A Religion of Film
(See Cover)
It wasn't the sort of place people usually see a movie in. No boorish Moorish architecture, no chewing gum under the seats. Instead, the hall was a deep blue nave, immensely high and still, looped gracefully with golden galleries. And the images on the screen were not the sort one sees at the average alhambra. No Tammy, no Debbie, no winning of the West. Instead, a bear roamed and roared in a Mexican mansion and a regiment of French actors fought the American Civil War and a samurai disemboweled himself right there in front of everybody.
The first New York Film Festival, now at Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall, must confess its infancy compared to Cannes and to Venice, which had its first film festival in 1932. But by its taste and high excitement, by the quality of its films and the intelligence of its sellout crowds, it may well mark for Americans a redefinition of what movies are and who it is that sees them. For in the decade since Hollywood came unstuck and television became the reigning medium of mass entertainment, the movies have suddenly and powerfully emerged as a new and brilliant international art, indeed as perhaps the central and characteristic art of the age.
All the World's . . . The new status of cinema has largely been achieved by movies from abroad, by an array of vigorous and original creators who live and work in every quarter of the globe. At the heart of the new movement is a hardy little band of inspired pioneers: Japan's Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon); Sweden's Ingmar Bergman (Wild Strawberries); France's Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, Man Amour) and Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows); Italy's Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita), Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura) and Luchino Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers); England's Tony Richardson (Look Back in Anger); Poland's Andrzej Wajda (Kanal) and Roman Polanski (Two Men and a Wardrobe); Argentina's Leopoldo Torre Nilsson (Summerskin); India's Satyajit Ray (Father Panchali).
Their imitators are legion. All over the world--in Canada, Greece, Brazil, Japan, Israel, Hungary and both Germanys, even in Moscow and immoderately in Manhattan--cinemania has descended upon the rising generation. Young men at all hours of the day and night stalk through the streets clutching fleaweight cameras and proclaiming prophetically a new religion of cinema. Its creed has been passionately enunciated by Director Truffaut.
"It is necessary," he once cried, "to film another thing in another spirit. It is necessary to abandon these expensive, disorderly, insalubrious studios. The sun costs less than a battery of lights. A borrowed camera, some cheap film, a friend's apartment, friends to play the parts, and above all the faith, the rage of the cinema--the rage to storm the barricade, to use this way of expression--the way of the future, the art of the future. A revolution of intentions is beginning. No longer do we trust in the old labels, the established themes. To express ourselves! To be free, free of prejudice, free of the old cult of technique, free of everything, to be madly ambitious and madly sincere!"
... A Sound Stage. In France, where the movement is called the New Wave, 60 young directors made their first full-length films in less than two years (1959-60). In Poland, 22 films both long and short are now in production. In Brazil, nine new directors have made their film debuts in the last two years, and two dozen more will do the same in the next twelve months. The rage and the revolution are rising everywhere, and everywhere the new movements are really one movement, a new international cinema in which all the world's a sound stage and the screen emblazons a microcosm of mankind.
With startling speed, the new international cinema has created a new international audience. It is a young audience; exhibitors in a dozen countries report that eight out of ten foreign-film buffs are under 30. It is a vehement audience; it applauds what it likes and hisses what it doesn't. It is an expert audience; the new generation of moviegoers believes that an educated man must be cinemate as well as literate. And it is a mass audience; financially, the new cinema is a going concern.
Not that foreign films have seriously challenged the commercial hegemony of American movies, which still capture two out of every three dollars the world spends on cinema. But in the last ten years they have doubled their take in the international market (La Dolce Vita alone grossed $10 million), and in the U.S., where in 1953 they grossed $5,200,000, they have in recent years grossed as much as $69,000,000.
Public support and their own technical economies have given a great measure of artistic independence to the men of the new cinema. More and more they have been able to say what they want to say and not what some banker thinks the public wants to be told. The results have not always been happy. The new men, in particular the very young new men, have turned out miles of absolutely asinine acetate, and whover wirtes thos subtilise ouhgt to be shto. Nevertheless, with stunning consistency, with the fire and elan of spirits snatched out of themselves and whirled away in the tremendous whirlwind of the spirit of the age they have wrung out of their hearts remarkable efforts of film. They have evolved through the last decade a vast pageant of heroic drama and gentle eclogue, of delectable gaiety and dispirited lust, of mordant wit, glittering intellect, grey despair, apocalyptic spectacle and somber religious depth. They have held the camera up to life and shown humanity a true and terrifying and yet somehow heartbreakingly beautiful image of itself. They have created a golden age of cinema.
Strong words? Perhaps. But consider the carat of the films displayed at the first New York Film Festival. The program was restricted to new pictures never before seen in the U.S., but the festival's director found a score of excellent shorts and half a dozen top-chop features. Among them:
> The Exterminating Angel, one of the strongest of Bunuel's many strong films, relates a harrowing parable of salvation and damnation in which the grand old anarchist pours all the vials of his wrath upon the idle rich and the mother church and in the process disports a religious imagination seldom paralleled in its demonian ferocity since the visions of Hieronymus Bosch.
> In the Midst of Life, the first full-length film by a 32-year-old Frenchman named Robert Enrico, is an adaptation of three stories by Ambrose Bierce, all treating of the U.S. Civil War. Though the picture was made in France with a French cast, the American atmosphere of the period is exquisitely interfused. The story is told in a sure and subtle flow of images, and Jean Boffety's photography makes a grave and lovely homage to Mathew Brady.
> Knife in the Water is a Polish thriller as sharp as a knife and as smooth as water. Director Roman Polanski, 30, puts two lusty men and one busty woman aboard a small sailboat, throws them a knife, and for the next 90 minutes lets the tension build, build, build (see cover picture).
> Hallelujah the Hills, the work of America's Adolfas Mekas, is a gloriously funny and far-out farce about two great big overgrown boy scouts who pratfall in love with the same girl.
> The Fiances, the second movie made by a 32-year-old Italian named Ermanno Olmi, will probably become a cinema classic. Director Olmi tells an almost too simple story of how absence makes two hearts grow fonder, but he tells it with total mastery of his means.
> The Servant plays morbid variations on the theme of Othello. Directed in Britain by Joseph Losey, an American who lives and works in Europe, the film tells how a sinister servant destroys his master by playing to his weakness for women--and for men.
Shadow of the Bomb. The historians of the new cinema, searching out its origins, go back to another festival, the one at Venice in 1951. That year the least promising item on the cinemenu was a Japanese picture called Rashomon. Japanese pictures, as all film experts knew, were just a bunch of rubber chrysanthemums. So the judges sat down yawning. They got up dazed. Rashomon was a cinematic thunderbolt that violently ripped open the dark heart of man to prove that the truth was not in it. In technique the picture was traumatically original; in spirit it was big, strong, male. It was obviously the work of a genius, and that genius was Akira Kurosawa, the earliest herald of the new era in cinema.
Trained as a painter, Kurosawa got interested in the movies because they seemed to him unnecessarily stupid. Rashomon was his tenth picture, and since Rashomon he has produced a relentless succession of masterpieces. Seven Samurai (1954), considered by many the best action movie ever made, is a military idyl with a social moral: the meek shall inherit the earth--when they learn to fight for their rights. Ikiru (1952), Kurosawa's greatest work, describes the tragedy and transfiguration of a hopelessly ordinary man, a grubby little bookkeeper who does not dare to live until he learns he is going to die. Yojimbo (1962), conceived as a parody of the usual Hollywood western, mingles blood and belly laughs in a ferocious satire on the manners, morals and politics of the 20th century. I Live in Fear (1955), an eerie and comminatory meditation on the life of man in the shadow of the Bomb, was shown last week as a special treat for festival fans but it may never be shown commercially in the U.S.--the exhibitors think it's too hot to handle.
Kurosawa in the raw is not everybody's meat. Not since Sergei Eisenstein has a moviemaker set loose such a bedlam of elemental energies. He works with three cameras at once, makes telling use of telescopic lenses that drill deep into a scene, suck up all the action in sight and then spew it violently into the viewer's face. But Kurosawa is far more than a master of movement. He is an ironist who knows how to pity. He is a moralist with a sense of humor. He is a realist who curses the darkness--and then lights a blowtorch.
Death of the Heart. Kurosawa made moviegoers sit up and take notice, and the next thing they noticed was Ingmar Bergman. As a man he didn't look like much--just a gangling, green-eyed, snaggle-toothed son of a Swedish parson. But as an artist he was something unprecedented in cinema: a metaphysical poet whose pictures are chapters in a continuing allegory of the progress of his own soul in its tortured and solitary search for the meaning of life, for the experience of God. In his early films (Illicit Interlude, Naked Night), Bergman struggles to free himself from the fascination of the mother, the incestuous longing for innocence, safety, death. In the dazzling comedies of his second period (A Lesson in Love, Smiles of a Summer Night), he fights the inevitable war between men and women. In The Seventh Seal, he plunges straight down into the abyss of God and wanders there among the gnarled and leering roots of living religion. In his recent films (The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light), God is present again and again but always in dreadful or ambiguous wise: as a spring of water, as a giant spider, as a silence. Never as love, never in the heart's core.
And so the search goes on. It is conducted with intelligence and irony, with a beauty that endlessly inveigles the eye, with a sense of form that is subtle but perhaps more theatrical than cinematic, with a gift of intuition so intense it sometimes seems insane. But Bergman is not a sick man; he is a sick genius. His sickness is the sickness of the times: the death of the heart, the separation from the source. His genius is the genius to say what all men suffer.
Bergman hit Paris like a wild north wind. In 1957, when a cycle of his films was first shown at La Cinematheque Franc,aise, the main film library in Paris, hundreds of cinemanes stood in line night after night for three nights to get seats. "We were absolutely overthrown," says Director Truffaut. "Here was a man who had done all we dreamed of doing. He had written films as a novelist writes books. Instead of a pen he had used a camera. He was an author of cinema."
The Wave Hits. Stimulated by Bergman and encouraged by a charming American feature, The Little Fugitive, that had cost only $100,000, Truffaut got a loan from his father-in-law and one fine day in 1958 got cracking on a film called The 400 Blows. About the same time Claude Chabrol, who worked with Truffaut as a reviewer for Cahiers du Cinema, blew his wife's inheritance on a picture called Le Beau Serge. Meanwhile Marcel Camus, an assistant to some top French directors, popped off to Brazil to make a film in color called Black Orpheus. And Alain Resnais, an obscure documentarist, buttonholed some businessmen for money and flew off to Japan to shoot a picture called Hiroshima, Mon Amour.
Suddenly all the films arrived in Paris. Suddenly the press and the public were buzzing about them. Suddenly they carried off the top prizes at Cannes. Suddenly there was a New Wave.
Four years and several shoals later, the New Wave is still rolling strong. It has thrown up a dozen films of first quality and new actors of international note (Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Pierre Cassel). It has also produced two dozen talented young directors. Philippe de Broca has created two of the funniest films (The Love Game, The Five-Day Lover) made in France since Rene Clair was clicking. Jean-Luc Godard has done an astonishing cubistic melodrama (Breathless). Pierre Etaix, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim, Henri Colpi, and Agnes Varda have all done exciting work. But the world fame of the new French cinema derives largely from the labors of two men.
Cold One, Warm One. Alain Resnais, 41, the more famous of the two, is the supreme theorist and technician, the Schoenberg of the new cinema. Hiroshima startled the critics with its methodic modulations and harmonic structures. Last Year at Marienbad made Hiroshima look like casual noodling. In it four kinds of time, five points of view and innumerable frames of symbolic reference were assembled in an infinitely intricate structure that seemed more like a puzzle than a picture, that might more suitably have been fed to an electronic computer than shown to a human being. And when the puzzle at last was solved, what did it signify? Everything--and nothing.
Resnais, in short, has the skill to say whatever he wants to say on the screen. Unhappily he has nothing, or almost nothing, to say. As an artist he lacks humanity, lacks blood. He is out of this world, a man of air. Nevertheless, his work is important. He has shattered the public image of what a film is. He has freed all film creators to remold the cinema nearer to their art's desire.
Franc,ois Truffaut, 31, perhaps the most richly talented of the new French directors, is as warm as Resnais is cold. His films are about real people with real feelings: a boy who runs away from home, a husband whose wife runs away with his best friend. His films are heavy because real life is heavy, but at the same time they are gay and somehow lucky. They are natural things, and like natural things they are full of false starts and irrelevant twists. But they grow and go on growing in the mind long after the film says fin. Truffaut goes on growing too. Shoot the Piano Player is much more skillful than The 400 Blows, and Jules and Jim in its bittersweet worldly wisdom makes the other two seem like child's play.
Cinema Breasterns. Meanwhile, the cinema in Italy had suddenly taken a new lease on life. After the sudden death of postwar neorealism (Open City, The Bicycle Thief)--stabbed in the back by politicians persuaded that seamy movies were hurting the tourist trade--the Italians produced almost nothing but mythological monstrosities and what are known in the trade as "breasterns." Only the great Vittorio De Sica achieved a faint infrequent toot (The Roof) on the clarion of reform. But around the turn of the decade Pietro Germi, who later made a wickedly wacky comedy called Divorce--Italian Style, came into view. And about the same time three major Italian talents rose vigorously to their full height.
Luchino Visconti, 56, is an Italian nobleman--Count of Modrone and a direct descendant of Charlemagne's father-in-law--whose friends say he "votes left and lives right." By the same token, his movies look left but are made right. In Rocco and His Brothers (1960), a bruising revival of neorealism, he followed a family of peasants as they moved from the country to the city and saw them grated away like cheese in the big mindless mechanism of Milan. In The Leopard (1963), adapted from Giuseppe di Lampedusa's touching elegy for feudalism, he summons from the grave a way of life and the valiant dust of a proud but kindly man who lived that life and leaves the vivid air signed with his honor.
Visconti's films are sometimes laborious and doctrinaire, but they have the solidity and urgency of living bodies. At times they seem to lack direction, but actually they are borne on a slow, irrefutable current doomward. On the tiny raft of hope his heroes glide toward the cataract of fate.
Imagination Minus Taste. Federico Fellini, 43, is the most inventive, versatile and popular of the new Italians. In I Vitelloni (1953) he put together a conventional but faultless social satire. In La Strada (1954), a poetic comedy, he followed in Chaplin's footsteps but couldn't quite fill the little fellow's shoes. In La Dolce Vita (1960), the film that made him and Actor Marcello Mastroianni famous around the world, he constructed a spectacular travesty of the Apocalypse in which the prophecy is luridly fulfilled and Rome, the Great Whore of Revelation, wallows gorgeously through seven nights of destruction. In 8 1/2 (1963), his most daring film to date, he aimed his camera into his own psyche and let it record his fears and fantasies, desires and despairs in a cinematic language that owes more to Joyce than it does to D. W. Griffith.
All these movies were executed with tremendous verve; Fellini is unquestionably one of the most imaginative fellows who ever had his name on a canvas chair. Unfortunately, his imagination is not controlled by taste; he panders incessantly and shamelessly to the public letch for sensations. But there is nothing petty in his pandering. He is a vulgarian in the grand manner, the Barnum of the avantgarde.
Taste Minus Variation. Michelangelo Antonioni, 49, is the temperamental antithesis of Fellini--a sensitive esthete who could hardly make an error of taste if he tried. He has done only three pictures (L'Avventura, La Notte, Eclipse) that really matter, but they matter a lot; any one of them would suffice to establish him as one of the finest stylists in the history of cinema. His style is slow and spacious. His scenes begin a little while before they begin and end a little while after they end.
His camera usually sits still, and his actors move like figures in a funeral procession--as indeed they are. Each of Antonioni's films is a somber and ceremonious wake for the living dead. His characters have lost all sense of the meaning of life, of the reason for being. They wander through a weary series of loveless loves, hoping vaguely that mere amorous friction will rekindle the fire of life in hearts gone cold.
The theme is a great and timely one, and Antonioni states it in grave and noble measures. The trouble is that he states it again and again and again. He seems to have nothing else to say. If that's a fact, the eclipse he envisions may very well be his own.
In the work of all the important new Italians, and no less in the films of the rising young Frenchmen, the attitudes toward sex have much agitated the critics. There are several attitudes, none of them new and most of them sick but all of them more serious and significant than Hollywood's. In Hollywood movies, sex is a daydream for people who are scared of the real thing. In the new French movies, sex is a sort of physiological religion, a mystical experience almost as profound as, well, eating. In the new Italian movies, sex is what one feels bad after, as good a way as any to get lost. In any case, people in the new European movies do not moon around like people in Hollywood movies and wonder what sex is like. If they want to do it they do it, and in some films they do it pretty often. But when they have done it they forget about it till the next time. Sex is explicit in the new European pictures and often it is exploited. But at least it is real.
Angry Young Tony. Men like the French and Italian directors simply assume that cinema is an important art in its own right. Most British moviemen are not so sure; British movies are traditionally regarded as subsidiary to drama and to literature. Most of the new British movies have in fact been adapted from plays and novels, and the new cinema in England has rather tamely taken its direction from the in-group in the allied arts. But since the in-group happened to be the Angry Young Men, the direction has been vehemently taken. Politically the direction has been left; geographically it has been north. Almost all the good British movies of the last five years have been films of social protest, and in general the protest has been leveled at living conditions in the industrial slums of Yorkshire.
Director Jack Clayton instituted the trend with a cruel little monograph on class warfare called Room at the Top (1958), but before long an angrier and younger man moved in on the movement and pretty well took it over. In rapid succession Tony Richardson directed Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, A Taste of Honey, and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
In cinematic terms, Richardson is not a great director--not by a long chalk. By temperament and training he is a stage director, and sometimes he is a very good one. He is clever at casting and knows how to make the most of a strong player. Under his tutelage Albert Finney, Rita Tushingham, Tom Courtenay and Rachel Roberts have become international cinema attractions. But moviegoers are getting a bit bugged by that same scummy old roofscape and the eternal kitchen-sinkdrome. They sometimes find it a bit hard to believe that things are really all that bad in Merry England. Yet at their best, the British protest pictures have served up great juicy chunks of local color, and they have handsomely displayed six or eight of the most talented young cinemactors in the world.
Outside the Epicenter. Britain, Italy, France: Western Europe is currently at the epicenter of the new cinema. But can the center hold? Secondary concentrations of film production are forming rapidly all over the world--some of them behind the Iron Curtain. In Poland there is a small but fiercely active cell of film fiends. Director Polanski is obviously a completely prepared professional, and Andrzej Wajda, the Polish Kurosawa, is even more accomplished. When his two tragedies of battle (Ashes and Diamonds, Kanal) were released in the U.S. in 1961, they startled moviegoers with their black intensity. Hungarian production has doubled in the last ten years, and in the last three years the quality of the movies that come out of Moscow (The Cranes Are Flying, Ballad of a Soldier, My Name Is Ivan) has steeply improved.
In the free world outside Europe, cinematic creation is even more gingery.
In India there is Satyajit Ray, 42, a onetime commercial artist in Calcutta who has proved himself one of cinema's greatest natural talents. In the last five years, six of Ray's films have been released in the U.S., and every one of the six swells with the fullness of life and glows with the light of the spirit. His first three pictures (Father Panchali, Aparajito, The World of Apu) made up a trilogy that speaks a thousand volumes about life in India and stands as the supreme masterpiece of the Asian cinema. The films that follow it (Devi, Two Daughters, The Music Room) are even more accomplished. They are beautiful to look at and musical to be with. They are quiet films, as all deep things are quiet. They are not in a hurry to happen, they take time to live. They experience life, they experience death. Nothing human is alien to them. They are works of love.
In Argentina there is Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, 39, the Bergman of the Antipodes. He is by no means a great artist, but his films (The End of Innocence, Hand in the Trap) are intelli gent, tasteful, passionate and relentlessly true to life in Argentina. And they get better year by year.
In the U.S., when most people think of movies they still think of Hollywood. But the new American cinema is not coming out of Hollywood--it is springing up in New York. There are art houses, film libraries and terribly strange little film groups that meet at midnight in Greenwich Village garrets and show movies about nail biting and things.
It is all wonderfully stimulating, and since the late '50s several hundred people have been running all over town trying to make independent pictures.
Quite a few have succeeded. In 1957 Morris Engel made Weddings and Babies. In 1959 Robert Frank shot Pull My Daisy, and Sidney Meyers directed The Savage Eye. In 1961 John Cassavetes released Shadows, and Shirley Clarke did a movie version of Jack Gelber's play The Connection. The same year Jonas Mekas fired off Guns of the Trees, and two years later his brother gave out with Hallelujah. In 1962 Herbert Danska filmed The Gift, and Frank Perry came in with David and Lisa, the best U.S. film of the year. And in 1963 Robert Drew, Greg Shuker and Ricky Leacock produced The Chair. Some of these films were heavily haired-over and a few were downright funky, but most of them looked new and alive and original, and when they were shown in Europe the men of the new cinema were mightily impressed.
New Techniques. More than many others, U.S. moviemakers have taken advantage of new techniques: lightweight, hand-held cameras; directional microphones that spot the right voices in crowds; transistorized sound equipment. Such devices have been used with striking effect--particularly in the "living camera" pictures of Drew and Leacock. This or similar equipment is now available in most major centers of moviemaking, and so are a number of extremely sensitive and rapid varieties of film that can just about see in the dark.
The men of the new cinema know these new tools and use them. As a result, the craft of film is changing rapidly and so is the art of film. The new tools have enlarged its language and enriched its spirit. They have set the camera free as a bird. They have put in its head the eyes of a cat. Anywhere a man can go a camera now can go, and anything a man can see a camera can see better. Such an instrument is sure to make the art of film more supple, more various, to put within its reach a larger share of life.
The Way Lies Open. Such an instrument indeed may do something even more important. It may free the movies from the gilded cage in which they have so long languished; it may free the creator from the grip of the financier. The new equipment is absurdly inexpensive to own and to operate. A standard motion picture camera, for instance, costs $25,000; an Arriflex costs $3,500. Eleven standard studio lamps cost $2,100; eight of the new portable lamps do the same job and cost only $566. With such reduced expenses, the new international cinema can quite comfortably be supported by the new international audience.
For the first time since Edison cranked up his Kinetograph and recorded Fred Ott's Sneeze, the way lies open to a free exploration of the full possibilities of cinema as an art. The possibilities are clearly immense. No other art can so powerfully exploit the dimensions of time and space. No other art has so many ways of involving a human being. It involves his eyes, ears, mind, heart, appetites all at once. It is drama, music, poetry, novel, painting at the same time. It is the whole of art in one art, and it demands the whole of man in every man. It seizes him and spirits him away into a dark cave; it envelops him in silence, in night. His inner eye begins to see, his secret ear begins to hear. Suddenly a vast mouth in the darkness opens and begins to utter visions. People. Cities. Rivers. Mountains. A whole world pours out of the mouth of the enraptured medium, and this world becomes the world of the man in the darkness watching.
A tremendous power, a great magic has been given to the men of the new cinema. What will they do with it? Will Resnais really be able to renovate the esthetic of cinema? Will Bergman at last kindle the fire in the heart and light his gloomy world with love? Will Ray redeem his prodigious promise and become the Shakespeare of the screen? Or will new men emerge and surpass them all? Whatever happens, the pioneers have broken through. The world is on its way to a great cinema culture. The art of the future has become the art of the present.
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