final strength Moritoh feels by becoming a monk, and the righteousness Wataru gains in his self-pity.) This rather melancholic attitude Kinugasa considers inspiring because of the ideal it acknowledges, and for the infinite emotional capacity it bestows on the individual. -ROBERT COHEN

51

director, Krsto Papic, and co-scenarist Ivo Bresan. More significantly, in its Balkan context, it is a statement which can be construed as an attack against ideologues and Communist Party bureaucrats-the interest groups who are leading the recent campaign for a return to socialist realism throughout most of Eastern Europe. Socialist realism consists of a broad range of guidelines and prohibitions imposed on artists by Eastern European communist parties. In content, socialist realism demands an "optimistic" ending and typically incorporates effusive praise of all aspects of the regime, particularly the communist leadership. Stylistically, socialist realism calls for sluggish editing and immobile camerawork. Krsto Papic belongs to the generation subjected to socialist realism before the "thaw" of the fifties. As a documentarist (Hello Munich, Special Trains) he would be especially threatened by a return to the enforced falsifications and stylistic rigidity of this artistic "doctrine"; nevertheless, he is confident that such a return is impossible. Like many of his generation, he sees his country advancing irresistibly toward "true socialism," with the works of the more creative Yugoslav artists reflecting this movement. The documentarist's interest in subjective truth was clearly important in choosing the thematic aspects of the original Hamlet which are encountered in Papic's film. As in the original, the characters in A Village Production of Hamlet are in conflict over a problem of hidden truth and reality. The young man who plays Hamlet in the village production is searching for concealed evidence that will prove his father innocent of a charge of embezzlement. The corrupt president of the local agricultural collective is equally concerned with truth-in his case, like that of King Claudius, the difficulty is to manufacture reality through deceit. At the conclusion of the film, A VILLAGE PRODUCTION OF HAMLET seem to have worked totally in favor of the events president, in a very un-socialist-realistic manner. The Yugoslav feature-length entry at the 1974 The actor's father has submitted to public presBerlin Film Festival came as welcome proof that sure and committed suicide, the romance between the supposed ideological retrenchment in Yugo- "Hamlet" and "Ophelia" has been destroyed, and slavia may not be as serious as many fear. The the protagonist's attempt to discredit the president film, A Village Production of Hamlet, is an has been met with censure and ridicule. Nevertheoutspoken political statement by its scenarist- less, the audience is still left with the impression

52
that truth will eventually emerge. This feeling of optimism is reinforced by using 1947 as the setting of the events and by identifying the corrupt official with farming collectives and the cult of Stalin, aspects of Yugoslav life that have since passed into history. The search for an objective, elusive truth is also emphasized by the film's sudden, dramatic changes in style and mood. As in the Shakespearian play, the confrontations between the protagonist and the Establishment vary from the comic to the tragic. The film medium, however, also gives Papic the option of documentary technique. Thus the final scene-a wild banquet and kolo orchestrated by the president of the collective--is first viewed in medium distance, much as a newsreel camera might record festivities in a Bosnian village following a "progressive cultural program." The mood of the scene changes abruptly into the satirical as the camera focuses in on the gluttony of the president's clique through exceedingly long takes of banquet guests stuffing themselves in silence, bits of food dribbling from their mouths. A second abrupt change in mood occurs as the camera closes in on the tense features of the villagers as their festivities dissolve into an orgy, suggesting that abandonment to physical pleasures at Mrdusi Donjoj, like other aspects of life, was a reaction to the authoritarian rule of the local ideologues. In effect, Papic has presented three perspectives on the banquet-documentary, grotesque, and critical-each a segment of the total reality. Staging and lighting play an important role in underscoring another major theme in A Village Production of Hamlet: the isolation of the protagonists from their society. The local schoolteacher, whose drunken Shakespearian soliloquies provide a sort of Greek chorus to the action, is filmed in claustrophobic settings, lit dimly and surrounded by darkness. Similarly, the young "Hamlet" is often revealed alone in harsh light, with glaring white expanses and deep shadows, which mirror his vision of reality. The president of the collective, in contrast, is never alone, although his bulk continually dominates the groups in which he appears, accentuating his position of authority.

REVIEWS
Despite such strong stylistic elements, A Village Production of Hamlet will be remembered primarily for its characterizations. The division of the equivalent of Hamlet into two separate characters-ineffectual intellectual and heedless activist-is an innovative conception of the protagonist as a schizophrenic. From the Yugoslav point of view, the characterization of the president of the collective who represents King Claudius is the most controversial aspect of the film. As the most important local Party member, he is a virtual gold mine of misquoted Marxist-Stalinist jargon adaptable to his personal needs of the moment. In this and his anti-intellectualism, the President is a model for opportunists who joined the communists after Tito's rise to power and maintain their positions of authority through hardline ideological stands on everything except their personal conduct: being "more Red than the Reds" to use the Yugoslav expression. The potential danger in this characterization is that the narrow-minded in both Yugoslavia and the West may interpret the characterization of the President as condemning all communists. There are reliable reports that Party officials requested several meetings with Papic, Bresan, and studio representatives during which they urged that the character be made more positive or, at least, toned down. Nevertheless, the film was released unchanged in both Yugoslavia and abroad, Papic and Bresan continue to be productive, and no wave of orchestrated press criticism has emerged. The reaction of the state and Party officials was therefore far short of the reprisals directed against other well-known directors after the release of their most recent works. One reason for this apparent inconsistency is the administrative organization of Yugoslav cinema. Unlike film production in other socialist states, the Yugoslav industry is highly decentralized. No less than 24 film-making enterprises are currently active, making prerelease censorship almost impossible, especially since there are also six regional republic film boards, each operating with their individual censorship and cultural policies. This creates a peculiar situation in which a film made in one region of Yugoslavia with official approval can be banned by censors in other regions. Nationwide

REVIEWS
prohibitions by the central government are rare. However, the 1971 ban on Dusan Makavejev's WR-Mysteries of the Organism proved that nationwide censorship can be exercised in Yugoslavia; the concerted press attacks on Makavejev provided evidence that an internationally recognized artist can be hounded into exile if Yugoslav authorities find his work sufficiently damaging to the morale and morals of the state. The restraint shown by these authorities in dealing with Papic's film brings differences between the two directors into sharp relief-particularly those differences which ultimately determined the successful release of Papic's work in his own country. Makavejev, in WR-Mysteries of the Organism, endeavoredto shock the viewerwhile exposing him to Wilhelm Reich's theories on the connection between political and sexual repression. His juxtaposition of images of Stalin with images of torture and plastic phalluses was practically guaranteed to offend Yugoslav neo-Stalinists. The approach of Papic and Bresan avoids a tone of confrontation. Instead, they try to win acceptance of their political message in a conventional manner through audience identification with positive characters. Even a staunch member of the League of Communists can accept the corrupt collective president as a villain and feel anger against his misuse of power, understanding that the director does not imply an attack against the entire Party or its "sacred" symbols. Also, the application to the current situation in Yugoslavia is defused by using 1947 as a setting-a period when Party morality was admittedly at a low watermark. Despite the use of a historic setting, A Village Production of Hamlet attains universality in its attack on the abuse of authority, partly through the use of the classic story as leitmotiv. The Soviet director Kozintsev used the technique in his Hamlet (1963) to expand the relevance of his depiction of Stalinist intrigue to a critique of all oligarchial politics. In the Papic film, Western audiences can readily see parallels between the cover-up of forged records and small-scale embezzlement and contemporary scandals, including Watergate. Other differences between the two directors concern cinematic styles and sexual morality.

A VILLAGE PRODUCTION OF Hamlet

Makavejev'sinnovative use of montage doubtlessly perplexed the conservative authorities reviewing his film in Yugoslavia. They greatly prefer Papic's work, which is less foreign to the stylistic principles of socialist realism. Papic's treatment of sexual relationships closely follows the mix of earthiness and sentimentality which characterizes both the Shakespearian and the traditional Yugoslav literary attitudes toward love. The encounters of Papic's "Hamlet" and "Ophelia" invoke a relationship between two complex personalities. This contrasts sharply with the seemingly continuous love-making of Jagoda and Ljuba, the secondary characters in WR-Mysteries of the Organism. In Papic's film, male/female relationships are totally acceptable to the regime's standards of sexual conduct in film and literature. In retrospect, the conflicts between the Yugoslav Party authorities and certain Yugoslav artists, including Makavejev, have resulted from violations of the limits of expression at their most sensitive points: the depiction of sexual acts and the apparent (although possibly unintentional) denunciation of the regime's ideology. In the case of WR-Mysteries of the Organism, these "faults" in the eyes of unsophisticated censors were combined with an innovative style far removed from the familiar stylistic conventions of socialist realism. The success of Papic and other directors in continuing the new tradition of political commentary in films demonstrate that the reprisals represent an exception to Yugoslav cultural policies in the seventies. While repression cannot be condoned, the case of Makavejev does not necessarily imply a major change in Yugoslavia's treatment of its intellectual community. Instead,

54
the success of A Village Production of Hamlet indicates that Yugoslav directors retain their license to criticize aspects of their society, contrary to the stifling content restrictions of the old socialist realist policies, providing they remain within the limits of conventional style and "moral tone" imposed by the demands of an ideologically oriented state. MICHAEL JON STOLL

REVIEWS

Spanish Royal Academy of Art, wishing, from the outset of his career, to acquire the precision of a Renaissance master in capturing the world around him. After graduating from the Royal Academy, Chambers remained in a small village in Castile, where he underwent what he called "a series of births," experiences that grew out of a synesthetic perception of the Castilian landscape and a simultaneous realization that the landscape would be eternally impenetrable to him. It was this latter realization that caused Chambers to decide, THE in 1961, to return to his birthplace: London, HART LONDON OF Ontario. A film by Jack Chambers.1970. ConadianFilmmakers Distribution During his late Spanish and early London Centre,406 JarvisStreet, Toronto, Ontario. period, Chambers harnessed the disciplined technique of the Royal Academy to an attempt to Through the crushing banality of local television render some of the states of mind induced by his news images, we learn that a deer has wandered "series of births." The first attempts were highly into downtown London, Ontario, during the expressionistic fantasy images. Slowly, though, winter of 1954. After jumping the fences separat- throughout the sixties, Chambers's work began to ing the city's back yards, the deer is captured by demonstrate a realization that the impressions, local police. It is bound and placed in a cage the "WOW moments" he wanted to create, made of storm fencing. A policeman pats it on would not be found in a compromise between the head. Then a man dressed as a hunter mental and corporeal images. His work evolved, balances his rifle through the wires of the fence. instead, toward the exact reproduction of meWe don't actually see him pull the trigger. chanically perceived reality on canvas. Using These are the events described by the title of photographs of his family, his friends, and his Jack Chamber's film, The Hart of London. Like geographic environs as models, Chambers created most Canadian films-from National Film Board compositions that modified the photos in terms of documentaries through the features produced by saturation, color, and details of subject matter. the infant French and English film industries and This modification became less and less prothe work of the Canadian nounced and, by 1969, it disappeared altogether. avant-garde--Chambers's film centers around the exploration of a It was in October 1969 that Chambers pubparticular Canadian place. Yet The Hart of lished his manifesto, "Perceptual Realism" in London, made by one of the most sophisticated Artscanada. The piece announced his intention to theorists of realism in his documentary-oriented directly imitate the experience of perception by nation, goes further than most other Canadian creating exact renderings of photographs. At the films. Like a drummer, Chambers beats upon the same time, however, the paintings were meant to core images with a rhythmic persistency until they be seen as paintings. Chambers did not and does yield a rich interweaving of personal conscious- not work to achieve a Super-realist sense of ness, news, and history. trompe loeil. Instead, his intention is to invite The Hart of London grows, more than anything the viewer to attempt to understand the artist's else, out of Chambers's own evolution as an experience of the chosen subject. He has, since artist. He is, by profession, a painter. Unlike 1969, worked to separate style and ego, to make most Canadian artists, however, Chambers was his presence felt not by imposing upon reality but not trained in the modernist schools of Toronto, by coming to terms with it. New York, London, or Paris. He chose, instead, Chambers released The Hart of London in to undertake the rigorous classical training of the 1970. On its most basic level, the film is an

54
the success of A Village Production of Hamlet indicates that Yugoslav directors retain their license to criticize aspects of their society, contrary to the stifling content restrictions of the old socialist realist policies, providing they remain within the limits of conventional style and "moral tone" imposed by the demands of an ideologically oriented state. MICHAEL JON STOLL

REVIEWS

Spanish Royal Academy of Art, wishing, from the outset of his career, to acquire the precision of a Renaissance master in capturing the world around him. After graduating from the Royal Academy, Chambers remained in a small village in Castile, where he underwent what he called "a series of births," experiences that grew out of a synesthetic perception of the Castilian landscape and a simultaneous realization that the landscape would be eternally impenetrable to him. It was this latter realization that caused Chambers to decide, THE in 1961, to return to his birthplace: London, HART LONDON OF Ontario. A film by Jack Chambers.1970. ConadianFilmmakers Distribution During his late Spanish and early London Centre,406 JarvisStreet, Toronto, Ontario. period, Chambers harnessed the disciplined technique of the Royal Academy to an attempt to Through the crushing banality of local television render some of the states of mind induced by his news images, we learn that a deer has wandered "series of births." The first attempts were highly into downtown London, Ontario, during the expressionistic fantasy images. Slowly, though, winter of 1954. After jumping the fences separat- throughout the sixties, Chambers's work began to ing the city's back yards, the deer is captured by demonstrate a realization that the impressions, local police. It is bound and placed in a cage the "WOW moments" he wanted to create, made of storm fencing. A policeman pats it on would not be found in a compromise between the head. Then a man dressed as a hunter mental and corporeal images. His work evolved, balances his rifle through the wires of the fence. instead, toward the exact reproduction of meWe don't actually see him pull the trigger. chanically perceived reality on canvas. Using These are the events described by the title of photographs of his family, his friends, and his Jack Chamber's film, The Hart of London. Like geographic environs as models, Chambers created most Canadian films-from National Film Board compositions that modified the photos in terms of documentaries through the features produced by saturation, color, and details of subject matter. the infant French and English film industries and This modification became less and less prothe work of the Canadian nounced and, by 1969, it disappeared altogether. avant-garde--Chambers's film centers around the exploration of a It was in October 1969 that Chambers pubparticular Canadian place. Yet The Hart of lished his manifesto, "Perceptual Realism" in London, made by one of the most sophisticated Artscanada. The piece announced his intention to theorists of realism in his documentary-oriented directly imitate the experience of perception by nation, goes further than most other Canadian creating exact renderings of photographs. At the films. Like a drummer, Chambers beats upon the same time, however, the paintings were meant to core images with a rhythmic persistency until they be seen as paintings. Chambers did not and does yield a rich interweaving of personal conscious- not work to achieve a Super-realist sense of ness, news, and history. trompe loeil. Instead, his intention is to invite The Hart of London grows, more than anything the viewer to attempt to understand the artist's else, out of Chambers's own evolution as an experience of the chosen subject. He has, since artist. He is, by profession, a painter. Unlike 1969, worked to separate style and ego, to make most Canadian artists, however, Chambers was his presence felt not by imposing upon reality but not trained in the modernist schools of Toronto, by coming to terms with it. New York, London, or Paris. He chose, instead, Chambers released The Hart of London in to undertake the rigorous classical training of the 1970. On its most basic level, the film is an

REVIEWS 80-minute discourse on the evolution of Chambers's modes of perception, the growth of his realization that he could render the multi-sensuous impressions he desired only through precisely reproduced images of the world around him. Like Brakhage's Scenes from Under Childhood, the film is about an opening of eyes. But it is not a general statement about the nature of perception. It is, in a typically Canadian fashion, a chronicle that documents the reconciliation of one man and one place over time. The Hart of London begins with an exposition of the core incident described above. Beginning with the second image of this sequence, however, the reality of the news story comes to us not with the dubious clarity of a television news item, but rather with the flickering perception of a 20-year memory. Printing multiple exposures of positive and negative images and overexposing single images, Chambers creates a winter within the winter of 1954. The frequent whiteouts, the failures of perception, also evoke an awakening consciousness which cannot yet fully experience and thus retain an image. The content of the news story, the automatic and pointless destruction of a graceful and innocent animal, would seem a metaphor for Chambers's conception of his own situation in the Canada of the early fifties before his departure for Spain. While continuing the cinematic winter of overand multiple exposures, Chambers adds to the deer incident shots of hunters piling up the frozen bodies of masses of dead deer in a setting unrelated to that of the news story. There then follows the longest sequence of the film, the compilation and reorganization of found images into a visual history of London. We see a barrage of single-frame images of maps, drawings, portraits, and photographs from London's precinematic past arranged in an approximately chronological order. We then see the relics of London's cinematic history, bits of archival footage dating from the late twenties or early thirties. The contents of these shots show a personal memory rather than a textbook history. Rather than news events, we see what appear to be establishing shots for news stories: street scenes, factories, old-fashioned fashions surrounding local landmarks. Humans can be identified only as

THE HART OF LONDON

"group of wealthy looking men in front of doors to large building," "coeds of the forties on University bridge" and "worker at bench holding something." All the shots used recur again and again in the sequence, by themselves, superimposed on other shots, in negative, superimposed on their own negatives, reversed and overexposed to the point of illegibility-techniques, it would appear, that are direct visual metaphors for states of memory. The shots that recur the most in this sequence are those having to do with the mass slaying of deer with which the sequence began. By repeating these shots in the history sequence, Chambers successfully generalizes the deer incident, making it a metaphor for the place he is describing. Just as the hapless single deer jumped over backyard fences in his doomed efforts to escape London, the dead masses of deer are an involuntarypart of the city's frozen landscape. The double meaning of the title, engendered by an invitation to pun on the word "hart," becomes clear. The first two sequences of the film are unified not only by the techniques of cinematic winter but also by their mutual sound track-the slow, repetitive sound of waves breaking against a shore. The net effect of the image/sound montage during these first two sequences is that of time passing, of waves of memory drawing up and washing away the past, just as waves of light create and wash out images. Toward the end of the history sequence, however, the sound of waves is abruptly replaced. The sounds of the backwashes of waves heard in the first two sequences are the audio negative of the first sounds in the film.

56
The change in the sound track accenuates an equally abrupt reversal in the nature of the images. We go from the stock shots of London to shots, probably taken by the film-maker, on the general theme of the coming of a literal and figurative spring. The cinematic winter of optical techniques gives way to clear black and white photographed imagery of the budding of plants, the plowing of a field, spring floods, children out for a walk. It is a step forward in an opening of the eyes, a giving back of images to the world that had produced the memories seen previously. In autobiographical terms, the film at this point leaves London, just as Chambers left it for Spain. The film temporarily abandons the experiencing of a single place in favor of the exploration of experience itself. The "series of births" that Chambers experienced in Spain is recreated not only with shots of a human birth but also with shots of birth intercut with those of death. We see muscles spewing forth life and life becoming meat. There are shots of babies and a baby's genitals. The sequence begins subtly with close-up tracking shots of shears going through a hedge. It never really ends, but rather is subliminated into sequences made up of different kinds of images. The "series of births" sequence is awkward. The human nativity and the stuff of death that one sees upon the screen cannot be favorably compared to Brakhage, or even to Brakhage's more skilled imitators. The cutting of the sequence is undeniably hackneyed. It is a montage exercise that was undoubtedly old when Dovzhenko used it in Earth and all but exhausted when Vertov was through with it in Man with the Movie Camera. Chambers may well mean the sequence to be awkward as a reflection of his difficulty in attempting to assimilate his Spanish experiences. If so, then this admission of difficulty also contains a hint of Chambers's eventual solution to his perceptual dilemma. For while the cutting of the sequence is weak and most of the images uninteresting, one shot of the sequence stands out as the most poignant image of the film. The shot is a straightforward "WOW moment" of perceptual realism in which we see a sheep bleeding to

REVIEWS
death on a large stone slaughterhouse table. We have previously seen part of this same shot in black and white. But now, for the first time, The Hart of London is in full color. The sheep raises its head imploringly toward the camera, then lowers it back to the table. The camera is stationary and, as the sheep bleeds to death, the film runs through the camera, until both are bled white. All this to the sound of backwards waves. The film returns to London, Ontario. The first images of home are the midwinter burning of Christmas trees in a large bonfire surrounded by onlookers and a water truck marked London Fire Dept. The shots are tinted red, as if by the blood of the previous sequence. They are followed by an intercutting of rather innocuous color homemovie shots with color shots of images from the previous sequence. The "series of births" sequence comes out red from the blood and the muscles photographed. The shots taken in London include or imply water. London water, then, in conjunction with the sound track, attempts to put out the red fire of Spanish images. It does not entirely succeed. For while the Spanish images disappear, along with a temporary disappearance of color in the film, the water shots also disappear. They give way to a series of 15 minor news and human interest stories-the descendants of the previously viewed archival footage-that frequently present grotesque images of the waters of London. We see a swimmer taking a midwinter dip in the riveronly to be escorted, along with his friends, to a London Police paddy wagon. We watch the pulling down of some water towers. We are taken to a mental patient's field day, at which one athletic event involves the soaking of participants. We are introduced to a man who keeps his sunflowers dry with a garden full of umbrellas. The 15 items are also the beginning of a summary of all that has come before. The second items, for instance, in showing the survivors of an earthquake being dug out of rubble, keeps alive the thought of death amid the much more innocuous material that surrounds it. The twelfth items shows old people looking at some of the old photos we looked at briefly earlier in the film. The fourteenth item is a local news report of a

REVIEWS farmer who shot a timber wolf during the winter. The farmer and his wife play with the dead animal and then he poses beside it for the camera. The last item of the series seems almost a parable, a summation of the film. An elderly lady pours water into the feeder on the side of a parakeet cage. We discover that the cage is only one of many assembled in a living room. A well dressed middle-aged gentleman and a policeman take several cages each and exit. They are seen entering another house in which a working-class couple is trying rather desparately to get their brain-damaged child to lift his head and look into the camera. The aristrocratic man presents the child with a caged parakeet. Close-ups of the child's terribly distorted face are intercut with close-ups of the parakeet. And then there is an abrupt change in the sound track. We hear the sounds of screeching birds. But the sound comes not over a close-up of the parakeet but rather over the last close-up of the child, a shot in which he is frantically moving his lips. There are approximately five minutes left to the film at this point and it takes about two minutes track. to discern the exact nature of the .sound The sound of birds continues over more local news items, including shots of people sleeping on a local beach, London's own UFO, and the dismantling of the old city gates. The bird sounds merge into those of passing traffic and children's voices. As we see a home movie of Chambers pushing his lawnmower, we begin to hear adult voices talking to the children. A man and a woman are warning them to be careful, not to get too close. There is a cut to far away, from a travelogue perhaps, in which a European and an Arab stand in caves on a mountainside. Then, as climax, we have what Peter Kubelka calls "synch event." We discover that the sound track to which we have been listening is a recording of a day at a local children's zoo. Chambers is with his wife Olga and their children, John and Diego. The children are feeding the deer. The film contains an epilogue. It is a simple epilogue, consisting of four semicircular camera movements shot along the banks of the Thames. (Indeed, London has a Thames River, and an

57 Oxford Street and a Covent Garden Market. When you take a picture of London, Ontario, you get a reflection of a reflection.) The camera moves toward the right along the bank, tilts up into the sky and then returns approximately the same distance. The sound track continues to the end of the first three sweeps at which point it ends on Olga's saying "you've got to be careful." The camera sweeps once more in silence, this time at sunset, around a very dark screen. -SETH FELDMAN
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chambers, John, John ChambersInterviewed by Ross Woodman.

Coach HousePress,Toronto, 1967.

"Perceptual Realism." Artscanada, XXVI, 5 (October, 1969), 7-13. Magidson, Debby, "The Art of Jack Chambers." Artmagazine VI, 19 (Fall, 1974), 19-21.

of Shadbolt, Doris,"OnTheEvolution JohnChambers' Perceptual Realism."Artscanada.XXVII, 5 (October/November 1970),57-62.

Woodman Ross, "Canada's Finest Painter." The Business Quar-

terly,XXVII,4 (Winter,1972),72-76.
Woodman, Ross, "The Realism of John Chambers." Art International. XIV, 9 (November 20, 1970), 37-41.

CROSSROADS
A film by BruceConner.36 minutes. 1976. SeriousBusinessCompany, 94703. 1609 JaynesStreet, Berkeley,California

Crossroads continues a fascination with death and destruction that has marked almost all of Conner's films, and it also continues his use of "found" materials-JFK assassination footage in Report, first comic and then increasingly painful accident footage in A Movie, and here government footage of the first Bikini H-bomb test, code-named "Crossroads," in which an underwater bomb blew to hell and gone an entire fleet of US and Japanese warships. While it does not teach you to love the bomb, Crossroads teaches you that is was, in its appalling way, beautiful. There was an awesome grace in the initial

REVIEWS farmer who shot a timber wolf during the winter. The farmer and his wife play with the dead animal and then he poses beside it for the camera. The last item of the series seems almost a parable, a summation of the film. An elderly lady pours water into the feeder on the side of a parakeet cage. We discover that the cage is only one of many assembled in a living room. A well dressed middle-aged gentleman and a policeman take several cages each and exit. They are seen entering another house in which a working-class couple is trying rather desparately to get their brain-damaged child to lift his head and look into the camera. The aristrocratic man presents the child with a caged parakeet. Close-ups of the child's terribly distorted face are intercut with close-ups of the parakeet. And then there is an abrupt change in the sound track. We hear the sounds of screeching birds. But the sound comes not over a close-up of the parakeet but rather over the last close-up of the child, a shot in which he is frantically moving his lips. There are approximately five minutes left to the film at this point and it takes about two minutes track. to discern the exact nature of the .sound The sound of birds continues over more local news items, including shots of people sleeping on a local beach, London's own UFO, and the dismantling of the old city gates. The bird sounds merge into those of passing traffic and children's voices. As we see a home movie of Chambers pushing his lawnmower, we begin to hear adult voices talking to the children. A man and a woman are warning them to be careful, not to get too close. There is a cut to far away, from a travelogue perhaps, in which a European and an Arab stand in caves on a mountainside. Then, as climax, we have what Peter Kubelka calls "synch event." We discover that the sound track to which we have been listening is a recording of a day at a local children's zoo. Chambers is with his wife Olga and their children, John and Diego. The children are feeding the deer. The film contains an epilogue. It is a simple epilogue, consisting of four semicircular camera movements shot along the banks of the Thames. (Indeed, London has a Thames River, and an

57 Oxford Street and a Covent Garden Market. When you take a picture of London, Ontario, you get a reflection of a reflection.) The camera moves toward the right along the bank, tilts up into the sky and then returns approximately the same distance. The sound track continues to the end of the first three sweeps at which point it ends on Olga's saying "you've got to be careful." The camera sweeps once more in silence, this time at sunset, around a very dark screen. -SETH FELDMAN
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chambers, John, John ChambersInterviewed by Ross Woodman.

Coach HousePress,Toronto, 1967.

"Perceptual Realism." Artscanada, XXVI, 5 (October, 1969), 7-13. Magidson, Debby, "The Art of Jack Chambers." Artmagazine VI, 19 (Fall, 1974), 19-21.

of Shadbolt, Doris,"OnTheEvolution JohnChambers' Perceptual Realism."Artscanada.XXVII, 5 (October/November 1970),57-62.

Woodman Ross, "Canada's Finest Painter." The Business Quar-

terly,XXVII,4 (Winter,1972),72-76.
Woodman, Ross, "The Realism of John Chambers." Art International. XIV, 9 (November 20, 1970), 37-41.

CROSSROADS
A film by BruceConner.36 minutes. 1976. SeriousBusinessCompany, 94703. 1609 JaynesStreet, Berkeley,California

Crossroads continues a fascination with death and destruction that has marked almost all of Conner's films, and it also continues his use of "found" materials-JFK assassination footage in Report, first comic and then increasingly painful accident footage in A Movie, and here government footage of the first Bikini H-bomb test, code-named "Crossroads," in which an underwater bomb blew to hell and gone an entire fleet of US and Japanese warships. While it does not teach you to love the bomb, Crossroads teaches you that is was, in its appalling way, beautiful. There was an awesome grace in the initial

Bruce

Conner's
CROSSROADS:

The water burst cloud begins to decend

enormous upward spurt of water, the instantaneous formation of a puffy round cloud, the protrusion of the staggeringly large mushroom cloud itself, and the threatening descent of radioactive water over a huge area. The camera is never quite close enough to suggest the ghastliness of events near the explosion point; by straining, we can make out giant ships being tossed by the blast wave, but the general effect is curiously ritualistic, detached, solemn: an enormous destructive force is being unleashed for the first time on earth, a force so great as to rival a hurricane. The havoc it wreaks is impersonal, and perhaps it is just as well that Conner was unable, because of its Catch-22 rules, to get the National Archive to give him footage that must have been taken by automated cameras on the doomed ships; as it stands, the scale of Crossroads is so grand that we cannot even imagine charred bodies, screaming, individual ships (as in A Movie) going down. The event was, after all, as much a moral as a technological watershed point, and Conner's film is a kind of atomic Guernica. Conner choreographs the vision slowly, with ominous synthesizer and organ music. We circle repetitively in a plane, at what initially feels like a

safe distance. Then the monster rises from the lagoon; the plane shakes in the blast wave; and then the roar of the explosion hits, wiping out all other sounds. With the repetition of this ritual we become accustomed to the rhythms, the expectations; we attend to the curiously beautiful variations of cloud-formations in different lights; we become familiars, in the ancient sense, of the atomic demon-to whom, in a year or a decade, we may very well be sacrificed. If art consists of immersing in "the destructive element," Conner remains a master of it. -ERNEST CALLENBACH

DIANE
Diane. StarringDianede Lorian.Directedby Mary Feldhaus-Weber. Cinematography DavidWestphal.Editedby MartinOstrow. Odeon by Films.

This independently produced short belongs to the growing genre of portrait films-film-makers' images of themselves, their companions, relatives, neighbors, or mentors. But it is far more ambitious and successful than anything the genre has pro-

Bruce

Conner's
CROSSROADS:

The water burst cloud begins to decend

enormous upward spurt of water, the instantaneous formation of a puffy round cloud, the protrusion of the staggeringly large mushroom cloud itself, and the threatening descent of radioactive water over a huge area. The camera is never quite close enough to suggest the ghastliness of events near the explosion point; by straining, we can make out giant ships being tossed by the blast wave, but the general effect is curiously ritualistic, detached, solemn: an enormous destructive force is being unleashed for the first time on earth, a force so great as to rival a hurricane. The havoc it wreaks is impersonal, and perhaps it is just as well that Conner was unable, because of its Catch-22 rules, to get the National Archive to give him footage that must have been taken by automated cameras on the doomed ships; as it stands, the scale of Crossroads is so grand that we cannot even imagine charred bodies, screaming, individual ships (as in A Movie) going down. The event was, after all, as much a moral as a technological watershed point, and Conner's film is a kind of atomic Guernica. Conner choreographs the vision slowly, with ominous synthesizer and organ music. We circle repetitively in a plane, at what initially feels like a

safe distance. Then the monster rises from the lagoon; the plane shakes in the blast wave; and then the roar of the explosion hits, wiping out all other sounds. With the repetition of this ritual we become accustomed to the rhythms, the expectations; we attend to the curiously beautiful variations of cloud-formations in different lights; we become familiars, in the ancient sense, of the atomic demon-to whom, in a year or a decade, we may very well be sacrificed. If art consists of immersing in "the destructive element," Conner remains a master of it. -ERNEST CALLENBACH

DIANE
Diane. StarringDianede Lorian.Directedby Mary Feldhaus-Weber. Cinematography DavidWestphal.Editedby MartinOstrow. Odeon by Films.

This independently produced short belongs to the growing genre of portrait films-film-makers' images of themselves, their companions, relatives, neighbors, or mentors. But it is far more ambitious and successful than anything the genre has pro-

REVIEWS

duced to date. With a controlled irony, Diane approaches that receding horizon where an individual's mental life and her life in the conflicted society she must inhabit attain, like it or not, a confused and restless identity with one another. Diane is an actress, nearly thirty, single and sarcastic. Naturally she lives in New York. Her friends are actors and actresses. Her apartment has a steel security gate across its window, a Wyethesque picture of a wood frame church somewhere in the Bible belt, and a little makeup mirrorwith lights. In the course of the film you gaze at Diane's face from a hundred angles. You see her with and without 'eyes,' lipstick, sunglasses, hats and other concealments, looking at you, looking at herself, peering offscreen at something you can't see, smiling, smirking, and sometimes in a sequence of still frames or in a rainbow of color filters, overexposures and lightstruckfootage. Diane seems at home amid the remote vertical symmetriesof Manhattan. She is exhilarated walking in the park and aggravatedin the crush of cars, buses, and lost souls on the avenue. A party one DIANE evening at Diane's apartment is the occasion for flashes of wit, shop talk, and mild oneupsmanship In their effort to mirror Diane's psyche, tracing on the part of various fellow actors. into this distracted, exciting life another her roots and guessing her thoughts, director Mary But have reality intrudes. Memories of a midwestern child- Feldhaus-Weber and editor Martin Ostrow hood crop up in the form of a puritanical sense of created a complexity of styles. Using the South Dalost innocence. Diane grew up in South Dakota. kota images to comment on the party scene and The picture of the church in her apartment, sym- vice versa is a particularlybold instance because it bol of this Protestant upbringing, also represents takes liberties with the direct-cinema scenes and an impossible salvation that still tantalizes her in on-camera monologues which have become the conventional staple of portraitfilms. other forms. The film-makers took their sync scenes, cut This symbolic church intrudes quite literally. Shots of the church itself, the faces of the congre- them to the bone, and juxtaposed them ironically material. They gation, and the dry Dakota prairie are cut directly against other, more controlled into the party chitchat as subliminal flashes, fic- jump-cut the footage, put voice over it, and shuftional subjective shots which shatter the surface fled it out of chronological sequence. VWritein Diane becomes one of several elements of style, as realism of the vdritdstyle. The old folks singing "Faith of Our Fathers" flexible and controllable as the flash-cuts, soundhave the last judgment etched in their features. butts, music contrasts, or flashed and colored am using They wouldn't find Diane's attitudes the least bit leaders that are used as punctuation. (I " and onfunny or her wicked life forgivable. The irony of it "vdrit loosely, of course. Direct cinema is that Diane herself is not as free as she might be, camera monologues originated as the hallmark of thanks to the persistent influence of that little the unrehearsed documentary, but were soon church and that flat, hot countrysidewhose atmos- adapted to fiction as stylistic elements, notably in Masculine Feminine and David Holzman 's Diary. phere of latent violence she recollects in the film.

60
The verite style in Diane is closer to such a fictional technique than to true documentary veritd, which of course does not lend itself to manipulation.) The oblique approach, colored leader and all, is a necessity. Diane is not one of those naive film subjects who simply bares her soul in a heartfelt interview on camera. She is irony incarnate-a defensive irony: "How I look right now is how I generally feel about most things. Hostile." Diane performs. You can savor her ironic attitude at face value-for this delightfully snide film is permeated with humor-but if you prefer you can seek the person behind the masks. The medium is your accomplice in this work. Diane's mimetic visual language is something the cinema can acfiieve supremely. It is rhythmic, supple, and inconstant, more subjective and more telling than the monologues it counterpoints. An interruption of mood, a raw camera move, or a lightstreak left in the editing seem to belong to an inchoate language of correspondences which redoubles the psychological cohesiveness of Diane's tale by suggesting certain associations. I don't think the film-makers proceeded from some preconceived aesthetic to achieve this language. On the contrary, they may have arrived at their radical decisions only after wrestling with the raw material in the editing. Diane bears traces of this creative struggle. David Westphal's camera treatment of the church and landscape looks like it was intended originally for a very different film, one of the stiffly poetic variety. And FeldhausWeber may well have directed the verite-typescenes with no particular idea that they would later be honed so sharply by Ostrow's bold editing. It is precisely this clash, so brilliantly modulated, between apparently unassimilable film styles that gives Diane its unpredictable vitality. At one point Diane remembers a scene from childhood. "I must have been really young, like three years old. Some little boys got me and took me into this chicken coop and said they were going to fuck me. And I didn't know what it meant. And I went home and I asked my mother. I said, 'Mommy, what does fuck mean?' She says, 'It means to dig a hole and bury someone real deep. Now go away and shut up."' Then Diane adds,

REVIEWS
tongue in cheek, "I guess indeed it does mean that, but..." All this is spoken on camera. Diane is sitting at her dressing table but looks away from the mirror when she adds that last line, which she tosses out with nonchalance. But the film-makers, like psychoanalysts, won't let such jokes slip by without examination. Sensing anxiety behind the irony, they cut Diane's scene abruptly on "but ... ," turning her witticism into the loaded remark it really is. Diane long ago internalized her mother's command to go away. Much later in the film, we find her recalling a childhood mood. "I can remember when I was a kid just desperately wanting to get a7way."This time the camera is staring out at a darkening Dakota horizon in the twilight. At the words "get away" the camera drops abruptly till the dark earth fills the frame. It is possible to associate this image with the "hole" the little girl may be buried in. Related to this association is still another scene. It is a minor sequence, yet it is perhaps the rhetorical center of the film. In it you watch Diane walking alone down an anonymous street of storefronts and parking meters. A few reaction shots show us some men in the street, working-class men wearing dubious expressions. (Actually they are inserted still photos. While the discrepancy takes away some of the physical credibility of the sequence, it makes the subjectivefeeling all the more intense.) Diane quickens her steps, finally running down the street, apparently in panic. The camera pans from the supposed viewpoint of the men and watches her run away. Over this scene you hear Diane recalling religious anxiety in her childhood. "They were trying to point up to us that we could save ourselves. Well, I didn't understand that ... You could pray to God and you could be saved. And I couldn't quite understand what it was. Like, could you do it once, and that'd do it? But I did it dozens of times, all day long. I can remember going through screen doors saying, 'Please save me! Please save me!'" The bemused tone of adult retrospect can't hide the anguish, for the words combine with the banal

REVIEWS
shot of Diane running along the street to form a simple, haunting image.

61

You'd hope the resulting portraits, especially considering their extensive borrowing of documen"Could you do it once ... ?" The religious anxitary techniques, would begin to explore the classety, an earlier form of Diane's present neurosis, related conflicts which accompany the smallest upis a sublimated version of the child's wonder rootings in bourgeois society, putting a bit of perabout, and fear of, sex (particularly in view of the spective on competitiveness, ambition, and anxiemorbid connotation Diane's mother gave it). Being ty. Instead, films like Miriam Weinstein's Living fucked; being buried; losing salvation; yearning With Peter and We Get Married Twice and Liane for salvation (and for sex); "desperately wanting to Brandon's Not So Young Now As Then never get get away"; going to the city to be an actress instead beyond their own insipid cockiness. Ill-digested of getting "stuck" in a small-town working class-veritd techniques only serve these film-makers' all these things are interfaced. Diane leaves such compulsion to ridicule the social class they are still connections to your own speculation, using its con- uncomfortably close to, without either self-examitrasts and correspondences to show a few casual nation or compassion. suggestions. Diane is the story of one woman's flight from the Diane escaped the prairie, yet she now finds that fate an oppressive social order has in store. But a certain latent violence makes the world go round her flight is a self-perpetuating one: she escaped in Manhattan too, whether in the form of the de- the life of classmates who "graduated from high grading nude "appearances" that aspiring actors school and went on to stay there," but she still carand actresses have to take in stride, the male ries a full complement of conflicts inside her and strangers in the street, or the fellow who stars in she knows it. She mostly manages to be ironic Diane's final tale. about it. The makers of Diane, for their part, are The last scene of Diane consists of an uninter- capable of respecting Diane even as they penetrate rupted on-camera monologue in which Diane tells her defense. In order for you to experience this the story of a recent date that typically ended in a woman and perhaps see a bit of yourself, they demoralizing macho bedroom scene. This single have created a fascinating, and liberating, work of take is long (over one fifth of the film's half hour), art. -RANDALL CONRAD yet it is not broken by an inserted scenes: Diane performs by herself. You finally know all the background you need to: the accumulated context lends enormous resonance to the story, by turns humorous and odious, which Diane is telling. cont'd. The recent rash of portrait films is not necessari- CONTRIBUTORS, an artistic movement. If anything it is a phely contributed to Artweek, nomenon of passing interest to the sociologist: SHEEHY teaches at San QRFS, and FQ. TERRY Francisco State University. today a certain stratum of America's petty bour- MICHAEL JON STOIL is a political scientist who lives geoisie has the leisure and means to make films in Washington, D.C. about itself. As it turns out, the subject isn't We announce with shock and regret the sudden death usually interesting. Someone has become a film- (from a heart attack) of James Kerans, who until recently maker and intellectual instead of a housewife, was a member of FQ's Advisory Editorial Board. A doctor, or teacher. At some point the film-makers' hockey player in his spare time, he was vigorous in all lower-middle-class background embarrassed them things, and an enterprising and supportive person in his work as a teacher and stage director. He had been an -perhaps too they felt a twinge of guilt at surpas- early contributor to FQ; his wide learning, intelligence, their elders or schoolmates-and they picked sing sensitivity, genial cynicism, and careful judgment were up the camera to make home movies with a ven- endlessly refreshing while he served in the editorial geance. group. He will be greatly missed.

Controversy and Correspondence

A SHORT DEFENSE OF SCREWBALL COMEDY
In his Fall 1975 Film Quarterly discussion of Daniel Dayan's "The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema," William Rothman correctly points out the critical limitations inherent in a priori arguments that certain forms of cinema are destined by their nature to serve specific ideological ends. Such arguments, we must agree, effectively prohibit scholarship by prejudging entire classes of films. Why bother to study works of "classical cinema" if all such works have one and only one common purpose--to uphold bourgeois ideology? Such an argument would require, if we took Dayan and others like him seriously, that we condemn out of hand and without further discussion the bulk of our cinematic heritage. It is a frightening prospect, and those who urge such cultural suicide demonstrate a genuinely frightening sense of arrogance. Rothman is right to attack such arrogance, it seems to me, and the point bears re-emphasizing: witness the fact that the same issue of Film Quarterly contains a film review by Karyn Kay which proposes to define "the essential form and theme of Screwball Comedy" in the course of six paragraphs and through very brief discussions of seven works: three medieval mystery plays (all variants of the "Noah" fable) and four Hollywood comedies. The brevity of the argument is astounding, particularly in light of its sweeping conclusion that all seven works, and by extension all "screwball comedies," are concerned solely (or at least primarily) to assert and support a "correct world order of male domination." In each of the three Noah plays, Kay thus argues, Noah and his wife quarrel over obeying God's commandment: she refuses to board the ark. After much ranting and raving, however, the wife is persuaded (or gives in) and the "correct familial hierarchy is affirmed." And in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, to extend the argument, the "proper world order is established" when "Gable dominates Colbert with her father's (God the father!) complete approval"--once again screwball comedy (as Kay defines it) can be seen as an ideological enterprise aimed at oppressing women. I do not deny the possibility that an extraordinarily perceptive and knowledgeable critic might be able to construct an historical theory brief enough to be expounded in less than two pages and powerful enough to effectively critique the ideological/aesthetic project of an entire class of art works. At the very least, however, we would expect such theories to provide accurate statements of fact (and Kay's assertion that "Gable dominates Colbert" seems to border on misrepresentation-unless you consider love a priori a form of slavery) and we would expect facts to be coupled with reasonable and supportable conclusions. I would argue, however, that Ms. Kay's attempt to construct such a theory falls short in both regards-and by so doing betrays the same sort of arrogance that Rothman rightly detects in Dayan's theory. Her discussion of the Noah plays, for instance, clearly misreads the humanist impulse that motivates the action in nearly every variant. The Chester Deluge, to focus our attention on an exemplary case, tends to bear down on the capriciousness of God's actions, actions which seem incomprehensible to the point of cruelty, particularly when set against the instinctive empathy that Noah's wife feels for her friends: But I haue my gossips everichon, One foote further I will not gone; They shall not drowne, by St. John, And I may save their lyfe! They loved me full well, by Christ. And a similar empathy motivates Noah and the family in their attempts to get mother Noah to board the ark. They are not concerned to oppress her (indeed, Noah admits that his wife really runs the domestic show: as he tells her-"all they wene [know] thou art master"). They are concerned rather to save her life (and, metaphorically, her soul), as she in her turn wishes to save the lives of her "gossips everichon." Of course, the play does not deny God's omnipotence-and to the extent that God is perceived as a male we are correct to raise the feminist question-but the play's central concern, clearly, is the more general issue of humankind's relationship to the universe. Floods occur; people die in droves; and death under such circumstances hardly seems "just." Just or not, however, the world goes its incomprehensible way-and it is a matter of common sense more than ideology that people come to acknowledge the natural facts of the matter. The play does not approve floods-no more than it approves or condemns God-but neither the tides nor the deity are subject to mankind's control. Like it or not, we are not the center of the universe. At best, we are part of a natural biological order ("The hee and shee together") subject to laws and forces beyond our comprehension. And a similar case can be made regarding Ms. Kay's description of It Happened One Night: once again she misrepresents the feel and tone of the work in order to support a questionable ideological reading. Clearly It

CONTROVERSY AND CORRESPONDENCE

Happened One Night is not about enslavement but freedom. At the film's beginning Ellie (Colbert) is clearly a victim, not of the social structure, not of an all pervasive male vs. female plot, but of her father's love. It is not therefore a matter of male dominating female, but of parent dominating child (and, truth to tell, all of us have fathers, like it or not). Her father's overprotective attitude thus drives her to wed King Westely, whom she marries not for love but for protection. A feminist critique might rightly point out that Ellie sees her options here solely in terms of male/female liaisons (her father vs. Westely)-but again the situation derives not from a dogmatic belief in marriage but from her father's refusal to give her free rein. Andrews is clearly wrong in this-and it is not until Ellie escapes his control that she gets the opportunity to truly be herself. At which point we come to the crux of Ms. Kay's argument. As she reads it, Ellie's growing affection for Peter Warne (Gable) and her eventual decision to marry him evidence "a reiteration of this man-above-woman world order." I do not take it that marriage (in art or life) in and of itself represents the domination of male over female. Nor do I take it as axiomatic that parental approval-in this case Andrew's approval of Ellie's decision not to marry Westley-necessarily robs Ellie's decision of its legitimacy. The axiom here, or so Ms. Kay implies, is that no woman in her right mind would choose to be married under any circumstance. Ellie's decision to marry Peter, however, is motivated by the very fact that he respects her spunk, her drive, her instinctively independent sense of self-hood. But as Peter demonstrates, independence per se is no guarantee of happiness or fulfillment. If anything, Peter is too independent at the film's beginning-so independent thathe finds himself without a livelihood. Therefore Capra, as I argue in my book The Cinema of Frank Capra: An Approach to Film Comedy (A. S. Barnes, 1975) holds out for a middle course between independence and isolation: the marriage of equal beings who share common values and common goals. In which context, then, marriage can be seen as a positive institution, respectful of each partner's self, and expressive of the emotional/sexual bonds which make selfhood all the more satisfying. None of which is intended to deny that marriage as a social institution is very often a matter of exploitation, nor do I deny the possibility that marriage might setve as a very powerful feminist metaphor for subjugation. Indeed, some such metaphoric use of marriage may well be at work in Kluge's Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, and it seems clear that Ms. Kay's otherwise perceptive reading of the film gets carried away, to the point of overstatement, by her sympathy with Kluge's feminist message. The point I would make, however, is that marraige as an aesthetic image can serve a variety

63
of purposes, depending upon the sensitivities of the film-makers involved, and those purposes can only be understood through "serious acts of criticism" (Rothman, p. 48). Ms. Kay's simplistic "marriage-screwball comedy-oppression" theory is therefore problematical. As a practical enterprise it is trivial for being demonstrably superficial. And theoretically speaking, it denies the necessity for serious scholarly investigation: to designate a film a "screwball comedy" in Ms. Kay's sense of the term is to cut off rather than encourage -LELAND A. POAGUE thoughtful analysis.
Karyn Kay replies:-

I will keep my defenseto three basicpoints:(1) explaining my of Noahplays;(2) extending criinterpretation the medieval my It One Night:(3) elucidating tique of FrankCapra's Happened disconnected my purposein relatingseemingly dramatic structuresto film. Lee Poagueassertsthat Mrs. Noah'srefusalto boardthe ark in the Chester for Delugestemsfroma deepconcern herfriends, the Gossips,about to drownin the flood. With such analysis, Poagueplungeswillingly into the humanistpit whichfeminist scholarRosemary Woolfwarnsagainstin her excellentvolume.
The English Mystery Plays (Oxford, 1973): " . . . the attach-

ment of Noah'swife to her friendsmightbe takenas a sympatheticsignof humanfeeling,whichthe authors do manifestly not intend." For Woolf,the Chester womenas innately playwright regards obstinate, Mrs. Noah included. She acts perversely, proudly exhibiting in "irrational obduracy" hangingaboutdrinking and her risking life-anythingbut obeyherhusband.Mrs.Noahis in wives and lovers "common league with all the cantankerous to... misogynistic Latinsatire,sermons, literature, comicpoems and fabliaux."These womenare Eves and Pandoras,hazarddeath,for the purepleasure contraing everything, of including
dicting their husbands. (In The Art of Courtly Love. Andreas

cites the Capellanus approvingly caseof the clever manwhokilled his bellicose wifeby simplycautioning not to drinkpoisoned her liquor.) has Woolfcontendsthat the Chester playwright little respect forMrs.Noah'sdecision remain to withfriends."Noah's has wife turnedintothe perverse shrew... She becomesmorevehement in herchurlish obstinacy." Simply,hershowof will mustnot be tolerated. mustbe dragged theark. She onto V. A. Kolve,in the authorative criticalwork,ThePlayCalled CorpusChristi,locatesa slightlymorehumane,less misogynist strain in the Chesterplaywright. The dramatistexpresses"a sense of humanloss . . . an elegaicsadnessfor that whichis destroyed," an understanding whyMrs.Noahwantsto reand of maina bit withhergossipsfor "afarewell of fellowship drinkand song and laughter. . . Mrs.Noah is like her gossips,and her dignityconsistsin knowingthis is so." KolvewouldagreewithPoaguethat "theinstinctive empathy that Noah'swife feels for her friends"is genuineand treated author.Yet however favorably the Chester noblehermotives, by Mrs. Noah's Falstaffiandesire to remain drinkingwith her friendsstill can not be allowedany morethan merrymaker Falstaff could be carriedoverby Shakespeare HenryV. The into Mrs. Noah(The ChesterPlaywright well-meaning to According KolveandPoague) the performs sameill functions the troubleas

64
making Mrs. Noah (The Chester PlaywrightAccording to Woolf): She jeopardizes the lives of her family who wait for her-and they are the very lifeline of the human race who must survive the flood. She disobeys her husband. She disobeys God. The Noah plays do not "bear down on the capriciousness of God's actions," as Poague contends, but rather they remind of and reaffirm for the medieval audience the rightful order of the universe as God ordained in Genesis: Unto the woman He said: ". .. thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. " This command established the proper world order. God rules the universe, master of all creation. But man rules woman. Eve is taught the lesson for all her sisters to follow. In refusing to enter the ark, the reckless, insubordinate Mrs. Noah blasphemes outrageously. She essentially recreates the conditions of the first Fall, the original sin (even to the literal inclusion of the devil as her advisor in the Newcastle play of Noah.). Mrs. Noah-"off-spring of that initial mistake in marital 'maistrye'" (Kolve)-must relearn Eve's lesson. Salvation depends on obedience to one's husband as much as to God. Kolve continues: "maistrye" . . serves as a major principle . . . in the cycles . . . it is the notion that all things exist in their proper degree . . . the lower shall be subject to the higher. God is greater, stronger, more worshipful than the angels, the angels are above man, man is above woman . . So . the progression goes, with obedience as its binding force and the proper condition within it. The alternative stability was ... chaos and sin. Mrs. Noah's comic disobedience leads to cosmic disorder. The world flung awry. Northrop Frye has written: "The theme of the comic is the integration of society, which usually takes the form of incorporating a central character into it .... in Christian literature it is the theme of salvation." As a comic rebel, Mrs. Noah sits on the periphery of society, drinking with her gossips, the sinners about to die. She is reintegrated into the familial community when she enters the arkdragged bodily toward salvation. The conclusion of the Noah play marks the beginning of the new world. God ends the destruction, and the Noah family quarrels cease-Mrs. Noah is docile now. With the final sending off of the raven and the dove, salvation is assured. And the proper, heavenly ordained, man-abovewoman world order is reaffirmed. In his autobiography, Frank Capra refers to It Happened One Night as a sort of contemporary Taming of the Shrew (whose character, as Kolve notes, finds a "root-form" in Mrs. Noah). Capra's "shrew" is Ellie (Claudette Colbert)-the bored and bratty heiress. When Ellie dives off her father's yacht, she plunges into the flood waters, the deep blue sea of the "real world." She's never been on her own before, and she can't get along alone. Ellie is a baby-throwing food at her father in a temper tantrum, losing her bus ticket and finally wanting to spend her last pennies on candy. She needs guidance--someone to protect and amuse her and, yes, hold her in line during Daddy's absence. That man is Peter Warne (Clark Gable)-the real "King" (as his newsroom comrades call him). Her fiance, literally named

CONTROVERSY AND CORRESPONDENCE

King Westly, is just a pretender to Ellie's throne-a weak-willed buffoon who wants to sky-dive into his wedding. Peter is of the practical world, not from outer space. It ille is a brat, he is punk enough to put her in place. Peter functions as a paternal surrogate. He carries Ellie across a creek (she doesn't swim anymore). And when she tells him she hasn't ridden piggyback since childhood, he spanks her-both cute acts Daddy used to do. Peter also protects her from a potential seducer and shelters her from the storm. Mr. Andrews happily gives Ellie away to Peter-a younger, more virile version of himself-for Peter knows how to tame this shrew. He tells Ellie's father-who agrees heartily-she needs to be spanked once a day, whether she deserves it or not. It is not quite accurate for Poague to state simply that Mr. Andrews approves "Ellie's decision not to marry Westly." That sentence seems a strangely sneaky way of avoiding the fact that Andrews aggressivelyconspires to unite Ellie with Peter. He even plants a getaway car with Peter in it for Ellie's quick escape from the wedding ceremony to King. The father's final role in this marriage plot-a bizarre partis to send off the message allowing Ellie and Peter to "drop the walls of Jericho"-a motel blanket which has stood between them in their battle of the sexes. Like the "Captain of the Lord's Host" who advised Joshua in battling Jericho and felling those famous walls, Mr. Andrews takes over as heavenly messenger, signalling his children to consummate their wedding vows. Marital sex is OK in a world restored to its proper man-above-woman order. Ellie's short-lived revolt is over, just as quickly as with Mrs. Noah. Despite Poague's claims, she has gained neither true independence from her father nor a marriage of equals. She has simply learned-as all spoiled female adolescents must-to listen to her father and to her man and not to be a runaway. Like God of the Noah plays, her father turned out to be infinitely wise, knowing from the start that King Westly was the wrong guy, but that Peter was all right for his daughter. Ellis is back on the ark. Perhaps as Lee Poague suggests, I laid my claims to the relationship between screwball comedy and the medieval Noah plays a bit too stiffly. While I do perceive an affinity between the two forms, it was never my intention to posit an intractable or reductive formula upon which to hang all comedy ("marriage= screwball comedy= oppression"). To know a structure is not to know a film. This is only the most primary step-the beginning of analysis. Do structures "mean"?-as Frye would suggest of the comic structure's essential conservatism? Perhaps. Then to see how, in individual cases, an innate structure and its "meaning" is manipulated, transformed, commented upon, reaffirmed or subverted is to understand the strategies of artistic works, to understand the shaping effects of social-hstorical forces, to detect the variances between one director's work and that of another. Screwball comedy seems tied by form to the medieval Noah plays, the battles of husband and wife which I have tried to show end up as homiletics about the need for wives to obey husbands. Some screwball comedies not only go along with the form of the medieval dramas but the conservative theme also-Poague's favorite, It Happened One Night. Other films borrow the form, but gloriously subvert the theme-my choice, Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave. Different directors, different screwballgames.

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