75 - Film Critics' Critique

Film Critics' Critique
By Anthony Schillaci, Ernest Callenbach, and Arthur Carduner

The kind of writing about movies mentioned by Richard Fuller in our last issue ("The Film-Book Explosion," THEOLOGY TODAY, January, 1969, pp. 483 ff.) suggests that reviews often contain more than routine notes about production and plot. Frequently, movie reviews include incisive editorial commentary. Three examples, excerpted from longer pieces, follow. The first is from the article, "The Now Movie," which appeared in the Saturday Review (December 28, 1968). The Rev. Anthony Schillaci is a member of the National Film Study Program at Fordham University. The second is from an editorial by Ernest Callenbach who is the editor of Film Quarterly ( 1968 by The Regents of the University of California; reprinted from Film Quarterly, Vol. XXII, no. 1, pp. 9-10, by permission of The Regents). The third is from the monthly schedule, The Movies (January-February, 1969), for The Bandbox in Germantown, Pa., and The New Strand in Lambertville, N. J. Arthur Carduner is the editor and the founder of the two houses. The citations are reprinted here with the permission of the publishers.

Education increasingly means developing the ability to live humanly in the technological culture by changing with it. Film is forever spinning out intensification's of the environment which make it visible and livable. The ability to control motion through its coordinates of time and space make film a creative agent in change. Not only does film reflect the time-space continuum of contemporary physics, but it can manipulate artistically those dimensions of motion which we find most problematic. The actuality of the medium, its here-and-now impact, reflects how completely the present tense has swallowed up both past and future.

76 - Film Critics' Critique

Freudian psychology dissolves history by making the past something we live; accelerated change warps the future by bringing it so close that we can't conceive it as "ahead" of us. An art which creates its own space, and can move time forward and back, can humanize change by conditioning us to live comfortably immersed in its fluctuations....

The performance of youthful audiences in discussions of contemporary film indicates their freedom from the judgmental screen which blurs so many films for other generations. In speaking of Bonnie and Clyde, late high school kids and young adults do not dwell upon the career of crime or the irregularity of the sexual relationship, but upon other things. The development of their love fascinates young people, because Clyde shows he knows Bonnie better than she knows herself. Although he resists her aggressive sexual advances, he knows and appreciates her as a person. It is the sincerity of their growing love that overcomes his impotence, and the relationship between this achievement and their diminished interest in crime is not lost on the young audience. The reversal of the "sleep together now, get acquainted later" approach is significant here. These are only a few of the nuances that sensitive ears and eyes pick up beneath the gunfire and banjo-plucking. Similarly, out of the chaotic impressions of Petulia, patterns are perceived. Young people note the contrasts between Petulia's kooky, chaotic life, and the over-controlled precision of the surgeon's existence. The drama is that they both come away a little different for their encounter. Instead of a stale moral judgment on their actions, one finds open-ended receptivity to the personal development of the characters....

Ben, The Graduate, is suffocating under his parents' aspirations, a form of drowning which every young person has felt in some way. But the film mirrors their alienation in filmic terms, by changes in focus, by the metaphors of conveyor belt sidewalk and swimming pool, better than any moralist could say it. The satirical portraits of the parents may be broad and unsubtle, but the predicament is real and compelling. This is why the young demand no assurances that Ben and the girl will live happily ever after; it is enough that he jarred himself loose from the sick apathy and languid sexual experimentation with Mrs., Robinson to go after one thing, one person

77 - Film Critics' Critique

that he wanted for himself, and not for others. Incidentally, those who are not busy judging the morality of the hotel scenes will note that sex doesn't communicate without love. Some may even note that Ben is using sex to strike at his parents-not a bad thing for the young (or their parents) to know.

In general, foundations wish to back respectable, already successful people; as one foundation mogul wrote to me, "We leave poverty programs to the federal government." In plain English, this means that they do not care about artists as much as about their own prestige, and that in particular they do not care about new artists, who are not yet widely known and do not yet have powerful friends and clients. It is well to keep in mind that, press releases aside, a foundation is basically an entity set up for tax and public-relations purposes. Foundation grants are erratic tidbits, useful but irrelevant to the long-range problem, which is how beginning artists can manage to eat while they are discovering if their talent is significant. That problem will only be solved when we have some kind of guaranteed minimum income, so that those strange and gifted individuals who wish to pursue unremunerative activities like writing or painting or film-making can at least be sure they won't starve while they try it. Work, in the old sense of labor performed for another man's profit, in return for wages, is indeed going out of style. Millions of members of the expense-account middle class have learned this since the war, and it is at last getting through to ordinary working people and labor organizations. "Work" in the advanced technological society is becoming a formal and partly fictional phenomenon; one watches the dials and buttons, but it isn't necessary to actually do much. And so increasing numbers of people are able to contemplate what it would be like to work for something, or on something, that genuinely interests them. . . . A great race is on, in American society, between the massive forces of conflict and disintegration set in motion by Vietnam and the decay of the cities, and forces for new and freer ways of living which are being generated. Film is a weapon in that struggle, for only film can literally show it like it is. But film is also a prize: to the winners will go the images of the future.

78 - Film Critics' Critique

Madness is the vision seen by a solitary person; genius is the same vision communicated to others. Sanity is nothing more than finding someone to share your viewpoint; no matter how outrageous and illogical the opinion, or how inhuman the act, its sanity is certified by acquiescence or approval. The man who leaves a homemade bomb on the subway that injures a few people is known as "The Mad Bomber," and he is locked up for the rest of his life, but the man who twice in one week annihilated an entire city and barbecued all its inhabitants is not only still walking around loose but is highly esteemed in some circles. In Israel, where every able-bodied person is in the armed forces, the Harry S Truman Peace Center is dedicated to the man who, by actual body count, is behind only Hitler and Stalin as the greatest mass murderer in the twentieth century. Every anniversary of the occasion, he is quoted as saying he would do it again, and I see no reason to doubt it. Is he sane, or insane? In a world where millions of people are passively starving to death, millions of others are being tithed; one-tenth of their entire substance is being taken from them forcibly and used to "put a man on the moon." For what it costs the Government of the United States to put a man on the moon, they could give every young person in the country a four-year college education, all expenses paid. If one had to choose between these two objectives, which one is the "sane" choice? I don't see how anyone in his right mind could shoot the moon, even if there were nothing else to do with the money but placate the militant minority and preserve for a few more decades a society so wealthy and unbalanced that it can send a man to the moon. One-tenth of the moon money, judiciously disbursed, could buy off the leaders and potential leaders, and keep the dissident factions disunited for at least a generation.