THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
YEAR OF THE WOMEN In the previous issue I began surveying last year's films about women, of which there were an unprecedented number. I mentioned eight in that column— Altaian's Three Women,...
...The trouble with Julia, both politically and aesthetically, is that it is not in control of its own implications...
...It's hard to say which is the more remarkable, though—that such Nazi spiel should turn up now in connection with feminism, or that the connection should have been made by Fred Zinnemann, who was himself a German refugee from Nazism at about the time that Julia takes place...
...By choosing two women who look very different—one an endomorph, the other an ectomorph...
...In fact, Bavarian mountain-climbing epics were in the twenties a German genre almost comparable in popularity to the Western here, and it was because of her prominence in such films that Riefenstahl attracted Hitler's notice...
...This returns us to the question of what their relationship is based on in the first place...
...If you want to see how inferior to Bunuel's film or Truffaut's a film that is politically "correct" can be, take a look at Fred Zinnemann's Julia...
...But he chooses not to do this, and the series of brief flashbacks in which he does attempt to establish the relationship between the two women is, to say the least, remarkable...
...This is, anyway, what Zinnemann's vision of their relationship suggests...
...That is the real reason she runs the risk...
...Of what does the relationship between Julia (Vanessa Redgrave) and Lillian (Jane Fonda) consist, after all...
...Like Truffaut's film, Bunuel's is calculated to disappoint certain expectations it itself creates in us...
...What is it between them—indeed, what can it be between two women— that inspires such devotion and nobility...
...Besides being the setting for Nietzsche's Zarathustra, scenes of mountain gloom and mountain glory like these are right out of the films in which Leni Riefenstahl starred before she became a propagandist for Hitler...
...If this "object of desire" is "obscure," it is because the film purposely cuts across the grain of the premises Bunuel himself has established for it...
...But in the context of so many films about the relationship between two women—all of the ones listed above except Truffaut's, Goodbar and The Lacemaker, and even so, the last two have a relationship between the heroine and another woman as a sub-plot— Bunuel's film, in which two actresses play the role of one woman, is a real coup d'itat...
...If women find this film misogynous, they ought not to take it personally, for Bunuel's biases violate none of the EqualOpportunity prpvisions of the law...
...yet Lillian goes to extraordinary lengths, and even puts herself in mortal danger, in order to perform a service for Julia...
...Not that I give any credence to the argument that in judging films about women, moral or political considerations should take precedence over artistic ones...
...My instinct in returning to the subject this week is to head straight for Bunuel's film, though I know that doing so will be sure to miff some readers already impatient, no doubt, at my having devoted much of the last discussion to Truffaut...
...Until then we are stuck with the ruminations of unredeemed men like Truffaut and Bunuel, and with feminist kitsch like Goodbar, One Sings, the Other Doesn't, The Turning Point, or—last and least—Julia...
...Zinnemann might have gotten away with not answering this question at all...
...I mentioned eight in that column— Altaian's Three Women, Varda's One Sings, the Other Doesn't, Zinnemann's Julia, Mezzaro's Women, Ross's The Turning Point, Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire, Brook's Looking for Mr...
...During almost the entire film the two women are out of touch with each other...
...Zinnemann and scriptwriter Alvin Sargent seem oblivious to the imagery they themselves have created in adapting Lillian Hellman's memoir...
...After a couple of early scenes elsewhere, these flashbacks concentrate on a camping trip Lillian and Julia once took...
...But I shall restrain myself from enthusing further over Bunuel...
...Lillian performs this service, which is to smuggle money to the anti-Nazis in Germany, out of admiration for Julia's self-sacrifice to that cause...
...Here they are traversing a gorge on a fallen tree from which Lillian nearly falls, and here sitting and talking serenely on the edge of a mossy precipice below which yawns a mist-filled valley...
...This is why the films by Altman, Truffaut and Bunuel are greater than, for want of their own style, any of the other films being discussed here...
...These flashbacks, which are intended to provide a friendship that the rest of the film can use as motivation, do so by creating some sort of myth of the Uberfrau— by simply transferring the old Aryan myth of the Vbermensch to women...
...He could have just let us assume their relationship...
...But at the same time Lillian's political regard for Julia is all mixed up with her personal friendship for her, for Lillian is smuggling the money because it seems to her the only way she will ever get to see again this long-lost companion of her girlhood...
...That's nonsense...
...Is this why the relationship between these two women is so special, because womanhood itself is a kind of racial purity like that to which Nazism was committed...
...Here they are before their tent deep in the virgin forest, wearing jackboots and jodhpurs...
...As I said at the beginning of the first of these two columns, if we want better films about women, we may have to wait until women themselves are ready to make them —women whose talent is as great as Leni Riefenstahl's, but whose ideology, one hopes, will be different from hers...
...He saw in the physical culture and camaraderie of those films an anticipation of the Nazi ideology of Kraft durch Freud which Riefenstahl was to realize in her 1938 film, Olympiad...
...Style is morality in art, as Susan Sontag says...
...His misogyny is only part of a general misanthropy: he has easily as much contempt for men as women...
...antiNazi film...
...But wait a minute: I thought this was an...
...Goodbar and Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women—and a ninth film I should have added is Claude Goretta's compassionate and lyrically sad work, The Lacemaker...
...It keeps saying things it clearly does not intend to say...
...one dark, the other fair—Bunuel seems to be attempting to embody the two sides of his heroine's personality, which is teasing and seductive one minute but taunting and prudish the next...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...There just aren't two ways about it...
...So far as I can see, however, which actress plays the role when is practically arbitrary...
...A stunt like this would be typical of Bunuel, whose films have a long and delightfully perverse history of anti-symbolism...
...The reason is at least in part political in the old-fashioned sense...
Vol. 105 • February 1978 • No. 4
