On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITATIONS BY JOHN SIMON HERE ARE TWO films that plainly demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of the medium. Take the limitations first, as displayed in...
...Both the biting cold and the hardbitten methods of scrounging for illegal heat are well conveyed...
...Moreover, film has seldom communicated so palpably the hardness, roughness, exhaustingness—the very feel—of labor...
...Yet just as the camera underachieves in some areas, it accomplishes too much in others, with equally untoward results...
...Otherwise, the film has merits...
...It is because music is farther than film from literature, because it does not invite close comparisons, that an autonomous success can result in it even from an adaptation...
...It is faithful to the book...
...And the fellows who did 15 days were dead and buried...
...There the cold penetrates deeper than the lashes of the knout, one sleeps on the wooden floor, rations are minimal...
...Peter Gimbel's documentary chronicles the long, frustrating, dangerous chase of Gimbel and his expedition after the Great White Shark, the deadliest of marine killers, and one of the world's oldest and scariest beasts...
...Take the incident involving another inmate, a former Navy captain who is led off to "the cells": For a petty protest, he is given 10 days in a cell that is a barely heated icebox...
...and the various British and Norwegian character actors make much out of their generally small parts...
...Now it is the saxifrage of a smile, now the hardy lichen of intellectual debate about the artistic merits of Eisen-stein's films...
...Take the limitations first, as displayed in Casper Wrede's movie version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich...
...and also its minuscule, sneaky exultations when whatever shifty stratagem yields badly needed results...
...IT IS TO Solzhenitsyn's credit trnt he does not show extraordinary bru-talities where the ordinary ones will do nicely...
...But when the prisoners are marched out to their terrible labor as the icy dawn is about to break, the screen becomes overwhelmingly beautiful...
...But the mind, the mind creates desperate, speculative, life-giving parentheses of its own, where the abject prisoner lives su-perreally...
...The divers have nothing but a sort of underwater cattle-prod for protection from the danger they crave as well as respect...
...In both instances the snow on the ground provides an obbligato to the celestial color organ, a neutral, blue-white bass that modulates into white or black to stay in harmony...
...Some 14-16 feet of swift-gliding intent to kill are here, slate-colored on top and deathly white below...
...He has been condemned to 10 years' imprisonment merely because his speedy escape from Nazi captivity in 1941 looked suspicious to the Russians...
...The film is good as cinema-verite, recording the expressions and comments of these adventurers, evoking their splendid daring that nevertheless encases a grain of gnawing anxiety...
...And the camera is, for the most part, denied access to these...
...If you had 10 days in the cells and sat them out to the end, it meant you'd be a wreck for the rest of your life...
...And something else...
...The film adaptation, however, cannot do for this book what Leos Janacek's musical genius did for a very similar work, Dostoevsky's From the House of the Dead, turned by Janacek into an opera as great, if not greater than, the original...
...But Tom Courtenay is a believable and likable protagonist who does not become overingra-tiating...
...but living death, life in a prison camp, is precisely a parenthesis...
...This sparing use is absolutely judicious, but it manages to become obtrusive, even though the voice is, correctly and unmelodramatically, Ivan's own...
...The body is confined in space and, even more, in a daily round of dreary and dehumanizing activities or brutish exhaustion...
...And Blue Water is superb in its grand climax when, after many droll, disturbing and disconcerting incidents, eyes and lenses finally focus on the monster aptly named White Death...
...Like the novel—and here it is a match—the film shows persuasively how even under the most bestial circumstances men can hold on to their humanity, can find crevices in the rock of inhuman discipline from which kindness sprouts...
...The film is even better when it becomes pure documentary, showing these men and a woman floating about among a school of blue sharks greedily feeding on a whale carcass, and quite willing to vary their diet with a little human flesh for dessert...
...That is not the way Ivan Denis-ovich, or any of the other unfortunates, would have seen it...
...The novella is told from Ivan's point of view: We get the bare, dismal facts of a day in a Siberian "special" camp of the Stalin (and, presumably, Brezhnev) era as filtered through the consciousness of a simple carpenter, a man of courage, cunning, pawky common sense, and also decency...
...For the prison barracks scenes, Nykvist gives us exactly the right hues: soiled blues and lackluster browns, colors that do not improve on the situation...
...As the camera comes in on or withdraws from the trudgers, we see less or more sky around them...
...If One Day is sometimes hard to follow, that is in the nature of the material: the weird regulations and circuitous machinations of the camp...
...You got tb and you'd never be out of hospitals long as you lived...
...end of paragraph, blank space...
...To be sure, the film uses voice-over narration where it considers it proper and necessary...
...It records, too, their need to push daring further and further, until common sense takes over and checks the urge toward recklessness...
...and the camera does not reflect...
...In fact, such things as prisoners discussing Potemkin or avidly reading a newspaper account of Zavadsky's latest production are among the sunniest occurences in this icy inferno...
...But it cannot give you the vital information of Ivan's interior monologue...
...but even the greatest could not find cinematic equivalents for every one of literature's major and minor triumphs...
...The film briefly shows the Captain hunched up helplessly in his cell...
...But then the text reads: "What could you say...
...Ivan, downto-earth though he be, is reflective...
...No less lovely is the sky-show at evening, when the prisoners return...
...and each time we see more, the color has subtly, insinuatingly modified...
...The brief comment, which in Solzhenitsyn often pierces the heart, cannot be rendered by any medium but print— especially if it is followed by some white space, inviting a pause for meditation...
...If you want to see what film can do magisterially, and want to have a lively time to boot, see Blue Water, White Death...
...The problem is that narration is the novel's medium...
...Regrettably, too, half the cast speaks with a Norwegian accent, and the other half with British ones, mostly Cockney or Yorkshire, to indicate humble origins...
...In the present case, because Ivan's reflection is a sort of parenthesis, the film had to omit it and we do not learn the full horror of the Captain's ordeal...
...In the book, Ivan thinks: "Ten days...
...Repeatedly the brute bangs against the underwater cages: It is as if prehistory, from which this pea-sized intellect bent only on murder and mastication descends in unbroken lineage, were seeking revenge on man for having presumed to develop beyond it...
...But something still more important gets lost: the offhand, almost humorous tone of Ivan's comments that, paradoxically, makes the dread-fulness even greater by showing how accepted, banal a part of existence it has become...
...Still, it is finally a life-enhancing movie, deserving a place somewhat higher than that of a mere respectable failure...
...The color photography here is by Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman's superlative cine-matographer...
...A great director, which Wrede is not, might have found a solution...
...And, again like the book, the film records a good day in Ivan's life—which is the loveliest and saddest thing about it...
...There are some obviousnesses: I wish, for instance, that a debate about God did not take place between prisoners Karamazov-ishly named Ivan and Alyosha...
...The matter of parentheses is particularly important here: "and death i think is no parenthesis," ends one of E. E. Cummings' finest lyrics...
...Large, idiotic eyes pop from an obscene, pointy head on whose underside gapes the hideous slash of a maw lined with bony pyramids that could bite through the explorer's aluminum cages almost as easily as they can slice a man in half...
...The result, to my ear, is less than convincing...
...That leaves the mind free, indeed forces it, to roam obsessively in the backward, the forward, the sideways...
...What the body does is piddling and linear, although the line may be a frantic zigzag...
...on film, it tends ever so slightly to clash with, or needlessly duplicate, the images we see...
...and "Don't let 'em get you down...
...It is too beautiful, and it is no use saying that's how it is in Siberia or in northernmost Norway, where the film was shot...
...It is too ennobling...
...But the way he looks at his life simply is not the way the camera sees it...
...Strange, unsuspected colors appear in the Northern sky: nacreous, opalescent, bore-ally understated...
...The centerpiece of the film is a lengthy chunk of toil, the building of a house with the most primitive means in far-below-zero weather...
...it is at least adequately directed...
...It is a responsible, conscientious transposition of the short novel to the screen, yet, despite incidental felicities, it does not truly come off...
...He has outlasted eight years of subhuman forced labor in subzero colds, and will maintain a sizable part of his dignity through the remaining years, thanks to resiliency, resourcefulness, and a sense of humor...
...and it contains sober, apt performances...
...When the Captain is led away, the others shout after him, "Keep your chin up...
...What can the film do to equal these few plain, helpless, undramatic but shattering words...
...This the film reproduces...
Vol. 54 • June 1971 • No. 12
