Art taint and Art Attained
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon Art Taint and Art Attained The National Student Film Awards for 1966 made a poor showing. It may be that the writing, painting, or composing of college students would have...
...What was particularly dispiriting was that some of the losers were better than the winners, but I wish to dwell here on two points only...
...We get narcissists, pederasts, lesbians, transvestites, drug addicts, sadists, hustlers supposedly revealing the shabbiness of it all, but actually reveling in the exhibitionism of it...
...Neither Bolt, nor his director, Fred Zinnemann, was able to do much about that...
...There was more offscreen desecration of Andersen...
...Movie audiences, after all, are plain, simple men (and women), and God forbid that they should take offense...
...days...
...If only some reviewers could be stretched into full-length human beings...
...But because a minute of Warhol's brand of boredom is easily the equivalent of an hour of the Hollywood kind, the actual duration is 17...
...But, next morning, Bos-ley Crowther loved it: it could have easily been stretched, he wrote in his Times column, to a fine full-length film...
...MORE: It's very nice anyway...
...This sophomoric concoction featured an unattractive and untalented girl (and, by the looks of it, quite possibly lobotomized as well) who kept explaining why she likes to light matches-and lit them continually -while Warhol, in whose studio the inaction took place, went about his monkey business, and his aide-decamp, Gerard Malanga, did the frug all by himself...
...When, in the final self-defense, that patience is cast away, it is as if you saw the soul, unbearably luminous, shooting out of the body into heaven...
...First, that there was a category called "Experimental Film...
...A Man for All Seasons suffers from the usual ills that plague a play adapted to the screen...
...A nice color, anyway...
...Now why should the Arkoffs of this world, who surely would not have permitted the beheading of a saint, be insulted...
...It is a colossal piece of stupidity to institute such a category when you already have "Documentary," "Dramatic" and "Animated" categories...
...On the other hand, it is all too painfully clear why More's answer to the jailer who tries to justify his carrying out of heartless orders by explaining that he is a plain, simple man-"Oh, sweet Jesus...
...But one bird does not make a summer, to say nothing of all seasons...
...When, in the trial scene, the camera shuttles swiftly across the faces of the spectators, it seems rather as if Zinnemann had suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to put the art taint in...
...It may be that the writing, painting, or composing of college students would have been no better, but, on the other hand, neither would it have been displayed at Lincoln Center, excerpted for TV presentation, and lauded by the New York Times...
...The title, I suppose, is meant to be translated as "The Unnamable...
...I have written a good deal elsewhere (The Hudson Review, Theatre Arts) about this commendable but somewhat less than considerable play...
...The grand prize for the "Dramatic" film went to an abortion called The Little Match Girl by someone from Boston University who, when in New York, obviously camps out with Andy Warhol and Company...
...From the film, moreover, some of the play's strongest or wittiest lines have been excised...
...Thus it is unfathomable why the immensely moving bit of dialogue when More sees his wife for the last time: "MORE: That's a nice dress you have on...
...Ostensibly intending to show how the decadent tenants of the Hotel Chelsea live, Warhol has merely invited his various friends, followers, and freaks to disport themselves ad libitum and ad nauseam, while his no less freakish camera either just lies there chewing the crud [sic], or jiggles around as if palsied, or zooms in and out compulsively, for no reason except that the zoom lens is a gadget, and Warhol's birdbrain is enamored of gadgets...
...It was, in fact, unspeakable...
...By giving us such a flawless man, Bolt gives us a flawed play and film...
...A bird in a tree sings against a delicate pale blue sky...
...As it is, no comment on narcissism emerges, no point of view, not even anything like the beginning of a conspectus...
...Come to think of it, I can't guarantee the last item...
...Typically, the winner in this class was something called Metanomen, a bunch of boring tricks meaninglessly strung together...
...Most of the lovely, understated pathos is unhappily lost thereby...
...Even they...
...Georges Dele-rue is uncomfortable with antiquarian scores, as his music for the Com?©die Fran?§aise's recent L'Avare also demonstrated...
...And, significantly, it is only in the area of film that such madness prevails...
...Not even the courage of scabrous convictions...
...Nice color should have been reduced to: "MORE: That's a nice dress you have on...
...However, it did give the film a sort of art taint, which is important in Europe...
...The outdoor scenes always have that feel of, "Oh, yes, that was thrown in to make it more of a movie...
...ALICE: It's my cooking dress...
...Those who are still unconvinced of the worth-lessness of labels like "Avant-garde" or "Experimental," I earnestly urge to read Hans Magnus Enzensber-ger's essay, "The Aporias of the Avant-garde," reprinted in Philip Rahv's Modern Occasions...
...This countenance seems almost immobile-even as the voice appears never to be raised...
...But in film there is even a festival of experimental films-and, of all places, in Belgium, where they haven't been able to make a decent rear-guard film yet...
...has been cut...
...Cut to More and the headsman on the scaffold, against the same sky...
...Pause...
...Next, she dressed up nattily and warmly, went out to nocturnal Fifth Avenue carrying a container of those foot-long fancy party matches, which she occasionally wanly held out to a puzzled passer-by...
...Like Samuel Z. Arkoff, for instance, the cigar-smoking executive vice-president of American International Pictures, who had this to say recently about A.I.P.'s The Wild Angels: "No one was more surprised than we were when the film was chosen to be shown at Venice...
...If, for example, Nico, who is a genuine narcissist all right, primps and preens for the camera for a minor eternity, that still does not yield any revelation...
...For this means either that, in the latter three, films are expected to be old hat, or that to qualify as "Experimental" is an end in itself...
...But I digress...
...But, within that deliberately narrowed range, the expressions, like the inflections, are a perfect, filigree variety, and as scrupulously precise as the illuminations of a precious medieval manuscript...
...The noxious claptrap it proffered must be blamed largely on the organizers and judges...
...Either the girl or the camera would have to be a little more than an idiot...
...in adapting his work for the screen, Robert Bolt once again both idealized and oversimplified Thomas More, who was, at times, both more religiously fanatical and broadly facetious than Bolt's protagonist...
...even Orson Welles as Wolsey is, for a change, controlled and effective (his Swedish consul in Is Paris Burning...
...Indeed, I think, it is one...
...The Chelsea Girls is a testimonial to what happens when a camera falls into the hands of an aesthetic, moral, and intellectual bankrupt...
...A category like that, I am afraid, invites the worst...
...Not only that, but producers, too, are plain, simple men...
...There are, glory be, no awards for experimental novels or paintings or music (not even at Donaueschingen), which, needless to say, does not prevent works in various competitions from being radical and winning prizes...
...But it is all too stagey to be cin?©ma-v?©rit?©, too stupid to be cinema...
...was an outrageously dishonest performance), and Robert Shaw's Henry VIII is a small masterpiece...
...It goes on for about 3...
...hours on two separate but equally dismal screens, thus really lasting seven hours...
...These plain, simple men...
...One character, the self-styled Pope of Greenwich Village, does reel off a few funny remarks along with endless trashy farrago...
...other changes I cannot for the life of me comprehend...
...My second strong objection is not unrelated to the first...
...Ted Moore's color photography is consistently appealing, and production and costume design are, on the whole, more graceful and flowing than the sometimes jagged continuity of the script...
...But Wendy Hiller's Wife to More is unexpectedly unmoving, and Susannah York's Daughter is expectedly so...
...And, above all, the sad, wise, ironic patience...
...And when the subject is more ticklish, say, homosexuality or sadism, the "expos?©" becomes even more coyly truncated: suggestions, titters, token gestures...
...What makes this film required viewing, however, is Paul Scofield's More...
...A large segment of the hip, mostly student audience in Philharmonic Hall booed and hissed...
...Well, Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls is full-length with a vengeance...
...about them, and Zin-nemann's direction is decent but plodding...
...An off-screen voice read snatches of Andersen's tale...
...And that was all...
...In the theatre you could not get close enough to that subtly overpowering face...
...Now, with close-ups, you can...
...One device, though, is effective...
...I TURN with relief to A Man for All Seasons, which may not be a film for all seasons, but certainly is a godsend in this particularly impoverished one...
...The platonic pyromaniac then went home, where she lounged about in a bra and panties...
...Some of these lines may have seemed too epigrammatic or erudite or philosophical for the larger public (but will the larger public take to this film in any case...
...It is all there: the pity, the pride, the just contempt, the righteous but controlled anger, the infinite compassion...
...The male supporting cast could not be improved on...
Vol. 49 • December 1966 • No. 25
