Musings on the movies: the popular art of our century ELLIOTT EMANUEL, MD There is nothing to match the excitement of a stage play, well constructed and well acted, in which nightly before our very eyes a miracle takes place: a world is brought into existence, ordered, amusing, exciting. But one must live in a great city, must accept an often awkward time, must chatter boringly through the intermissions needed to restore the stamina of the actors and must often accept a cast that can only imperfectly make the miracle take place. The cinema avoids these limitations. One sees the same performance in the sticks as in the metropolis, at a time more or less of one's choosing, without intermission and with the best cast that can be assembled. No surprise then that it is the popular art of our century and our great escape. The little screen in everybody's living room is no competitor, not because it is little (film critics often have to review major films in a tiny viewing booth), but because television fare is ephemeral, quickly and cheaply made, in quantity and for a mass audience. Everyone seriously interested in cinema knows that the star system is a commercial gimmick to lure the public and that the true creator of a film is the director. Indeed some directors work with virtual amateurs, almost literally picked off the street, whom they can bully into brief moments of expression and action that can be cunningly stitched together. Anyone who has watched the making of a film must be struck by the endless and boring retakes and must wonder how anyone can express anything dramatically for the 40th time in a day. A few directors, Ingmar Bergman pre-eminent, have assembled what is virtually a repertory company of actors who resonate at once to one another. The signature of the director may Reprint requests to: Dr. E. Emanuel, 352 Dorval Ave., Ste. 201, Dorvat, PQ H9S 3H8

not be so visible as Hitchcock's momentary silhouette or appearance in a crowd scene, but his hand is evident in all you see. You would not confuse the way Robert Altman handles the many strands of a complex weave with the bloody sadism of Sam Peckinpah, nor the broad humanity of Fran.ois Truffault with the cold and heartless cynicism of Luis Bunuel, nor the boisterous extravagance of Fellini and his cast of monstrous caricatures with the aristocratic panache of Visconti. I admire especially the great Italian directors. They work in a language spoken by only perhaps a hundred millions, hardly a world language or a world market. They were stifled by 20 years of repressive dictatorship, suffered dreadfully in war, and yet there emerged nearly a dozen cinematic geniuses - Rosselini, de Sica, Bertolucci, Antonioni, Pasolini, Lina Wertmuller and others. Any one of Wertmuller's films contains enough ideas for four ordinary films, higgledy piggledy, sometimes jangling and discrepant, but always alive and exciting. She can get wonderful performances in varied roles from Giancarlo Giannini, as Fellini could from Mastroianni, or Bergman from Liv Ullman. Strengths and weaknesses The technical excellence of camera work can now be taken for granted in all but the most sleazy productions, often even in those. Clear sound is not so predictable. The weak point in contemporary cinema is the script. Though novels are written with the intention of being transformed into film (the surest way to make money) and though, or perhaps because, several writers may work together to compose the script, it is rare to find literate dialogue or even careful plotting. These are elements whose absence would doom any play to failure, no matter how good the acting. On film it is hoped that CMA JOURNAL/OCTOBER 23, 1976/VOL. 115 817

Courtesy: National Film Archives stills library

Stanley Kubrick, director of "A Clockwork Orange", searches for the best angle to convey the antics of one of his adolescent subjects. Music from Beethoven and Rossini was skilfully used to enhance the camerawork in this futuristic film, heightening scenes of violence and complementing the satire.

clever cutting and camera work can conceal these shortcomings. Fellini, among others, is reported to work without a script, improvising as he goes, but I find it hard to believe that the many millions of dollars now needed to make a film are risked so recklessly. Often one has the impression of a director unsure how to end a film, as dangerous as speaking in public without planning your peroration in advance. Some of the best films have been recreations of stage plays, although this practice is regarded as being untrue to the medium unless the scene is "opened up" to go outside of and beyond the stage set. Yet I recall wonderful performances of "Hamlet" and "Othello", of "Hedda Gabler" and "The Doll's House", of "The Seagull" and "The Rhinoceros", which gave permanent form to productions that would otherwise have become mere memories when their casts were disbanded. The filming of opera is not so simple, as the close-up of a singer's face is brutally unlovely. Usually the voices are dubbed while the singers mime, even though they dub their own voices. "The Magic Flute" is unique among adaptations of operas, and Bergman's version attained a level hard to beat with any stage production, but this is a special case. Ballet too seems difficult to transfer to film, though I recall a powerful documentary about Rudolf Nureyev, mingling set pieces with in818

terviews and glimpses off stage. In tonight's paper I count 31 pornographic films listed, as against 29 others. (I excluded the repertory programs because these are a selected group of older and artistically valuable movies chosen for rerun.) In spite of what I once wrote in favour of pornography as harmless, stimulating and sometimes amusing, I find this statistic disturbing. No specialist in this field, I believe the purely erotic films rarely have merit apart from the monotonous recording of sexual acts, reportedly of increasing sadism and perversity. In this and in other ways we in Quebec are far from the era of Maurice Duplessis, with its overpowering censorship, and I cannot help wondering where it will end - perhaps in a return of puritanism and repression. At any rate quick money is evidently to be made from these films, and they have their public, perhaps of a few loyal sexual misfits who see them all. The division of a stage play into acts ensured that it had shape. Each act had to work towards a climax and the whole towards the denouement. Moreover the actors, physically facing an audience night after night, must themselves have insisted on crescendi to bring the curtain down amid bravos and applause. (Not for them the flaccid ending of a typical Eisenhower speech: "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.") Films, lacking this framework, often seem formless. Certain kinds of punc-

CMA JOURNAL/OCTOBER 23, 1976/VOL. 115

tuation have become clich6s: the chase, the escape, the disaster, the union of lovers, murder or suicide, and of course it is a legitimate device to leave everything exactly as it started, save for the terrible insights we have had into the lives of the participants. ("Uncle Vanya" and Priestley's "Dangerous Corner" are theatrical examples.) Many films are just a series of anecdotes, comic or adventurous: Woody Allen's farces or Richard Lester's two films about the Three Musketeers or Tom Jones or Barry Lyndon. A truly shapeless film, one of Norman McLaren's cartoons for instance, has to be short. Nothing so surely imposes shape as the strong curve of an interesting story, but how rarely we find it! The whodunit, by definition, achieves this, but few are any good. Too often the film fades away and the cast and credits appear without a climax having been reached, and we feel cheated. Actors would never dare to let this happen before a live audience. It is a great mistake to arrive late for a movie, because often the titles make a subtle introduction, setting the mood or sketching in a character. They may be tiny works of art in themselves and, I believe, are often created independently by specialists. The sound that accompanies them (whether naturally a part of the action, or a song or other music) is like the overture to an opera. Indeed, music contributes enormously to the emotional effect of a film, and some music, great in itself, becomes associated with special visual images. Rachmaninov's second piano concerto permeated Noel Coward's beautiful "Brief Encounter", and the slow movement of Mozart's 21st piano concerto set the mood of "Elvira Madigan" (love that must be renounced); Richard Strauss's opening octaves from "Zarathustra" hinted at the interstellar space of "2001", while Rossini's "Thieving Magpie" overture quintupled the excitement of some paroxysmal sequences of "A Clockwork Orange". "Pure music thus stolen is more effective than the music written by Shostakovitch, Vaughan Williams, Arthur Bliss, Erich Korngold and others for specific films. It is better music. Everyone takes his girl to the movies. Marriage changes this for some, as it changes so many of our habits. But while there is a film to be seen that opens a window on the world or makes me laugh or sets my pulse racing, I will seek it out. And as you in your turn line up to go in, you will notice as I leave, if I have been lucky in my choice, a sparkle in the eye, excitement in the voice and, perhaps, the traces of tears - of sorrow or of laughter. A film has once again turned me on.U

Musings on the movies: the popular art of our century.

Musings on the movies: the popular art of our century ELLIOTT EMANUEL, MD There is nothing to match the excitement of a stage play, well constructed a...
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