Screen
Macdonald, Nicholas
Continental executives repeatedly ignoring explicit warnings about their Penn Square holdings until much too late; and when one reads of Continental's top officers deciding to sell their credit'card...
...In the film's final scene, having sold his camera in order to buy a train ticket home, he looks at a beautiful woman across from him in the train's compartment...
...T HE SWISS moviemaker, Alan Tanner, is clearly one who has been influenced by Godard...
...Orwell is a man we Catholics ought to get on reading terms with," a reviewer for the Jesuit magazine America declared, "for he is very definitely on our side...
...There is no reason why, at least in Chestertonian geography," a critic for the Dublin Review put it shortly after Orwell's death, "one should not travel the path to Rome by the road to Wigan Pier...
...There is a sense about this movie of the understated physical recording of the story (there is very little dialogue or philosophizing...
...that just last year Chase Manhattan was reported to be insolvent...
...But rather than the amusing and subtle implications underplayed by Hitchcock (who knew very well how to make small movies), this scene develops nastily: Joseph drags Carmen into a men's room...
...The scatter-shot technique and false profundities are like the antics of a self-consciously naughty child...
...25 2 yrs: $40 Q The Chadian Catholic Review C 1437 College Drive ~..skatoon,Saskatchewan StN 0W6 7 September 1984:465 five...
...There's no longer easy money in the float...
...its effect, like the placing of piece next to piece in a mosaic, is cumulative...
...And it is true that Godard has indeed been parent to a generation of film makers...
...At first they are simply moving-picture postcards (Paul mugs self-consciously for the camera, as would any self-respecting tourist...
...He mocked the Catholic and Anglican priesthood and notions of heaven in Down and Out in Paris and London and A Clergyman's Daughter, frequently denounced "Romanism" as the ecclesiastical equiv- alent of Stalinism in his journalism and in The Road to Wigan Pier, and castigated the Spanish church in Homage to Catalonia...
...OrweU invited many of these compari- sons...
...The debt burden borne by Argentina, Brazil, and other hard-pressed nations has increased correspondingly...
...And Tanner spins this magic quietly and without fanfare...
...Screen LIGHT & FOREBODING TANNER SI, GODARD NO rg~laN-LUC GODARD'S First Name: Carmen, an updating of osper M~rimte's Carmen, is Godard seen through a ss lightly--mellow, tired Godard...
...The Super-8 home movies that Paul mails back to Elisa, his lover in Switzerland, are a critical element of this form...
...Nothing could have been further from Orwell's professed intent...
...Tanner's'is a vibrant and complex film, calmed by its formal precision...
...Lacking his usual means of dealing with reality, his imagina- tion literally seizes the camera's role as the film ends with a Super-8 shot of the woman, from his point-of-view (a trans- cendent, and uniquely cinematic, moment...
...Yet Orwell's passing comment that Graham Greene" might become our first Catholic fellow traveler" was neverthe- less in effect applied, with a sharp shift in emphasis on the phrase's last two words, to Orwell himself by postwar critics...
...I yr...
...Yet at times the photography is as highly stylized as an MGM musical (shots of Paul and Elisa, as they read aloud their letters, bathed in theatrical lighting) or as pedestrian as a documentary (Lisbon's streets at night...
...A ND ONLY the naive will believe that the "market" exerts adequate discipline on the banking system...
...The precision of the photography oddly counterpoints the casually offhand scenes and dismembered sound...
...Both as a force in Commonweal: 466...
...After spotting a Bible Society sign noting that the local Protes- tant shop did not carry the Catholics' JOHN RODDEN i$ joir~ng the faculty of the department of rhetoric and communication studies at the University of Virginia, and com- pleting a book dealing with George OrweU...
...The paradoxi- cally warm response of Catholics to Or- well illumines the larger pattern of Or- well's reception on the right in the 1950s, and illustrates how observers project selected aspects of a thinker's worBonto the author's whole corpus...
...In short, whatever the merits of a free market for most business sectors, it makes no sense in banking...
...One must find one's oven interpretations, somewhere sub- merged in the leisurely pace of those scenes, so jaggedly assembled and left unabashedly without explanation...
...The metaphor is appropriate...
...finally, as the affair goes awry, Paul's home movies begin to indicate his disintegration into a primitive, almost animalistic, state (aimless shots of water, buildings, drying laundry, cobbled streets devoid of people and human contact...
...First Name: Carmen ends with a title: In memoriam small movies...
...The familiar traits of this consistently personal moviemaker remain: the improv- isatory, even random, form...
...Languages swirl around him like a blast from the Tower of Babel (French, English, Portuguese, German...
...This profusion of the ways of seeing keeps Tanner's film offbeat and unpredictable...
...He pushes himself to his lim- its, even flirting with death in a knif'mg over stolen money...
...Indeed, despite Orwell's frequent and scathing assaults on "the stinking RC," Orwell's enthusiastic history of re- ception in Catholic periodicals rivals that of many leading Catholic writers...
...But more often Godard's touch is not so light...
...At his best Godard, by force of style, can sketch a key moment expressively...
...The bottom line is that deregulation has produced a competi- tive and unstable banking industry...
...And, left unintegrated, his innovations become repetitive and selfindulgent...
...Continental's shipwreck has shaken the confidence of borrow- ers and lenders throughout the world...
...so long as that spirit is in the land we are safe from the RCs...
...After all, even an enfant terrible has to grow up eventually--if only to become aparent terrible...
...Only the willfully naive can believe that Continental was alone in its reckless- ness...
...It's a paradox that Godard, entranced by the "small" qualities of American movies and peppering his own movies with homages to them, makes movies that, even with small budgets, are inflated and ponderous...
...It is a seamless movie, unfolding organically and appar- ently without effort...
...Overlapping time in two shots from different angles, in a gracefully operatic styli- zation, he shows the development of Carmen and Joseph from combatants (grappling for a gun in the fast shot) to lovers (exhausted, they roll into embrace in the second...
...It's worth the effort...
...and when one reads of Continental's top officers deciding to sell their credit'card subsidiary in order to increase the bank's dividend payout, it's hard to believe such behavior is widespread...
...Spurred by competition from rival banks, insurance companies, brokerage houses, and other financial institutions, banks can no longer afford to play it safe...
...In an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, the hero and heroine are tied together at the wrist in one scene...
...His relationship to the audience is adversarial rather than communicative...
...Typically, Orwell found that "the enemy" was up to no good, and he pulled no punches in his war of words against Catholics, especially Catholic intellec- tual apologists...
...Religion," which Orwell often discussed in the singular as a nionolithic and anachronistic institution, was not a subject to which he directed sustained attention...
...Within the White City, he has made a smoothly assured movie which is crisp and classi- cally under control...
...NICHOLAS MACDONALD (Nicholas Macdonald, a guest critic reviewing films for Com-monweal, is an independent moviemaker...
...But...
...Commonweal: 464 Godard has also indulged himself in his demeaning attitude towards women...
...It's as if they possess an identity apart from the movie in which they happen to find themselves...
...Tributes to Orwell like these from believers --and posthumous conversions of him --became frequent during the 1950s...
...the pleasantly thrown-away joke becomes an aggressively belabored one...
...This is standard operating procedure for capitalist economies with one important differ- ence: if a manufacturing business, for example, fails to survive the competitive wars, it can cease operations, or be taken over by another corporation without much pain for society as a whole...
...He had written of some with qual- ified admiration...
...Bitterly declaiming throughout, he occasionally refers to a slide rule as if finding his words in mathematical calculations...
...And if the market doesn't know what's happening, how can it punish poor performance before it's too late...
...The tone is evocative rather than provocaTHE POPE SPEAKS TO CANADA /+ The COMPLETE text " ~ ~ /I/(';~/ of the addresses of // . : +'X Pope John Paul II ' i~i ~+ ~ during his visit to Canada will be published by the Canadian Catholic Review Ideal for individual reading for study groups, for the class room...
...The con artist in Godard, with his intellectual pretensions, is most evident in his own role: Godard as Orson Welles-rumpled and unshaven, unable to raise money for his movies, self-pitying, the artist as victim...
...a dog does not praise its fleas, but this is somewhat contradicted by the special status enjoyed in this country by Irish Nationalist writers...
...His pioneering experiments with technique, rather than being meshed smoothly into the narrative (as in small movies), are more self-consciously displayed (as here...
...Just as the enormity of Continental's plight did not emerge until it was f%rced to open its books to would-be purchasers, are we not entitled to ask what lies below the tip of the banking iceberg...
...the pretensions to deep philosophical truths, the "in" references to other movies...
...And the startling, even unsettling, silence as well as the plaintive wailing of a saxophone, in which these grainy shots are alter- nately bathed, adds greatly to the melancholy tone ofln the White City...
...But, unlike Godard, he explores an alienated life in a way that is not, in itself, either boring or abstruse...
...American banks have had to raise their interest rates to attract deposits from the newly wary...
...If Messrs...
...As in Godard's films the feeling here is improvisat0rY and casual, the form fragmented...
...most serious movie makers, post-Godard, are to some measure in his debt...
...The acclaim began even before the 1946 publication of Animal Farm, with the appearance a few months earlier of Dickens, Dali and Others, Orwell's first American essay collection...
...It would seem, at this point, that the burden of proof must lie with those, like William J. Isaac of the FDIC, and Paul Volcker of the Federal Reserve, who hold that our problems are now behind us...
...Volcker and Isaac are proven wrong, and Continental is followed by another bank that misjudges the Competitive tides, the massive wealth- generating capitalist system will lose its moorings...
...But these traits are generally muted, not unlike the semi-catatonic character played by Godard himself (as a moviemaker...
...his experimental fragmentation of sound and narrative (evident here in three leitmotifs: a quartet playing Beethoven, nocturnai city scenes, the low beating of waves on a beach...
...One generation learned that lesson fifty years ago...
...And that's all short-term...
...A movie all of one piece--the slow move- ment of a symphony perhaps, or a ruminative blues number...
...Following the pattern of his previous movies, Tanner reveals his characters through dis- jointed vignettes...
...his misogynous tendencies...
...There is a bloodless and remote quality about Godard, sheltered behind the safety of his abstruseness...
...and that concern about Manufacturers Hanover shook financial markets just three months ago...
...It's intriguing also that, a movie of whiteness and light, it is, as well, somber, even foreboding...
...I -10 copies: $5.00 each ll -20 copies: $4.50 each 20 plus: $4.00 each You may wish'to subscribe to the Review and receive the Special Papal Issue as your regular October issue...
...Nothing that has emerged from the collapse of Continental is quite so clear as that neither bankers nor federal regulators can be counted on to divulge bad news: both fear provoking a run on deposits...
...We can't afford short memories...
...He knew Greene and Waugh personally, and respected much of their work...
...If the relaxed regulators did not inform us until they were forced to that Continental's problems included shaky loans to Nucorp, Wickes, and many of the other corpo- rate basket cases of the 1980s, should we not expect that the same holds true of the bank's competitors...
...But several more shots are added to underline this quasi-surreai moment...
...But it is not an easy movie...
...I i I Douay Bible, Orwell wrote in August, 1931, to a friend: "Long may they fight, I say...
...It is an elegantly disheveled film...
...she pulls down her panties and sits on a urinal, watched closely both by Joseph and a stranger...
...In the spring of 1931 he explained to Old Etonian and Catholic acquaintance Christopher Hol- lis why he regularly read the Catholic press: "I like to see what the enemy is up to...
...A commercial paper market competes with banks for corporate customers...
...In the midst of a hotel shoot-out, a man reading a newspaper is blithely unaware both of the police and the terrorists (led by Carmen...
...that only five years ago Continental's chief regional rival, First National of Chicago, was in dire straits...
...In this vale of tears we are all fellow travelers...
...Tanner captures the gradual deterioration of a Swiss en- gineer, Paul (Bruno Ganz), who jumps ship in Lisbon and slowly withdraws into a cocoon of timelessness...
...The onslaught against reli- gious belief and Catholicism in particular continued with the satiric figures of Moses the Raven and Sugarcandy Moun- tain in Animal Farm, and O'Brien's power-crazed rhetoric associating politi- cal with religious orthodoxy in Nineteen Eighty-Four...
...that its heedless plunge into international lending was exceeded by Manufacturers Hanover and many others...
...then one remembers that Continental's bad judg- ment on Penn Square was shared by Seafn'st, Michigan Na- tional, and Chase Manhattan...
...The religious fellow traveler JOHN RODDEN S PEAKING of the high literary reputa- tion in England of Communist fel- tlow traveler Sean O'Casey, George Orwell remarked in 1945...
...It is an extremely beautiful film, mysteri- ous and haunting...
...soon he uses them to record his love affair with Rosa, a young Portuguese woman (played mov- ingly by Teresa Madruga...
...Many observers have fairly noted that Orwell had "a blind-spot" when it came to religion, dismissing it as an other-worldly evasion of the here-and-now's problems...
...In contrast to these grainy films-within-the-film, the photo- graphy ofln the White City is soothing and sharp-edged, with painterly compositions and harmonious colors that seem natu- red and unforced...
...Much of OrweU's work shared that anti-Catholic spirit...
...Orwell's remarks on Cath- olicism --often couched in sharp com- parisons and contrasts with Com-munism, Anglicanism, Judaism and anti-Semitism --sho.w the curiously an- tinomian character of his religious thought, and how politically schematized and blinkered it could be...
...Even acquaintances of Orwell, like Christopher Hollis, argued (in a full-length critical study of Orwell's work) that Orwell "half-understood" the need for God, and that his thought "pointed in the direction" of religious belief...
...One might say the same about Orwell's warm reception in religious circles, despite his career of bit- ing attacks against believers, especially Catholics...
...An attempted rape in a shower with a particularly degrading aftermath, and several aggressive proposals of sexual assaults, hardly improve the tone...
...Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Eve- lyn Waugh, Charles P~guy, l~on Bloy, Jacques Maritain and Graham Greene...
...They can't make easy money by paying depositors lower interest rates...
...But when a bank runs aground, it's another matter...
...For, like the greatest jazz,ln the White ORWELL & CATHOLICISM City has that magical combination of opposites: relaxed and lo~-key and yet, at the same time, rigorously structured...
...Catholic (and non-Catholic) intellec- tuals have compared Orwell and his work favorably with the outlook and writings of G.K...
...Wealthy people and institutions can choose among money market funds and government securities that compete with the instruments banks offer...
...Banks now must pay high interest rates to attract deposits, and they have to take greater risks to generate high interest loans...
...their shock value and freshness, with time, have inevitably faded...
Vol. 111 • September 1984 • No. 15
