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AMERICAN
CINEMA PAPERS
1979
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LONDON FILM FESTIVAL – 1979 JAMMED SCREENS
& AND CAT SWINGING by Harlan Kennedy Staggering groups of
sprocket-drunk festivalgoers could be seen gasping
for air in the short breaks between bouts of film as the 1979 London Film
Festival wound down. If the festival becomes burdened with much more
celluloid in forthcoming years, it is safe to predict that it will sink into
the Thames. Ninety feature films?
Over a hundred shorts? It may not sound excessive by Cannes or Berlin
standards, but remember that the National Film Theatre has only two
auditoriums, neither vast, and bundles the films in and out, not to mention
the audiences, in the space of eighteen days. Some movies get only one public
showing, none more than two. But no matter how
tight the schedules or how many films are hurled at the spectators' heads,
the London Film Festival remains an indispensable part of the British movie
calendar. Without it, London filmgoers might never have seen Eric Rohmer's Perceval, which trooped late but
gloriously into town more than a year after it played the 1978 New York festival.
There are plenty who dislike Rohmer's film and anathematize its quaint
cardboard sets and stiff recitative.
But for me, it's the first film ever to
transport the filmgoer into the real Middle Ages; and it does so
not by a spurious dab at social realism, but by unmasking the processes of
the medieval creative mind – the music, the writing, the painting, the
mythmaking. The film demands a little patience from its audience and gives
back enormous beauty in return. Sharing the place of
honor among films-we-might-never-have-seen-without-the-London-festival were
two movies as different from each other as from Perceval. Tieh pien (The Butterfly
Murders) is the latest eye-opener from Hong Kong, a costume romp that is like
Kurosawa's Throne of Blood crossed with a James Bond movie.
Cloak-and-dagger intrigues abound in the vast, dark labyrinth of Castle Shum,
and conspiracy is finally catalyzed into open warfare by the arrival of the
"Three Thunders." These sibling warriors are each a sort of walking
arsenal-cum-circus: One does high-wire acts on the bolts and pulleys he
shoots from his sleeve into adjacent rooftops; another hurls explosives from
his pockets like a conjurer dishing out rabbits; the third .. . well, wait
and discover for yourself his chef
d'oeuvre. The film is dazzlingly
cut and composed – a dingdong antiphony of acutely angled shots, chiaroscuro
tableaux, and lunging camera movements. And when shown in tandem with King Hu's new diptych of films (brought to London after their
unveiling at Edinburgh), it suggests that Hong Kong cinema is a treasurehouse far too long neglected by Western
filmgoers. There are no high-wire
acts or vertiginously virtuoso camerawork in Bill Forsyth's "That
Sinking Feeling," but it's a miniature masterpiece nonetheless. Made in
Glasgow, Scotland, on a shoestring budget (Forsyth claims it cost only
$6,500, since the actors and crew chipped in with their own living expenses),
it's a hang-loose comedy about a group of jobless teenagers who decide to
steal sixty-odd stainless steel sinks from an ill-guarded warehouse. But forget the plot,
it's the least of Forsyth's achievement. The film's charm and novelty lie in
its comedy of social stasis: a world turned topsy-turvy by the idleness of
unemployment, in which suicide is languidly discussed over cornflakes and
milk, older boys cadge cigarettes from subteen
smokers,
and Glasgow itself becomes like some blitzed, bizarre, and oddly beautiful
playground for eternal adolescents. The London festival
mined a seam of offbeat comedy this time that was probably its strongest
happen-along trend. Surreal humor is definitely in the air in modern cinema
– with Monty Python's Life of Brian foremost in scooping in the
rewards – and with Ken Wlaschin's anything-comes
programming policy, it was bound to waft through the festival's open doors. One such waftee was The Night the Prowler, a beguiling comic oddity
from Australia about an overweight teenager and her revolt against her superdainty suburban parents. The revolt graduates from
screaming imagined rape one night to dressing up in butch leather and
prowling nearby parks and houses. Jim Sharman directs with spiky humor, and
the film is vastly better than his Rocky Horror Picture Show. Waftee number two, Roger Graef's The Secret Policeman's Ball, is a merry caldron of
British zany comedy into which the following contributors have been thrown:
Peter Cook, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Billy Connolly, Clive
James,
and Eleanor Bron. It's a filmed record
of a charity stage show for Amnesty International, and though no great
shakes cinematically, it does keep hitting the funny bone and features such
immortal morsels as the Monty Python cheese shop sketch and Peter Cook as
that Ancient Mariner of useless information, E. L. Wisty. And the last waftee was Ratataplan, coming to London garlanded
in praise from the Venice Film Festival. Its director-star, Maurizio Nichetti, is a pleasing screen
nincompoop, but the film itself seemed the weakest of the festival's surreal
comedy contingent. Nichetti dreams up ingenious
slapstick routines – a glass of water carried through Milan on a tray, a
self-modeled robot à la Woody Allen running amok – but he
makes the mistake of not grounding them in at least a token plausibility.
When anything is possible in cinema, nothing quite becomes hilarious. Italy, nonetheless,
fielded the strongest overall entry in London. Faliero
Rosati's Morte
di un operatore (Death of a Cameraman), La macchina cinema (The Cinema Machine), a documentary
collaboration by four filmmakers, including Marco Bellocchio,
and the Straubs' Dalla
nube alla resistenza (From the Clouds to
the Resistance) are all meditations on, and extensions of, the possibilities
of cinema itself: self-reflexive movies that bend or break the cinematic
codes we are used to and make us look with fresh eyes. And Christ Stopped
at Eboli is also a departure,
although of a more local kind. It's the first film by Francesco Rosi to embrace a kind of
stream-of-life naturalism. Gone are the fractured narrative of Salvatore Giuliano and the teasing crosscutting
of Cadaveri eccellenti. Instead, Rosi's adaptation of Carlo
Levi's
autobiographical novel about political exile in southern Italy in the
thirties has a plain, resonant, Rembrandt-like grandeur. Gian Maria
Volontè is undemonstratively magnificent as the
hero, learning social enlightenment from his surroundings even as he
dispenses it, and Pasquale de Santi's
diamond-sharp photography gives a pantheistic beauty to all – man, animal,
nature – that passes before the camera. West Germany gave us Maximilian Schell's
Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald (Tales
From the Vienna Woods), a supple and sparkling movie version of Odön von Horvath's melodrama of
doomed love and social oppression, and a triple bill of Fassbinder films.
Two of the latter – In a Year of 13 Moons and The Marriage of Maria
Braun – were reviewed
from Berlin. The third, Die dritte
Generation
(The
Third Generation), is a craftily hyperbolic tale of terrorism set in modern
Germany and making multiple bows to film noir
style.
To a glittering cast – Bulle Ogier and
Eddie Constantine joining Fassbinder's
regular troupe – the director adds virtuoso camerawork (his own) and a
brilliantly developed theme about the Establishment-serving lunacies of
modern terrorists. From behind the iron
curtain came two strong trios of films from Poland and Russia. Poland
proffered Amator (Camera Buff) and Andrzej Wajda's latest movies, Bez znieczulenia (Rough Treatment) and Panny z Wilka (The Young Ladies of Wilko). Wajda's two films,
already festival showcased in New York, impressed London: Bez znieczulenia more especially, the penny-plain tragicomedy
of a middle-aged media man coping with a sudden concatenation of crises in
his public and private lives. Amator, directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski, is the sad-hilarious bildungsroman of a young filmmaker growing
from the first enthusiasms of an amateur to the questionings and compromises
of sponsored moviemaking. Kieslowski's film shared with Christ Stopped at
Eboli this year's Moscow festival Grand Prix. Russia presented Nikita Mikhalkov's atmospheric but
dauntingly wordy Pyat vecherov
(Five Evenings), Lana Gogoberidze's perky Neskolko intervyu po lichnym voprosam
(Interviews
on Personal Problems), the adventures of a crusading woman journalist, and –
a surprise late addition to the festival – -Sergei Paradzhanov's unearthed 1969
classic Sayat nova (The Color of
Pomegranates): an illuminated manuscript come to life, in which dazzling
iconic and folkloric images succeed each other (before a totally still
camera) like a Magic Lantern show beamed from the subconscious. Even in this
unauthorized version – it was recut and redubbed by Sergei Yutkevich in 1973 – it's a masterpiece. Tragically, it
was the Ukrainian director's last film; he has since disappeared into the
engulfing depths of the Soviet prison system on charges of homosexuality and
"incitement to suicide." Nothing is known of his whereabouts today. Perched on the fringes
of the London Film Festival were two more Soviet films, shown in London after
having been spirited into the country by the Oxford Film Festival for a
special November pendant devoted to USSR cinema. (Their main festival is held
annually in July.) Sergei Bondarchuk's
The Steppe is an
epic trudge through a Chekhov short story by the director of War and Peace, short on wit and long on
folksy wisdom. But Vitautas Zialakiavicius's
The Centaurs has moments of real bravura. It re-creates the last days
of Chile's President Allende, and although
shamelessly hagiographic, it plays some lively variations on the political thriller
(school of Costa-Gavras's Z) and ends in a finely
orchestrated climax with the siege of Allende's palace. There was nothing
hagiographic about the festival's free world contribution to the theme of
East-West tensions. Frederick Wiseman is no respecter
of
institutions, and the latest target of his courteous scorn his NATO. In Manoeuvre,
Wiseman has joined the army, following the fortunes of the autumn
war games in West Germany. The result is sometimes revealing and sometimes
hilarious, but as always with Wiseman, the anthropologist's fascination with
the surface tics and rituals of institutional life, and his sweeping
indifference to their alleged raison d'être, tells us only half the story
(the scornful half) while pretending it is All We Need To Know. Wiseman in
this icon-bashing mood is a sort of Wise Monkey of the counterculture: Hands
up to head, he sees no good, hears no good, and speaks no good. But the film
isn't bad. In Dawn of the Dead, George Romero has
found a different and more entertaining way to launch an assault on American
institutional life. The institution here is the hypermarket, and Romero's all-color
follow-up to Night of the Living Dead maroons its quartet of human
survivors in a giant shopping mall surging with zombies. It's zap, thud, glug, shock and horror time, with much blood, many
screams, a switchback story line, and Romero's
incredible
ability to dispense wit and grace while spraying the screen with corpses. No
visit to the supermarket will ever be quite the same. The 1979 London
festival came through victorious with its strength-in-numbers policy,
although it seemed to need a bigger saturation of movies this year to ensure
the quota of masterworks. Not least prolific were the shorts, in which
Britain stole the thunder with Bob Godfrey's superb comic-erotic cartoon
"Dream Doll" and the Quaij brothers'
eerie, shadow-strewn puppet film "Nocturna
Artificialia." Just as the screens
were jammed with films, the London Film Festival clubroom was jammed with
filmmakers. You couldn't swing a cat in the space between F. Wiseman, B.
Forsyth, K. Hu, J.-M. Straub, et al. By
contrast, the prize for Distinguished Absenteeism must go to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who was invited by the festival to grace the
all-day showing of his films, flew to London to do so, and then wouldn't come
to the festival. He wins this year's Greta
Garbo award
for Stepping Back into the Limelight. Ken Wlaschin, unfazed by Fassbinder's
nonappearance or by that of Mark Rappaport's new
film Impostors (lost in transit and when last heard of was flying to
Karachi), poured balm on these belated wounds with a belated surprise
premiere. Saying it with flowers, Wlaschin gave us
the first British screening of The Rose. Like Godard, he
obviously thought a festival should have a beginning, a Midler, and an end,
but not necessarily in that order. Frizz-haired before a packed
late-Saturday-night audience, the electric Bette
chanteused her way to dusky death. It was loud,
it was vulgar, it was sentimental, it was showable,
and it was what everyone needed. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE
NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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