THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
PATTU[O~[C 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 $Cmlnml There is a certain level on which we see contempm-ary Italy as a symptom of the disease that is going to kill us all. That's the level on which...
...There is nothing to get ahold of since, as I said before, Bertolucci has come up with a handful of air himself...
...Am I, from the House of the Dead, destined to note down only what belongs to life...
...The being in death...
...Malraux admits (as do other great Lazarus figures in modern literature, those of Andreyev, Rilke, O'Neill, Lagerkvist---and unlike the Kilbler-Rosses) that his "odyssey outside the earth to bring back the tablets" brings back nothing at all...
...But elsewhere Bertolucci's affection for the brutishness of rural lifebecomes perverse and turns into an enjoyment of brutality...
...He has again come up with a handful of air...
...The worst that can be said about much of the imagery this sentimentalism produces would be that it is ribald, as when the village men massage the anuses of their livestock to get manure to throw at Attila (Donald Sutherland), the local Fascist leader...
...Scenes of this kind in a movie are an atrocity against our eyesight, and it is distressing to see Bertolucci employing them...
...The unknown realm of the unthinkable has neither shape nor name...
...He discusses death philosophically with his doctor...
...It may be that Bertolucci has conceived the boy's murder this way so it will appear to us a variation on the theme of the killing of the cat earlier...
...In another, Attila crushes a cat to death with his head...
...That wrestling led Malraux to the writing of this book, which explores not only the idea of death but also the "meaning of life" as pondered from the near-death perspective...
...BOOKS , I III I I I LegzmsoMJ ANDRE MALRAUX Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $7.95 Seriousy ill in 1973 with a "form of sleeping sickness," Andr6 Malraux spent critical days in the S a l ~ Hospital wrestling with the possibility of his own death---a confrontation with mortality some three years before his actual death in 1976...
...But in his meditations, ranging twixt battlefield and hospital (those two representat/ve locations of twentiethcentury soffering), where is the knowledge about the mystery of death itself...
...This final volume in Malraux's autobiography is an artful, economical summary of much of his previous writing, a useful introduction actually to his thinking about man's fate, the human condition, the fundamental man, etc...
...Sa/o is such a desperate, violent, degraded film that it makes a ghastly kind of sense for Pasolini to have been murdered by a homosexual lover after making it...
...He comments on his own lifelong concern with the "metaphysical character of death...
...In a curious way Pasolini's film and subsequent murder also suggest that, artistically anyhow, the end for Bertolucci may be at hand already...
...9 Af~rmative in that Malraux gives major emphasis to the human quality of fraternity, that instinctive "element in man which is today fumbling for an identity," "as mysterious as love, and as divorced from right-mindedness or duty...
...In 1900 he has tried to find a subject just as large, but without success...
...He has been to the dark wall of death and has returned...
...It does not imply that we are impotent...
...And the answer is yes--his Lazarus, a book of death, becomes an affirmative book for the living...
...Knowledge about dying, yes...
...But with a film that runs over five hours in the original Italian version, and over four even in the version currently being shown in this country, Bertolucci has over-reached himself...
...He reviews his father's suicide...
...Looking back from death's shadows, Malraux discovers the meaning of life implicit in this linking and constructive fraternity ;mbedded in human nature...
...The one exception to this was Last Tango in Paris, where the subject was sex...
...The story Bertolucci has written for...
...And he candidly explains: "The tragedy of agnosticism does not lie in the fact that we regard death as unthinkable, but in the f a c t t h a t we cannot bring ourselves to do so . . . . The word unknowable insidiously suggests a knowledge that is never attained . . . . The unthinkable is not what is hidden from us...
...How insubstantial Bertolucei's characterization is can be seen from the fact that Robert De Niro gives in this film the most toneless, lost performance of his career...
...In yet another we have to watch while Attila kills a young boy by battering the boy's head against a wall...
...Perhaps he expects us to understand from the two images of bloodied heads something important about the character of Attila...
...other as they have been at every turn of history since the film began...
...He has a style that is in search of a subject matter...
...surveying our death customs (reminding us of the distribution of sugar skeletons to children in Mexico on All Souls' Day...
...Bertolucci's difficulty in 1900 is the same in which he always finds himself...
...like love--and unlike liberty--a provisional sentiment, a state of grace...
...With its kidnappings and pollution, its political chaos and dolce vita, Italy is a country that the rest of us are watching uneasily these days to get a preview of the decline and fall of the whole Western World...
...The real failure of the film's content, however, is a failure of nerve...
...And by the same token, the nature of Sate as a work of art seems to inflate the importance of similarities between it and 1900...
...My view of man," Malraux says, "has changed little over the past thirty years," and now that view is given its last, perhaps most effective, articulation Reliving the events of his illness ~anxiety, plunges into unconsciousness, stretches of lucidity, dark nocturnal dreams, remembered images floating before him--Malraux sets forth his essential beliefs and convictions...
...It is as if Bertolucci thought men really could copulate with the land--as if he believed in some eternal, autuchthonons myth of Italy, and saw Italian politics as a mere ritual part of that myth...
...As old men in the last scene they are still trying ineffectually t o cudgel and pummd each...
...The revelation is that nothing can be revealed...
...It seems to aggravate, and perhaps exaggerate, the significance of some horrific imagery that also occurs in Bertolucci's film...
...This unthinkable nothingness "territies humanity," but Malraux proposes that "it alone can deliver humanity...
...But what about the condition of death...
...his film deals with two men, one a peasant, Oimo (Gerard Depardieu), and the other his padrone, Alfredo (Robert De Niro), who are born on the same day in 1900...
...If he can rely on such scenes at all, what is to prevent him in the end from making a movie like Pasolini's Sa/o, which has nothing but scenes of this sort in it...
...We die with our eyes staring back into the lighted room of existence...
...The first of two parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...At least it is tempting to see in this film that has ended Pasolini's life the course that Bertolucci's career will take as well...
...In the light of the death-resurrection experience, Malraux sees himself as a modern-day Lazarus...
...And these new historical epochs by two of Italy's greatest directors seem to fit into this pattern of warnings that the end is near...
...He has things to tell us--not unlike Prufrock/Lazarus, "Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you alL" Indeed, he makes the great effort to proTHIS SIDE OF DEATH WlNmN W~AI~IDIS vide us knowledge about death---recalling the famous deaths of Socrates and Christ, probing the very ways of dying (why is suicide taboo...
...can we make a good death if we are destroyed by torture...
...In one scene we see a peasant cut off his own ear...
...Such images only leave us numb...
...As even this brief outline must suggest, Bertolucci's characters lead such symbolic ~ allegorical lives that they are hardly characters at ~!o By trying to personify in them the whole course of Italian history from 1900 to the present, Bert olucci oversimplifies badly both historical conditions and the human one...
...Both are brought up under the tutelage of their grandfathers (Steding Hayden and Burt Lancaster) who prepare them for their roles in life--Alfredo to be a landowner and Olmo to be leader of the local Communists--and both marry women (Stephania Sandrelli and Dominique Sanda) who come to tragic ends...
...Whatever symbolic 23 December 1977:820 meaning may lie in them, that meaning is lost, and couldn't have justified the images themselves anyway...
...In a scene early in the film where Alfredo and Olmo are playing follow-the-leader in a field, each boy digs a little hole in the ground to stick his penis in, and from this there follows in the film a kind of mystique about the earthiness of all Italians...
...To demonstrate, Malraux devotes a large portion of the book to his own fictional account of an incident from World War I that, for him, provides the ultimate definition of fraternity: At Bolgako on the Vistula, 1916, the first German gas attack, which, Malraux says, was "a confrontation beCommonweal: 821...
...They all evaporate and become nebulous under the pressure of his vision...
...For the "inconceivable has no attributes--not even menace" and without menace there is no fear...
...The ultimate method actor, a man who can wriggle his way into any personality, as his performance last year in The Last Tycoon proved, De Niro cannot get a hold on the character of Alfredo at all...
...it implies nothing...
...He records the death-threes of the patient in the next room...
...The reason Bertolucci has such goodnatured tolerance for them both is that behind the dumb show of politics in 1900 lies a vague sentimentalism about Italy...
...That subject proved large and substantial enough to be equal to Bertolucci's style...
...He has such extraordinary stylistic powers that no subject seems commensurate...
...After having reduced the struggle between landowners and peasants, Fascism and Communism, to an episodic brawl between two men who were raised as brothers, Bertolucci then calls the fight a draw...
...It is Bertolucci's failure to have the courage of his own political convictions, or even to have any political convictions...
...His subject here is modern Italy--all of it, its history, its culture, its politics and people...
...And pressed against the wall of nothingness, Malraux also realizes that the only vision left is that of life itself...
...Accepting the nothingness, we can die without anxi, ety...
...We do not die with our eyes looking into death...
...Malraux asks...
...That's the level on which Pasolini's 5a/o and Bertolucci's 1900 have been made...
...But understanding cannot enter in when the imagery that's supposed to convey it is so shocking...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 26
