THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
In insisting on the essential triviality of Dirty Linen, I do not want to suggest--as some reviewers have-that it is simply a playful gambol. It is a farce with a message---perhaps several. It...
...Yet this creation is contemporaneous with every man's secret desire to be liberated from frustration and despair...
...But Resnais's film-making was far superior in the days when he and his own thoughts were the unseen protagonist of his films...
...Since this film is a character study rather than a philosophical inquiry of Resnais's own, it has to remain true to Clive's mental state...
...It is an attractive idea in a time when the right to privacy seems to be getting trampled underfoot by an endless guided tour through the bedrooms of the nation...
...Similarly, where society, the collective and public experience, has real counterweight to individual, private experience in Hiroshima, in Providence the decline of civilization into martial law against which the story is played out can be understood only as a correspondence for the deteriorating health of the film's lone, all-consuming character, Clive...
...In effect all the earlier films mentioned before have been about memory and the relationship of past to present...
...As a result, Clive Langham's thoughts are, though driven by guilt like those of characters in earlier Resnais films, not straitened by inalterable events the way memories are...
...The texture, the tension and the tautness are slack and loosely-knit in the chronological indiscriminate unfolding of events...
...as a citizen and, in effect, tells press and public alike to buzz off...
...I may not care what my elected representative does with his spare time, but I hate being asked to pay for it...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...It's about providence, about the future and speculation, fancy, rather than memory...
...At a given point Porges drops his objective stance, and ceases to address his subject in the third person singular...
...And that state is, though facile and often amusing, also unstable to say the least...
...and from there it proceeds to a story in which the affair that a French woman has with a Japanese man is deflected by memories it arouses of an earlier love affair she had with a German soldier during World War II...
...The only difference is that we are in a corridor of trees this time rather than a hotel corridor, and the entwined branches are real instead of being plaster and gilt ornamentation on a baroque ceiling...
...Within a couple of reels we have become aware that what we are seeing is only Clive's thoughts about his sons, never the sons themselves...
...Muriel plays off two pairs of lovers and past and present in a similar fashion when a middle-class woman suddenly gets as a house guest an old lover hoping to renew his relationship with her...
...With Burroughs the act of creation is sublimely innocent...
...Since all Resnais's films have created a mental reality in lieu of a concrete one, we seem to be on accustomed ground in Providence...
...Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan IRWIN PORGES Brigham University Press, $19.95 When Irwin Porges set out to write Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan, he admits he had "no concept of the complexity of the project" he had undertaken...
...Still, as the Elizabeth Ray: story showed us, the matter is not that simple...
...In Providence, on the other hand, the mind with which we are ultimately dealing is not Resnais's, but Clive Langham's...
...The book as mission and biography becomes vuluera'ble...
...Clive is an engaging old curmudgeon, a genuine dramatic tour de force...
...For much of the film he makes his dead wife into his son's mistress, and once or twice he even rewrites scenes whose implications displease him...
...There was a warehouse full of material--records, journals, correspondence, and almost uncountable pieces of memorabilia dating back to the turn of the century...
...It argues, through its sex symbol as sage, that the public does not care what its government officials do with their private lives and that journalists, who write only for other newspapermen, care about scandal only as a subject...
...Thus is the entire film imprisoned in Clive's mind, subject not only to his fantasizing, but to the lapses that pain and old age are causing him as well...
...There is a difference between sex and sex at public expense...
...for even as Tarzan is the anti-hero and the orphan of his three lost worlds--his personal world, his jungle world, his civilized world--so is 18 March 1977:182...
...For in all Resnais's greatest films---Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marienbad and Muriel--the mental reality with which we are ultimately dealing, the one that holds the film together and gives meaning to all the others, is Resnais's own...
...What these films have in common is not only the disjointed, relativistic quality of the world depicted in them, but Resnais's ability to get such a contradictory, protean world to make sense in the end...
...Men turn into werewolves, a cadaver is dissected, white wine is drunk almost continuously--but none of these things ever really acquires any meaning...
...and Tarzan is the dream child of ERB's own fitful yearning...
...but since he isn't remembering that event so much as trying to imagine its emotional consequences to other people, he is free to manipulate their lives in his mind...
...Burroughs, or Edgar Rice Burroughs, disappears from the text reference and Ed appears, subtly linked in a consanguine rel,ationship to Porges's psyche From this point on, the critical detachment loosens...
...The substitution of one kind of foliage for another indicates that the seeming allusion to Resnais's past work is quite intentionat here, and the general strategy of the film, like much of its imagery, gives usa feeling of dd]d vu as well...
...The suicide of Clive's wife (Elaine Stritch) does loom large in his mind...
...For one thing, Porges never let us know that Burroughs (Ed, of course) has touched a raw nerve in his own unconscious that is linked to the elemental magma of the universal mythological stuff from which all ideal heroes spring...
...Thus, at the same time we move through space with this tracking shot, we move through time and back into the past as well...
...But Providence is not about the past nor about memory...
...The sort of aesthetic ordering which disclosed meaning within the confusion and made past Resnais films great is here inappropriate...
...Yet at the same time there is a certain unfamiliarity here apparent even in the cursory description of the film above and increasingly distressing as Providence continues...
...In this welter of material Porges was determined to uncover the real flesh-andblood man who had somehow got-ten lost in the world's adulation of the exalted, mythic superhero: Tarzan, the Lord of the Jungle...
...In his writings, even in the biographical data Burroughs himself had sketched from time to time, the author had emerged...
...The way in which Resnais's own mind had to provide the context for events was clear even in his early documentary about the concentration camps, Night and Fog...
...The main message of Dirty Linen can be found in the committee report, drafted by the secretary, which brings the play to a triumphant end...
...Night and Fog becomes not a documentary about the camps so much as a meditation on them, a film on the difficulty of thinking about certain events rather than on the events themselves---a film about memory rather than actuality...
...It declares the rights of the M.P...
...In place of the orderliness of conventional reality, he imposed an order all Commonweal: 181 his own--an aesthetic order which approached events obliquely because it approached meaning and feeling more directly, and thereby compensated us for any confusion or disorientation it caused...
...Like everything else in the film, as they are part of the personality of one character, they are essentially histrionic rather than symbolic in nature...
...Some of the comments I heard from Indiana relatives about the Carter interview in Playboy suggest that the first point is debatable, in the United States at least, but the second appeals to me--has, in fact, since I read Geoffrey Wolff's "I Scoop, Therefore I Am," in the November, 1975, More...
...the result is less than the goal...
...Here as in earlier work, Resnais has fractured his story line like a nut in order to get at the interior qualities of human experience...
...Here it is not only the reality that is interior, but the view of reality as well...
...Porges sets after the man...
...This is why Providence turn~ out to be a lesser film than Hiroshima or Muriel...
...At one point, for instance, a tracking shot that Resnais made in color along an overgrown railway line at the now abandoned site of a camp cuts away to a black and white shot along a rail line in use at a camp years earlier, crowded with boxcars full of inmates and pacing SS men...
...Here the point is for the flow of associations to be truly free and rambling...
...Dirty Linen appears to be a harmless romp, liberal in spirit and light in delivery, but with a simple shift in the nature of the scandal involved it might serve as amicus curiae to Tip O'Neill's defense of Representative Robert L. F. Sikes...
...Consequently, much of the imagery in the film seems at last to be purely gestural rather than thematic...
...The tracking camera soon arrives at the house of Clive Langham (John Gielgud), a novelist who is up all night at the mercy of his aging body and mulling over the lives of his sons (Dirk Bogarde and David Warner) whom he is trying to turn into characters in a novel...
...GERALD WEALES THE WAVE OF THE PAST 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN From the very start Providence seems to involve us in that same illusory demimonde where all Alain Resnais's past work has taken place...
...Porges shifts his ground, and the conceptual determination to uncover the real man blurs...
...Although much of the film is stock footage of the camps made by the Nazis themselves, the only continuity for either the film or the experiences it depicts is provided by Resnais's own rumination...
...and the book, instead of a monument of great power eliciting the insight to a major, mythopoeic mind and its decline, becomes, instead, a monumental, uncritical assemblage, an olio, of a kind...
...The film begins with the same shot as Last Year at Marienbad, a tracking shot down a shadowy corridor with the camera low and looking up at what passes overhead...
...Hiroshima begins with a prologue film, anothel Night and Fog really, about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan...
Vol. 104 • March 1977 • No. 6
