THE SCREENS

...Williams is a great raconteur, as when he proposes that the Battle of the Marne began when he and other over-eager black recruits returned the fire of German soldiers who were only boar hunting...

...Though he feels compelled to include a chapter on rock music, he is primarily concerned with developments in American poetry and fiction and only secondarily explores literary criticism, social theory, and journalism...

...The beginning and end of Roseland are, thus, very much of a piece with the other films I've been describing...

...But then .this is also the episode that comes closest to being an interaction among characters, a drama, rather than just a character study...

...HI[X~DN, ,]flit...

...None of the self-contradiction in man on which real art depends is evident in the films I'm dealing with here...

...Consider Omar Gatalate, an import from--of all places--Algeria...

...In the first, the performance is Lou Jacobi's as a good-time Charlie who is trying to avoid advances made by Teresa Wright because dancing with him gives her visions of her dead husband...

...Marilyn wants to take Russell away from all that...

...None of the other noteworthy shorts, as I said, has its central personalities as its ostensible subject...

...Perhaps the most attractive of all the shorts, though, is William Miles's Men oJ Bronze, an hour documentary about the all-black 369th Regiment which fought in World War I. Certainly the most attractive spokesman any of these films contains is Frederick H. Williams, a veteran of the 369th whom Miles turns up...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, Jig...

...As a story, it is rather uneventful...

...He likes his job because it is little work and leaves him time to day-dream about rock music, clothes and being a stud...

...The one possible exception-and a very limited one at that--is the middle episode of Roseland...

...This is the sort of film which gets by on the sheer force of some personality in it...

...On the one hand, the university presses are beginning to pour out monographs on the Indochina war, black protest, and political trends...

...If Dickstein singles out certain aspects of American culture for close analysis, Godfrey Hodgson is determined to encompass the entire sweep of society...

...For many years American correspondent for the London Times and the Observer, he has few peers in mastering detail...

...Dickstein addresses himself directly to cultural developments within the decade...

...Marilyn can see only that Russell is prostituting himself with the beautiful but ailing and cloying heiress, Pauline (Joan Copeland), who supports him...

...The first and last of these episodes are, like two of the three shorts discussed above, carried by a single performance...

...Two of the most rewarding of these new syntheses are Morris Dickstein's Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties and Godfrey Hodgson's America in Our Time...

...on the other, a smaller group of authors are attempting the riskier task of "putting it all together...

...Whichever is the case, this one moment in Roseland manages to give us a much more privileged sense of human nature than is found in any of the other films discussed here, wonderful ,as the smiling public selves we see in them are...

...And the only '"character" in a film we can hope to know in that way is the director or writer...

...BOOKS i I I I TIlE TIME THAT WAS THE SIXTIES WllLLI&M II...

...The result is a film which is amusing rather than moving--a film which has, if not the power of art, at least charm anyway...

...But it's not...

...Marjie Short's Kudzu is presumably about a plant that grows rampant in the State of Georgia...

...Miles wisely lets Williams, who can hardly be less robust and forthright now than sixty years ago, spend much of the film just telling anecdotes...

...The filmmaker takes a back seat here...

...It's the story of an attempt made by Marilyn (Geraldine Chaplin) to lure Russell (Christopher Walken), a gigolo, away from the wealthy Roseland habitu6 who supports him...

...She just made up the characters who frequent it...

...Filmmaker Merzak Allouache lets Omar speak to us directly in much of the film, offering us his reflections on his life as if he were in a Godard movie...

...It's about the poet James Dickey, who vehemently denounces kudzu as "vegetable cancer," and about the reporter who ironically recommends a young man go into kudzu farming...

...The recent New York Film Festival demonstrated how gratifying such films can be, too...

...That one is Grandpa, a film which an aspiring director named Stephen Forman did about his grandfather Ben...

...All these are of course documentaries, though only one is ostensibly about the individual whose personality carries the film...

...Aside from Omar Gatalato, though, what the films at the Festival suggest is that it is difficult to sustain an entire feature this way...

...To me, art is a process of private disclosure, of finding a way to make public and available feelings and ambiguities whose only other medium is life itself...

...But the characters shine...

...But it's really about Georgians...

...In the last, the performance is Lilia Skalla's as a tough and seedy old dowager who literally peabodies her dancing partner to death...

...Nevertheless, there are a great many films that do offer us just the other sort of character, the one whose fictitious or documentary story is being told by the film, and that are not to be sniffed at...

...for the sixties writers history is absurd but it can kill you...

...It's about the matronly, overweight woman who remembers with relish having been "Kudzu Queen" in college, and the old cracker who blandly declares, "The three things I hate most is cities, liberals and kudzu--can't see no need for none of 'era...

...Gates o f Eden: Amer'aean Culture i n t h e S i x t i e s MORRIS DICKSTEIN Basic Books, $11.95 Amertea i n Our Time GODFREY HODGSON Doubleday, $12.95 In the present context of disillusionment and drift, it is not surprising to see a spate of books on the 1960s, written less for purposes of fabricating nostalgia than for finding out where we are now and how we got here...

...In the case of fiction, for example, Dickstein argues that the realist tradition reached a dead end in the 1950s...

...He becomes selfeffacing in ways that limit both art and cinematic technique...

...Since Ben also paid for the film, the whole thing might well be a cinematic version of the vanity press...

...Nonetheless, Roseland is a short, or rather a series of three shorts filmed on location at Roseland and packaged together as a feature...

...It is tOo bad that there is no real audience for the short, for several of the most appealing films of this kind indeed, of the whole Festival --are films whose fifteen- to sixty-minute running times doom them to a distribution limbo...

...Determined to refute McLuhan's assumption that "books have been displaced," Dickstein concentrates almost exclusively on the written word...

...The general narrowing of political vision in those years was paralleled by a specific narrowing of the novelist's focus, so that reality was seen "less in terms of money, class, and social ambition than as an infinitely complex web of personal relationships and subtle shades of consciousness...

...A young man buys a second-hand tape recorder in which the previous owner has left a tape so captivating, he eventually asks her out...

...But she tries to force the issue on a night when they are all gathered at Roseland for a welcome-back party for Pauline, who is recently out of the hospital...

...Hodgson dispatches with ease such convoluted questions as trends in the distribution of income, the impact of the war on inflation, or the shape of public opinion in 1968...

...Russell decides to stay with Pauline, and it is impossible to say whether it is his own sloth and dependence that makes him do so, or a genuine decency that renders him incapable of deserting Pauline in need...

...Nor are the values and preoccupations of Omar (Boualem Benani) very attractive ones...

...On the contrary, where the film succeeds is at those moments when Ben's reminiscences about his own father and repartee with his grandson off-camera throw the generation gap into relief...

...The satisfying irony of this episode is that Russell turns out in the end to represent a more complex view of human experience, and therefore perhaps a more moral one, than the good-hearted Marilyn...

...As a consequence, someone we cannot resist emerges from the disparity between Omar's monologue and his actions---~between the young man who boasts with such posed casualness about being a womanizer, and the one who takes the whole film to make up his mind whether he should ask the woman on the tape for a date...

...Within these limits his book is a sustained and illuminating analysis of American writers and their relationship to the wider culture...

...In the middle episode, however, something else happens...

...By allowing Williams to dominate his film, Miles allows him to stand for the whole 369th, and so puts his subject across more vividly than he could have in any other way...

...Commonweal: 757 Perhaps the limitation of this sort of film which lives on charm alone is that it can only represent mankind in a loving and sentimental way...

...In the early 1960s, in contrast, "there was a scent of change in the air, a sense of things opening up" in both politics and literature, and in the "experimental forms" of Joseph HeUer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon he finds a "creative exuberance," a "belief that old molds can be broken and recast," which would become leitmotifs for the entire culture of the decade...

...His talents, however, are not limited 25 November 1977:7S8...

...What wins us over, however, is still Omar himself--or rather, in spite of himself...

...PERSONALITY PLUS OOOOOOOOOO OOOO THE SCREEN As is no doubt apparent by now to anyone who has read this column on a regular basis, the only humanity I ever expect to find greatly revealed in a film is the filmmaker's own...

...He is as callow as the lower-middle-class youth one meets in any capitalist country...

...Roseland might be thought of as a documentary too, except that it was written by a woman, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who had never heard of the famous New York ballroom until shortly before she did the script...

...At the same time the "comic-apocalyptic" themes of these authors foreshadowed another side of the sixties, and in one of the most penetrating passages in the book, Dickstein contrasts them with the themes of the novels of the fifties: "For the fifties writers history is remote and irrelevant compared to 'private people and their minute concerns...

...But the reader should be forewarned that his focus is somewhat narrower than his subtitle might imply...