The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Divorce has now touched almost every American Catholic family somewhere in its immediate experience. More and more Catholics know that the reasons for these divorces are not all bad character and...
...Just as all the episodes I have mentioned are about the paradoxes of seeing and not seeing, so too do all involve us in the audience in their act of vision...
...But then all filmmakers are also voyeurs, not only by nature but by profession...
...The people are ready for a creative approach to marriage and divorce in the Church, ready to see the Church help those who have suffered alienation from the religious home of their birth because of divorce and remarriage...
...Clearly Bunuel is one of these...
...But then so is her young lover blind in a rather glorious way--as blind as the statue of the noblewoman's husband, who watches over his wife even though his eyes are of stone...
...The Catholic people have increasingly had the experiences of more and more friends and relatives growing up through the sad experience of a divorce and then finding real happiness in a second marriage...
...They know that the causes of these marital breakdowns are complex and that many tried very hard but could not make it...
...and afternoon dissembled the debris of what was left, of what had flashed like flame then ashed into forgetfulness, as burnt out as a vagrant warmed upon, a vacant lot by selfsame fires that save him just for this...
...Although Bunuel's ostrich may not actually stick its head in the sand for us, that older woman in love with the young boy does...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 BYRON VAZAKAS THE INADMISSIBLE EYE Even the slummers of this hung up on poverty, keep to foursquare acres of the skidrow gray, moving on better life...
...Young Readers A TOAD FOR TUESDAY by Russell E. Erickson Illustrated by Lawrence Di Fiori While skiing through a wooded valley, Warton the toad is captured by George, a mean and nasty owl who threatens to eat him...
...Ages 3-6 $4.75 WHERE ARE YOU, JASON...
...That it exists for us at all---exists for us as visibly as it does for the boy--is what this episode shares with 22 November 1974:190 the others in the film...
...As disparate and fragmentary as the episodes seem, however, we can't help feeling in the end that they all go together somehow...
...Ages 10 up $4.50 SYCAMORE YEAR by Mildred Lee Wren Fairchild is suddenly confronted with the complexities and contradictions of adolescence when her best friend becomes pregnant...
...Though she protests that even her husband has never seen her naked, she undresses for this boy...
...What is her ann flung back across her eyes if not this...
...They do sit down at a long, elegant table, but instead of eating they sit on commodes with their braces and garters down and read magazines...
...Out of the welter of free association and fancy a unique wholeness emerges...
...Yet another trap is set for our sensibilities when we expect to see a dinner party and wind up watching people evacuate their bowels instead...
...Though empty halls tick off a tenement, a longer shadow than the evening falls across the mystery of what was here...
...Outraged, they interrogate her and fire her governess...
...Like ostriches sticking their heads in the sand, all the characters in all the episodes in this film have had a capacity to deny their own eyes...
...In like manner, by not letting us see the postcards that the little girl brings home to her parents, Bunuel gets us to infer their pornography...
...As a parable on friendship it will serve its readers any day in the week...
...But when the coffin is opened all the soldiers are stunned by the sight of a face, buried a hundred years, yet preserving the perfect beauty of the youth in which the woman died...
...And so to blot out stains that will not wash with sly evasions of not looking where this man or that sprawls drunken on a stoop...
...Into the void created by the older woman's want of seeing rushes her lover's excess of it...
...Lee & Shepard...
...and when she sinks onto the bed, her arm thrown across her face in modesty and fear, the body that Bunuel reveals to us is that of a peerless twenty-year old--a body to match the face of the longdead nobleman's wife...
...Ages 10-14 $5.50 Commonweal: 191...
...Thus Bunuel makes us unwitting accomplices to his own imagination...
...When I've explained to groups the scriptural and historical traditions and how the Church could change on this issue, I have found great openness among the people...
...The film does indeed come across as a mischievous hodgepodge...
...As Bunuel's treatment of the scene between the old woman and her young lover demonstrates, he is not moralistic about voyeurism...
...The only readily apparent connection among any of them is the way that several seem to be jokes which work by a kind of inversion...
...Aside from that the episodes seem to have only the most chancy and arbitrary relationships...
...The liberty really is only "apparent" here, and the film remains extraordinarily single-minded, the work of an undeniable auteur...
...Maybe this apparent liberality only reflects the vitiated desires of an old man, but I doubt it...
...I would insist that on this point the people are much farther ahead than the clergy and the bishops...
...In the opening scene, set during the Napoleonic wars, a funeral statue of a Spanish nobleman hits a French soldier taking perverse liberties with a companion statue of the nobleman's wife...
...All that links the episodes is a tendency for a minor character in one to be the major character in the next...
...Ages 6-10 $4.50 Older Readers PEACHES by Dindga McCannon Illustrated by the author This story about growing up in Harlem brings the setting and a wonderful cast of characters vividly to life through the eyes of a young black girl...
...They have had an ostrich's capacity to react t9 what they see with both obsession and oblivion...
...But then they also examine the cards more closely and begin to become excited themselves looking at them...
...Kirkus Reviews "There is a buoyant quality to this little book--and its spirit is so basically loving...
...Other episodes seem to match up in ways that are even more tenuous and eccentric...
...Valuable lessons about life, love, and friendship...
...Ages 6-10 $4.75 DORRIE AND THE AMAZING MAGIC ELIXIR by Patricia Coombs Illustrated in one and three colors by the author Dorrie and her cat Gink, guardians of the Amazing Magic Elixir, have to use all their brains to outwit the Green Wizard and squash his evil plan in the newest of the delightful Dorrie adventures...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...With her eyes shielded, his dominate the scene, for the beautiful young body revealed when she undresses is of course merely her body as seen by him...
...and then when he does show us the cards, our attitude towards pornography is transferred, for the confused moment, to these monuments of high civilization...
...The exchange of the obscene and decorous here seems very like what occurs a bit later on when another set of characters arrives at a fashionable home, presumably for a dinner party...
...Books for growing milch...
...And in a curious way that unexpected face seems to belong to an equally unexpected body we are to see a few scenes later, when a teenage boy brings an older woman to an inn to consummate an affair they have been having...
...by Greta Matus Illu.~trated in two colors by the author Young readers who value their privacy will applaud Jason's inventiveness in finding places, imaginary or real, where he can hide and "get away from it all...
...Bunuel has never been so much of an anarchist, a practitioner of "apparent liberty," as he likes to boast...
...Bunuel knows only too well that we moviegoers are all voyeurs by nature, enjoying the mere vision of life as if it were the fullness of it...
...The punch line, when Bunuel at last gives us a peek at the cards too, is that they are all pictures of famous sights like the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal...
...The soldier, furious, has the wife disinterred, intending to violate what is left of her in retaliation...
...Times Book Review THE BOY WHO WAS A RACCOON bySalMurdocca Illustrated in two colors by the author One fine morning a boy says to himself, "1 think rll be a raccoon today" and sets out to meet one in this delightful tale about a mysterious and beautiful forest world...
...When we see a body so lovely and erotic as this old woman's, we are forced to take seriously, in a way we had not thought to do, the boy's desire for her...
...It is as if she felt that by not looking at the boy she would prevent his looking at her too...
...More and more Catholics know that the reasons for these divorces are not all bad character and lack of moral fiber...
...Ages 3-6 $4.50 KING OF THE DOLLHOUSE byPatriciaClapp Illustrated by Judith Gwyn Brown King Borra Borra, his eleven royal babies and occasional visits from the adventurous Queen Griselda turn EIlie's dollhouse into a temporary palace and her life into a state of confusion...
...Hands thumbed the graining of the banisters...
...This neat, humane toad is thoroughly lovable--and full Of surprises...
...Ages 5-9 $4.25 --N.Y...
...Her eyes are as blind as the eyes of the dead noblewoman whose head would fit her body...
...Then later one of them retires discreetly to a bathroom where a meal is served in privacy...
...JAMES YOUNG OBSCENERY 0 0 0 0 0 | THE SCREEN Alluding to his own title, Le Fant6me de la LibertY, Jean-Claude Carriere said at a press conference that he and Luis Bunuel had wanted to arrange the fifteen or twenty episodes in their script for the film "with apparent liberty"--that is, at random, with no arrangement at all...
...In one episode, for instance, a dirty old man gives a girl a pack of picture postcards, which she blithely passes on to her parents at home...
...The final shot that fades from the screen at the end is of an ostrich's head, and it seems a surprisingly apt, summary image...
...The beauty of her exists for us to see only as an earnest of his feeling...
...Whatever their age, the greatest filmmakers are almost certainly those who never feel guilty about their voyeurism of life: those who can accept their talents as talents and take a certain playful delight in their visions...
Vol. 101 • November 1974 • No. 7
