31 Hath September

...Pier Paolo Pasolini's bit was a ponderous and tasteless pseudo-satire on religious films and man's inhumanity to man, which was chiefly a pretext for dragging in various pederastic types and jokes in which Pasolini revels, and to show off Orson Welles in the depths of his degradation: a horrendous leviathan, beached and barely capable of moving its bulk, heavily sneering at everybody to overcompensate for its physical and spiritual paralysis...

...The films were picked by Richard Roud, a young American living in England (if you can call going to the movies 10 to 15 times a week living) and, as organizer of the London Film Festival, shuttling between the world's festivals to choose films for London and now New York...

...Other ebbs were The Sea, a trickle of homosexualized Antonionification, well acted and studiously photographed in a style that outAntonionis Antonioni, but perfectly pointless-except perhaps to inverts-and nasty and soporific to boot...

...I would have serious a priori doubts about anyone who, like Roud, writes in a program note of "the divinely tinny music" in a film, and who quotes approvingly the Lincoln Center credo of providing "enrichment beyond understanding...

...That meant an average of three films a day, not counting numerous short subjects, and even though I saw only 26 of the 31 features, the experience proved both dizzying and enlightening...

...This much unrelieved film viewing is stultifying, and Roud's taste is woefully inadequate...

...Kanelopoulos' The Sky was by turns as touching and chastening as a war film can be, and vacuous and Marienbadized beyond the call of duty...

...Jacques Baratier's Sweet and Sour was sometimes tartly satirical but generally juvenile and aimless...

...Now for the quality...

...Rossellini contributed a feeble joke amateurishly filmed...

...At Philharmonic Hall there was the Hungarian Love in the Suburbs, about as bad as a film can get...

...but Muriel, alas, is banal without being reassuring...

...But to film the production of Sophocles' tragedy as staged at Epidaurus, i.e., to compound impossibilities, could have occurred only to a pair of Greek-Americans who combine American culturevulturism with Greek chauvinism...

...Roud...

...The Hungarians sent it to Cannes no doubt because they were proud of its "Western" themes: unhappy marriage, adultery, the emancipation of women...

...Space permits me no discussion of some interesting shorts and documentaries such as the excellent Point of Order, The Chair and Crisis...

...Kurosawa's / Live in Fear was often poignant though essentially routine...

...That Greek tragedy is virtually impossible on our stage has become clear to all but the most desperate culturemongers to whom art is all Greek anyhow...

...Gregoretti's The New Angels was an occasionally amusing trifle, at least unassuming...

...that it is impossible in the movies has been demonstrated by the recent Antigone and Electra...

...There were a few honorable misses or near-misses, of which more later, and, for the rest, some incredible junk...

...Le Joli Mai, an interminable specimen of the genre cinéma-verité, in which the candid camera interviews exhaustively random people in the streets who after a couple of sentences become living tautologieswhile the aim is to probe the pathos and callousness of man, the result merely displays his uninterestingness both as interviewer and interviewee...

...Herbert Vesely's The Bread of Former Years, based on Boll's novella, had some fetching touches, but the Marienbad technique, not even expertly handled, and crippling subtitles did not help matters...

...Then there was Elektra at Epidaurus from Greece...

...Things like Rogopag, Magnet of Doom, The Sea, Lola Montès, you would hate yourself for spending 50c on on a rainy day in Oshkosh...

...but whereas in Marienbad the schematization, stylization and oneirism gave the technique its spurious justification, here, forced onto a simple and trivial story, the method produces a dissociation of sensibility to make Eliot's mouth water and befog the viewer's brain...

...Heckscher, who knows all about Culture and nothing about the arts, proceeded to inform us, with a true-blue smile and honey-golden voice perfectly matching the color scheme, that film has now become an art (which it has long been) and that we were about to witness some films which are good and some which are very good...

...The schema is always identical: His wife, Beatriz Guido, writes a lurid scenario-something about sadism, sexual slavery, the corruption of adolescents-and then Torre Nilsson decks it out with fashionable chiaroscuro, arty camera angles, lots of turning door handles and opening doors (count them in The Terrace...

...From Argentina, there was The Terrace...

...At the Museum, James Blue's Olive Trees of Justice, though hampered by a mediocre script, had a fresh and authentic way of dealing with experience whether quotidian or catastrophic...

...ON SCREEN By John Simon 31 Hath September As we entered Philharmonic Hall for the opening of the first New York Film Festival, a floating uneasiness hovered over our heads, exuded perhaps by the architecture, a fine specimen of the Late Midwestern Cafeteria style...

...Let's start with that...

...If you can imagine a high-school version of Brief Encounter grafted onto an Eskimo adaptation of A Doll's House, poorly photographed, leadenly acted, with dialogue (I happen to know Hungarian) almost as bad as the subtitles-thus "Edited" in the credits emerged as "Compilated"!-you may have an inkling of something that would have made the crassest Socialist Realism seem interesting...

...Not that the implicit propaganda wasn't there: A wife not allowed to continue her work as a weaver will weave a tangled web of adultery...

...Of the story films I did see, only three seemed to me unquestionably worthy of festival showing: In the Midst of Life by Robert Enrico (France), Knife in the Water by Roman Polanski (Poland), and The Fiancés by Ermanno Olmi (Italy...

...One of the worst monstrosities was Lola Montés, the closing bill at the Museum, and the last film of the late Max Ophiils, who had the taste and mentality of a chambermaid along with a talent for kitsch barely equaled even by Vadim and Chabrol...

...guarded liberalism, and musical scores that, in the best New Wave tradition, shuttle between cool jazz and Scarlatti...

...Au fond, c'est une histoire banale -ça me rassure," says the heroine...

...Only Gregoretti's episode had a little flavor...

...the Brazilian Barravento was an amiable mixture of exoticism and rank amateurishness...

...There were other bad films and shorts, but let me turn to the somewhat better ones...

...the others, and most particularly the recent Hand in the Trap, are so much claptrap with the film-maker's foot in it...

...Jean-Luc Godard more of his attitudinizing and maundering about the human crisis, with the same poverty of invention straining to be different that made his My Life to Live insufferable...

...And, sure enough, the first film, Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel, proved to be an unsound and unsightly mixture of spurious allegory and genuine craziness, whose human beings were uninteresting, story unconvincing, and cinematography mediocre...

...Here again is the technique of fragmentation, sequential scrambling, dislocation of the aural and visual...

...Of six of his films I have seen, only The Fall (characteristically not released here) has any merit...

...on the three outstanding features I shall report at the time of their release...

...A meager and generally tiresome festival, then, which brings us to the question of selection and organization...

...It is disheartening to find this in the wake of the imaginative and challenging Viridiana, but Bunuel has always been an unbalanced and fluctuating artist...

...it has much the same gimmicky frame as Ophiils' vulgar La Ronde, the same dime-store sentimentality as his Earrings of Madame De and Letter from an Unknown Woman, plus lavish overproduction whose stifling opulence merely underscores the exiguity of Cécil St.-Laurent's script and the blatant insufficiency of Martine Carol in the lead...

...Once inside that hall of or and azure, we were welcomed by William Schuman who then introduced the Chairman of the Sponsoring Committee, August Heckscher, as the President's Cultural Adviser (which he no longer is...

...Kobayashi's Harakiri, after an unendurably static first half, inched its way to a splendid finale, whereas Joseph Losey's The Servant went from an extremely promising beginning to preposterousness and dreariness for dreariness' sake...

...And if-as I definitely do not feel-one needs all this quantity, at least Roud should refrain from publicly proclaiming the high quality of all his films...

...Most of the films here were gleaned from other festivals...

...By now the atmosphere was truly ominous...

...Before discussing the quality of the other films, let us consider their quantity...

...This film which brazenly announces in an epigraph that it is a new departure in cinematography is nothing of the sort...

...Little good can be said about Bresson's catatonic Trial of Joan of Arc and less about Resnais' Muriel, a further stage in the disintegration of an impressive directorial talent...

...Magnet of Doom, more than usually trashy Simenon turned into a slack would-be thriller, with Belmondo perpetuating his irresistible, smilingly evil, stereotyped self...

...Still, how anyone can tout Love in the Suburbs, Muriel or Le Joli Mai is certainly beyond understanding...

...I doubt that some of these were the best movies available, but if they were, they should have cheerfully been left to rot wherever found...

...No less appalling was Rogopag, another of those doomed episodic group efforts...

...Neither, I submit, is satisfactory...

...Leopoldo Torre Nilsson is very likely the chief purveyor of pretentious artsy-craftsy sensationalism to artless art-film audiences...

...In ten days, 21 new films were screened at Lincoln Center, and 10 somewhat less new but hitherto unreleased films were shown at the Museum of Modern Art...

...It has already been announced that next year's Festival will have the same format and the same Mr...