hollywood vs 'Camp'

...It is odd that he would make his silk purse out of this sow...

...The Motion Picture Association of America, as the Festival's most formidable sponsor, has the power to intercede with the major foreign companies for or against its special interests...

...On the other hand, only three of the 20 films have not yet been snapped up by a distributor during their short sojourn at Lincoln Center, a better record than last year...

...Mekas was reported to be unhappy about this association, although it is difficult to see why...

...The only stamp of the auteur discernible is that it's bad: badly photographed with a camera so "fluid" it appears to have run completely out of control...

...But despite this sendoff, Fail-Safe misfired...

...As he mumbles and squirms into love with Lilith, the house psychiatrist nods his approval...

...Warren Beatty, looking more like Elvis Presley than ever, plays an apprentice therapist who seems to have been hired by this sybaritic institution solely as a romantic dividend for the idle patients...

...but in the Mekas film the repetition is merely tiresome...

...It is news guaranteed to make news, and for news, read "new trends...

...Either that, or forget all about criteria...

...Apparently, Romain Gary is not the Pygmalion he was pegged to be...

...Leslie's film is about noncommunication, so the girl babbles in a fictitious tongue...

...About all that can —and inevitably will—be said for this movie is that it provoked a degree of audience response (indignation, then anger, then amusement) rarely heard in an American theater...

...Hollywood may be more anxious for this "participation" than Vogel after a particularly ill-fated season with the European festivals...

...badly lit with available footlights and two immobile kliegs much in evidence...

...With the exception of the Russian Hamlet, the 35-year-old Bunuel classic, L'Age d'Or and the Japanese period piece, Taira Clan, which deserve separate mention, the remaining 20 films can be viewed as "the quieter, more serious works" which Directors Vogel and Roud feel are too frequently overlooked in the increasing commercialization of the art film...

...badly recorded in an empty hall where dialogue grates like chalk on a blackboard...

...If we could only care about Lumet's people (and not laugh at their homiletic idiocy), we might really have something to worry about...

...In this serious Hollywood blockbuster, it looked as if he had found one of the "new trends" which he is fond of directing to his Festival "to reveal as they occur...

...President Henry Fonda salaams to the liberal conscience (rarely so miscast as here) by selling New York for Moscow, and everybody dies happily ever after...

...at the same time, too many "fresh forms of visual expression" congregated in any one place tend to stale, but that is perhaps a necessary risk...

...I think it was Lewis Mumford who wrote to The New Republic last spring that he'd like to see a Dr...

...From the warhawk professor to the pacifist general (with a chorus of uniformed puppets in between), Lumet's characterization of the power structure "responsible" for the "accident" of nuclear war remains terrifyingly naive...

...Whether or not Vogel and his program director, Richard Roud, are prepared for resistance remains to be seen...

...When later Leslie must break the spell to fill us in on the world situation by way of cryptogrammatic subtitles, the true intellectual shoddiness of this movement becomes apparent...

...Although I haven't seen the staged production, I imagine that the insane repetition of torture in the flesh might reach an hysterical pitch which an audience can neither ignore nor escape, and that, I suppose, is living theater...

...The inclusion of Lilith and Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe (also Columbia) as major American entries should have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the brief history of the New York Film Festival...

...Fail-Safe will be heralded as such a film...

...Love conquers all— the kind of love which drives young Vincent to snatch Lilith from a lesbian aristocrat, screaming "You dirty bitch...

...Jean Seberg acting the mad girl Lilith, with all the "Method" her poor flat voice and empty face permits, is painful to watch...

...The real question will be answered later when it becomes possible to gauge how effectively the New York Film Festival has aided its choices on the open market...

...Just why the Festival chose to honor it is no mystery...

...Should its films, which Roud admits "can only be classified as difficult," discourage the majority of discriminating moviegoers from rising to the greater challenge in order to experience a keener reward, then there may not be much hope left for the originality of New York Film Festivals to come...

...Perhaps because the New York Festival director, Amos Vogel, was unable to find a solution to this problem, he enthusiastically welcomed the recent endorsement of two major motion picture industry associations— patronage which automatically insures the right of each to act in an advisory capacity in the selection of films...

...If any film epitomizes the New American Cinema's total fixation upon the absurd fragments of experience, it is Alfred Leslie's The Last Clean Shirt...

...What brought Jonas Mekas to Judith Malina's production of The Brig is anyone's guess...

...It is about boredom, so the same six-minute shot of the girl and boy driving in a convertible is repeated four times...

...Any serious American festival of feature-length films finds itself in an awkward position right from the start, for where are the American features worthy of standing beside the entries from Italy, Japan, and France...

...Otherwise, the spectacle of brutality in a Marine Corps jail hardly resembles the "poetry of the soul" which Mekas venerates in The Village Voice...

...With the exception of Venice, which refused even to accept Lilith, the American motion picture industry officially participated in six major festivals in 1964 and was rewarded with one grand prix and a couple of acting citations...

...It will be interesting now to see how energetically the campaign proceeds for control of the non-competitional New York Festival as a prestige showcase to make up for these overseas losses...

...Unwisely, the confrontation between the two forces was staged during a week end midway through the 13-day program when a wider public was sure to attend...

...Vogel cited their sponsorship as having "opened the way for festival participation of major Hollywood pictures," and stated his hope "for at least three major American films this year...

...Strangelove with the "real people," the sober, hard-working technocrats who measure the safety of our nation in megatons, instead of the General Turgidsons who gauge it solely in terms of spiritual and muscular derringdo...

...Like many a not-so-sound investment, the Festival has been forced to stake this year's events on more immediate returns...

...In this world, machines are evil, men are repentant...

...For Columbia Vogel had the warmest praise on the night of Fail-Safe...

...It is difficult to tell whether it was the new patronage of the American film industry or the infiltration of New York "camp" which posed the greater threat in this second Festival...

...Somehow, Philharmonic Hall plays a poor host to the experimental...

...Such compromises, of course, are not so terrible unless they also prove to be dismal failures on their own terms, and then they can be downright embarrassing...

...Robert Rossen's Columbia release, Lilith, followed by the Mekas brothers' White Line Production, The Brig, would lead even the most unsuspecting audience to question the sanity of the "criterion of quality" upon which Festival selection was ostensibly founded...

...Camp' By Carol Brightman What was original about last year's first New York Film Festival—its firm, if somewhat cheerless, experimentalism — still survives in the second, but disillusionment over the inability of the experimental to weather the open market has inevitably left its mark...

...Films such as Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes, Rosi's Hands Over the City and Salvatore Giuliano, Godard's A Woman Is a Woman and Band of Outsiders, Roemer's Nothing But a Man and Dönner's To Love honor the original aim of the New York Film Festival to act "as catalyst and witness" to the truly experimental trends in contemporary cinema...

...while franticly absolving her with normal kisses...

...and indifferently edited since Mekas prefers to swing his camera back and forth instead of cutting later, no doubt to give this earthbound set some wings...

...Whether it is a lamentable breach of faith with "real people," or an unwitting revelation of the utter poverty of their comprehension of the Bomb, Fail-Safe testifies to the danger of allowing our technology to lead us down the straight and narrow path towards apocalypse...

...Indeed, there is not much to say about Lilith, a rendezvous in an affluent asylum by the director of The Hustler, except that in its tasteless exploitation of schizophrenia, nymphomania and hysteria, it manages to be an extraordinarily corrupt movie...

...In effect, it belongs with Andy Warhol's Eat and Sleep (for tomorrow we shall die) movies, which the Festival ran as a continuous sideshow in the lobby...

...With Eat and Sleep, too, belongs the 30-minute short which accompanied The Brig...