On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen PROPAGANDA AND PRETENSION BY JOHN SIMON The Eighth New York Film Festival brings to fruition the tendencies inherent in the undertaking from its inception. For this Eighth Festival is a...
...Furthermore, both actors and camera are held down to minimal movement...
...Othon is a play in which women are reduced to preposterous pawns, though whether sexual as well as political implications induced Straub to pick it...
...But this intrinsically mediocre play is further undermined by Straub's production...
...For this Eighth Festival is a scandal and those primarily responsible for it are Richard Roud, the Festival director, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which tolerates the kind of direction Roud provides...
...among other things, president of Keep America Beautiful, Inc...
...I realize also that conservatism is less of a stimulant to creation than is the fiery craving for change, which embraces any art, and film in particular, as a political weapon...
...insane, that I can see no point in a detailed description of it...
...I particularly liked something about the lip-sick correspondent for human night--the Leipzig correspondent for L'HumaniteV) A disciple of Godard's, a certain Marin Karmitz (the son of a millionaire businessman protege of King Karol of Rumania), was represented by a piece of inept agit-prop called Comrades, teaching the workers how not to try to reason with management but simply take over the factories...
...Just as these actors are allowed no emotion in their speech, they are not permitted to register the least facial expression...
...The Spider's Stratagem an exercise in combining the symbolic naturalism of Teorema with the mock-thriller elements of Godard's Made in U.S.A...
...More about the Festival, especially its one outstanding film, Carlos Saura's The Garden of Delights, next time...
...Certainly power looks bad in this film...
...The films were, with a very few exceptions, either Leftist or homosexual propaganda, and, in especially felicitous cases, both...
...its chairman is president and chairman of American Can and...
...I could not say...
...Herzog doubtless thinks that he has made a profound symbolic indictment of our society, though he cannot pick up a camera without deeply incriminating himself...
...It draws the disaffected into its world of stupefying point-lessness, which they perceive as destroying the "bourgeois" conventions of plot, character, meaningful dialogue, etc...
...A git-prop, poster art, and corny grand opera combined into a trite pageant, The Inheritors, by the Brazilian, Carlos Dieaues...
...Camp is responsible for most of today's pseudo-art, whether pop, minimal, earth, or whatever other name it goes by...
...Then there was The Cannibals by Liliana Cavani, a retelling of the Antigone story, but with Tires-ias as a Christ figure--perhaps so that the odious Pierre Clementi could be worked in (in The Conformist, more appropriately, he played a homosexual seducer...
...Forty years of Brazilian history were compressed into two hours of political platitudes, high-flown revolutionary and counterrevolutionary rhetoric, and predominantly static visual non sequiturs...
...It could be argued that a film is not necessarily responsible for its possible political consequences if it is a valid work of art;most of the films at the Eighth Festival, however, were unmitigated trash...
...in between there are the usual Godard intertitles and narration as hollowly grandiloquent as it is inflammatory, this time dubbed into English by lowbrow voices mispronouncing every conceivable word...
...When several people asked me whether he was doing this consciously or unconsciously, I answered that I neither knew nor cared, the results, in either case, being the same...
...I don't know which was worse: watching this piece of filmic imbecility or hearing its author pontificate about it afterward in mock-modest manner and highfalutin terminology (words often mispronounced...
...Its president is an investment banker...
...It must be remembered that the most ingenious transferrals of plays to the screen are not truly satisfactory...
...By stomping on these middle-class values (and in a world growing daily more uncultivated, a gnat can stomp), the film becomes a weapon in the Revolution--any kind of revolution: the truly disaffected are not fussy about what kind...
...It is in tune with their Zensibility...
...and national chairman of Religion in American Life...
...Zorn was a 19th-century German mathematician whose lemma (axiom) states that every partially ordered set contains a maximal fully ordered subset...
...At the critics' screening of Othon, well over half the unusually small audience walked out, but the few dozens of fanatics who remained, appauded with that special frenzied defiance that turns critics' screenings and public showings at the Festival into social or political demonstrations...
...I want to end here with a question to the Film Society of Lincoln Center...
...At the end of each series of alphabet shots, we get a few shots of a wheat field, a bit of gray ocean, a fire, a tree in winter, a woman's face decomposing, the lacing of a boot, the peeling of a tangerine, and a couple of others...
...This goes on--hold on to your heads!--for 45 minutes, the trick being that word-shots gradually thin out, while the fire, water, boot-lacing and tangerine-peeling shots take up more and more of the footage...
...But, then, the camera is rapidly becoming as associated with the hands of mental invalids as the rattle used to be with the hands of medieval sufferers from the plague...
...Stupid, pretentious, inept, aggressively boring pieces of militant anti-art, selected and fulsomely advocated by Roud and his program committee of four...
...But 1 can't understand why a capitalist would want to head a festival relentlessly dedicated to the overthrow of the values he himself embodies...
...The older Italians, of course, cannot be kept from emoting...
...The rest of the cast are Italians, and the younger ones among them add to the other alienation effects their ghastly pronunciation of French...
...Most of this year's Festival films were not merely awful...
...At this point the question might be asked: What does such a piece of pretentious junk, even if it scales new heights of Festival dullness, have to do with either radical or pederastic propaganda...
...Not only small but also misshapen, perverted, and often cretinous, these creatures, confined to an institution, are shown tormenting chickens, killing a sow, parading about with a crucified monkey, breaking a camel's legs, destroying a car, climbing up on a banquet table and hurling the food at one another and all over the place, getting two blind midgets tc fight each other with sticks, trying to induce two of the most imbecile among them to fornicate, eating each other's scabs, slobbering over campy '30s pinups, cutting down the one fine palm tree around, and burning the director's potted plants...
...But filmmaking looks much worse yet...
...Zorns Lemma is in three parts...
...First, while the screen remains black, a woman's deadpan voice recites "'The Bay State Primer," a Puritan jingle for memorizing the alphabet...
...A fourth film...
...They do this in the standard Duras language, which sounds like a semidemented phrase book, or an ultra-long-playing Linguaphone record teaching zonked French to the mentally retarded...
...In retaliation, he plays vindictive little tricks on it...
...but what with their thick accents and the lifeless zombies around them, they end up even more absurd than the others...
...And sharing the blame for Roud's appalling selections are the Lincoln Center Film Society, the critics who review them rapturously, and that part of the audience that does not hiss and walk out on the films--as a good many people do...
...Even Dwarfs Started Small, by a German filmmaker of less than no talent, Werner Herzog...
...These proceed in alphabetical order, omitting the letters J and U so as to reduce the alphabet to 24 letters that match the 24 frames-per-second speed of film...
...A film like Zorns Lemma is camp, whether or not it was so intended...
...He once upbraided a Festival official for not showing films like The Sound of Music...
...Certainly a film advocating the rule of the people is more appetizing than one advocating Doris Day or America iiber alles...
...And so it went...
...Unreconciled and The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, were the nadirs of previous New York Film Festivals...
...They have dropped out of society, and are perfectly used to thumb-twiddling, navel-gazing, and staring, into space...
...Some of the actors are French, but have been instructed to read their lines as fast and uninflectedly as possible, making nothing of the rhetoric that is the dubious mainstay of Corncille's later works...
...It is Straub's conceit to have actors in costume play the tragedy against old Roman backgrounds...
...Furthermore, there is something very attractive about commitment to the poor, the oppressed, the toilers, the radical idealists--at least as such commitment looks on film...
...So there are ironies within ironies at work here, which, on paper, might seem fairly interesting...
...Meanwhile six women's voices, lower-class and rather butch, take turns reading a medieval treatise on light and form, each voice speaking one word at a time...
...Now I have no grave objections to such slanting as long as it does not exclude artistic merit and does not come at me in long, unrelieved succession...
...whose two earlier monstrosities...
...The second part consists of close-ups of words from signs and graffiti around New York, with the word held on screen for 24 frames, i.e., one second...
...The film is unable to update the story without making it both ludicrous and unbelievable, and the dialogue does not even pass muster as Communist propaganda...
...What Zorns Lemma needs, more than an apostrophe after the "n," is a kick in the rear...
...It shared a bill with another hour-long film, but the young Englishman responsible for that one at least had the good grace to announce his dislike for it and publicly wonder why Roud bothered to pick it...
...The maladjusted homosexual (as opposed to the more adjusted kind) is the conscious or unconscious enemy of existent society, which often has treated him badly...
...Then comes a concluding 10-minute section in which a man, a woman and a dog are walking away from the stationary camera through a snowy field, till they vanish into a distant forest and snow starts falling, and the image gradually whites out...
...One of the most lucrative of these is "camp": the adulation and exaltation of bric-a-brac, grotesqueries, excesses, parodies--material or human--till they become enshrined as meaningful, tasteful, indeed artistic...
...The scene is the institution's courtyard in an unspecified Mediterranean country, and the soundtrack, for no good reason, periodically erupts into the shrillest and most garish flamenco singing, often to the visual accompaniment of a one-legged hen being pecked to death by "normal'' fowls...
...For difficult letters like Q and X. Frampton usually prints a word beginning with them arbitrarily over some indifferent background...
...Or take Zorns Lemma, made by an American underground filmmaker, Hollis Frampton...
...sloppily made and, yes...
...It is to them a Molotov cocktail, three parts monotony and one part hostility that explodes in the bourgeoisie's face without, however, harming the disaffected...
...and feeble classic plays, literal-mindedly transferred, rattled off by human metronomes, badly if at all directed, are intolerable...
...Miss Cavani, the least feminine directress seen hereabouts since Marguerite Duras, informed us during the press conference that the only attacks on her film came from the Vatican and the extreme Right, thus deftly disposing of her potential critics...
...As for the anachronistic sights and sounds, even when they don't actually detract, they add nothing...
...Roud seems to be waging a war on bourgeois-heterosexual society...
...speakers are often shown only from the back, and sometimes not at all during an entire scene...
...Destroy, She Said, one of the horrors of last year's Festival...
...this lasts five minutes...
...Mostly, it shows a bunch of kids acting out a mirthless parody of an American western, which is supposed to exemplify the exploitation of the Third World...
...The Conformist was a piece of viscous Visconti...
...they were so maniacally tendentious that the average liberal who sat through the lot of them--assuming that anyone but a critic or madman could have lasted the course--had to emerge as a Spiro Agnew...
...A third atrocity was Marguerite Duras' La Musica, easily as bad as, though made before...
...She also explained that the title referred both to what the American Establishment called the blacks, and to that Establishment itself...
...Othon is one of Corneille's later and weaker tragedies, dealing with a bloody power struggle in ancient Rome...
...I can understand these gentlemen's not knowing anything about film and being unable to tell a work of art from a pile of Straub, or a festival director with taste and discernment from a Richard Roud...
...But that is what I got, punctuated with press conferences where the directors, abetted by those who tend to constitute the audience for the press screenings and conferences, vied with one another as to who could spread the gospel of Marx and revolution most blatantly...
...has a cast of some 26 or 27 dwarfs and midgets, who, ostensibly because they are condemned to live in a normal-size world, perform one outrage after another...
...Bertolucci's snide answers were a perfect match for the idiotic questions of the festival press-screening audience, and I especially cherished his comment that bourgeois anti-Fascism during World War II had nowhere near the value of Communist anti-Fascism...
...I think there is an indirect link with both...
...but when the vision becomes reality, the commissar and the prison camps prove rather less desirable than the superstar and the chain stores...
...Not just ordinary trash...
...Yet the soundtrack hums with contemporary Roman traffic, and there are a few panoramic shots of the modern city...
...Who would not espouse the ideals of the Left, without its bureaucratic despotism, its repression, its anti-individualism...
...There were two films by Italy's most pretentious young director, Bernardo Bertolucci, who derives from both Visconti and Pasolini, while adding showinesses and pseudoprofundities all his own...
...classic plays work even less well...
...I realize that film is a young art, appealing especially to youth, and youth understandably gravitates to the Left and toward rebellion...
...This may symbolize the approaching death of verbal culture, unless indeed it is already part of its final paroxysm...
...The Festival also had its obligatory Godard film, Wind from the East, a piece of infantile Maoist propaganda, so boring, antifilmic...
...Two unutterably dreary characters, a just divorced husband and wife, mope about a nearly empty provincial hotel and speculate about their past and future...
...To top it off, ancient Rome is seen as ruins or restorations, and the play itself is a product of 17th-century France, one of the last great ages of European autocracy...
...Let me briefly describe some of the typical horrors...
...There was Othon, by the supremely perverse and incompetent Alsatian filmmaker, Jean-Marie Straub...
Vol. 53 • October 1970 • No. 19
