Screen

...It's only the literal-minded dolts of the world that Eric Idle and the rest of the Monty Python lunatics can't stand...

...Now 'e's startin' in on a bloody flowuhrs...

...His life is used as an expedient here, a story in the public domain which is therefore convenient as a hook to hang the satire on...

...Almost without willed effort she will suddenly be propelled by her quicksilver legs into the most complex combinations and emerge serenely and confidently...

...It's completely arbitrary...

...Simultaneously getting the zinger here are radical splinter groups, traditional British schooling, dumb cops and, vaguely, the New Testament...

...Father Rivard is supposed to be a 26 October 1979:597glowering ascetic who needs cheering up, but Kramer leaves it to the gloomy weather in the film's Washington-State locations to convey Rivard's character...

...Again here Kramer has the extra dimension of its being a love story with a priest and nun...

...verb in the imperative...

...The events leading to Rivard's arrest are then filled in through flashbacks that are the main plot of the film...

...They should have taken a look at Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, made in 1953, the only great film about religious experience I have ever seen...

...The New Testament is really the least of the targets, though...

...She has particularly eloquent arms and brings a range of expressiveness to her gestures that is special even by Russian standards...

...In attack one wields an 6p~e and the other a saber...

...Monty is sticking it to the crowd here rather than to Brian...

...The only certain interpretation possible is that it happens in order to open the way for more gags...

...How ironic it is that, whereas Martin Luther wrested the Bible from the institution's grip by rehabilitating its historical, literal sense, Kermode now stigmatizes the investigators of that sense as the same institution's mouthpieces...

...Domus" in the accusative, indicating motion toward, "Domum"--and then makes him copy the slogan over 100 times on the walls...

...It's little more than the banana peel on which the other objects of this satire are taking their pratfall...

...Far more than any other nation Russia stresses a "speaking" quality to arm movement that Semenyaka uses to express anguish and dismay most poignantly...

...To blend in, he begins ranting himself, saying whatever comes into his head about the birds of the air and the lilies of the field...

...Her legs almost have an interlocking relationship, so that rapidly traveling steps have a slight flickering look unlike the broader more defined steps that one ordinarily anticipates...

...Brian (Graham Chapman) has been sent out by the People's Front of Judea to graffiti" Romans Go Home" in the market place, but a burly centurion catches him at it...

...Spartacus" was but one of the five ballets that the company presented in New York...

...Narrative seems to be taking flight as a transcendental concept since it can hardly be circumscribed any longer by a single category of function or finality...

...Ere now, what's gown' on...

...The same is true even in scenes where Holy Scripture is being parodied directly, as when Brian, in another brush with the centurions, hides among some street-corner preachers...

...To his dismay, his sermon starts a commotion that draws attention to him...

...The film does appropriate the life of Christ for its own, secular purposes, but it has no ideas about that life which are coherent enough to be objectionable...

...Even here the real pasting is being taken by the British working class, not the Bible...

...the listener, who's getting hot under the collar, complains to the centurion...

...Unlike Monty Python, though, Kramer is a hypocrite about it...

...The reader, on the other hand, is always prey to passions for order and sequence that make him pursue the "comfortable fictions" of "transparency, the single sense, the truth" in a story, instead of divining its various modes and possibilities of "Meaning" (majuscule mine again...

...N INDIFFERENCE to religion is also the insulting thing about ,Stanley Kramer's The Runner Stumbles...

...The Legend of Love," a turgid bit of Orientalia, appeared in 1961 and confirmed their good opinion of him...

...Hostilely he looks around and points out a juniper bush with berries on it...

...Once a story is written, it eludes the designs and expectations of everybody connected with it: author, reader, and protagonist...

...If not, it's cheating...

...Aside from sticking it to the British masses, Monty Python has no consistent gag...

...It is already clear that Kermode subscribes to the current fashion of "structuralist" exegesis, which is committed to analysis of a text's immanent features and mostly disregards its historical setting and genesis...

...It is the laws of man rather than God to which the group seems to fear it might be answerable...

...In almost all the ballets there are groupings upstage in some manner commenting on the personages downstage--their postures are a base for these principal dancers...

...He pretends that he takes people who believe in God seriously...

...Divination," he says...

...The accent imparted to the movement suggests that it is, in some manner, removed from ordinary articulation...

...As he bounces along on his priestly rounds in his flivver, we can't help remembering him fondly from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang...

...An author, as we know, cannot remain in control of the valences of his speech, so it is otiose to make his original intention the lust order of interpreters' business...

...How can you condemn a point of view where none exists...

...Having originally stayed only to dispute him, the crowd now falls at his feet shouting, "A miracle...

...Then you can claim that the injured party has no grounds to believe that the slanderous role is intended to caricature him as well...

...Iss bloke," explains a bothered listener, "is sayin' 'ow the buhrds ain' gaw no jawbs...

...The antagonistic relationship between Romeo and Tybalt in "Romeo and Juliet" is expressed with almost the same arched back leaps as characterized the adversary role of Crassus in "Spartacus...

...When the Sentimentalists like Kramer abuse religion even worse than nihilists like Monty Python, God is really beginning toget caught between the rock and the hard place...

...Stitt want us to believe in the power of religion in their characters' lives, but are either unwilling or unable to imagine how a religious vocation might be realized on the screen...

...together they form one of the most popular.stage couples in the Soviet Union...

...All were full evening in length and all of them were examples of Grigorovich's determination to eliminate mime from the stage and replace it with pure dancing...

...But nobody today can believe that middle-class propriety once kept people from hopping into bed, so Kramer needs more powerful restraints...

...Does he misunderstand historical criticism as criticism concerned primarily with the "historical" basis of narratives ("what is written about...

...This device is designed to exploit the shock value of the story rather than tell it well...

...Grigorovich has certainly laid his stamp on the image of the Bolshoi in these past twelve years and has much to answer for, though apparently not to the political watchdogs who keep him in power...

...He and Mr...

...Books: EXEGETES & ALCHEMISTS M OST of the humanities will have their transitory mystiques, and, in case you have not been watching lately, literary criticism is currently in the business of mysticizing "Narrative" (majuscule mine...

...others will say, alchemy...

...Consider the lily," interjects Brian, trying to change the subject...

...He simple didn't look the type in the way that the less polished Godunov did...

...Otherwise, Monty Python hasn't really given much thought to GOd...

...In this he is in total agreement with George Balanchine, director of New York City Ballet, but Balanchine is one of the supreme geniuses in the history of ballet and Grigorovich is one of its hewers and drawers...

...The standard gambit when you're basing a fictional character on someone real who might feel defamed is to introduce that person into the drama under his own name in another, more neutral role...

...When they have chased Brian up a mountain, his unwanted disciples begin moaning that he's led them into a wilderness where there's nothing to eat...

...Sister Rita is of course supposed tO be Rivard's cheererupper...

...The film, adapted by Milan Stitt from his own Broadway play, begins in a cell where a Catholic priest named Rivard (Dick Van Dyke) has been locked up for the murder of a nun, Sister Rita (Kathleen Quinlan...

...Gordeyev is her partner and husband...

...Taken by themselves, the flashbacks are a love story, not a murder mystery...

...His apology is scarcely sincere, of course, because he feels an outsider is always at full advantage as an interpreter, able to approach a text without the encumbrances of institutional consensus...

...If something Brian says or does one minute should give offense, the next minute it might as easily be taken as sympathetic to religion...

...In a general sort of way, I suppose, Brian is a reluctant Jesus...

...She's so full of vim, vigor, spunk and sparkle that her pumping legs show flashes of white flesh above the black stockings...

...The trouble is that, like Monty Python, he's only using religion as an expedient...

...119, 129f...

...Pavlova's special quality is most easily identified in the effortless flow of her danced steps...

...He is a classical dancer with the reserved temperament that one would associate more with the crystaline Kirov style and yet he is a total product of the Bolshoi school and has never danced with any other major company...

...However, it is n,~t so much a counterpoint or any kind of a dynamic interchange but a decorative background...

...Malice would have been a bore...

...Brian is only the foil in this skit...

...A nun and priest in love have a currency that interests Kramer, the sort that's plunked down at the box office...

...Blasphemy is the first word that comes to mind as an adequate description of his recreation of the Petipa/Ivanov masterpiece "Swan Lake...

...It is in fact an inept way to tell it...

...Be the merits of structuralism what they may, it is curious that its adherents come to be celebrated as the "outsiders," while practitioners of hisI torical criticism are classified as torchbearers of an institution that nervously protects the historicity of the gospels and cares little for them as literature...

...Its austerity and the tiny audience to which its difficult beauties have limited its appeal over the years might have discouraged Kramer from even trying to mess with religion...

...It is therefore hard to make the charge of sacrilege, which the church has leveled against the film, stick...

...All were by the company's artistic director Yuri Grigorovich...

...But his story is too garbled for us to be able to tell for sure...

...This patrician air, in some way, cut down on his effectiveness as the rough-mannered slave hero of 'Spartacus...

...And pity the poor protagonist, for various sources of "opacity" take him quickly out of sight in any interpretation, and "transparency on events" is absolutely the last thing one cati expect from "Narrative...

...Being literal-minded, such people never laugh at Monty Python's jokes...

...The love story that Kramer really wants to make is an old-fashioned one, Brief Encounter maybe...

...Right at the beginning, Kermode apologizes for being an "outsider" both to the skills of professional exegesis and--so we pick up by innuendo--to the ecclesiastical institution, which hovers over exegetical studies and indentures those who carry them on...

...Thus has Monty Python insured that God won't be able to haul them before the Queen's Bench and sue...

...The latter charged through the ballet with the impetus of an angry locomotive...

...The inconsistency is what keeps the group going, in fact...

...These chaps are gadflies, flitting about fecklessly from subject to subject and having their bit of fun with each...

...Frank Kermode bids for a respectful hearing, however, by undertaking to illustrate these "disappointments" of the interpreter's trade in the narrative of Mark, earliest and briefest of the New THE GENESIS OF SECRECY On The Interpretation of Narrative Frank Kermode Harvard, $10, 169 pp...

...The lack of malice is worse than the malice itself would have been because the movie, as it is, is funny...

...It's a cheap trick to get our attention...

...Life of Brian does this by representing Brian as a second infant who was born in a manger the same night as Christ...

...Does Kermode know nothing of the modem warfare between leading exegetes and the churches...

...If you don't like the joke, wait a few minutes...

...A priest killing a nun may still be a shocker, but a priest loving a nun is more of a teaser these days...

...Beginning with the accusation of the priest is like snapping open a capsule of smelling salts right under our noses...

...After quibbling with what he says on the street corner, everyone follows him anyway...

...It's as if she were, underneath her habit, one of those little sex sprites whose cartoon figures used to decorate the pages of Playboy...

...able, too, to savor narrative as "Narrative" by "declining to situate (it) in historic time" and divining all the hidden conjunctions and oppositions that are at play in the text as it stands (pp...

...His real interests lie elsewhere...

...I'm unclear what specific objections the church has to this movie, but what really rankles is that it treats the life of Christ with indifference...

...One could even live with the rosy dawn happy ending were it not that every creative impulse was directed toward dragging this gossamer fairy tale into cartoon brashness...

...The Stone Flower" is a ballet from the '50s in which Grigorovich first demonstrated some of his theories about danced movement as opposed to mime and presumably brought himself to the attention of the powers that be...

...When Kramer wants us to understand how much Father Rivard suffers over Sister Rita, he cuts to shots of the Stations of the Cross...

...Dick Van Dyke, cast in the role because his TV fame makes him a box office draw even for people who don't ordinarily go to the movies, is completely inadequate to Rivard...

...A miracle...

...When he wants us to see how attracted to her Rivard is, he shows us Rivard watching her run across the schoolyard with the children...

...He was made artistic director of the Bolshoi in 1967, the fifieth anniversary of the revolution...

...There is also a rigid symmetryrunning through the ballets which is not so much a classical balance as it is the hobgoblin of a rather limited creative intelligence...

...In The Runner Stumbles it turns out in the secondtolast scene that the murder was committed by someone else whom we never suspected, whose motives remain obscure, and whose character, what little we've seen of it, seems no more capable of murder than the priest's...

...Does he imagine that his votum in favor of'the priority of "what is written" is emancipating when it comes fully seventy-five years after the work of exegetes Wrede Wellhausen, and twentyfive years after even the Belgian Benedictine, Jacques Dupon t, presumed such priority as first principle of a resurrection-narrative study...

...Neither has as yet adopted the furious, energetic approach of the Bolshoi, but both rely on a chaste, singing line that only occasionally makes some bow to the dramatic acting so much a part and parcel of the Bolshoi...

...Where others walk she glides and shimmers...

...In an appeal to Spinoza's hermeneutic that is either careless or high-handed, Kermode finds the philosopher's distinction between truth and meaning to be the license of interpretative "divinations" over and beyond a sacred author's intentions (pp...

...To begin by raising the question of whether a priest could have committed a murder is only a good idea if that's the question your story answers...

...It is an approach that does not rely on subtle character shading but strikes for the blunt, uncomplicated gesture that will be understood in the furthest reaches of the house...

...It'slike the weather in Chicago...

...There is a slightly dark shading to Semenyaka's dancing as if she were perpetually living with some hidden sadness that was allowed to peek out to a slight degree...

...DON McDONAGH Screen BELIEF AS BANANA PEEL AND KRAMER STUMBLES C ONSIDER HOW many things are being sent up at once in a typical moment from Monty Python's Life of Brian...

...It's intended to make us light-headed so we won't be knocked senseless by the banality of the rest of the plot...

...When the crowd at first shows such typical working-class disrespect for Brian, does not the parable in this imply that the multitude today wouldn't recognize Christ if they saw him...

...136-137...

...Her performance is based on The Flying Nun and heavily influenced by Julie Andrews...

...Libel law in England is very strict...

...Nabbing Brian by the ear, the centurion impatiently corrects his Latin--a noun of direct address should be in the nominative plural, "Roman...

...When the Wise Men discover their mistake in paying adoration to Rrian, they reclaim their gifts and go off down the street in a huff to find the right stable...

...If one bothers to go to chapter VII of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, however, one disCommonweal: 598...

...He needs something that still has at least a bit of credibility to keep his lovers apart, to make their love manifest through denial...

...Richard J. Dillon Testament gospels, and the one to which Martin Dibelius gave that oxymoronic label, "the book of secret epiphanies...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...His vocabulary of movement is small and his conception of stage space is that of a In'st-year art student who has been told about the figure and ground distinction and v~ho ponderously adheres to the division in the most.correct and stultifying way...

...One is tempted to view all this as the kind of vaporizing, of the atmosphere by which academicians, like bureaucrats, protect their jobs from public scrutiny...

...Where making the former into a movie might take a certain courage, the latter only takes opportunism, which is why the script switches to it and abandons the murder angle as quickly as possible...

...asks a passCommonweal: 596ing centurion...

...As Luther well knew, however, the alchemists will serve the institution better in the long run than the miners of the historical sense ever could...