Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR TYLER in his ailicle. "Playing Poor Politics" (NL, August 18), Gus Tyler quotes Richard Scannnon: "if you count on the young, the black and the poor to do the job, you can have sound...
...But what is surprising about that...
...But the Democrats cannot win without the support of the young, the black, and the poor...
...Yet Bruce Bailie, Michael Snow, and especially Stan Brakhage...
...Chicago, III...
...The unfortunate fact, as Shorter notes, is that most of Pasternak's reputation, particularly outside of Russia, derived from Cold War hysteria rather than the quality of his work...
...Portland...
...We should argue with them, we should use restraint in repressing their violence, but we must not let them have their way...
...There are two kinds of critics: those who frequent avant-garde screenings in lofts, living rooms, out-of-the-way theaters—the private cinema...
...David C. Williams ROCHE The criticism to which Louise Hess ("'Dear Editor," NL...
...it sets off the martial prowess of the gang from the incompetence of their enemies and invites the viewer to be "coldblooded" in a highly self-conscious way...
...And I agree that almost all commercial films have little to do with art...
...indeed, even seems to fall for it...
...and those who concern themselves with more established, aboveground operations—the public cinema...
...DRAFT David Bernstein's review ("A Plea for Lady Luck...
...Were he to give these and other "independent" artists some of his attention and reviews, Simon assuredly would help the The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...the United States never maintained a peace-time draft and yet always managed to fight any war that happened to come along...
...2) in this push-button age of ours, a million or two mud-slogging gi's don't count for much in a conflict that can destroy the earth in mere seconds...
...Cleveland, Ohio...
...If Congress said no—too bad, no war...
...I am most astonished, however, by Simon's lyrical paean to the rear tracking shot of Pike fading into the sunset...
...By sabotage—from blocking entrance to classrooms to arson—the movement has tried to force upon administrators, city councils and other agencies composed of direct or indirect appointees of the voting majority such policies as were contrary to community needs as seen by the executors of the majority will...
...Jonathan Herrick John Simon replies: I regret having to say that I consider Brakhage and Bailie even less interesting than the commercial cinema...
...Playing Poor Politics" (NL, August 18), Gus Tyler quotes Richard Scannnon: "if you count on the young, the black and the poor to do the job, you can have sound ideological purity as you leave office.'' True enough—but, for the Democrats, not the whole truth...
...C\Ri...
...It was, in fact, the failure of these groups to go to the polls in normal numbers?particularly in the big cities of the industrial Midwest—which cost the Democrats last year's Presidential election...
...New York City Murifi...
...It is perfectly true—and Roche himself has said so with emphasis—that only a small core of the student movement wants to use the campus "as a launching pad for destroying American society...
...I don't know the work of Michael Snow, but let me clarify something right now...
...to name the few T am familiar with, are highly original and beautiful...
...July 21 ) subjects John P. Roche's article "The Rebellion of the Clerks" demonstrates in a rather exemplary manner the wrong conclusions drawn by many sincere people from their observations on campus disorders...
...There is...
...Now the way it use to be...
...so far as I am aware, no reason to believe that this did their millions of victims any good...
...It is the generals and, in theory at least, the political leaders...
...It has given us our Renoirs and Fellinis, our Welleses and Wojdas, our Antonionis and Bergmans...
...this does not seem to deter makers of coups d'etat...
...His big novel, Doctor Zh'wago, is an utter maze—not, in fact, one but two novels which are never effectively joined...
...But the first test of belief in political and social equality is the willingness to let every other member of the community, as far as possible, be one's equal in power...
...Landauer SIMON In reading John Simon's review...
...When your avant-garde filmmaker is successful, he himself joins the latter group...
...Calif...
...and if Congress said okay, an army was raised...
...Even the film's extraordinary violence is at heart sentimental...
...Among the unyoung, the unblack, and the unpoor, the Republicans have an automatic majority...
...Washington...
...What is surprising is that Simon persists in wasting time and viciousness over this instead of leading his readers to modern film that is art...
...To be sure, it attacks present society in the name of equality, and representative democracy in the name of democracy...
...Anne-Marie Engar The very reasonableness of David Bernstein's "a Plea for Lady Luck" infuriates me, just like all the other reasonable arguments I've heard in favor of peace-time conscription, whether a lottery or what-have-you...
...Frances Mayhew...
...The film does, it is true, depict children as cruel and women as unfaithful and mercenary, but these are mere inversions of the usual Hollywood stereotypes, and therefore required little or no thought...
...Berkeley...
...This attitude has been taken by many enemies of democracy, from Lenin to Hitler to Sukarno: They all claimed to be protagonists of "true democracy...
...NL, August 18) of George Reedy's book...
...if a President wanted a war, he asked Congress about it...
...Now that he has been dead for nine years., however, it is best that we get on with the job...
...The reason for all this, of course, is that it is not the privates, or even the lieutenants, who direct the policy of an armv...
...Violent Idylls" (NL...
...This implies the recognition of majority rule, and sticking to this principle even when one feels the majority is wrong in this or that decision and for the moment cannot be persuaded by our arguments...
...Who Wili Do Our Fighting for Us'.' is not the first time I have read in The New Leader that conscription guards against encroachments by the "military industrial complex"—and, it is usually hinted darkly, fascism—but I certainly hope that it is the last...
...Braverman SHORTER In the years that I have been reading The New Leader you have published many perceptive and amusing critics—I think most especially of Stanley Edgar Hyman—but I doubt I have ever read in your magazine a review better than Kingsley Shorter's "Centuries in Collision" (NL...
...In what sense is the student movement antiegalitarian, elitist...
...And if we had not so stupidly maintained the involuntary Selective Service System over the years, we never could have gotten involved in an escalated Vietnam...
...August 18), I was struck by the fact that this critic, who is usually so alert to anything maudlin, does not begin to convey the sentimental ism of The Wild Bunch and...
...Those who want to make democracy more perfect by first tearing down the imperfect democratic institutions built with infinite toil and struggle are antidemo-crats...
...The highly political armies of Latin America and Africa are mostly drafted...
...Unlike poetry or painting, film is an expensive, large-scale, cooperative venture...
...He gives the impression that in contemporary American cinema there is no art...
...We've become thoroughly entrenched in this unofficial full-scale war because after each and every military and political blunder, when more men were called for, they were available...
...Surely, this point of view, absurd enough in 1966 and 1967, is now wildly farfetched...
...by draftees is goine to prevent the eventual Junkerization of our societv...
...The private cinema hasn't matched them—not by an extreme long shot...
...It must be remembered that we are, after all, not officially at war...
...otherwise, it ends up as home movies or mere solipsism...
...Hitler's Army, and even his SS, were formed by conscription...
...If, as now seems to be the case in America, the latter ignore their constitutional duty to firmly control the military, then no amount of gripi'm...
...Old Chatham, N.Y...
...One often does not know which of the main stories one is reading about until half-way into the chapter...
...William Sybley In an overall response to John Simon's criticism I must respect his pure standards for the cinema...
...This means that the actions of the movement are determined by its core, and Roche was perfectly right in treating disruptive tendencies as characteristic of the movement...
...3) a dead 19-year-old has as much a life to lose as anyone else...
...it is equally true that in all critical situations this core controls the rest of the movement, and that this much larger number, because of total inexperience with the tempo of historic change and because of wishful thinking about the possibility of accelerating the pace, cannot be brought out from under the spell of the disrupters by such progress as can be made at a particular time...
...Before The Wild Bunch I had not seen a western in many years, but if I remember the films of my youth at all accurately there were at least three such shots in each and every one of them...
...Both for political and human reasons, it has always been difficult to dislike the work of Boris Pasternak...
...cause of film art in America and might pass a satisfying afternoon or evening as well...
...Some further points for Bernstein's enlightenment: I) Up until the end of the Korean war...
...This is known as democracy...
...The most superficial "lance at the record shows that the student movement has consistently violated this eeali-tarian principle...
...If he had not been fortunate enough to arouse the wrath of Khrushchev he would no doubt have gone down merely as one more 20th-century writer with his heart in the 19th...
...Even artists who have made good small films—TrufTaut, Olmi, Bellocchio—operated on a much larger scale than, say, Brakhage, whose chief interests are one-minute fragmentation and close-ups of his wife's uterus...
...No critic can begin to cover both scenes...
...Doesn't anyone remember that the Imperial German Army, the prototype of all modern militaristic institutions, was also the first peace-time draft army in the world...
...What is much more germane to Peckin-pah's work is the almost rapturous treatment of the themes of male comradeship and the mystique of leadership, both of which are wallowed in uncritically...
...My only complaint about Shorter's analysis is to protest that Pasternak's approach was not novelistic at all, but poetic, in the fashion of the wildly disorganized political poems of Victor Hugo...
...The movement uses the defects of our democratic process as an excuse for not recognizing the majority rule, thus supplementing rationalizations of an anarchist character...
...my choice is the public cinema...
Vol. 52 • September 1969 • No. 16
