FILM
Seitz, Michael H.
FILM Michael H. Seitz Third World Views Americans, unfortunately, have relatively few opportunities to view Third World motion pictures—that is, movies made in so-called underdeveloped countries...
...Privates on Parade Inventive and unusually witty film version of an award-winning Royal Shakespeare Company musical, in which a campy song-and-dance unit seeks to entertain British troops in Malaya during the 1940s...
...And the performers—villagers playing themselves—are not quite able to conceal their self-consciousness...
...There is no noticeable "art direction...
...Just as his countrymen turn the debris of industry into tools and handicrafts, Tahimik makes use of the accidental and available, transforming cast-off materials into art...
...A set of checkers is fashioned from discarded soda bottle caps...
...The script playfully revises many of the conventions of the World War II homefront flic, and the soundtrack features much wonderful (and often unfamiliar) period music...
...The family—indeed, the whole village—is radically transformed...
...and preemptively buys up the family's annual stock...
...Third World efforts not only depict a foreign way of life using foreign words, but they sometimes find expression in a foreign language of film...
...Turumba focuses on an extended family: The father is village kantore, responsible for animating the street singing...
...But these ostensible defects, paradoxically, tend to work in the film's favor, reminding us that we are viewing real people involved in real events...
...As part of preliminary rituals, every able-bodied member of the community ascends the local mountain, stopping at stations along the way to rest and sing...
...Proceeds from the sale provide for the family in the year that follows...
...His first feature work, Perfumed Nightmare, was made on expired film stock using equipment lent by German filmmaker Werner Herzog...
...LeBal The biggest disappointment of the spring...
...The highway brings outsiders to the festival, including a relentlessly entrepreneurial German woman in search of colorful handicrafts, who demands "How much for everything...
...The movie opens on preparations for the town of Pakil's most important religious festival, the Turumba...
...Swing Shift Hollywood's version of Rosie the Riveter, directed by Jonathan Demme (Melvin & Howard), a filmmaker who boasts an unusual sensitivity to the details of ordinary American life...
...filmmaking...
...Suburbia Youth-in-revolt "mellowdrama" with punk trimmings...
...other members of the family, under the grandmother's guidance, craft some 200 brightly painted papier-mache figures and animals, which are sold at the town plaza...
...In the case of Turumba, Tahimik obtained financing from German television to make a forty-five-minute documentary on a Philippine religious festival...
...The village band rehearses in the church, and the aged town seamstress makes resplendent robes for the local Madonna, the Virgin of Seven Sorrows...
...The product, formerly a carefully handcrafted figure cast from turn-of-the-century molds, becomes an ugly, blocky commodity, each identical to the next...
...Most of the second half—generally tedious—takes place in Victorian England, as the young ape-man attempts to adjust to human society...
...Glenda Jackson is convincing in one of the starring roles...
...And since the villagers live on the margins of industrial capitalism, deprived of its material fruits, they generate goods by ingenious recycling of industrial debris...
...Production is rationalized, a jungle assembly line is set up, the village children are hired to work it, and the grandmother is appointed "quality control manager...
...When the festival begins, the tearful Virgin is carried through the streets by singing and dancing villagers...
...She returns several months later to place an order for 500 items (each of which must have the word Oktoberfest painted across it...
...The children, and even Granny, can now dance to the music of John Lennon, and the fact that they are no longer making music goes unnoticed...
...Privates mixes styles and tones, violating to good effect conventions of commercial feature filmmaking, bringing considerable cinematic imagination to the problem of transposing a stagey work to the screen...
...But most remarkably, Tahimik realizes a unique perspective on economic underdevelopment from the poverty of his resources...
...No one doubts that progress has arrived...
...The best of such works offer memorable experiences, privileged glimpses of unfamiliar places and cultures...
...This meager subsistence rules out consumer luxuries and modern amenities, but it has other compensations...
...Some parts of Turumba resemble a well-edited home movie...
...Tummba, the second feature of young Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik, is a case in point: It is replete with shots of Philippine village life and lush landscapes, the dialogue is in Tagalog (with English subtitles), and its leisurely pacing and deft use of cinematic resources are alien to conventional U.S...
...Excellent performances in the lead roles by Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Christine Lahti, and Ed Harris...
...M Hits and Misses Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes This glossy, big-budget treatment of the Edgar Rice Burroughs story contains all of the profundity and insight of the original novel...
...Most of the first half—generally engrossing—takes place in the jungle, depicting the childhood and coming of age of an orphaned English heir raised among the apes...
...If the celebrants make her smile, it is said, their wishes for the coming year will come true...
...the blacksmith hammers out a machete blade from a junked shock absorber, and the new highway from Manila is used as a surface for drying rice...
...FILM Michael H. Seitz Third World Views Americans, unfortunately, have relatively few opportunities to view Third World motion pictures—that is, movies made in so-called underdeveloped countries by indigenous filmmakers...
...The imported films we are most familiar with—those from France and Italy—are scarcely foreign at all in this regard...
...This necessitates a doubling of production and has a marked effect on the family's way of life...
...With dance and music, but no dialogue, Ettore Scola's film presents a sequential summary, within a single ballroom, of modern history from the Popular Front to the present...
...Industrialization leads to alienation: The children are proletarianized, the father can find no time to fulfill his functions in the Turumba, and the fabric of tradition is torn...
...The film unfolds with the rhythms of a mystery-thriller, developing significant social and political themes, and probing journalistic ethics (such as the responsibility of reporters for the consequences of their coverage...
...There are a few nice bits in the film but it is terminally crippled by a simple-minded kids-versus-horrid-adults plot...
...Leisure time all but disappears, and money from the German makes possible the installation of electricity and the acquisition of an electric fan, a phonograph, and a television set...
...All of this is shown with considerable wit and a keen sense for what is ironic (and occasionally downright ludicrous) in the attempt to bring Western-style capitalism to Philippine village life...
...Then a telegram arrives with a larger order—25,000 official dachshund mascots, to be sold at the 1972 Munich Olympics...
...He then reedited the footage, imposed a narrative, did some additional shooting (the most expensive parts had already been filmed)—and came up with an original feature...
...And Nothing But the Truth Taut British drama that impresses me as the most penetrating and most accurate film treatment to date of the workings of television journalism...
...old newspapers provide material for papier-mache...
...The lighting is often less than state-of-the-art...
...Because the family can produce an adequate supply of painted figures in a relatively short period, there is leisure time—for play and for music making, time to enjoy the natural beauties of the environment, time for the family and for community traditions...
...But the dancing is mediocre, the music is predictable, the history is embarrassingly shallow—and there are no redeeming compensations...
Vol. 48 • June 1984 • No. 6
