Cinema: The Eyes Have It

“The cinema is changing. Unless audiences catch up, they will be left behind. The onus is not on the artist; he is merely the sensitive antenna. It is we who must learn to read him.”

With this hard-slung pebble for the Philistines, Director Amos Vogel of the New York Film Festival last week opened the fourth annual session of the most prestigious U.S. cinema congress. In a way, the pebble ricocheted. Too many of the far-out films shown at this year’s festival tried hard to be difficult but just turned out dull. Too many others were bad jobs by good directors (Bunuel, Bresson, Godard, Torre Nilsson, Varda). Though the sponsors had doggedly previewed 400 films, their efforts failed to turn up enough hits to fill out the festival’s fortnight.

Despite these demerits, Vogel & Co. presented a provocative cinematic circus. There were eye-grabbing sideshows enlivened by the thumps and grinds of U.S. independent film makers: exhibitions of Underground Cinema, Direct Cinema, and something the Marshall McLuhanatics call Expanded Cinema or Intermedia Kinetic Environment (IKE)—a sort of slap-happening half on and half off the screen. For movie goers who did not particularly like IKE, there was periodic excitement in the main tent. Seventeen nations were represented in a program that included ten or a dozen superb shorts and five fine features. Pursuing ever more strongly a direction evident for more than a decade, the new films showed more freedom of narrative form, more richness of visual vocabulary. The new moviemakers more and more firmly reject the rules of the drama, and more and more sensitively obey the laws of the eye. They mean to write with the lens and not with their pens. The festival’s best:

The Hunt. A burgeoning new school of camera-wise Spaniards enters a sturdy claim for recognition in this spare, gruesome drama about a quartet of upper-crust Spanish hunters—three middle-aged malcontents and a wealthy young sprout—who slaughter rabbits for sport. The cool mechanics of death are recorded in some of the most grisly hunt scenes ever filmed, and during a long, hot afternoon the lust for killing slowly grinds toward a fitting climax. Boozing and broiling in the sun, the men try to buy, sell and slander one another. The hair triggers of anxiety touch off frustrations over their wives, mistresses, businesses, and their expanding waistlines. And at last the verbal sniping takes a deadly turn—hunters hunting hunters.

Writer-Director Carlos Saura’s achievement is to arouse concern for a markedly unsympathetic crew in a credible horror story, drawing upon the well-documented history of mankind’s particular gift for committing violence against his own species.

Loves of a Blonde is a boy-meets-girl comedy so fresh and unassuming that 34-year-old Writer-Director Miles Forman appears to have put it together without quite realizing the strength of his perceptions. The seeming simplicity conceals extraordinary skill: Forman observes small human aspirations very precisely, then borrows the style of a documentary to carve out a comic slice of life in swift, easy strokes.

The unglamorous blonde of the title is a pudding-faced little pretty (Hana Brejchová) housed with other unfortunates in a shoe-factory town where the girls outnumber the boys 16 to 1. To boost morale and expedite production, the factory manager gets some foot-slogging soldiers assigned to the area, most of them doggy, dumpy and married. The blonde succumbs by default to a callow young piano player (Vladimír Pucholt) who has all but forgotten her when she shows up, a week or so later, at his parents’ apartment in Prague.

Forman strews this commonplace tale with insights that are compassionate, painfully true, and almost continually beguiling. Instead of jokes, there is abundant, honest humor, erupting spontaneously in a dance-hall sequence that pits the man-hungry girls against a trio of loutish army Lotharios. One furtively removes his wedding ring, only to see it go spinning crazily off among the dancing feet. In an endearing seduction scene that avoids nearly every nudenik movie cliché, the shy blonde hasn’t a stitch on by the time she reproachfully tells her playboy-pianist: “I don’t trust you.” He, in turn, observes boyish discretion by bounding up at intervals to tussle with a window shade that lets in too much light. The sly tone is sustained through a dormitory matron’s wonderfully irrelevant lecture on morals to the film’s bittersweet climax in Prague, where the boy’s parents forcibly separate their wayward son from his unexpected guest by dragging him off to their own bed for a riotous family quarrel.

Using nonprofessional actors in all but the principal roles, Forman has collected a gallery of picture-perfect types. They not only look right; they smash the formulas of sex comedy. They sleep through situations that usually call for sobby sentiment, squabble when they should be snoring, sulk when they should be squirming. Altogether human, thus seething with quirky surprises, they satisfy the primal need of festivalgoers who forever sit down in darkness hoping that small miracles may come to light.

Intimate Lighting is another exquisite Czech comedy by one of the scenarists of Loves of a Blonde, 33-year-old Director Ivan Passer. Slight but abrim with self-assurance, the film simply jogs along delightfully from moment to moment, following a young middle-aged musician, Peter, who takes his cello and his mistress to the country for a day or so, intending to play a concert with his former classmate, Bambas.

Little happens, except what Passer calls “life as it is, unheroic, unexceptional but nonetheless interesting.” More than interesting, Lighting reflects a humanist tradition seldom seen on the screen since the early films of René Clair, Renoir and De Sica. The young city visitors quicken the tempo of existence for Bambas’ family. Everyone goes off to supply music at a country funeral. Later the menfolk, including Grandpa, get together with the village pharmacist to form a string quartet in a rehearsal sequence that is disrupted by intramural arguments and arthritic aches, with additional time called by Peter’s giddy girl friend for sexual overtures and fun with a cat. The scene is a brilliant tour de force of unstrained comic invention.

Passer’s highly personal style, patient, prying, makes a feast of the small telling details that reveal human character in unexpected ways. The entire hierarchy of the family is threatened during a chicken dinner that ends in a wildly hilarious dispute over who gets the drumsticks. Behind the laughter lie the ordinary interwoven tragedies—of time passing, of the unbridgeable gulf between generations, of youthful illusions gone, and finally, the rueful acceptance of one’s lot.

Hunger. A dry bone lies in the gutter. Above it, a snarling dog stands muzzle to muzzle with a snarling man (Per Oscarsson). Suddenly the dog snatches at the bone, but the man grabs it first and begins to gnaw ravenously at his prize. It is clear that the man is starving, and before long it becomes clear that he is not starving for bread alone. Hunger is a deep and touching study of a man going mad because he dare not satisfy the natural hunger of his heart for love.

The man is a young Norwegian writer of the last century who lives alone in Kristiania and suffers the fearful anguish of alienation. Mother complex is written all over him. Terrified of life at its source, he pretends that he does not need the milk of human kindness and instead takes refuge in a crazy pride. He jostles people in the street to assert his importance, scolds strangers for imagined insults, brags pathetically as he pawns his vest that he is “a name in the world,” declines toploftily a publisher’s advance and then can’t finish his article because he is too hungry to write. Kicked out of his room for not paying the rent, he wanders the streets in rags, sleeps under bridges, sinks swiftly into delusions that he is conversing with his Doppelgänger and even with his own two feet. At film’s end, the poor man is at wits’ end.

Oscarsson’s sketch of a schiz is easily the festival’s finest performance, and the film itself, though too long and sometimes repetitive, is a clinical classic of its type.

The Hawks and the Sparrows. “I am a Communist,” Pier Paolo Pasolini recently remarked, “but I am nostalgic for Catholicism.” In his films, Director Pasolini attempts to combine the best of both worlds. In The Gospel According to St. Matthew, he presented Christ as a revolutionary firebrand. In this delightful little political parable, he makes frisky fun of both cop-it-all-ists and communitwits. The first half of the picture tells the story of a 13th century Franciscan fra (Totò) who learns the language of birds and teaches both hawks and sparrows to believe in Christ, but then discovers to his horror that Christianity isn’t quite enough—the hawks, being hawks, still eat the sparrows. The second half of the picture, applying the lesson to the modern scene, makes a rueful admission that Communism, personified in a shabby old crow that talks itself to death, may not be the final answer either. The whole show is wonderfully fey and unfanatical. The graceful shrug, Pasolini seems to be saying, is a gesture every Communist should practice in a country so prosperous that most of its workers have nothing to lose but their chins.