Screen

...Friday the 13th, in short, doesn't lead me to denounce our culture, society, and economy, which may simply reflect my illiberal mood...

...As with so many other attempts to alert church leaders to the challenge facing them, this warning was largely ignored...

...Bresson dehumanizes his characters because he believes money does...

...So he axes a girl who has just slept with her boyfriend for the first time, corkscrews a boy who has just"scored," and knifes another girl while she's suggestively gobbling a banana...

...Without a dramatic point to violent films, why not classify them as a kind of pornography - - give them an "X" or a " Z " rating - - and use law and social pressure to limit their distribution...

...You don't feel that money dominates you when you watch L'Argent...

...Little as the bishops might like to admit it, it is the liberal "pressure groups" using the pulpit of the media to preach their particular moral codes who are molding the values of the majority of the Irish people today...

...The story is an absurdist parable, reminiscent of plays like Ionesco's The Chairs or The New Tenant, where human beings are subordinated to things and where human conversational exchange is reduced to the barest, bleakest noncommunication...

...This is especially pertinent for Friday the 13th since most of Jason's victims are women...

...The only groups that seem to take the bishops seriously on these issues are those tiny ultra-conservative Catholic groups whose crusading defense of traditional morality is largely linked to a futile resistance to all social change...

...And new issues such as social justice or nuclear disarmament have warranted major episcopal statements...

...The young people who flock to the movie do so because of their own repressed Jason-like anger, their own fear and fascination with sex -- forces that have been exacerbated in some by poverty and in all by a commercial culture that exploits sexuality without ever explaining it...

...As the bishops' own working party of 1977-78 warned, there is a great danger "that Irish Catholicism is increasingly absent from the major tasks of social, political, and human progress which face us...

...But The Bounty does not turn neoconservative: while Bligh isn't wrong, Christian isn't either...

...I DIDN'T SEE Friday the 13th, The Final Chapter, I heard it...

...To be precise, I didn't hear the movie either, I heard the screams of the audience watching and responding to the gory slaughter on the screen...

...Perhaps this movie should have been tiffed L'Argent as well...

...However, they point to a particular challenge which appears to be lost on the Irish hierarchy...

...It was the reverse of watching a movie without headphones on an airplane, but my audio was secondhand...

...Yet why, after expressing my frustration with Bresson's mode, did I feel lightened, my senses more acute, as if cleaned in some subconscious way...

...Bresson, similarly, seems to exploit understatement to defy an audience's expectations of what a realistic film ought to be...

...But art involves a method to mayhem...

...they don't involve dramas with human beings, but screenplays with copulations...

...the movie simply literalizes the violence against women that feminist groups have identified as the core of pornography...

...It was being shown next door in a split "quad" theater...

...Just silence...

...Numerous episcopal commissions have been set up, like the Commission for World Development, Trocaire, which have been enormously successful...

...There was some slacking off on the following weekends, but sales continued high, and presumably the.screams too...

...His Tahitian breadfruit expedition -- as Hopkins laughingly terms it, a "grocery trip" -- promised glory if he could circumnavigate via the treacherous Horn...

...In the absence of any real attempt on the part of the clergy to draw closer to the people, to listen sympathetically to their needs and experiences, and to fashion with them some new ways of living as church in this new situation, the only result can be the constant weakening of the residue of Christian faith which remains...

...He left a name synonymous with martinet, which Charles Laughton's memorable 1935 portrayal translated into sadist...

...This is no reason to mount a jeremiad on the decline and fall of American taste...

...we learn, but yawn...

...It is spectacularly shot, especially in the open sea sequences, which still retain the look associated with the original director, David Lean...

...How, I wondered as I left the theater, could anyone - - in the name of whatever message - - hold to such a robot-like view of human beings...

...The Irish Catholic church has responded better than most to the challenges of institutional adaptation in the postVatican 1I period...

...appropriately, Bresson was booed when he rose to accept the award...

...After that number the evening continued as it had started, with another five or six folk songs - - nice, pleasant, entertaining, But/they did not embody the kind of archetypal essence I heard in the cathedral, or in the Indian Chant...

...Months later, I found out that Susan Osborn would be doing a concert on the West Coast in conjunction with a conference I was planning to attend...

...Furthermore, the institutionalization of all church ministry in parishes, schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions in that period of expansion made the veritable army of church officials prison= ers of their own institutions, unable to adapt to the challenges of Vatican II or of the liberalization and expansion of Irish society in the 1960s...

...we can also learn how to possess it without contamination...

...Granting that money may be the root of all evil, is all money the root of all evil...

...What is the difference between Friday the 13th and basic porn...

...Like his other films (Lancelot du Lac, The Trial Of Joan of Arc), L'Argent is filmed in Bresson's bleak, laconic style -- the kind of understatement that became a fetish to Tolstoy as he rejected the rich realism of his earlier novels...

...Shakespeare put the literally obscene on stage with the blinding of Gloucester in Lear...

...As lead vocalist in the Paul Winter Consort she has appeared in numerous concerts and made her album debut on the widely acclaimed" Common Ground" LP...

...Worse, the flashback from the trial leads to Bligh's history previous to the main action -- his plans, his family life, his recruitment of staff, including Christian...

...The Bounty doesn't...

...If Bresson meant to moralize, he has missed his mark...

...My part of the theater rocked with demented howls, as if the audience next door were being murdered, or had become savage enough to commit murder themselves...

...In many ways the real problem of the Irish Catholic church is due precisely to the very strength and success of its institutions...

...L'Argent is a stark tale about how money corrupts and destroys human personality...

...Instead of stock melodrama, and stereotypical politics, The Bounty provides an image of two tragically divided points of view, to both of which, alas, life makes perfect sense, it is refreshing to see such a treatment of conflict, where black and white hats are replaced by vulne];able human beings, their foibles, their passions, the pressures of events, and mainly the limits of their understanding...

...John the Divine...

...For the huge expansion of the numbers of clergy and religious in Ireland from the 1850s right up to the !960s led to the development of a highly clericalized church, with clergy and religious dominating all church activity, and the laity reduced to a largely passive and conformist role...

...I left in a trance-like state, but vaguely putting this concert in the same mental category as a Mary Lou Williams gig two years before and an Arthur Rubinstein concert three years earlier...

...Depending on your point of view, Bresson both succeeds and falls -- if, indeed, given his aims, the two are distinguishable...

...It's a symptom of other potential sins, like judging on the basis of rumor and stereotype, and once we start doing that, the liberal argument reads, who knows whai sins we might commit against broadmindedness...

...Even by our liberal guidelines, porn has been controlled by limiting its presen~tion to certain neighborhoods where local "standards" make it tolerable...

...It is difficult to recognize our ordinary transactions with money in this tale, or any of the evasions and elisions it forces on us, say, around April 15...

...Another result of such a clericalized church is the lack of lay involvement...

...Music SOUL SHAKERS SONGS BOTH HAPPY & SAD "White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing t h e m . . . " James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time W HEN James Baldwin wrote those lines he wasn't referring to Susan Osborn...

...The slasher here is one Jason, an alienated adolescent jealous of the sexual hijinks of his peers...

...Nevertheless, The Bounty, at best, is a mixed success...

...The bishops' loss of influence is not due to any institutional weakness...

...As a recent survey of youth attitudes to religion and the church discovered, most young people see the church as "an excluding church" offering them neither acceptance nor openness to their distinctive experiences and needs...

...I June 1984:339...

...Later I discovered what happens in Friday the 13th, the latest in the quaintly named genre o f " teen slasher films...

...It is also powerfully acted, with Mel Gibson as mutineer Fletcher Christian and Anthony Hopkins as the troubled, driven, all-too-human Bligh...

...The words, and the raw unaccompanied melody of that chant are still reverberating in my brain...

...I first heard her at New York's Cathedral of St...

...Finally the door business becomes laughable, one of those super-telegraphed clunkers like the glass of curacao which Madame Bovary licks and that the French, with their dreary theories, mistake for arty symbolism...

...It is a death wish of astounding proportions...

...Screen MONEY & MUTINY AND MAYHEM & MUTILATION L 'ARGENT is derived from a short story by Tolstoy, and its director, French film master Robert Bresson, shares Tolstoy s old moralist's venom against both the complexities of civilization and the complexities of its art...

...The percentages of lay Catholics actively involved in parish life is very low by international standards, only 5.6 percent...

...Thus new catechetical programs have been introduced, and institutes opened to train teachers...

...A film can be uncertain in its verdicts, but it better be clear about its uncertainties, define them quickly, and pursue them relentlessly...

...But in The Bounty we get to know Bligh as a human being, gentle in his own way, though ambitious, to be sure...

...you feel Bresson does...

...Worst of all, although the trial eventually makes for some effective counterpoint with the sea voyage and mutiny, references to it are dropped at a critical juncture, just when it seemed the film had found its rhythm...

...But someCommonweal: 338 times civilization pales when compared to the delights of nature, and film versions of The Mutiny on The Bounty have asked a different question: how could Captain Bligh keep them calm on the deck after they'd seen Tahiti...

...Great art, it is true, often involves violence...

...His sailors, after Polynesia, didn't agree, and dumped him into an open boat...

...My own response spanned both reactions...

...It was, however, enough to tell me not to see the film...

...But what works so comically in theater of the absurd is not so successful with tragic material, where the excessive contrivance of Bresson's technique prevents a passionate pre1 June 1984:337 sentation of character...

...The new liturgy has been introduced without any significant backlash...

...Any stannch defense of traditional moral values at the expense of some far-reaching pastoral program to involve lay people actively in the life of the church is bound therefore to result in the tired, bored, and mostly confused attitude most Irish Catholics have to their bishops...

...On the other hand, such an essay in the examination of material objects - - their borders, their partitions, almost their feel -- left me at least seeing differently...

...L'Argent won the Grand Prize of the 1983 Cannes Film Festival...

...For most bishops these are an acute embarrassment...

...A counterfeit bill is passed in a camera shop, and gets passed in turn to a gas man, who gets charged with the crime, loses his job, turns to real robbery, is jailed, loses his wife and child, and eventually is driven to murder...

...The whole story is seen vi~ flashback at a naval inquisition held, not to try the mutineers, but to determine if and how Bligh had failed...

...Yet one glorious, magical song did emerge...

...Of course, one is not supposed to condemn movies one hasn't seen, and this is really quite illiberal of me...

...Why not apply the same logic to grossly violent films, films which exist only to exploit dismemberment...

...The answer involves Bresson's method, which represents the cerebrality of European filmmaking at its best and worst...

...And I remember the singer's voice filling the space in that immense vaulted chamber the way the light of a candle fills a darkened room...

...Once we get into the prison, moreover, Bresson has a field day with his symbol, with shots of numerous courtroom partitions and the inevitable clank of the old slammer...

...However, most of the songs that evening just did not hit me in the solar plexus as the ones did months before in the cathedral...

...Though aided by the presence of Laurence Olivier and James Fox as skeptical British officers, the trial begins slowly...

...By questioning the traditional romantic view of the mutiny, and refusing to treat an authority figure as an easy scapegoat, The Bounty reflects doubts about our antiestablishmentarian sensibility, about the assumption that all power corrupts, and about our culture's proclivity to anarchy...

...That's for starters, since I heard more than three audience screams...

...The material, in short, is historically valuable, chronologically accurate, and dramatically inert...

...Nevertheless, it is hard to make a movie without heroes and villains -- hard, but not impossible...

...Susan Osborn put her guitar down, closed her eyes, and proceeded to intone a melody she had written for a Hopi Indian chant while on a raft trip down the Colorado River...

...in Manhattan, for example, sleaze stays pretty much in Times Square...

...In Bresson's stony, unrelenting tale, there is no chance to breathe this alternative...

...But it does lead me to a recommendation...

...His people become less important than the material objects that surround them...

...Something had.been revealed to me, deeply personal in the singer, and, in turn, within me...

...Something tells me that Friday the 13th is a rotten movie, and that I don't have to see it to say that...

...At best, The Bounty feels like life...

...For as they show themselves staunch in seeking to defend values, the very people on whose behalf they say they speak are showing little or no commitment to those values...

...Friday the 13th has certainly been highly profitable...

...When I left the theater, I felt that my brain had been inside a pencil sharpener, and my perception of shapes tutored into an acute consciousness of their abstract being and bounding of my life...

...I also remember that I sat there with the tears running down my face not knowing quite why they were coming, or caring, had I known, how to stop them...

...There was no applause afterwards...

...TOM O'BRIEN (Tom O'Brien, one of the guest critics reviewing movies for Commonweal, teaches at the Manhattan School of Music...

...This is what is fast happening in Ireland, and the church leadership seems largely unaware of it...

...The screenplay is bare, and the action transpires with a minimum of emotional display, even on the part of the victim and his eventual victims...

...Money can possess us...

...Porn films are given this treatment not simply because of their depiction of sex, but because they treat nothing but sex...

...The medium is implicitly sensational, and everything else -- drama, structure, pacing -- must cohere perfectly to create effective ambiguity...

...I had the same feeling I did throughout the concert in the cathedral...

...Nevertheless, people, young and old, have been pandering to violent and aphrodisiac art for centuries, from the gladiator shows to cockfighting in Shakespeare's days - - indeed, to Shakespeare himself...

...I did not, however, feel corrupt...

...To its credit, the newest recounting of the mutiny, simply called The Bounty, asks a different question: who exactly was Captain Bligh...

...I was in the front row and I remember that evening very vividly: I remember the sacredness of the cathedral, its vastness and silence...

...Indeed, the movie might very well have been titled Doors, for it often resembles an essay on the classification of exits and entrances...

...As yet the church has provided few opportunities for lay people to explore their faith in a more challenging and socially committed way, and few lay Catholics seem to expect or demand such opportunities or challenges...

...As the early scenes show, Bligh was a loving father, a kindly friend to Christian, and an exceptional sailor battling the aristocratic prejudices of the admiralty...

...I went, full of expectation, and in many ways I wasn't disappointed...

...I left L'Argent both exasperated and enlightened...

...So pray for me as I descend the slippery slope to censorship...

...The first scenes in the camera shop involve so many different people opening the front door, then the door to the darkroom, that you might think Bresson got his camera caught in some sort of cinematic revolving door...

...On its first weekend out (timed perfectly for Friday, April 13, one of several such Fridays this year), the movie grossed more than any other film has ever made in its initial three days...

...Great art can often be made from raw material like Bligh's combination of decency and dementia, but The Bounty blunts its power by a static dramatic method...

...These defects are unfortunate, since the issue the film raises is morally significant...

...Furthermore, most of these lay participants are active in traditional organizations which embody little of the vision of a post-Vatican II church...

...To a degree, moreover, the tale of the gas man had some power to frighten...

...A S COLE PORTER asked of American servicemen at the dawn of the modern age in the 1920s, "How you gonna keep 'era down on the farm after they've seen Paree...