Cinema: Festival Attraction, Side-Show Action

Most film festivals give prizes—which is why they seem to resemble the kind of raucous television M.C. who calls more attention to himself than to those he introduces. Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival, which opened last week, has always been more seemly than its European counterparts, because it gives no awards; thus there are never any egos jockeying backstage for the coveted Silver Palm or Golden Frog.

This year that policy seems wiser than ever. In the past, Lincoln Center featured new films by the creative experimenters of the art-house circuit—Bufiuel, Resnais, Kurosawa, Losey. The 1967 scene offers an old and a new Godard (Les Carabiniers, Made in U.S.A.) and a sluggish Rossellini (The Rise of Louis XIV), but otherwise gives itself over to cinematic unknowns. Unfortunately, few entries rise above mediocrity.

Among the strongest:

Young Topless is a painstakingly accurate re-creation of life in a military school of imperial Austria. Torless (Matthieu Carriere) is a sensitive boy—the despair of his father and the overweening hope of his mother—who begins his scholastic career at a noted academy. Hardly has he buttoned up his tunic when he begins to sense that military intelligence is a contradiction in terms. His professors are interested in order, not in knowledge; most of his fellow students are toadies and bullies who pervert the authority over them by victimizing those under them. In Tor-less’ class, the chief victim is Basini (Marian Seidowsky), a dim-witted boy who steals some money and then finds himself blackmailed into blind obedience by his discoverers. Nightly, in an attic over the dormitory, the two young extortionists sadistically beat Basini, who submits to every indignity with the passivity of a pack horse.

Torless never engages in the brutality, but he becomes a pliant onlooker—revolted by sadism, yet unwilling to murmur a word to the authorities. Even tually, the boys’ nocturnal brutality cannot be contained in an attic; during one hysterical afternoon, the entire student body participates in an orgy of cruelty and hangs Basini by the heels.

At times, Director Volker Schlondorff tries all too obviously to point up parallels between the violence of the academy and life in Hitler’s Germany —as when Torless rather ponderously testifies at a school-board inquiry into Basini’s death that “there is no boundary between a good world and an evil world: they run together and very normal people can spread terror.” Otherwise, Young Torless, adapted from the novel by Robert Musil, is a perfect—and perfectly chilling—evocation of the underside of a vanished era.

Elvira Madigan is an elegiac pastorale based on the true story of a Swedish cavalry officer (Thommy Berggren) who deserted his wife, children and career for a hopeless liaison with a circus tightrope walker (Pia Deger-mark). Abandoning their past, ignoring their inevitably tragic future, the two flee to Denmark to spend one delirious summer of happiness. Like stars that burn most brilliantly just before they are extinguished, the couple are renewed by simple pleasures—their bodies, the heady summer air, the wide riverbanks and the small, disciplined forests.

All too soon, their pitifully small supply of money runs out, and they are reduced to scavenging those forests for edible berries and mushrooms, stealing eggs and bread from farmhouses and bars. As the weather turns against them, so do other circumstances. Their pictures are widely circulated in newspapers; recognized everywhere, they eventually come to realize that life can only drive them apart, death alone can keep them together.

As spare and elegant as an Isak Dinesen tale, Elvira is marred by photography that lingers too long and drunkenly on sun-dappled fields and windswept shores. But not since Jean Renoir’s Picnic on the Grass has any film shown such sensitivity to texture, color and fluid light. Moreover, Director Bo Widerberg—who made the film for less than $200,000—has augmented his simple story by scoring it with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21, an oddly appropriate 18th century accompaniment to a 19th century story that speaks lyrically to the 20th century and beyond.

Le Depart was directed by Poland’s Jerzy Skolimowski, 31, who first made his mark as a scriptwriter for Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water, the hit of the 1963 Lincoln Center Festival. The new movie, filmed in Belgium, is a piece of pop-aganda about a boy in love with a car. His romance takes the form of occasional thievery and masquerades, as when he gets a friend to dress up like an Arab sheik in order to con a Porsche from a showroom for an afternoon of wild driving. A hairdresser, The Boy spends his waking hours fussing over women until he finds himself bored by anything in a tress. All he lives for, he claims, is a rally that he is too poor to enter. Yet when he meets The Girl, who is willing to sell her possessions in order to get him a car, he discovers that there is more to life than shifting gears.

A fair premise for a comedy, and Depart is augmented by the beaky, cheeky performance of Jean-Pierre Leaud as the hairdresser. But Skolimowski’s direction slows down at the corners and frequently fails the film. He moves his camera around in obvious debt to the screwball antics of Richard Lester, the inspired improvisations of Godard, the static compositions of Antonioni. Le Depart soon becomes less Skolimowski than his teachers, a set of acknowledgments, like a novel composed entirely of quotations.

The Battle of Algiers. “Algiers opens to the sky like a wound.” So wrote Algeria’s most famous native son, Albert Camus. In the 1950s, that wound bled copiously, as the Arab Front de Liberation Nationale fought for the country’s independence from France. Italian Director Gillo Pontecorvo has re-created the bitterness and ferocity of those terrible days in a two-hour film that has the impact of a bombe plastique.

The movie begins with a major defeat of the F.L.N. guerrillas in 1957, then flashes back to the early days of the strife, when the Arabs began to organize terrorist gangs, which roamed the streets of Algiers killing Frenchmen and bombing their cafes. On the boulevards where Pepe le Moko once swaggered, the murderous explosions sounded almost daily; just as regularly, Arabs were rounded up and tortured into giving evidence against themselves.

Pontecorvo presents both sides of the Algerian conflict with little comment. His newsreel-like studies of the F.L.N. underground could serve today as a blueprint for revolutionists; yet his portrayal of a French colonel sent in to quash the rebellion is both agonized and tragic. At film’s end, it is the French who win, blasting into bits the final survivors of the once-widespread revolutionary council. An epilogue, however, acknowledges that history later proved too much for the French, who granted Algeria its independence and moved out. Pontecorvo’s achievement is in making that epilogue understandable simply by showing the Arab faces of Algiers—intense, fierce-eyed men and women cold-blooded enough to blow up a restaurant full of innocents to prove a point, courageous enough to undergo the most inhuman tortures rather than betray their comrades.

As an illiterate, rebel leader, Brahim Haggiag displays the fanatic intensity that the F.L.N. must have had, and Jean Martin as the French colonel supplies an intelligence and wit that are not written into his role. When a journalist informs him that Jean-Paul Sartre has written a tract on the Algerian question, he asks rhetorically: Why are the Sartres always on the other side?” It is the film’s only editorial, but Martin makes it sum up an epoch.

The festival this year also offers a compelling sideshow entitled “the Social Cinema in America,” consisting of 15 documentary films actively concerned with contemporary issues. Not so long ago, the term documentary signified a ten-minute break for popcorn while the screen celebrated sunsets in Tahiti or toured an automobile plant in Detroit. There were occasional exceptions to the rule of somnolence, notably Robert Flaherty’s pioneering ethnological studies and the vivid battle vignettes that came out of World War II. In an age of the hand-held camera and the portable mike, however, the documentary has come into its own. Admittedly, some of the festival’s choices are as downright bad, in their own way, as any Fitzpatrick travelogue. Among the films on Viet Nam, for example, are a finger-wagging polemic against pacifism (While Brave Men Die) by Far-Right Commentator Fulton Lewis III, and a bumbling bit (Victory Will Be Ours) of anti-U.S. propaganda made by the Viet Cong. Nonetheless, the best of the documentaries demonstrate that pictorial truth can be more, powerful than fiction in exploring some of the questions and dilemmas facing modern man.

Warrendale is the most remarkable documentary in the showing—and perhaps the most unusual film in the entire festival. Produced and directed for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (which never aired it) by Allan King, the film portrays life at Warrendale, a home for emotionally disturbed children in Toronto. The story begins as the patients’ day starts, showing them in bed, resisting the morning rays of light. Soon the seemingly normal environment explodes with tantrums and shrieks. Each child is shown to be living in an emotional fortress bristling with hostilities: a small boy answers every question with a curse; others seethe with body-shaking fears and hates. With monumental patience, the young Warrendale staff tries to disarm the children, holding them during their emotional storms, constantly preventing their retreat into themselves with physical force as well as emotional empathy.

The film’s climax occurs when a member of the staff calls a meeting of the children to announce that a beloved cook has unexpectedly died. Some are stunned into silence, others burst out in self-destructive rage; two gins rend the air with mourning wails that continue into the night. The catharsis of tears signifies that the children, unable to separate reality and fantasy, now feel guilty for the death, as if they had willed it. In the film’s most subtle and affecting sequence,Warrendale focuses on the grieving faces of children at the cook’s funeral. There is a hint here that these innocent, awkward, suffering creatures are at last inching closer to normal human response—thus providing this powerful movie with that most elusive of cinematic conclusions, the truly happy ending.

The Titicut Follies shows that, unhappily, not every institution for the mentally ill is as enlightened as Warrendale. Some are trapped in traditions as old as Bedlam, and one such is seen in this raw, poorly edited report on Bridgewater Hospital for the Criminally Insane in the Titicut area of Massachusetts. As filmed by Frederick Wiseman and John Marshall, who had the cooperation of the institute’s authorities, the life of the patients seems like an echo of Marat/Sade, an existence bereft of dignity or honor. Old men are paraded naked to their cells and taunted by guards who make them rage impotently until the patients beat the walls of the cages they can never leave. A psychiatrist orders a man to be force fed, then smokes a cigarette, dangling the ashes inches away from the funnel that is emptying food into the victim’s stomach. A boy who claims that the institute is making his condition worse is answered with evasive jargon from a Kafkaesque staff. The 85-minute film offers no comment and no solution, but in its relentless expose of a present-day snake pit, it deserves to stand with works like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle as an accusation and a plea for reform.

Lay My Burden Down. The plight of the rural Southern Negro and the riots in the Northern ghettos are as related as a rifle to a bullet in the view of this hour-long documentary produced for National Educational Television. In lucid, evocative photography reminiscent of Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it weighs Selma, Ala., a year after the Freedom March, and finds it wanting. There still are no Negroes on the police force or the board of education or at city hall—except for the janitor. Living on white-owned land, Negroes are caught in a cycle of debt, their per capita income less than $1.000 a year. When S.N.C.C. workers prod them to screw up their courage and enter the voting booths, their candidate still loses—even in Negro districts.

In the end, the film implies, the rural children sense the doom of their existence and flee north to the cities where, lacking the skills for employment, they become targets for Black Power nihilists. The Federal Government has done little for the cities, says the movie, and even less for the grass roots of the problem. Summing up the story best is the blackboard motto at a shabby backwoods Negro school: “We Have Climbed ihe Hills, but the Mountains Are Still Before Us.”

Despite occasional lapses of information or taste, the documentaries, in contrast with the festival’s more convention al feature films, seem to be where most of the real cinema action is. “The obscurest epoch is today,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. In capturing the present as it passes, the skilled new documentary makers are attempting—and in large part succeeding—to make it a little less obscure.