On Screen

...The answer to this indictment is obvious...

...He listens to the birds singing in that huge park of a garden...

...There was one big disappointment in this category: Kon Ichikawa's documentary, Kyoto, which, despite a good touch or two, showed little of that director's usual mastery...

...But it is clear enough that Forsberg's sympathies are with Knut, that this intelligent albeit neurotic plebeian malcontent is perceived as superior to a tolerant but conventional society that finally can do no better than straitjacket him...

...Remarkably poor, and generally pretentious and arrogant as well, were this year's shorts...

...the events in the present, in which he struggles to re-learn speech, writing and thinking, and suffers several pathetic setbacks...

...We read: "Othon is magnificently performed by its almost expressionless cast," and, better yet, "This year, as in the past, the festival paid Straub its greatest tribute (the only valuable, though not infallible, objective test of a film's importance I know of) when at the press screening of Othon half the audience got up and walked out...

...I will not bore you with an account of them, but will mention only that even among hardened Festival fans and dedicated omnivores, walking out on the shorts reached new heights...

...The whole thing is surprisingly well photographed, and Martin Scorsese has nicely pulled it all together...

...Most disappointing among these was Scavengers, by the marvelous Ermanno Olmi, who this time came a cropper with an old-hat subject, indifferently put together for television, and containing little of that carefully and poetically articulated detail that gave his earlier works such simple nobility...

...Greenspun's critique contains gems of metacriticism that even Roud would find hard to match--gems, in fact, worthy of Greenspun's mentor, Sarris...

...And, of course, there are the standard squabbles between orthodox Party-liners and alleged or real revisionists...

...On Screen FURTHER FESTIVAL MISERIES BY JOHN SIMON The Eighth New York Film Festival included an unusually large number of "Special Events," some from the French Cinematheque, some from the American Film Institute, some from the Museum of Modern Art, which looked provocative in the program, but which a single human being, assuming he could fit them into his schedule, could not digest on top of the Festival's main attractions...

...The latter device, to be sure, conveys humdrum dreariness, but in a way that is the exact opposite of art...

...Things go from bad to worse as no work can be found, society is harsh and unconcerned, and the woman's small stock of money rapidly dwindles...

...Since Henri Langlois is the member in charge of retrospectives on the Festival Director Richard Roud's four-man Program Committee, this tribute to himself seem a bit revisionist in the current context...

...Before I discuss the other main features of the Festival--all except the best one of them already in general distribution and, therefore, dubious choices (why should anyone bother with a single performance at Lincoln Center if, the following week, he can have the film in continuous showings for 50 cents less...

...Two facts are apparent: (1) Roud picked its members because their tastes do not significantly differ from his...

...But the worst problem is the concept underlying it...

...a few more general observations are in order...

...After a particularly savage, though again not wholly unfounded, outburst, he has to be strapped down to his bed...

...The hero spends his days persuading workers to take over factories, and his nights revolutionizing middle-class girls in bed, his goodly repertoire of Marxist quotations proving seemingly equally efficacious for both purposes...

...Other films were shown, presumably, because they are the works of well-known directors: thus Satyajit Ray's primitively made, visually barren, simple-minded and sophomoric-humored Nights and Days in the Country...

...He is invariably rude and pugnacious, and his defense is always a diatribe, sometimes neither unclever nor wholly unjustified, against bourgeois society...

...It is a tepid, paltry film, but it has some sense of humor, rare in a Marxist context...

...Even the less manifestly Leftist or anti-Establishment films of the Festival tended to have at least implicitly disestablishmentarian tendencies...

...Consider, to begin with, one of the less prodigious scenes...

...In any case, the Zolaesque catalogue of her misfortunes and mistreatments is presented without artistry or depth, simply as a condemnation of capitalist society, and ignoring the woman's rashness...

...and, secondly, about the antiwar rally in Washington that followed it...

...and, finally, events in a limbo or dream world where certain visions, usually painful or frightening, torment Antonio...

...They are delicious songsters trilling away at leisure, but every once in a while a crow or raven intrudes on the concert...

...The Festival also dredged up Une simple Histoire, by the French-Tunisian director...

...The film is named after the Bosch painting at the Prado, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," showing monsters of sensuality disporting themselves...

...About Knight I concern myself as little as about the movie reviews in the Los Angeles Times, from which his are indistinguishable...

...Antonio's independent memories of the past, often pertaining to a lusty aunt with whom he had a protosexual relationship...

...Olmi's new film, a celebration of the scavenger as an anti-Establishment loner, fitted into the Festival pattern, but did not get across even that simple point with noteworthy forcefulness...

...More about this fascinating film next time...

...Two retrospectives were part of the main Festival fare...

...One was an anthology from the films of the French Cinematheque, entitled From Lumiere to Langlois, accompanied by a 52-minute tribute to the Cinematheque's director, entitled Langlois...

...Thus I was unable to squeeze in any mention of Mistreatment, the first feature by Lasse Forsberg, a 37-year-old Swedish television documentarist...

...Goethe's Mephistopheles said it (more or less): "Straub soll er fressen, und mit Lust...

...Suddenly, as Antonio listens with befuddled intensity, the raven's croak changes into something darker still, the neighing of a horse...

...On the verge of starvation, mother and daughter are rescued by good Samaritans...

...He would clearly not be driving around in a Jaguar even in the most Marxist of societies, and his loafing, recalcitrance and hostile tirades would have calamitous consequences...

...They gallop, lances lowered, across the broad lawn where most of Antonio's visions crop up...

...There are bits here that do not work--notably a walk through a ruinous machine shop, and a longish flashback showing Antonio convincing his father to expand the family business into big business...

...The film, despite lovely touches, falls below Grede's earlier Hugo and Josephine, which Warners has yet to release...

...We even see bits of physiognomy behind a not entirely close-fitting visor--could these be rustics hired by the family...

...I have often enough expressed my opinions of Sarris and Sontag, and see no need to repeat myself here...

...And it is just the sort of fuzzy thinking and misguided sympathy that Forsberg indulges himself in that undermines a viable but imperfect democracy and sends it hurtling into a so-called people's republic that, invariably, turns out much worse...

...While I have respect for the late Kenji Mizoguchi, I find him less compelling than some three or four other Japanese directors, and this particular film (though vastly superior to the wooden Princess Yang Kwei-Fei, chosen by Langlois for one of the Special Events series) represents him at less than his best...

...If the woman had had any sense, she would have stayed in Lille, where she had family and friends, and looked for work there...

...He is fundamentally unable to accept discipline, rather more exacting in a Communist state than in Sweden...

...A better but ultimately incoherent film, Kjell Grede's Harry Munter, was probably picked for the Festival because of an anti-American subplot (American big business interests wooing an independent-spirited young Swedish inventor to come to work for them in the U.S.--and in the process seducing his mother away from his father...

...The movie is a handsomely photographed trifle, an affectionately mocking tribute to a clandestine revolutionary cell, showing it as both dedicated and absurd...

...and (2) in any normally managed operation, such a committee would not remain the same from year to year...

...Alain Resnais' elaborately trivial, grandiloquently vacuous Je t'aime, je t'aime contains a critique of science without conscience, i.e., in capitalist hands...

...So that is what we got, thanks to Richard Roud and his committee, consisting of Andrew Sarris, Arthur Knight, Susan Sontag, and Henri Langlois...

...the knights prepare to charge...

...Patience may wear out in New York too...

...An uptown scene of picketing in front of the major network buildings, with ensuing street debates, is also interesting, but the Washington sequence, like the rally itself, fizzles...

...In a Communist society, Knut would be just as much of a misfit, for his difficulties are not social but emotional...

...What we saw was a 1958 television film, with all the constricting characteristics of the genre...

...The film proceeds parallelly on four levels: the reenactments...

...Later, with somewhat greater savings, she could have come to Paris...

...Hanoun's two innovations are that the soundtrack superimposes the woman's first-person narrative on snatches of the actual dialogue, and that a mundane statement like "I opened the door and went out" is accompanied by its equally matter-of-fact visual equivalent...

...If you think that preposterous, you have yet to read Roger Greenspun's review (New York Times, September 14) of the Festival's most brazenly uncinematic film, Jean-Marie Straub's Othon, discussed in my previous column...

...This Antonio is being manipulated in elaborate and frantic ways by his father, wife and grown children into remembering the number of one of those anonymous Swiss bank accounts where he abstracted large sums that both the family and the factories could now use...

...As he grows more and more violent, he ends up in a hospital...

...The one thoroughly fine film of the Festival was the Spaniard Carlos Saura's The Garden of Delights, which may also have been picked for its veiled anti-Fascism rather than for its shining excellence...

...After his arrest on an assault charge, Knut becomes the subject of various social workers' and psychologists' attention...

...Concerning The Inheritors, he writes: "The surrealist succession of betrayal and compromise is rendered beautifully by the constant shifting of the camera angle, the vertiginous spatial ambiguity and total meta-theatricality...

...A curious little English film, the first feature by Maurice Hatton, another tv documentarist, was called Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition--which might have served as overall title for the Festival...

...The number of his favorites that must have flunked his "objective test" can be equaled only by that of his pet peeves that triumphantly passed it, but I do hope he gets to see many more films by this master in an emptied hall...

...another is that much of it was improvised by the cast and, as usual with extensive improvisation, does not work...

...or Claude Chabrol's slickly efficient but hollow and specious The Butcher...

...He starts haranguing a young man who gets out of a Jaguar with a girl to the effect that he, Knut, really owns the car, seeing that he is a member of the working class that made it...

...The film, naturally, does not begin to resolve the questions it raises...

...It is the story, based on fact, of a woman from Lille who comes to Paris looking for work and brings along a small daughter...

...Janus Films, which bought his preceding and excellent One Fine Day, has been sitting on it this many a fine day...

...Exactly how the committee functions is unknown: Roud refused to answer questions on this subject...

...When the young man tries to argue the point, Knut knocks him down...

...Street Scenes 1970 is a documentary mostly about the confrontation last May between war protesters and the combined stockbrokers and hardhats of Wall Street...

...Roud's own criticism can best be gauged from the blurbs for the Festival program, mostly the product of his leaky pen...

...And presently, among the tall bushes, we begin to catch glimpses of a knight in armor--three of them, in fact...

...That program was not screened for critics, but I managed to catch the second retrospective offering, Mizoguchi's Chikamatzu Monogatari (1954...

...It tells of a great Spanish industrial family whose fortune is declining, and its desperate machinations to rekindle the memory of the eldest son, now fiftyish, left partly crippled and amnesiac by an auto accident...

...as for the former, since there are no significant discrepancies between the dialogue and the narration, the effect is the aural counterpart of a blurred snapshot in which a face has two noses and four eyes...

...Next, she tries to get him to reveal the combination to his wall safe hidden--the camera captures this fact with rapid casualness--behind an engraving of three mounted knights in battle array...

...The Wall Street part is rather good, giving almost equal time to both sides, and showing both of them exactly as they are...

...But Mizoguchi has become a cult-director among buffs and auteurists, and he is rapidly acquiring the kind of sacred-ness enjoyed by a Fritz Lang or Busby Berkeley...

...As mnemonic jolts, various traumatic scenes from Antonio's childhood and young manhood are reenacted for him (an actress has been engaged to play his dead mother), but the reenactments now take on both farcical and sinister coloration...

...Almost everything else, however, adds up cogently to a hallucinatory vision of personal and familial greed emblematic of a nation's decay...

...Poor Greenspun...

...By showing the effect before the cause, Saura recreates in us his hero's puzzlement...

...The full dire-ness even of these could not be adequately evoked in my last column...

...Marcel Hanoun, who has an underground reputation as a director's director and as the secret essence of what the New Wave was really about...

...But no...

...She primps in front of her mirror and complains about their children to her uncomprehending husband...

...Knut, a sporadically employed stevedore (played by Knut Pettersen, who is that in real life), has a grudge against the welfare state, and steadily fulminates against it...

...As for Roud, he has already been fired from his two other jobs, as director of the London Film Festival and film critic of the Guardian...

...Actually, the treatment accorded Knut is essentially clement and patient, and relatively individualized...

...One problem with the film is that it is subprofessionally directed, photographed and edited by Forsberg himself...

...An epilogue with some of the filmmakers (the New York Cinetracts Collective) and their friends meeting in a hotel room to discuss what went wrong and what should be done, illustrates the virtual impossibility of getting even like-minded people to agree with one another on modes of protest, but is sprawling and, as cinema, insufficiently absorbing...

...Antonio rises from his wheelchair and manages to stagger into his wife's room...

...Antonio, sitting in his wheelchair in the garden, has wearied of practicing to recreate his signature with his semi-paralyzed right hand...